Due diligence usually refers to the review of the asset you're trying to acquire. There weren't any significant surprises about Twitter's state. Elon's issue was Elon.
Elon specifically waived the ability to withdraw because of post-signing due diligence in his offer to twitter's board. It's one of the (many) reasons he had little ability to get out of the deal once he changed his mind.
As I just argued, due diligence wouldn't have uncovered any surprises. It's merely that Elon could have used the process to ascertain what consequences the acquisition would have for his own assets (compatibility/marketing audit) and what his ideas would lead to.
It potentially could have. For example, post-signing he had a big fight with twitter's lawyers over the right way to measure bot accounts. If he could prove it was much higher than twitter's SEC filings, he might have been able to withdraw from the deal if he kept the due diligence condition.
You won't get far with that approach in communication with such people on social media. That is, assuming the fault isn't with you, if you're on the spectrum, for instance, etc.
As you correctly realized yourself it is not common for people on social media to read attentively and between the lines, discern fallacies, take prior context into account or to focus on the objective substance of a subject without involving any personal attachments.
So you need to make sure you write down your entire thought process with quotes and examples. Don't skip even the obvious. Tell your position from a personal point of view, like this post, rather than formulating a more generalized, abstract argument.
Naturally, that part applies before someone starts trolling or becomes hostile.
When they do, then mute and move on. If you have no other goals, such a conversation is less than a drop in the ocean.
> Whether research is generally undifferentiated, as you claim, is not the same as specific research that proves that screen time is undifferentiated.
They are directly opposed: you have to have differentiation in the research to distinguish between a differentiated and undifferentiated effect.
> In other words, are you saying there are no such evidence as parent asserted?
I am stating a basis for my skepticism that there is sufficient basis for what he claims the research clearly shows, in that AFAICT the research is weak on both whether there is a differentiated association and not of the type that would be able to make strong statements about the causality of any association, differentiated by type of screen time or not, that it discovered.
It's betraying the word shameful in that it's an utter understatement.
If people don't care about supporting companies that enable and spread far-right content and groups, it's they who are a problem.
To say nothing of the pure disregard of the human right to privacy (and with AI now IP as well) that is forced on the the rest of the world by the dominance of the US market.
Apologies, but I genuinely find the intensity of this comment delusional. (1) Doesn't this perspective apply to any social media platform, for example Facebook Groups. And (2) RE: pure disregard of the human right to privacy: doesn't this implicate pretty much all popular digital platforms?
It's both you and right wing people who are the problem.
You're both puppets in the hands of the powerful who wants us divided and weak.
Don't trust authority. Don't trust anyone.
In the past left wing people cared and fought about freedom, today is the right wing fighting for freedom.
It's all irrelevant anyway, governments keep growing stronger and stronger during right or left governments. And soon there is not going to be anywhere to run to.
It's the same 20-25ug daily for adults in all the major western sources: EFSA, NIH, NHS, Mayo, Harvard. Yes, there are recent studies (2020s) suggesting it should be higher and likely the RDA will rise, but you should really be taking vit K with it for proper utilization.
It's a buzzword salad for investors or users, not developers. DYI stuff is cheaper and you can pretend to be an expert in everything (at least until you'll ruin everything). Input data is free as it's stolen from the internet just as other companies do it.
For text-to-image models there are currently two major lawsuits because they were trained on copyrighted pictures. I'm not aware of any such lawsuits for text, but in terms of copyright, text isn't very different from images.
I'm not aware of a text lawsuit either, but there is one for code: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/. I'm a little surprised there isn't one for text yet, since the Washington Post published an article detailing how many tokens from websites, including those run by major media companies, go into large models: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/a.... It may be that corporations think they can profit off these models to a greater extent than they are subject to damages, that their attorneys simply don't think they have a case, or that they want to see how the image and code lawsuits go first. This is all speculation, however.
One of the image lawsuits is by Getty, a stock photo repository. The business model of stock photo services is directly threatened by text-to-image models. The equivalent to this would be book publishers who can't sell their books anymore because everything is written by LLMs, which doesn't seem as imminent a threat.
Libraries acquire proper licenses for a particular manner of use. That license takes into account what a human and technology are capable of. Moreover, even beyond that, you aren't allowed to just utilize an IP however you wish just because you managed to memorize the contents.
I'm not someone in favor of overly broad copyright and authors' rights but it's certainly not an either nothing or everything dilemma.
https://lemmyverse.net/ is also a good place for finding either Lemmy instances or communities while on https://fediverse.party/ you can find links to the most important resources regarding the main platforms on the fediverse.
The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case.
>why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?
