mfed1122 @ mfed1122 @discuss.tchncs.de

Posts

2

Comments

68

Joined

4 mo. ago

Zooming in on tiny drops and saying XYZ PLUMMETS is my #1 pet peeve of all stock analysis

Absolutely there is, but unfortunately the solution to CP is having moderators who can delete content, and that alone is enough to cause all the problems with moderators. It seems largely intractable to me. The only thing I could see maybe working is some system where moderators can be removed by community vote, but then you rely on systems preventing fake accounts from being created or account age to stop those votes from being botted, etc... I just don't see how to technically solve the problem of moderators having power to delete things. It's the classic issue of who watches the watchmen. Humanity has never had a great solution to this.

The problem is that if you actually have no or insufficient moderation then people just start using the site to post child pornography. And then you visiting what used to be a site you like becomes basically illegal and dangerous, not to mention potentially traumatizing. I'm not exaggerating, there was a small game fan forum site I used to love along with many others, but someone caught on to the fact it was run by just one guy and kept signing up with fake accounts and posting child porn or links to it. Luckily I had already fallen off using the site by then, but one of my Internet friends who still visited it kept me updated on the drama. First everyone normal stopped visiting. Then it eventually got so bad the owner had to shut down the site.

People lack imagination when it comes to what will happen with no moderation. It quickly becomes horrible.

I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

Yeah same. I respect the huge amount of work it takes to make a suite like that, but... I'm lucky I've worked with Blender a lot to give me a good impression of open source software. If Libre was my first thing I experimented with in the open source world (and I think for many, many people it probably is), I would probably think "wow open source software is a joke, I guess you get what you pay for after all". It really makes a horrible impression. I wonder why LibreOffice has so many usability pains vs Blender, despite the fact that both applications have very high demand. Maybe it's just that LibreOffice seems really dull to contribute to?

Yeah, and this is before we even get into availability heuristic biases that would screw over people who do understand percentages. Most people are very bad estimators. If they live in a town with 40% Hispanic people, they're gonna overestimate the total % of Hispanic people.

For sure. Many Americans are confused by percentages. They do not understand that 20% is equivalent to saying "in a room of 100 people, 20 of them are trans", and even if they did understand that, they wouldn't have the proactive reasoning to make sure their percentage estimates add up/overlap in a way that makes sense, e.g not implying that 20 people in the room are all Hispanic Asian atheist Catholic bisexual transgender millionaires.

No, it's actually the worst name possible. It's the latest in a long line of giving things names that force them to be talked about like they're good. Big Beautiful Bill. Patriot Act. It's like if I name my proposal to make every human on Earth my personal slave the "Best Idea Ever Act That Only Stupid Evil People Disagree With". What's sad is that it's actually effective. There are people out there stupid enough to really think "How can you be against the AMERICA party? Aren't you an AMERICAN????". It takes advantage of linguistics to manipulate psychological response to the topic. And even if you say "well actually the big beautiful bill is actually not beautiful at all" then you sound like a silly hair-splitting moron who doesn't have an actual argument and can only attack the name.

Furthermore it creates an ambiguity. I can no longer say "I'm proud to be an American" without tacking on "but not the Elon Musk Party kind", which then spreads and reinforces the dominance of his term.

The left should really try to start some sort of social media trend of saying we're proud to be Americans just to try to undermine the ambiguity before Musk's marketing bots get into full swing and co-opt the term.

Post-Zuckerberg? I'm confused on the eras of Facebook I guess. He's still CEO isn't he? Wouldn't that make the whole history of the company the Zuckerberg era?

I, too, spent longer than I ever should have thinking about this. My first thought was, they're just using it in a linguistic sense, so it doesn't matter that the exponent would have to be something very small to go from 1 qualification to 4. But then I thought, hm, I guess since there's only 1 qualification for Bill, no exponent would be enough. But then I realized that grammatically the value in question is "qualification" and not "number of degrees". The number of degrees is merely standing in as a heuristic proxy to illustrate qualification. This "qualification" scale makes the most the most sense if it's between 0 and 1, representing percentiles of qualification. Therefore, the exponent applied to Bill's qualifications must also be between 0 and 1 in order to increase the value to Lundgren's. For a moment I thought this was the nail in the coffin for the original text, but of course the word "more" there again refers to the qualification, not to the exponent itself. This interpretation has the nice benefit that no matter what the exponent is, we always get a qualification value between 0 and 1. Hence I can conclude this is the only viable headcanon for this post.

Vertical video is better for content focused on a single standing performer, because it allows as much of the screen resolution as possible to show the body. Horizontal is better for a performer lying down or any traditional horizontal sex acts, for the same reason.

I'm probably reading a little too far into this, but IMO Gen Z is much less interested in "simulations" of intercourse and is more interested in something "real", i.e someone doing a dance. Intercourse feels like a fantasy, like you're supposed to imagine that you're the one having intercourse, it's that fantasy which is appealing. Something like dancing or dirty talking is more honest about what it is, since a video of someone dancing or talking is essentially the same experience as if they were actually there in front of you. I believe that because Gen Z is more digitally native than older generations, they see digital content not as a substitute or fantasy for a real thing, but rather as a real thing in itself, and the nature of the content they consume reflects that. Another example of this is the shift from real-life streamers who fake personalities but pretend that they are presenting their real selves, to vtubers - who implicitly acknowledge that they are playing a fictional character for their stream as symbolized by their avatars. The human streamers are a fantasy substitute for a real human friend, but with a vtuber the content does not pretend to be different than what it actually is - a pretend character putting on a show for your enjoyment. By acknowledging its artificiality and integrating it into the content itself, it shifts from being something "fake" and "simulated" to being something "real". To me it's the exact same dynamic manifesting in a different area.

