Quark's

Pretty freaky article, and it doesn't surprise me that chatbots could have this effect on some people more vulnerable to this sort of delusional thinking.

I also thought this was very interesting that even a subreddit full of die-hard AI evangelists (many of whom have an already religious-esque view of AI) would notice and identify a problem with this behavior.

Both contracts—Marvel and Disney fall under one agreement, and Avatar team Lightstorm has its own—offer minimum wage increases and access to IATSE’s pension plans and meal penalties. In terms of differences, Lightstorm’s contract guarantees preferential hiring rights on future Avatar films for current bargaining employees (and without a pay loss), new wage scale rates based on a 40-hour work week for those future films, and minimum call rates for the sixth and seventh days of work. This contract also has “protections against technological change and subcontracting” and AI-related language adopted from IATSE’s Basic Agreement.

Marvel and Disney’s specific contract ensures extra pay for “hazardous set conditions, and health and comfort during long postproduction assignments,” plus job descriptions for each role and legally binding agreements “enforced through a grievance and arbitration procedure.” Cael Liakos-Gilbert, a VFX wrangler for Marvel, considers the ratified contract “not just a victory for [us], but a much-needed win for the entire VFX industry. Seeing this come together after over two years as an organizer, contract negotiator, and now a founding union member is one of the proudest moments of my life. […] We’ve put ink to paper and given our people the contract we deserve.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29859271

Starting now, we are changing the dev update to a monthly schedule. This is more predictable and gives us more time to write it.

Last month saw the release of Lemmy 0.19.11. It included a lot of changes backported from the development branch. This way improvements can already reach users while the main branch is still under heavy development in preparation for the 1.0 release.

There were numerous other contributions:

• Leoseg added a new keyword filter.
• SolninjaA added support for using separate subdomains for federation and web interface.
• travis-jean@rblind.com made various accessibility improvements to the UI.
• @xaegit@lemmynsfw.com added some NSFW-related fixes.
• Nutomic and Flamingo-cant@feddit.uk fixed different federation bugs and got Peertube federation working again.
• Nothing4You and Matc-pub also contributed different bug fixes, speedups, and picture fixes.
• MrKaplan@lemmy.world helped with some release-related tasks, and backported some existing mainline bug-fixes.

On the 1.0 front Dessalines was busy with different rewrites of the database to improve pagination, adding read, liked, and hidden content endpoints, speeding up compilation time, and also getting lemmy-ui updated.

For Lemmy to have a future, it's been a long-term goal to ensure that donations can cover the two full-time devs' living expenses, and possibly add more developers to the co-op. Nutomic worked on various tasks to aid this, including:

• A redesign of the donation page on join-lemmy.org.
• A new donation dialog shown directly in the Lemmy web interface.
• A call for donations which was widely shared and discussed.

Although the goal is not reached yet, it looks like a success as the amount of recurring donations was almost doubled within a few days. It also helped to clarify and resolve some of the reasons why people were unwilling to donate.

You can see the full list of changes for April at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend

We've seen an increase in sign-ups on our instance lately, so the admin team felt it might be helpful to know what to expect from StarTrek.website as your home base in the Fediverse.

To give an idea of how we view this instance, the original URL we were considering was "startek.club". Our goal was never to be a "fan site" explicitly, but to feel like a social club for Trekkies and entry point to the "Threadiverse".

⭐What you can expect form us:

Active, aggressive moderation from our administrators and mods.

The admin team has decades of experience moderating on Reddit and we all have very low tolerance for inauthentic or aggressive behavior. If you feel that way too, you'll probably like it here. But if you're seeking raw, unfiltered Fediverse access, this isn't the instance for you.

The admin team actively defederates other instances, removes federated communities, and bans federated users for behavior that does not align with our core principles, even if those users/communities/instances have not interacted with our hosted communities in any way.

Everything you see on startek.website is ultimately hosted by us, even if the content originated on another instance. That means we have to consider what we are willing to host and what kind of experience we want to offer. In addition to the obvious stuff (spam, hate speech) here are some examples of types of non-obvious content/behavior we will moderate:

• Political propaganda
• "Snark"
• Drama/call-out communities
• Sealioning
• Reply guys

Unlike our local communities, we take a more laissez-faire approach when it comes to federated communities/users. This means we are not actively patrolling or holding federated content to the same standard as our own. We heavily rely on user reports and our own experience as users when it comes to taking action.

⭐What we expect from our users:

Our users are expected to be on their best behavior when interacting with federated communities.

Everyone with an account here is expected to respect other instance admin/mods time, effort, and mental health. This means adhering to our instance principles and terms of service in all communities accessed via startrek.website, even if the behavior is within the rules of the other community.

Keep in mind, whatever you say on the fediverse gets said here first, and our rules apply.

Our users are expected to actively participate in maintaining a positive culture.

As a user, you don't need to see someone blatantly spamming or harassing for us to consider taking action. If you see someone simply behaving in a way you don't like, report them and we will consider. We are a community unto ourselves, we are not beholden to advertisers or outside influence. We get to determine what kind of experience we want. 

This post has a mirror saved on our wiki. If you are curious about how we might approach something more specific please feel to ask in a comment!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

Thought this was a really interesting read and felt my fellow Website enjoyers might think so too.

[They Called Us] Enemy follows Takei, the actor who is best known for playing Sulu on the original Star Trek series, as he revisits his haunting childhood in American internment camps during World War II, tackling themes such as courage, country, loyalty, and love.

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