PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

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If it's a tech interview, practice solving coding problems in a tech interview format.

Find simple "coding challenge" problems, write the answers on paper, get satisfied with them, then run them and see what happens. Definitely at least cover the basics (reverse a linked list, quicksort). Do it until you're comfortable with it, which takes a while. You will start to ace programming tests because the calibrated response is for someone who does programming in a totally different format, and you're comfortable and experienced with the unusual format.

I know! I was super unreasonable. It's the worst. You're definitely right to get all upset and constantly write things that are the opposite of what I think and get mad. It's obviously the way. Obviously.

I am done now, I was just having fun. I hope that my condescending assistance has been helpful.

Now you have spent 453 characters. Are you really still using Google? Dude, they're lame now, everyone's talking about it.

The people need to know

I know! I was super unreasonable. I was required to agree with you completely, and everything different than your point was a weird distraction. It's horrible. You're right to call it out and get all upset.

If i spent a single character trying to “summarize your perspective” unsolicited you’d accuse me of misrepresenting you.

Here's a template you can use:

"It sounds like you're saying (argument). Do I have that right?"

Pretty hard to characterize that in bad faith. Establishing a shared mental model is pretty essential. It also puts you in a position where it will be extremely hard for your brain to trick you into thinking that the other person said "yes" when they said "no" or vice versa, whereas misunderstanding what someone is saying is surprisingly easy to do, even when you're not giving mental weight to "what liberals believe" in your model, or anything else that explicitly discounts the need to read or understand anything that's being written to you.

You can also try this template:

"It might seem like i’m lecturing you because I don’t think you’re grasping what I’m saying."

"sticking your fingers in your ears"

"paternalistic bullshit."

That's always super helpful and productive, you could try that too.

I have repeatedly, ad nauseum stated my disagreement. You do not agree with me, and that’s fine.

I feel like you have grasped the nature of my argument, and parts of yours that I do and do not agree with. We got there, I guess.

You seem very hung up on whether to call me agreeing with you in part, and not with another part, as full disagreement or full agreement, and you seem to have very confused for quite a while now that I am not falling in either of those categories. You've arrived at "full disagreement" now, as if daring me to challenge you on it. I am fine with that definition if you want to call it that.

In the future I would recommend that you pursue this course immediately instead of after a day of yelling: Objectively summarizing the point of view of the person you're talking with, and comparing it to your own and seeing where they differ and why, instead of just spending the whole time yelling your own side and then telling the other person what it is that "liberals" believe and getting confused. It will be outside your comfort zone but it is communication. I would actually recommend that you go forward from that point of comparison, and into analyzing the differences and reasons for their differing point of view and considering it even though (by definition) you will think it is wrong, and critiquing your own points of view based on the differences and the reasons for them and any counterarguments they may make. You will find your internet interactions more productive, I think.

In any case have a good one, I'm glad we got there in the end.

I think capitalism has a way of bribing people to make them into ridiculous caricatures of themselves, because anything authentic would be a threat to the powers that be. I can't even rightly articulate what I'm trying to say, but the type of content that makes it big on YouTube, the way that people in TV commercials who are in the same role the viewer's meant to occupy are presented as stupidly endearing with all these flaws on display, the way that even wildly popular content starts to get downplayed once it comes across as "political" or "overserious" or something like that. It's all of a piece. If anyone with money is making media, it gets set up to send a message that at the end of the day needs to include "You, the viewer, are powerless and kind of stupid, make sure you stay in your role."

Liberals insist that the democrats lost because of 3rd party spoilers and far-left activists deflating the cause

I don't insist this. I don't think this is what happened, although I do think that effect was one very small piece.

This is, again, you telling me what I believe (indirectly through the mechanism of "what liberals believe"), instead of listening to me when I tell you what I believe.

I'm actually pretty sure that somewhere in the history, I specifically addressed the two root causes of the Democrats losing, at least twice, of which one of those main root causes was:

I think there’s more evidence that the Democrats failed themselves by not reacting to the clear signs of distress that both the far-right and far-left populists were signaling.

This part, I agree with. Two things can be true.

It boggles my mind that you're apparently having so much difficulty with this concept. It is not either-or, such that me saying that propaganda and misinformation factored into the election means I am denying that the Democrats laid the groundwork by more or less abandoning the American people for decades. I agree with one part of your view, but not the other part.

