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2 yr. ago

  • I mean... if a friend used the word "female" in an obviously innocent way, and so I kicked them out of my house and told them they could never come back, I think the consequences that I would experience in terms of what my other friends said to me would be pretty similar to the consequences this particular mod team is experiencing. "You're not free from people criticizing your actions or taking action against you" applies both ways, I think.

    There’s nothing wrong with removing toxicity

    There is, though, if you define "toxicity" in a totally weird and nonsensical way. What I'm objecting to is the crazypants definition of toxicity, not the idea of removing actual toxicity from public spaces. Was that not already evident from what I wrote?

    I bet you think Musk is doing a good job with Xwitter too.

    Nice thought-terminating cliche. I am not your enemy; it sounds like you've decided that I am, as a way of dismissing whatever I have to say, but I can assure you that I'm not whatever cliche you have in mind. You can look over my post history if you still feel like I am.

  • was personally offended by the use of that word saw an opportunity to tell some other person what's what, which is deeply satisfying to them, and overrides the question of what's the actual right and wrong thing to do

  • I'm trying so hard not to use the downvote button as a "disagree" button here.

    Reality matters. If the post obviously didn't mean anything bad, and there's no realistic way that any real human person might be hurt in any way by reading the post title, then banning the post is pure wankery. Yes, even if it's "incel language." I would go further than that and also support all kinds of speech that actually might be offensive or hurtful to some person reading, for some variety of reasons, but this is so clearly on the "just let it be and worry about issues that are genuine issues instead" side that I'm having trouble believing that the people defending it are sincere.

    When the did the left get so thin skinned? What happened to the ACLU defending neo-Nazi rallies? Why pick a battle about something so silly the "winning" of which carries no benefit to anybody?

  • I would use python instead of BASIC, if it was me. I also started with BASIC as a kid, but I remember each step up language wise (BASIC -> Pascal -> C) being a big satisfaction of "hey, it seems like this language is a lot better and I can do more with it." I would echo the recommendation to use actual code though. Language is pretty deeply hard-wired into human beings, and I suspect that the kids that will do well with breaking tasks down into scratch primitives would do equally well with python, and the kids who find python "too hard" or something would also not be able to do too much with scratch. Maybe I am wrong, but that's my guess.

    My only other thought is to have some kind of graphical / game you can play / real world robotics angle to it. Maybe there's a little graphical ecosystem pre-provided, and they can write agents that can interact within the ecosystem and then see a visual representation of what everyone's agents are doing. I would definitely recommend to have a bunch of code that they can read, though; that was where my programming as a kid took a big step forward, was when I got a big disk filled with programs I could analyze and break down.

  • Why is this surprising? It's on. They already tried to steal the election and mobbed the capitol to try to kill the politicians that opposed the effort. They're threatening election workers, they're talking about civil war, they're posting the addresses of jury members.

    It's on. The people prosecuting Trump understand the stakes, I think (or I hope). Trump and his close allies definitely understand the stakes. I get being chilled by it and wanting to report on it, but anyone who is surprised by it, at this point, has no business being in journalism.

  • Moving from A to B can still be a good thing to do, even if there are some remaining problems at B.

  • I know this is not gonna be some revelation, but: I have literally never encountered someone who makes their whole identity about being an Alpha for the sake of getting women, being superior to other men, etc, who doesn't have some deep insecurity at the heart of it (and not very well hidden).

    Mostly the dudes who are what Andrew Tate wants to be have interests like fishing or carpentry or business or some particular sports team. They don't spend all their time in the "war room" scheming with other dudes how they can work together to trick women into having sex with them.

  • Yes, but that's not easy... I can't remember exactly, but I think I saw an estimate that the compute time to train just one of the GPT models cost around $66 million. IDK whether that's total cost from scratch, or incremental cost to arrive at that model starting from an earlier model that was already built, but I do know that GPT is still to this day using that September 2021 cutoff which to me kind of implies that they're building progressively on top of already-assembled models and datasets (which makes sense, because to start from scratch without needing to would be insane).

    You could, technically, start from scratch and spend 2 more years and however many million dollars retraining a new model that doesn't have the private data you're trying to excise, but I think the point the article is making is that that's a pretty difficult approach and it seems right now like that's the only way.

  • Remember: "If you come at the king, you best not miss" cuts both ways. There's a pretty good chance that some Trumpy Republican is planning to let all these guys out of prison as the vanguard of the new order in 2024, or in 2028.

    I'm glad they're going to prison. But also, please vote.

  • Yes, agreed. The current system in the US is so far from economic justice that it's hard to even talk about particular details of how to improve it, because the whole thing is such a gilded-age disaster.