Now of course, I do understand that vertical content also simply means you don't need to rotate your phone, and that Gen Z is almost exclusively using the Internet on the phone vs. the desktop as older generations will. But this too is essentially a reflection of the feeling that digital content is not an artificial recreation confined to a specific display area (a TV or computer) but rather perpetually available (your phone), as would be appropriate for something which has taken on the status of being real rather than fake. The two forces reinforce each other, imo.

Those are some good nuances that definitely require a nuanced response and forced me to refine my thinking, thank you! I'm actually not claiming that the brain is the sole boundary of the real me, rather it is the majority of me, but my body is a contributor. The real me does change as my body changes, just in less meaningful ways. Likewise some changes in the brain change the real me more than others. However, regardless of what constitutes the real me or not, (and believe me, the philosophical rabbit hole there is one I love to explore), in this case I'm really just talking about the straightforward immediate implications of a brain implant on my privacy. An arm implant would also be quite bad in this regard, but a brain implant is clearly worse.

There have already been systems that can display very rough, garbled images of what people are thinking of. I'm less worried about an implant that tells me what to do or controls me directly, and more worried about an implant that has a pretty accurate picture of my thoughts and reports it to authorities. It's surely possible to build a system that can approximate positive or negative mood states, and in combination this is very dangerous. If the government can tell that I'm happy when I think about Luigi Mangione, then they can respond to that information however they want. Eventually, in the same way that I am conditioned by the panopticon to stop at stop sign, even in the middle of a desolate desert where I can see for miles around that there are no cars, no police, no cameras - no anything that could possibly make a difference to me running the stop sign - the system will similarly condition automatic compliance in thoughts themselves. That is, compliance is brought about not by any actual exertion of power or force, but merely by the omnipresent possibility of its exertion.

(For this we only need moderately complex brain implants, not sophisticated ones that actually control us physiologically.)

I am not depressed, but I will never get a brain implant for any reason. The brain is the final frontier of privacy, it is the one place I am free. If that is taken away I am no longer truly autonomous, I am no longer truly myself.

I understand this is how older generations feel about lots of things, like smartphones, which I am writing this from, and I understand how stupid it sounds to say "but this is different!", but like... really. This is different. Whatever scale smartphones, drivers licenses, personalized ads, the internet, smart home speakers.... whatever scale all these things lie on in terms of "panopticon-ness", a brain implant is so exponentially further along that scale as to make all the others vanish to nothingness. You can't top a brain implant. A brain implant is a fundamentally unspeakable horror which would inevitably be used to subjugate entire peoples in a way so systematically flawless as to be almost irreversible.

This is how it starts. First it will be used for undeniable goods, curing depression, psychological ailments, anxiety, and so on. Next thing you know it'll be an optional way to pay your check at restaurants, file your taxes, read a recipe - convenience. Then it will be the main way to do those things, and then suddenly it will be the only way to do those things. And once you have no choice but to use a brain implant to function in society, you'll have no choice but to accept "thought analytics" being reported to your government and corporations. No benefit is worth a brain implant, don't even think about it (but luckily, I can't tell if you do).

Can you elaborate on why? Genuine question. It seems like if the alternative is also not getting what you want, then there isn't much to lose?

Cool. So since she's a member of the house of representatives, she must have initiated proceedings for impeachment, right?

Edit: I am happy to see that she did (or rather joined in with Al's), and it served a useful purpose of highlighting what posers the rest of the Dems are with their resounding votes against.

Yeah, I ask because I'd really like to start moderating or contributing to some type of community that is very popular outside of Lemmy but not currently on Lemmy much. Art seems like a good one. Cooking too potentially. I wonder what would bring the most new visitors to Lemmy?

What interests in particular do you think aren't well represented?

I'll be very interested to some day figure out what the explanation for this is. It's extremely bizarre and very creepy. Also, it's crazy that Internet access can just be whisked away so easily by the government. I guess satellite is just about the only way around that.

To be fair, the headline of this article did literally call it a birthday parade.

I think there is a substantial difference though. Meat processing is done in a measured, considered way for a benefit (meat) that cannot be obtained without killing the animal. It is done in isolated facilities away from people who find the process disturbing. Just because people find something gross doesn't mean it shouldn't be done - we have sewage maintenance done out of the public eye too - but it does maybe mean it should be done where people don't have to see it. The only benefit this man gets from killing the animal is some sort of "revenge". But this is in principle completely contradictory to meat processing, where animals are seen as less capable of higher order experiences and therefore more acceptable to kill. To seek revenge, you would need to be assigning more higher order experience to the seagull than we typically see it as having. You have to see the seagull as selfish, stealing, criminal, rude, etc., even though in reality a more reasonable person understands that it's just an animal looking for food. Meat processing is not done out of some emotional vendetta against the animals, rather it is the cold detachment of it that is exactly what makes it acceptable. Can you imagine if we killed the same amount of chickens every day, not to eat them, but just because we hate them? This is much more horrifying! Because that would mean we think chickens are having complex enough inner experiences to warrant hatred, yet still we kill them.

Meat processing maybe isn't great, but it's still much better than this seagull killer. It isn't impulsive, it isn't disproportionate in response to the situation, it acknowledges and conceals its own horrors; thereby paying respect to important social codes. The actions of this man, though, disregarded the well-being of children and others around him, in an impulsive and disproportionate response - your average meat-eater is indeed better than that, I think. When I have a craving for some meat, I don't drag a calf down to the nearest playground, cut it in half and spray blood over the children, and proceed to mock the calf's weakness and inferiority as I beat it to tenderize it before consumption. I just want some food, dude. But what's this guy's beef? It's not beef, and it's not even seagull meat, but rather some frightening notion of swift and decisive revenge, which reveals that he is just waiting for any excuse to get away with brutalizing things around him.