WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @lemmy.world

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11 mo. ago

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:

1. A set of securities fraud charges.
2. 8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.

He's out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there's a good chance that they won't be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?

So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he's telling the truth, he's endangering us all. If he's lying, then he's committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.

The penalty for burning ballots should be burning at the stake.

You're greatly exaggerating. There are all sorts of federal regulations on how stats can handle voter registration and voting. That's the Civil Rights Act, the Motor Voter Act, prohibitions on poll taxes, and on and on. States run elections, but the federal government has broad authority to regulate federal elections.

We need a federal law that establishes a civil penalty people can sue their state over if they are incorrectly purged from the voter rolls. I think $10k per person would do it. States can still clean up the rolls, but they can't "accidentally" remove a bunch of legit voters without being on the hoo for millions in legal liability.

Hezbollah clearly needs to seize a 20 km chunk of northern Israel to serve as a security buffer zone for the people of Lebanon.

So here's the path that you're envisioning:

1. Someone wants to send you a communication of some sort. They draft a series of bullet points or short version.
2. They have an LLM elaborate it into a long-form email or report.
3. They send the long-from to you.
4. You receive it and have an LLM summarize the long-form into a short-form.
5. You read the short form.

Do you realize how stupid this whole process is? The LLM in step (2) cannot create new useful information from nothing. It is simply elaborating on the bullet points or short version of whatever was fed to it. It's extrapolating and elaborating, and it is doing so in a lossy manner. Then in step (4), you go through ANOTHER lossy process. The LLM in step (4) is summarizing things, and it might be removing some of the original real information the human created in step (1), rather than the useless fluff the LLM in step (2) added.

WHY NOT JUST HAVE THE PERSON DIRECTLY SEND YOU THE BULLET POINTS FROM STEP (1)???!!

This is idiocy. Pure and simply idiocy. We send start with a series of bullet points, and we end with a series of bullet points, and it's translated through two separate lossy translation matrices. And we pointlessly burn huge amounts of electricity in the process.

This is fucking stupid. If no one is actually going to read the long-form communications, the long-form communications SHOULDN'T EXIST.

It's about rich donors. There are a small number of influential and wealthy Jewish donors that give a lot of money to universities. There are a far larger number of wealthy religious conservative donors who are more interested in the advancement of Israel for their apocalypse beliefs. Some are just old wealthy donors who grew up in an era when Israel was much more of an underdog than a brutal colonial occupier (or at least could more easily be portrayed as such.)

High-level admins like university presidents spend most of their time hobnobbing with wealthy donors and potential donors. Their primary job IS to secure donations. That's what they spend the vast majority of their time thinking about and prioritizing. And those donors are perfectly willing to cut off those dollars if they see things happening on a campus they don't like.

Universities have let private donors gain way too much power over them. Academic freedom has been severely degraded by their over-reliance on wealthy benefactors. That is unfortunately just the sad state of modern academia.

This should serve as a lesson to women everywhere that to conservatives, the definition of "trans" is flexible, and that someone is a "woman" only as far as it is politically useful to conservatives.

Look at the attack on the two Olympic athletes this summer. They were cisgender women, but they didn't meet western white beauty standards, and the right needed to find some "trans" athletes to attack, so they labeled cis women trans and demonized them. They still reference them in speeches.

Or these girls in this ad. Just some random cis girl athletes, but it was politically useful to label them trans, so they did.

As the culture war moves ever-more extreme, the definition of "trans" can always be expanded. Remember, 90% of cisgender women are crossdressers according to the traditional definition of the word. 90% of cisgender women regularly wear clothes that would literally have gotten them arrested in many parts of the US only half a century or so ago. It was literally illegal for women to wear pants in many areas. And as the push to confine women to ever-stricter gender roles marches on, any woman that doesn't meet this ever-narrowing standard of beauty can be labeled "trans" and have their rights stripped away.

Are you a woman athlete who looks a bit 'masculine' from years of participating in a contact sport like boxing? You're "trans" and deserve to have your civil rights taken away.

Are you a woman who works in a traditionally male career field? You're "trans" and deserve to have your rights taken away.

Do you wear anything other than dresses, skirts, and other traditionally female clothing? You're "trans" and deserve to have your rights taken away.