I literally cannot believe that I am explaining this so many times, just literally the exact same concept over and over again, and you're not grasping it.

Let me pause there. Has what I said so far make sense? Just removing everything else from the equation. Can you understand the thing I'm saying right now, and do you believe me when I say that this is what I believe? Does this message here, taken in isolation without reference to an expansive network of how you misinterpreted some past statements or anything like that, make sense so far?

Yes, you kept saying “i agree” to a vague sentiment within my comment, and then you’d turn around and disagree with the main thing.

I feel like this may be why you're having so much trouble with this: You are interpreting everything just through the lens of whether or not it agrees with you, what you think the main point is, and so on. Forget your point of view. Go back and read my message, try to absorb what it is that I am saying starting from a blank slate. See if you can answer this:

I think that, if you wanted to boil it down to main root causes, there are two causes for the Democrats losing because people didn't vote for them. One was and the other was .

Not what you think the singular root cause is, and whether or not I've got it right and am focusing on the right things if we assume your answer is the objective truth against which mine is being measured. See if you can answer that question in terms of what I on my side believe the two main root causes to be.

Letters to type this: 288

Letters to type "chris-chan" in your address bar: 10

You're taking extra time out of your day to let everyone know that you refuse to learn, even when learning is quicker.

What the FUCK man, to have this much motivation for something like this reads to me like a serial killer mentality

I said:

the center-right party we call “Democrats”

the Democrats are a bunch of corporate whores who don’t really “deserve” support

I mostly agree with you about the shittiness of the Democratic establishment and particularly as pertains to kneecapping Bernie, who would have addressed your (extremely valid) complaints and also would have won the election

The Democrats are ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform

I completely agree with you about the despair people feel about the system, Biden being part of that whole broken system regardless of the good that he did, and that being a key reason why people aren’t excited to vote for anyone, and pretty much 100% of the rest of it.

And you think it is "loose language" and you kept accusing me of things like "Insisting that ‘it should have been enough that she wasn’t trump’ while also insisting that the base doesn’t have legitimate concerns that depressed their motivation." Yes. That is precisely the kind of behavior I was calling out in my message. You have that part correct, you are in that bucket.

I agree with one part of what you said (that the Democrats are mostly shitty), but disagree with another part (that 100% of the "blame" attaches to them because they are shitty, and there is no other factor at all above 0% in the previous election that influenced the election, and in particular I have some specific things that I think influenced the election). I have no idea why you are so persistent in sending messages while also being so persistent about not understanding that. I tried, man, I really did. Do you want a diagram? I can send a diagram maybe and go back to each of my previous messages and show with color-coding how the different elements of the argument line up within certain messages and how it works to say "A and not B" and how that's allowed, to send that to someone who thinks "A and B." Should I do that?

It's also, as you noted, a condemnation of internet culture.

Chris-Chan was clearly disabled and mentally ill, and had a whole subculture of people devoted to increasing his suffering who spent significant effort on hurting him as much as possible. The whole thing is fucked, and I think people's mercilessness to him had a lot to do with causing the final tragic ending to the whole saga including causing unrelated innocent people to suffer.

Graham crackers with whipped cream on top. This one was very much the bottom of the barrel. 🥲

Ghirardelli brownie mix from Costco, filled up to about 1/3 of a mug mixed with milk and microwaved for 45 seconds to make a little brownie. Serve with ice cream on top, or with a glass of milk. I actually still do this one, it is delicious and costs basically $0 per serving.

Rice + milk + sugar and then mixed up in a bowl into a kind of puree. This goes great as a dessert after rice + frozen vegetables sauteed up from those massive Costco bags lol. If you're feeling bougie you can shred some cheese on top.

You clearly aren’t intending this to be about this (OP’s) post, and yet…

I realized, in the course of talking with you, that while me and OP have come to the same conclusion about what's going on in Lemmy, the specific sets of behavior we are calling out are very different. But we're describing the same underlying problem, we just have different perspectives on what we observed that led us to that conclusion.

I basically agree with OP's characterization of a type of argument these accounts like to make that to me doesn't make sense, but I just sort of suspect that there's a big contingent of genuine users that also like to muster that exact same argument pattern also, or at least a lot of the elements of it. But again it's probably pretty fruitless to start wildly speculating about which specific users are or are not "genuine," unless they do some kind of really obvious tell that they are not what they are claiming to be. It is absolutely impossible to know.

