DotMeow – A fun domain with a serious mission | Hacker News Reader

DotMeow – A fun domain with a serious mission

dotmeow.org

9 pointsOuterVale8 comments

If your mission is serious and you're seriously asking people to donate €80,000, surely you could be bothered to take it seriously enough to write the appeal for funding yourself rather than outsourcing it to an LLM?

  This isn't about charity — it's about building kinship-based infrastructure.

I'm so sick of that particular LLMism: it's not (just) X -- it's Y!

The sad thing is, this is one of the rhetorical flourishes that gets drilled into you in debate and comms education. ChatGPT picked it up because it's extremely common.

A few people have called us on this, but it's simply not true. The copy was all written by hand; the only machine assistance here is XCompose (you, too, can type an em-dash!).

It turns out that when everybody involved is some level of techie and you're targeting a sort of "corporate bland" tone so that you look professional and trustworthy by modeling your communications on other successful kickstarters, it comes out looking similar to what other marketing copy looks like, which is precisely what all of the LLMs were trained on.

Hi! I'm one of the founders of dotMeow, and it's been a long road to get to the point that we're willing to stake our reputations on a crowdfunding campaign. From applying to the applicant support program (we believe we were one of the first, if not the first organization accepted) to working out financial plans and overall strategy to achieve NIS2 compliance on a shoestring budget, it's been a year and a half of effort to reach where we are now.

It's quite late here in Belgium, so I'm about to go to sleep, but in the morning, I'll happily answer any questions people have about the project.

so not kitties?

/\__/\

(˶˃ᆺ˂˶) <(meow?)

Do catgirls count? We've got one or two on staff. We'd have a cat, too, if it weren't for the fact that I'm allergic.

What’s a catgirl? How can you be a cat and allergic to one at the same time? I’m so confused.

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