I guess you don’t really need to wait for a holiday to express your love and commitment to each other.

That’s right. We don’t celebrate birthdays, Xmas and stuff like that… because we don’t wait for a specific date. But we also don’t worry much with gifts and presents, we just care about one another ;)

I’m just lonely lol,

I think you’re spending your time in a good manner: reading is never a bad idea. Maybe treat yourself with a new book? I mean, one you may not usually think like reading. It’s could be like meeting some random person somewhere: it’s impossible to know in advance how far this encounter will lead you :)

We’ve been together for 20+ years and have never celebrated a Valentine. My spouse and I are more like: why should we dedicate a single day of the year to what is supposed to be a lifetime together or, if not a lifetime, at least a good chunk of it spend together? ;)

I for one miss the smaller internet of days past, but I’ve always assumed I was in the minority here

No idea how many we are (I’m not much into tracking users online, so I also don’t want to know how many we are ;) but I can assure you are not alone, no matter how few or how many of us there is :)

Also that Web is still there, and alive. Apparently, it’s just too much to ask to those many people that are used to mega-corp owned walled gardens to go have look on the other side of the fence.

However, as AI slop overruns these platforms, I’ve noticed increased interest in alternatives.

AI is dumb but keep in mind it improves at an incredible pace. Those mega-corps don’t invest billions in it just to make it look nicer, nor to please shareholders (go have a look at how Amazon was hammered for announcing its next round of AI investments). When it starts getting less stupid, AI will most likely regain whatever fraction of those users it… deceived.

Imho, the small web should not be offered to the public as an alternative to an AI-filled Web, but as plain and simple human-centric that is not corporate-owned. My own crappy part of that small Web is also AI free, and will most likely remain so, but it’s out of sheer habit (I’ve posting online since the late early 90s without any AI-crutch) what matters to me is that it is independent (and add-free and tracking-free) ;)

thx

<3

& real nice to see a few young peop… no, that’s not it, I mean it was nice to see people that have yet to reach a certain maturity playing around with those typewriters, too :p

Something I can’t imagine happening around here, as no business would be able to survive with so few customers. Not unless there was a radical change in the way we relate to tech.

Around here (Paris, France), typewriters are mostly offered as decorative objects, antiques or mere ‘vintage’, that are not to be used, and more and more likely to be priced as such… when they’re not priced as ‘fashion statements’.

Do you have any platform suggestions that don’t require a long time to setup?

There are many good platforms to host content but you should be keep in mind any platform you rely on, no mater how good it is today, can turn around and switch policies at a whim (see how reddit changed its policies and has now become what it is).

A better approach would be to aim to own and control your own tools. That doesn’t even have to be complex, but it does require a little more setup/configuration work. Imho, that’s the price to pay to keep control. What is required? To own a domain name (you will need to pay for that), to have a small web hosting space (selfhosted on a computer you own, or rented which is much simpler to do but seldom free), and some tool to help you create the actual website.

There are many creation tools. Ranging from writing HTML by hand to using tools like WordPress (the same WordPress that is being used worldwide by many pro websites), or use those little things called ‘static website generators’. Depending your background and willingness to learn new stuff the right tool will not be the same ;)

I had been using WordPress since it was first introduced in the early 00s, and before that I used to write my own pages … by hand, but now I use a static website generator. It’s called Hugo but there are many others like it. This will require some more work to set it up (not that much depending what you want to do, you can create your first website in maybe a couple hours but you may also spend weeks reading docs to get it fine tuned). The great thing is that once it’s done you don’t have to worry about it ever (unlike with wordpress).

Does anyone feel in a similar way?

As an analog note note-taker/writer and as an analog reader too (don’t underestimate how your ebook reading habits can be also be used/monetized) I can understand how you feel even though I’m not hostile to AI per se: I’m hostile to corporation/privately-owned AI, raiding human knowledge to feed itself and then poo… sell it back to us for a profit, and I’m hostile to AI being sold as the solution to everything.

If I may ask , don’t you think there is a higher risk using Substack, than some website/blog you would fully control and own, to see your content being force fed to AI without yout consent? I mean, like it happened with reddit, right?

Do you use the ability at all?

nope. I’m getting old enough, and my health is not that great, to not be keenly aware of how short life is. No matter the ratio of the exchange. I’m definitely not an Achilles ;)

Excellent! & congrats times 2.

1. for reducing e-waste, which sounds much nicer than ‘trash diving’ :)
2. and more importantly, for managing to set up something that neat for your spouse!

