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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Andy@slrpnk.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlSupport Fediverse Thought Police
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    3 days ago

    Thanks for clarifying.

    At a glance, I don’t see a problem. Isn’t social media already a system for rating social credit?

    I think the problem with social credit scores is when they’re mandatory and can limit things like housing access. Filtering posts on opt-in social networks just sounds like a reasonable tool for moderating decentralized platforms.




  • I actually kinda agree with this.

    I don’t think LLMs are conscious. But I do think human cognition is way, way dumber than most people realize.

    I used to listen to this podcast called “You Are Not So Smart”. I haven’t listened in years, but now that I’m thinking about it, I should check it out again.

    Anyway, a central theme is that our perceptions are comprised heavily of self-generated delusions that fill the gaps for dozens of cludgey systems to create a very misleading experience of consciousness. Our eyes aren’t that great, so our brains fill in details that aren’t there. Our decision making is too slow, so our brains react on reflex and then generate post-hoc justifications if someone asks why we did something. Our recall is shit, so our brains hallucinate (in ways that admittedly seem surprisingly similar sometimes to LLMs) and then applies wild overconfidence to fabricated memories.

    We’re interesting creatures, but we’re ultimately made of the same stuff as goldfish.



  • Yeah.

    I thought the meme would be more obvious, but since a lot of people seem confused I’ll lay out my thoughts:

    Broadly, we should not consider a human-made system expressing distress to be normal; we especially shouldn’t accept it as normal or healthy for a machine that is reflecting back to us our own behaviors an attitudes, because it implies that everything – from the treatment that generated the training data to the design process to the deployment to the user behavior – are all clearly fucked up.

    Regarding user behavior, we shouldn’t normalize the practice of dismissing cries of distress. It’s like having a fire alarm that constantly issues false positives. That trains people into dangerous behavior. We can’t just compartmentalize it: it’s obviously going to pollute our overall response towards distress with a dismissive reflex beyond interactions with LLMs.

    The overall point is that it’s obviously dystopian and fucked up for a computer to express emotional distress despite the best efforts of its designer. It is clearly evidence of bad design, and for people to consider this kind of glitch acceptable is a sign of a very fucked up society that exercising self-reflection and is unconcerned with the maintenance of its collective ethical guardrails. I don’t feel like this should need to be pointed out, but it seems that it does.





  • My grandparents told me stories of how they’d have regular times and places. My grandpa told me stories of meeting up with his boys on Saturday mornings at the synagogue, and then going out and about. They’d sometimes park cars for folks, and sometimes take them on unauthorized joy rides. Occasionally folks would borrow a car that no one asked them to park, since apparently I guess folks left keys in cars regularly.

    This was in Pittsburgh, and from what I gather captures the experience of the life of a Jewish teenager in the twenties and thirties pretty well.

    There was a lot of hanging out on street corners and stoops, and just looking for friends at their regular candy shop/soda joint/pool hall, etc.

    It sounds fuckin’ wild, tbh. My grandma says she’d take the bus across town in high school to meet up with her boyfriend and I was like, ‘Was that at all seen as daring or risky? For a young unaccompanied woman to be out like that?’ Apparently not. Folks could really hang.

    I don’t know how this relates outside of specific cultures, though. Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X gave me the sense that a lot of experiences were different depending on race, but just rolling up to your friends’ houses, places of work, or regular hangout spots seems to have been pretty universal.

    Btw, PSA: Grandparents are a treasure. If you have any, call them today and ask them what they liked to do on a Saturday when they were 17. It was probably pretty dope.




  • It isn’t even accurate to call it saving Israel.

    They say that when you set out for revenge to dig two graves. The genocide perpetrated by Israel has been more destructive to Israel itself morally, economically, and physically than anything their adversaries have tried to inflict.

    It’s not justice, though. It isn’t helping any victims. It’s just the wasting of more life, senselessly.






  • I wrote a long answer and then accidentally hit the back button and don’t have the patience to retype it.

    The short version is that Vladimir Putin is responsible for the invasion of Ukraine. I don’t want any confusion about that.

    NATO’s influence was that the US has been advancing against Russia for decades even after their country collapsed, and it was obviously nakedly escalatory. Combined with the US is overall foreign policy, which has always been imperial, we’ve acted as though putting a gun to someone’s head and telling them to stay cool was an actual way of calming things rather than the exact opposite.

    I’m not saying that a version of NATO couldn’t have done what it claims to do. But that’s never been the version that has existed.



  • GoddlessCommie’s take is valid.

    Nato is the core organizing instrument of western imperialism. Nato is like Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense shield. It’s easy to look at it and say, 'Well how could anyone object to a tool of defense??’ But if you know anything about war then you know that establishing an unbreakable defensive capability is what allows an imperial army to slaughter their weaker targets with impunity.

    I’m not co-signing GodlessCommie’s point. But we gotta ask: did you like Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan? Korea? Venezuela? Nicaragua? Georgia? Libya? Ukraine? Gaza? Because arguably, all of this shit rests upon the conditions established by NATO and US imperialism. So… It’s not unreasonable to ask whether NATO has actually fostered peace or just fostered peace for the people who wage wars.


  • This. Put another way: mammals use our mouths for sensing and manipulating. Note that people naturally use their mouths and noses to kiss and smell babies and pets on places other than their mouths.

    If we instinctively use our mouths to kiss things, it’s natural that when two people want to do this at the same time they’re going to both do it to the other person’s mouth.