We’re never going to get the old days back.

Nothing is stopping you from using a computer as a standalone machine not connected to the internet. Then you have a machine just like the ones in the 1970’s and 1980’s except for having much more memory/processor/diskspace etc. I would say you have a better OS also, except that Linux is basically the same OS as my SCO Xenix 386 I had in the 1980’s.

That doesn’t prevent power hungry mods from modding hundreds of communities, or mods or admins from enshittifying the most popular communities (or whole instances) with absurd rules or misinformation bots,

Then you jump to a similar community on another instance. In the long term the less restrictive place will win out. When the mods on the lemmy.world politics group nuked one of my highly upvoted submissions many months ago, I stopped submitting there and now all my submissions on that topic go to usa@midwest.social instead. I carefully researched which instance/community has the most reasonable rules. Bottom line is users have much more power on Fediverse than Reddit.

Couldn’t they “convince” instance admins to include ads?

Yes. One at a time. But the cannot “buy Lemmy” which is what a CEO would want to do.

In time, the Fediverse will also be easily accessible. And where there are normies, you’ll find corporate enshittification.

No, because corporations cannot buy the Fediverse.

and even more susceptible than Reddit to power hungry mods and echo chambers.

It’s not, because you can easily get around bans. You can go to a different instance and resubscribe to all the same communities.

I imagine if you were 13.6 km from a star you would either burn up or fall into the star’s gravity well.

AI doesn’t seem to be good at anything in which there is a right answer and a wrong answer. It works best for things where there are no right/wrong answers.

According to the website Space, the distance is 37.8 trillion km.

This is not correct, and is probably the result of rounding the light year distance to 4 ly before converting to km. The google answer is pretty close.

The correct answer is the distance to Alpha Centauri is 41.5 petameters (trillion km) and the distance to Proxima Centauri is 40.2 petameters.

I still play Civ 2 more than any other Civ.

AIs are definitely not “good enough” to give correct answers to science questions. I’ve seen lots of other incorrect answers before seeing this one. While it was easy to spot that this answer is incorrect, how many incorrect answers are not obvious?

It’s in the quote that they scaled it.

Yes but they supposedly scaled it to “one meter per meter”. A “scale where the distance from the Sun to Earth is 150 million km” is the actual distance.

One football field is about a hectometer and there are 10 hectometers per kilometer. So 415 trillion.

Close. The distance to Alpha Centauri is 41.5 petameters (trillion kilometers) and the distance to Proxima Centauri is 40.2 petameters.

41.5 petameters.

https://coco1453.wordpress.com/thinking-in-metric-for-astronomy/

Nobody using the metric system says “trillion kilometers”!

Unfortunately way too many people do even though it is not the correct SI unit for the scale, simply because ‘kilometer’ is the metric distance unit used for Earth distances. I have astronomy distances memorized as metric SI distances and I only care about the km distance so I can convert that to the SI distance. e.g. When I see “trillion kilometers” I convert that in my head to “quadrillion meters” which I then convert to “petameters”.

I would rather see the base unit ‘meters’ than km so I can skip a step. My own preference for astronomy distance units is:

metric SI units > meters > kilometers > non metric units

That’s what I think too. AI is mainly useful for things that don’t have right or wrong answers.

Although this incorrect answers is obvious, what about all the times where an incorrect answer from AI is not obvious?

Space is small.

The diameter of the entire observable universe is not even a full ronnameter.

And they seem to have forgotten that to do that, they actually need a database of facts.

This is the main reason why AI cannot be trusted to answer science questions. They absolutely need a database of facts.

I use to be able to ask google the distance in kilometers of anything in space and get an accurate answer. So I first asked this same question in google but it only gave the answer in light years for some reason. That’s when I went to bing and got their ridiculous answer.

Now, Reddit is charging Google for priority access to its posts

If the idiots at Google hadn’t shut down DejaNews they would have already owned a discussion forum more popular than reddit.

Don’t protest-edit your content because you’re just helping them separate wheat from chaff.

How about just replace some of your content with this stuff from time to time.

https://loremipsum.io/