I assume that the whole “Stalin starved his people” thing isn’t talking about the average conditions of the Soviet Union during more “normal” times, but rather specific events of mass starvation like the Holodomor. That being said, famine caused by accidental or malicious management of agriculture is something hardly unique to any single economic system (I imagine a comparison could be made to the Irish potato famine there, for an example of a similar type of disaster under a different economic system), so I’m not sure if it reflects entirely on the kind of system the Soviets were going for as much as it does mistakes in the process of transitioning to that system, and malfeasance on the part of those in charge in pushing the consequences of those mistakes upon disfavored groups.

The time of entertainment per dollar is probably a bit different too I think. Depending on the replayability of the game in question, one can buy a game and get enjoyment out of it for hundreds or in some cases over a thousand hours. Meanwhile, even if you really enjoy a movie and rewatch it like 10 different times, that’s still only like 20 hours. Movies tend to be cheaper to buy than games individually, but I suspect that buying enough movies to make up the time difference would make the movies significantly more expensive.

It could be the aro in me talking, but I don’t really understand how people can get good sleep in the same room as one another, let alone the same bed. Having someone within the immediate vicinity, even an extremely liked and trusted person, seems like it would be a distraction at best and at worst cause anxiety over if I was making it harder for them to sleep

hypothetically, I suppose it could alternately be done by instances just federating the number of votes from their instance and only storing who voted what internally. Though then you might get issues with very easy vote manipulation if a server just says a lot of people voted a certain way without needing to make accounts to “justify” the fake votes.

I dont know about LLMs specifically, but its happened with other AI tech. Like those amazon grocery stores where they wanted to make an AI that just sees what items you take and bills you for them without you having to go through a checkout line, but ended up having to cancel the idea after the AI didnt actually work the vast majority of the time and they just had hired a bunch of people in India to look at camera footage and identify what people had bought instead for those purchases. I would not be surprised if some AI startup or another wasnt just exploiting the desperation of people on MTurk or whatever to get something done and just pretending to have groundbreaking AI tech doing it to fool investors.

Under a few specific circumstances comments can make sense, like if it’s a community for drawn stuff of one variety or another, that’s used by newer artists looking for constructive feedback.

Default search engine on their browser?

hypothetically, what stops a spam group from creating their own instance to register accounts on, or several such? It’d get defederated quickly once the attack got going, sure, but it would take time for this to get done, and in the meantime the spam gets in

Something I once read is that different cats don’t seem to use exactly the same noise to mean the same thing, ie, one cat might use a certain sort of meow to show that it is hungry, but another cat might use a similar meow to show that they want attention. Further, that wild cats usually stop making many such noises after they grow up, but domestic ones keep using them to communicate with people. If this is true, then the cat noises don’t really represent a cat language as such since each individual cat would have it’s own different set of vocabulary it develops in an attempt to get humans to understand it, being forced to resort to being all dramatic and acting like a kitten to get their message across because humans are sometimes too clueless to understand their body language.