After years using it, both my spouse and I happily supporting it with our Premium subs, maybe it’s time for a change as I see nothing new that would be worth the almost doubling of the price.

for music: mpv to play good old audio files saved on a hard drive, from ripped CDs.

Agreed.

Certainly, and I did not delete my account either ;)

I’d argue that in some applications, this is fine.

It sure can be. Like I said, a bit like an address book has its purpose. But even if it has pages and printed text in it, an address book is not a book anyone would want to read, it’s just a stack of pages.

I have not considered UBI to be honest, maybe I should give it more consideration.
What I worry a lot more about is the way ‘creativity’ (as the OP tried to frame it) is being hijacked and privatised by very few corporations/private interests. The same that pillaged so many of our art history and creations in order to make their own version of it they want to sell us back.

recurring topics. My answer won’t change:

• More quality content/comments. People will go where they find what they’re looking for. No matter teh sad show reddit has turned into it is still filled with quality content (even more so in ‘niche’ communities).
• Less preaching. Does anyone really think that by telling people they’re doing it wrong or worse that they’re being dumb (because they’re using this or that) we will encourage them to change their habits?
• Less politics. My very first impression of Lemmy was almost enough to make delete my account. Politics, not the most subtle one, and memes were everywhere. Not really the type of content I was looking for (I’m fine discussing politics with anyone willing to discuss it provided we can go above the mere ‘you’re wrong because I don’t agree with you’ or the ‘you’re fascist if you don’t hate what I hate’ type of discussion).
  Everyone should be able to chose what they’re exposed to (including politics and memes, btw) but forcing them to taste it out of the box may not be the… most seducing default.

How do you feel about the fact that art created by AI this year is not much different from art created by humans? I think those who have seen it themselves understand what I mean.

I would say It’s quite… challenging to hope to hold any discussion about an hypothesis that requires all participants to already agree on it. That’s more akin to entering a cult.

But here are a few remarks worth keeping in mind imho:

1. Art is not limited to visual art. Far from it.
2. Visual art is not about portraying something in such or such specific manner (be it realism, surrealism, or whatever else) it is about sharing an experience (which no AI can do, as it doesn’t live and can’t experience shit by itself) and it is about sharing an emotion that can be ranging from the pure emotional one to the most cerebral. Things that no AI, no matter how sophisticated it is, can experiment either as it certainly has no soul and it has no mind. At best, an AI is a complex set of statistical textual analyses. At best. Hence it’s ability to spit out pure non-sense with the same seriousness as it will spit out factual data.
3. Randomly copying and iterating randomly is not ‘creating’ anything it’s playing with volumes of data (and violating copyright). Art is all about making decisions and following one’s own path.
4. AI art is boring. Like reading an address book would be (edit: still, even boring it can be useful like an actual address book). People are more then welcome to enjoy boring, like they’re more than welcome to watch shit shows on the TV, if that’s really what they want to get out of their life. I’d rather not and therefore I focus my time on less boring (and human made) art.

How do you feel about the fact that now and in the future, AI will do most of the creative work

If by creative you mean mimicking/monkeying what human do, well… AI can ‘do’ all the ‘creative’ work it can. It won’t make me enter any art gallery or museum to look at it and it will certainly not make me willing to spend a cent accessing it either.

No more than, say, good (bad?) old Microsoft Clippy ever pushed me to enter a bookshop in order to check if it had published anything under its name.

How do you feel

And you, how do you feel about asking questions that aren’t questions? And what do you get out of trying to portray AI as what it is not?

Edit: some clarifications + typos.

Should we tell people Lemmy exists

Tell them, sure. Preach it to them, a little less so imho. I often see people being such a pain in the you know where insisting on making other people using whatever it is they’re using, or proving them wrong when they don’t want to. It’s not the best way to make it attractive to anyone.

or is the organic slow growth much better long term?

There is no assurance it will get better. The reality is that it can fail, like it so frequently happen with anything ‘organic’. Living things can grow for sure, but they can also not grow at all and die. For many reasons, including the lack of care and… excessive care too (try giving too much water to a plant, or too much food to some creature).

What I do is tell people wanting to reach me I don’t use centralized social media at all. And that they can find me around here (or on my blog, or through email).

A few will indeed reach out to me using those, while most will simply not bother trying. Quite normally, I would say, as most don’t care about reaching out to me specifically (or anyone else, for that matter), they care about getting an answer (from anyone) to whatever is bothering them, or getting instant feedback/validation. And they care about it as easily as possible, putting in as little efforts as possible… meaning they’re not looking forward to trying new and less popular ways.

Depends how long you keep them in the fridge.

I will give it a look, thx for the tip :)