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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The common thread I’ve seen online is this:

    • Google’s search algorithm sucks. I always append reddit.com to get good forum results
    • Reddit’s search algorithm sucks.

    These two tools are quickly becoming coupled for Google-Fu expert users. The historical forum history that goes back 3-5 years on Reddit is their goldmine. You can’t just make a new subreddit overnight when a sub gets paywalled. All of that historical data will be lost and paywalled.

    I think a paywall could be an effective money maker for Reddit because they’ve basically become their own Google - in that each subreddit acts like a unique website with real, human, responses. The only problem is that reddit has a god awful search algorithm that they refuse to improve. So people use Google to essentially search reddit. The “whales” so-to-speak are the only people they need to capture. People like myself (frugal people) aren’t in their peripherals. But the people that think “I’ll pay each month for NYT” or “it’s just a few dollars for the WSJ” are going to use the same logic for Reddit: “it’s a small amount of money to have access to high quality forums on X, Y, and Z”.

    In addition, this might bolster Reddit’s content even further. Since paywalled subs will automatically reduce the amount of AI content spammed on them, they will inherently increase the legitimacy of each forum.

    Lastly, this will give them a path towards monetization for moderators which doesn’t require them skimming off of their own pay checks to achieve it.

    Do I like this? No. Is this fair? Also no. People contributed to Reddit under the impression that their data would be available and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. That implicit guarantee is being violated. It’s an afront to the hard working individuals that have developed these communities brick by brick.

    But does this “solution” make a lot of business sense? Possibly. As long as they survive the changeover in the short term, I think they’ll thrive from this choice for the reasons I stated above.

    Again, it’s going to give them a pathway for:

    • Monetization
    • Reduce AI spam (a big fear of all forums)
    • They could make even more money off the back of this

    I’m pretty much over Reddit anyways. Lemmy has been my backup social media for a while now. The Internet is still free - for now. I just hope we can all find better search engines and forums in the future. Google has been degrading. Reddit has been locking things down. We obviously need to pivot to other platforms. Or maybe just go back to the old days where you find niche forums hosted by some dude in his basement. Nothing wrong with that.


















  • Based solely on that quote, I whole heartedly agree. Science fiction is almost always supposed to expose something about our world through a different lens. Whilst it’s not the most elegant example, the two black & white striped races in TOS arguing over “black-white stripes vs white-black stripes” was a clear allegory for racism in our country when the show came out. District 9 is a decent allegory for something like Gaza & Israel: open air prisons and what-not.

    Science fiction should (IMO) make the muddy waters of morality more clear.

    A more nuanced example comes from Battlestar Galactica; wherein the human members of a concentration camp use suicide bombing as a means of rebellion. The show made sure to imply the efficacy of suicide bombing. It also made sure to expose the arguments against it. But I think during a post 9/11 world, suicide bombing was looked at as the root of all evil. Perpetrators were seen as aimless villains without a cause or reason (without a rational one, anyways). But BSG did make a compelling argument for such extreme cases of terrorist violence when your back is up against the wall.

    The bajorans in DS9 also make cases for terrorism as an act of rebellion against colonizers.

    I think science fiction is one of the only genres they really take a look at these topics. Other genres seem to only gleam the very tips of the morality iceberg.


  • If you use your eyes, nothing happens. Most people think “observe” means they can just look at the experiment and expect it to change. That’s why so many people end up in metaphysics thinking their own perception has any impact on the outcomes of physical states. In reality, it makes no difference.


  • Captain Janeway@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldWhoops
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    8 months ago

    The word “observed” has largely been conflated with human perception in the layperson’s understanding of quantum mechanics. When they were first experimenting with the dual slit experiment, they were simply trying to make measurements to predict where an electron might end up after entering one of the two slits. However they soon discovered that their measurements changed the behavior of the electron. That behavior has been denoted as an observation however observation is very vague.

    It’s better to say “a measurement which causes a wave-function collapse” rather than an observation. When phrased that way, it feels a lot more explicit and it allows lay people like myself to ask the next question “what causes a wave function to collapse?”

    Source: I just asked my physics PhD wife about this a couple nights ago and she did her best to explain it to me.

    If anyone can explain what exactly causes the wave function to collapse, id appreciate it. Because I can’t understand anything I read online.

    Also this meme checks out. A person could observe their CPU with the right conditions and instruments to cause a wave function collapse. But I believe a Qbit can reset its state no?