I actually like your idea, and I think that it could work if there was some kind of set structure to the posts, maybe using a template to make it easy for an LLM to parse, and to prevent comments from asking more follow-up questions than allowed. My partner is involved with competitive debate, and I think a highly-structured variant could work in an asynchronous format like forums posts, especially if there’s a bot to auto-remove posts that aren’t formatted correctly (that part could just be a script with regex or something).

Hm... this is an interesting idea. I was going to have it intuit the "main pillars" so to speak of each side's argument, and then make sense of how well the other side was coping with each of the pillars. Not in the sense of assessing right versus wrong or reading sources or anything, that's clearly hopeless. But just the basics: Are you addressing the argument directly, or are you just kind of stepping past it when you respond or pretending that it didn't exist, or are you mischaracterizing it as something totally different and then beating up the strawman? That might seem like kind of a simplistic bar to clear but I think there is so much on Lemmy that would fail that type of test that it would be really productive to have an objective referee. For everyone. It's surprisingly easy to fall into "my stuff is right, fuck all this other stuff, that is nonsense" type of thinking, it doesn't even have to be anything wrong with you if the bot is dinging you for not addressing something.

Formalizing the thing and the format you need to provide could work too, it's just an extra bar for people to clear and I feel like the LLM could probably do a half-decent job without it. I might try to knock up a quick version of it based on my idea but I'd be happy for any critique or other ways it could work.

Okay. You basically ignored most of my message, including some specific questions which I asked for specific reasons to try to get to the bottom of this. You just repeated your side again. So never mind.

You say you’re not, but then what is the remedy you’re putting forth?

This on the other hand is a pretty good question. So, one remedy I'd like to try is creating a moderated community specifically for political discussion, with a bot that can "oversee" the community and can identify fallacies or bad-faith engagement. LLMs aren't really capable of following the thread of a conversation or picking the "winner", but a lot of the stuff that pisses me off on Lemmy is pretty simple stuff to detect that I think they could do: Claiming that someone said something when they actually said something else, blatantly ignoring a direct question and instead going off and just talking about some different thing, repeating yourself forever without substantively responding to anything the other person says. That kind of thing. I think if there were a bot that could moderate discussions according to that kind of guideline and call people out in an unbiased way when they were engaging poorly, it would be hugely helpful. Because everyone does it, to some extent. It's easy to get emotional or get heated up about the point you wanted to make, it's easy to misinterpret something accidentally, and obviously everyone comes from a standpoint that their stuff is right (obviously right) or else they wouldn't be saying it. I think a more neutral arbiter could help to point those things out without it being a big acrimonious mess whenever people disagree. Accusing another person in the conversation of bad faith rarely goes anywhere good. I think in general (if it somewhat worked) it could be a really cool thing.

And, getting back to your question, I actually think something like that would do a lot to address the type of engagement that I tend to talk about when I talk about fake accounts. It sidesteps the (basically impossible and highly polarizing / inflammatory) task of categorizing accounts into "fake" or not. If you have a political viewpoint that I or OP happen to think may be coming from a "fake" POV, but you're just sitting there talking about it and engaging with people who disagree, it's fine. That's healthy. The problem comes in (to me) when people come in big gangs to all yell the same stuff, don't really engage with people who disagree but just mischaracterize the opposition and repeat their points of view forever, basically just engage in bad faith. Whether those people are "fake" or not is still relevant, to me, but I don't think just excising them out from your Lemmy experience is necessarily the way, and I definitely don't think trying to publicly call them out once they're "identified" by whatever specific criteria is the way. Because it is impossible to tell specifically for any given person.

Probably there are going to be 0 people who think that is a good idea. That is fine. I feel like the general street cred that AI in general has right now will lead people to hate the idea. That is fine. If I get motivation, I think I will just set the idea up and turn it loose, and if anyone's open to play with it then see how it works out. That is my remedy.

My take on a lot of this is that these sound like the strawmen positions that I’ve had levied against me before.

You've had people accuse you of having no idea what normal American salaries are or how Americans write their numbers, while claiming to be a genuine American who was super-concerned about the election, and saying that was suspicious? What strawman position similar to that have you had levied against you?

We need to be discussing any and every viable path to fixing the party, not calling people who say the current incarnation of the party can’t win “doomers” or trolls, when many of our point is that we can win, if we fix the party.

