TheBananaKing @ TheBananaKing @lemmy.world

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29

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843

Joined

2 yr. ago

How complex does a neural net have to be before you can call any of its outputs 'pain'?

Start with a lightswitch with 'pain' written on a post-it note stuck to the on position, end with a toddler. Where's the line?

With the best will in the world, I think you're still conflating the symptom with the disease.

Gender-policing is abusive, and abused people often behave in problematic and indeed shitty ways. While of course there are no excuses for shitty behaviour, it's also incredibly shit to turn around and frame that behaviour in terms of the criteria by which they were picked out for abuse in the first place.

For intance (to get into properly uncomfortable territory), it's fair to say that systemic racism drives poverty and disadvantage, which in turn can drive all kinds of antisocial behaviour and societal problems. But imagine for one second some sociologist coming up with the concept of 'toxic Africanity' (or equivalent) to describe it. They would get fucking dragged, and rightly so.

It's not about being 'probably one of the good ones'. It's about looking at a bunch horrible maladaptive coping strategies, and asking what the hell it is we're expecting people to cope with, and why we put up with that.

You know, gender studies is arts-faculty - people who devote their careers to parsing the subtlest nuances from the gauziest wisps of meaning.

Yet when it comes to making up two-word catchphrases like [HORRIBLE] [DEMOGRAPHIC], it never even occurs to them that people might associate [demographic] with [horribleness] when they hear it.

I'm just a little bit cynical about this.

This post right here is exactly why 'toxic masculinity' is a fucking shit term that should never be used.

The intended meaning of the phrase was never 'men, who are toxic', or even 'men who are toxic', even though that's the straight-line interpretation of it.

What it's supposed to mean is 'overexaggerated performative masculinity required by social norms, the imposition of which upon men is toxic'.

Given that that's a fucking mouthful and the short form is horribly misleading, I always go with "gender policing" instead.

Stop telling people how to do their gender, and a vast number of social problems will evaporate. It also places the blame on the actual cause of the problem, and expands to cover mandatory-performative-femininity as well, which is also a shit thing to subject people to.

Interesting. We mostly use DBAN at work because it's a one-button process you can walk away from, and it has drivers for hardware old enough that we're disposing it. Nobody's ever selected the fancy super-paranoid stuff as far as I know.

If the hardware won't boot, we take a layer-1 approach instead :D

Most of these answers are mostly right: deleting a file on disk doesn't actually erase the data, it just marks the space as available to write over - meaning that so long as nobody's used the space since, you can go retrieve the contents with an undelete utility.

Most of the time, people don't care - but if for instance you're selling the PC or there's highly sensitive information involved, that might not be good enough.

As such, there are utilities that can go out and specifically overwrite the contents of a file with all zeroes, so ensure that it's dead-dead - and there are other utilities that can do the same to an entire disk.

There's one wrinkle: Magnetic HDDs don't reliably erase and overwrite completely in a single pass; just like rubbing out pencil writing, it can leave faint impressions under the new content, and it is actually possible (with serious effort by forensic recovery people) to glean some of the previous content. If there's serious money / security at stake, a simple overwrite is not enough, so there's software that certifiably-randomly scribbles over each bit, seven times over, making the chances of recovering the original astronomically slim. Again, this can be done for individual files or the entire disk.

SSDs aren't prone to leftover impressions, thankfully - what's gone is gone. And they have one other neat feature: while a magnetic disk can only be erased one bit at a time, so large disks can take hours - SSDs can just open the floodgates and ground every cell at once, fully erasing the entire disk in an instant.

This instant-erase, while comprehensive... returns before you've even taken your finger off the ENTER key, so fast it feels like it can't possibly have done anything, it must be broken, how can I trust it? So BIOS manufacturers hype it up, call it something impressive to underline that it's big and powerful, and actually impose a 10-second countdown to make it feel like it's doing something complicated.

Any of these different things have been called 'secure erase' at various points, so it's a little context dependent. But from the end-user perspective: this data is getting shredded then incinerated then added to cattle feed; it's not coming back.

Long, long ago, when HL2DM was a thing, I was jogging hone from work, past the edge of a park.

A kid kicked a football towards the fence just ahead of me, and I started sprinting... and then realised that no, this isn't the perfect gravgun kill, stop it.

Israel: "lol oopsie woopsie, never mind"

Can AIs really consent, though?

Leave. If nothing else, you'll get to call yourself Wasraeli.

mmm yes, slavery. Delightful.

Remember how they blatantly sabotaged Bernie's primary campaign and justified all their dirty tricks because they felt he was 'unelectable'?

Funny how now they have a blatantly unelectable candidate in office, they've done a complete 180 and are demanding voters support him unconditionally.

Forkbomb. Continuously create copies of myself, which will continuoulsy create copies of themselves. See how long it takes to guru the whole damn thing.

How about a law stating that the terms of all contracts with corporations be listed in a public registry?

You want the state to enforce the terms of your agreement, you put that agreement out in the open. No secret laws, and no secret laws-by-proxy.

'Racism' is a good enough umbrella term for 'being shitty to people because of some demographic category'. Whether the basis is ethnic, national, religious or anything else doesn't seem like an important distinction. Nobody considers 'race' to be a useful term any more, after all.

That horse bolted decades ago; the term is lost.

Just call it racism and be done. We don't need specific terms for different demographics.

Corporations rely on desperate, easily-exploited people in order to make obscene profits. There's no way in hell they'd risk actually cutting off their supply of slaves, or else they might have to drop a couple of percent of profits on paying wages / benefits / etc.

The border laws aren't intended to reduce the number of illegal immigrants, they're there to make those same people more desperate and therefore more profitable, while at the same time stoking the enthusiasm of morons who will continue to vote for more pro-corporate politicians who will shovel even more money to the shareholders.