Do you want to have any independence at all, have your own bank account, and have any role in life other than daughter, wife, and mother? You're "trans" and deserve to have your rights taken away.

The attack on trans people is a perfect wedge for the right. There is no hard definition for the word "trans," and it can conveniently be defined ever-wider to confine women to ever-narrower ranges of acceptable behavior. When you hear hard right reactionaries talking about declaring being trans illegal or waxing about putting trans people in mental institutions, remember that it wasn't that long ago that cis women that showed any degree of independence were also institutionalized and lobotomized.

In the minds of many hard-right conservatives, 90% of women today are acting in ways that are fundamentally in contradiction to the role of their sex. In their eyes, most women are transgender. And while the narrow edge of the wedge is targeting people who actively seek out overt gender transition, that isn't the real end game.

Take a look! It's in a book! It's Readin Raaiiinboow!!

The current Republican party is just a party that has been taken over by the monster they curated for decades. The party of Reagan and the Bushes was mostly run by business interests. But to have a chance of winning, they pandered heavily to the religious zealots and the conspiracy nuts. For decades, the businessmen told the crazies that various nebulous evil forces were out to take everything they loved away from them. They used racial resentment, anti-LGBT bigotry, hatred of immigrants, etc. to pander to the crazies. The businessmen promised the crazies that they would punish the evildoers and keep the crazies safe. Well, eventually, the crazies came to realize that the businessmen never really seemed to live up to their promises. They never engaged in the mass brutal expulsion of those filthy immigrants. They never criminalized the queers and locked them in jail. They never actually banned abortion. The businessmen cultured, encouraged, and fed the insanity of the crazies, but they only ever wanted to just string them along. Doing all of the things the crazies wanted was bad for business after all.

Well, eventually the crazies got tired of waiting, and they took over the party. That is what Trumpism is. It's the monster the Republican leaders have been feeding for decades finally breaking loose and taking over the whole party. For decades, Republican leaders have been running on the same kind of hatred that fascist parties use, but without any intention of actually going full fascist themselves. But if you stoke up enough fascist hatred, if you make that kind of bile acceptable in the body politic...Eventually an actual fascist will come along to give the crazies what they want.

Like it or not, the Republican party of today IS the party of the past few decades. It is simply the party actually embracing its core message and carrying it to its logical conclusions.

The real reason conservatives love Israel so much, is that they want somewhere to ship all the Jews in America off to.

Wouldn't that be the most amazing form of this election? Kamala wins, and the reason the Dems are able to get a trifecta - is because Ted fuckin' Cruz loses his seat.

He can hem and haw, but it's not going to matter. The court wasn't willing to play ball with him in 2020, and they're not going to now. The court doesn't mind putting their thumb on the scale a bit, but they're not going to completely overturn elections that have clear unambiguous winners. Let Trump bitch and whine; that's what he was always going to do. It won't stop the orange bastard from dying in prison.

I would just as rather believe that the whole thing is a right-wing plan:

1. Get conservatives to harp about an incoming deepfake.
2. Get liberals thinking talking about it, condemning Trump for something they haven't even seen yet.
3. Release a video, that actually is a deepfake, a deepfake created BY conservatives.
4. The deepfake is quickly discovered, and conservatives accuse liberals of trying to frame Trump for sexual assault.

I too am disturbed by the noted decline in Austin Powers references among high school students.

It's worse than that. The US is a net oil exporter. We make all the oil we need at home.

Additionally, you can point to the indiscriminate attacks on Oct 7th against nonmilitary targets to give evidence to their lack of distinguishment between Israeli people and the Israeli military.

The crucial fact that is always left out of this - by the Israeli military's own admission, using their own numbers, the IDF and Hamas have the same collateral damage ratio. Hamas killed 2 civilians for every military member they killed on October 7th. This is the same civilian to military kill ratio that the IDF claims in their own numbers. Hamas is literally just as effective at avoiding civilian casualties as the IDF is.

That and more, and Bibbi himself said with biblical flair: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” Not out of context. The context was the “war” with Gaza.

I think it is high time that we acknowledged the elephant in the room.

"God's chosen people" = "ubermensch"

"God's promised land" = "lebensraum"