Most of the people OP was talking about are not trying to fix the Democrats, and they're often pretty explicit about saying that Democrats are as bad or worse than the Republicans and that they want to not vote or vote for third party candidates as a result. Obviously, advocating for a third party in itself isn't suspicious or anything, it's fine, but the particular type of guaranteed-to-be-counterproductive way that they're doing it is what OP is calling out, I think.

I sort of get what you're saying, that maybe someone has accused you of being a fake account because you criticize Democrats, and that's how you read OP's message. I don't think that is what OP's talking about, it's certainly not what I am talking about.

Well, since you’re asking me to surmise ‘why’ you might do that, my dime-store-psychology take would be that you’ve probably been influenced by the large amount of propaganda takes both pre- and post-election, that keep insisting that the pro-Palestine movement online was being driven artificially in order to divide the Democratic Party (as opposed to actually being a signal that Israel was in fact no longer considered ‘good’ among Dem voters).

I... what?

This has nothing to do with my question. I was pointing out that some of these fake accounts put on pro-Palestinian affects, and that I still think they are suspicious even though I am also pro-Palestinian. It doesn't even need to be anything to do with the Democrats in this scenario. I feel like you read what I talked about but now you're talking about some totally different scenario.

I am aware that there's a whole establishment-Democrat theory that the pro-Palestinian movement itself was "fake" or not really valid. That's 100% different from what I am talking about, and I don't think that theory ever really got traction with anyone outside of DC or the establishment media. Actually I would specifically contrast something like the "uncommitted" movement as an excellent example of something that is clearly real, because it clearly shows concern for the Palestinian people and a desire to fight for a better solution, whereas the exact thing me and OP have been talking about and what makes it suspicious is people who seem like they're totally unconcerned with making things any better, and just want to explicitly tell people never to vote for Democrats, and that's the end of it and as far as it goes. Which, voting's not enough sure, but refusing to do it at all seems totally counterproductive to anything good happening with immigration or Palestine. Totally different from what you're talking about as your own behavior and advocacy.

Did that all not come through from what either of us said so far? You thought we were just saying that anyone who criticizes Democrats must be fake?

I edited my comment to explain a little more. I'm honestly lost even trying to talk to you. Last message.

Okay, I'll work on my solution for better conversation on the internet. I think I've spent enough time aiming to help you with reading comprehension for today.

I said, "The Democrats can be ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform" and you spent like a short story's worth of words screaming at me that the Democrats are ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform, and then when I tried for like the 10th time to express to you that you can calm down about expressing that like a street preacher shouting on a corner an inch from my face, you apparently heard "I agree with you about 100% of what you say and have no disagreement with anything" even though you had previously picked up and explicitly disagreed with the part where I said that propaganda and media also had something to do with it.

You seem like you are doing literal backflips to avoid the conversation of whether that propaganda is happening, in favor of just shrieking at me that the Democrats carry some blame for losing the election, no matter how many times I attempt to express that I, also, think that.

I have literally no idea why you are that way. I hope you come out of it someday. Let me know if you do, and we can talk about the propaganda thing.

You have a lot of theories about why the dems lost, but none of them seem to be touching the point I was making.

Wait. Are you telling me that I have a different opinion than you about why the Dems lost? And you found that whole concept confusing, to the point that you had to reboot and repeatedly just explain your entire thing, from start to finish, including getting more and more strident about explaining to me the things I did agree with even when I told you I agreed with them, and interpreting me disagreeing with you in any respect into wild mischaracterizations of what I was saying, repeatedly and even after I explicitly explained that I believed the opposite of those mischaracterizations?

Well, I’m terribly sorry. In the future I’ll strive to be better about “touching the point you are making” when I say things, so you won’t have to be disturbed by the concept of reading something you don’t already agree with. I can understand how that could be discombobulating and might make you start hitting the bold and all caps to just say over and over again what you think to the person you're talking to. That sounds super productive, and like a gateway to an enjoyable and enlightening internet experience.

I think you and I disagree on what the most important takeaways from this election are

It is absolutely sending me that you just figured this out. Like that was the big mystery that you finally cracked, in this whole conversation, that finally made it make sense to you.

but I’m fine with letting it lie.

I think that would be best. I wish you the best in all your future endeavors.