Well, exactly. And who's doing all the blocking and filtering? What are the rules? And which community is better at reporting and keeping the instance the way you like it? What about your interests? If you join a busy generic instance, of course, you will become disinterested in your local timeline.
But why force people to categorize themselves? There's no special type of Twitter for people who are musicians, for example, or people who do airbrush paintings of squirrels. Who knows what you might want to send messages about tomorrow or next year or in half an hour?
Having "themed" instances implies that you're committing to whatever that theme is, but all you want to do is share whatever is on your mind from day to day. This apparent pigeonholing is enough to make the whole idea a failure. Remember Yahoo? It wanted you to drill down through dozens or hundreds of canned search categories... and then Alta Vista came along with just a text box. And of course today that's Google too.
Speaking of search... the bizarre and rabid animosity expressed by many Mastodon users toward FINDING CONTENT on Mastodon is baffling. I've seen threads where someone asks how to search for things on Mastodon and gets berated for even suggesting that people who PUBLISH STUFF on the Internet would ever want it found.
No one's forcing people to categorize themselves. You can be on a non-specific server, or you can be on one for a particular community—but even then, nothing precludes you from talking about other things. It may be the case that instance pickers/lists/descriptions aren't clear enough that you don't _have_ to limit yourself, but there's nothing forced about it.
The reality is that every server will have some local version of a bunch of the most popular things, and that will eventually reach a steady state with a tail. A few big ones, more medium size ones, decent number of small ones...
There's no point denying it, discoverability will be harder and communities will be smaller. So if you actually know of a really good community or magazine to point someone to, just do that. They can read the content without logging in. If they want to participate, then the server that they found a community they want to participate in is the obvious place to create an account, from which they can see everything else as you've said.
Little is being forced by the choice of server/instance, but that's not helping solve the hard part. The hard part is them finding what they need to find. They need a librarian, not a tech support desk. Tech people constantly assume the solution is technical... make the popular destinations popular by talking about them everywhere.
> The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case.
Bakeries and NGOs aren't sticky. Your relationships with them is a series of one-time transactions, and at any time you can switch to the alternative at no cost.
Picking a Mastodon instance is more like picking a school or university - it's a choice of where to commit, made at a point when you're least equipped to make a good call, and increasingly hard to reverse the longer you go along with it.
Perhaps Mastodon is just too immature at this stage for the servers to really differentiate themselves from each other. However, as the number of users and posts on Mastodon grows, will any server actually be capable of adequate moderation? Twitter has ~6,000 tweets per second—it's hard to imagine any Mastodon server today being able to handle even a fraction of that content.
It would be interesting to know how many moderators Twitter has. They do have ad income, so they can afford to employ full time staff. Then again, Reddit does well with volunteer moderators.
I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd
Which is exactly what worries me. I don’t want other people deciding who I can read and who I can’t. I don’t want other people deciding what voices should be heard.
This just seems like the creation of another echo chamber.
Well, turn the automagic updating of the banlists off then. It's configurable, but it's not the default because most people are not interested in seeing the posts of (as an example) people who upload kiddie porn, nor do they want that on their hard drive in the off chance the FBI comes by with questions.
So the possibility of highly illegal content justifies a block list which perhaps includes mainly blocking unwanted political opinions? That argument sounds familiar.
>I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd
IIUC (and I may not) there are blocklists that are shared between fediverse instances that, depending on the configuration, are automagically updated/applied on a regular basis.
Perhaps that's what's going on with your instance?
Edit: Modified comment to address GP's specific issue.
> I mean that’s the whole point of federation right??
The point of federation is not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that.
>It kinda loses its point.
Even if it comes to this, it doesn't. Another migration can happen at any point, but this time you wouldn't lose your social contacts - and in the future hopefully neither your content.
>But Google and Microsoft got in the game.
That's like your common anti-Linux argument.
>Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS.
Decentralized content/link aggregators just became popular so we'll see what'll happen, but personal social media shouldn't be as public for most people as it right now anyway.
> not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that.
The oligopolies from a single country might get replaced by groups of instances who will claim they're holders of the Truth and who are the Service, while rest is dangerous. Nothing also stops countries from running own instances or compatible services by dedicated companies or people to either dominate or lure people out of the federation. A good campaign, attractive interface and features and people will follow.
The remaining option is to "run your own instance" but in time when the federation will most likely solidify enough it might be hard to do so. Hard as in getting people to join your new playground. What we're seeing right now it's a boom period.
Don't get me wrong, I do like concept of federated services but there's too many sides where it might fail in long-term and help create a highly tribalized echo-chambered communities