    I sorta sympathize with this dude who's railing against "welfare," because there is a good point there. I don't think the goal should be just giving money whenever they seem like they need it. However, your point is equally well-taken; if someone's just fucked, then turning them out on the street maybe along with their family definitely isn't the answer. I keep bringing up the New Deal because I feel like that's pretty close to the answer. You can have a job if you want to work. The government is going to out-and-out create a whole bunch of jobs doing stuff that really badly needs doing, and if you want one of them, let's fuckin' get to work. Having a system where the majority of "jobs" are pretty low paying, miserable on a day to day level, and not doing much of anything for anybody involved, is the problem. Then on top of that, if something outside your control changes, you might get turned out on the street, or maybe we give you this minimal handout. Doing that handout seems, to me, better than not, but the problem goes a lot deeper.

    There's a bunch of work to be done. We need to improve education in this country, we should be trying to mitigate the apocalyptic damage that climate change is going to cause, we badly need to fix the roads and bridges and electrical infrastructure, stuff like that. There's no shortage of real problems to work on. The problem is that the system doesn't do anything to match up the huge population that wants to have a worthwhile job, with the massive piles of resources (wages) our technological efficiency makes available, with the massive amount of work to be done. It seems like we want everyone to just keep going to their office admin or retail jobs or whatever making $11/hr until we all sink into the boiling sea.

  • Hey, substantive statements! Okay, I can rock with this.

    "Welfare" is a very broad term. It can refer to anything from unemployment benefits, to SNAP, to this story about one-time aid specifically for homeless people in Canada (which is very far removed from anything resembling "welfare" as it's commonly implemented in the US), to section 8 housing or housing assistance, and lots more. There are so many goals and implementation details with varying levels of success that I don't think it makes sense to apply any kind of blanket logic to the whole collection, let along to apply the logic of "this one-time homeless benefit is welfare -> welfare never works -> end of discussion."

    Why would I put more than the minimal amount of effort into any post on lemmy, knowing that 100 communist teenagers are just going to reply “lol wrong, you fascist” and downvote?

    Yeah, I 100% agree with this, having been on the receiving end of it myself plenty of times. I don't think I'm doing that to you in any regard, but I do get the frustration with the overall state of discourse here (including from "the left") and reluctance to start any kind of real discussion. All I can say is if that bothers you, you gotta be part of the solution instead of starting to do the same thing yourself.

    If you want to debate me, I’d rather do that in real time on another program like discord.

    Lol not interested. You're on Lemmy, and you said specific things on Lemmy, and I replied. If you're suddenly not interested in having a discussion on Lemmy, then I won't try to force you into it I guess.

  • The core issue isn't complicated. No advanced Lemmy required. Giving money to people who have none, as a way to make the world better, either (a) works always, or (b) works when done some ways but not others, or (c ) never works. I say the answer is (b) and I'm happy to show sources and studies; to get to the truth of the matter you have to be open to looking at how things play out and examining evidence.

    If you're planning on saying over and over again that it's (c ), then you've done that! Mission accomplished. If you want to dig a little into the reasons why someone would say one thing or the other, and examining evidence from the real world which might or might not agree with you, we can do that too.

    Edit: (c ) not (c)

    1. McDonalds and Taylor are fighting tooth and nail to prevent people from circumventing their weird agreement and maintaining their machines successfully, in a Kafkaesque indictment of the whole concept that competition in a free market will lead to a sensible world
  • Nice deflection to a different topic. This whole story is about Canada, nothing about the US Democratic party. If for some reason you do want to talk about the effectiveness of "Democratic" fiscal policy versus "Republican" fiscal policy, I'm happy to do that.

    Like I said, I'm actually fine having a good-faith discussion about either one of these topics if you're into that, but if you're just interested in tossing little one-sentence quips at me and ignoring relevant things I'm saying or questions that I'm asking, then IDK what the point would be. Surely you can see that, right?

  • This dude on Youtube did an in-depth examination of the weird corporate reasons why the ice cream machines can't be maintained properly. Sorry for the Youtube link, but I honestly couldn't find a text story that went into the same type of analysis about it.

    Edit: Timestamped the link to skip some folderol at the beginning

  • It never does.

    Did you miss up above where I asked you for a source for this?

    This whole interaction is hilarious.

    We did a study of what happens when you do X.
    No, that's wrong. X never works.
    What is your study? Why do you say that? We did a study and it worked.
    Because it is known. X never works.

    Honestly, I would be 100% open to it if you made some kind of argument for why some specific social program is actually making things worse when you study it, because I do think that happens. But, just falling back on thought-terminating cliches like "Welfare never works" and "Democrats only ever have one solution" and refusing to examine them further is not going to bring you any better ability to understand the world, and now you're over here trying to export those malfunctioning thought patterns to other people, and surprise surprise, they're not being friendly to your efforts.

  • I agree, and I would also add that depending on how it's done, it can actually benefit the economy ("make people richer") quite a lot. I thought about replying to them with this whole typed out explanation of how the social safety net of the New Deal, over the next few decades, transformed the US economy from one in which a handful of people kept all the money and everyone else was starving into a hugely more powerful economy where the people involved in running the whole operation were invested in the whole operation's success and permitted to share (a little bit) in the fruits of that success. I'd call that, in the specific way that it was done, a pretty defining success that impacted the whole arc of the 20th century.

    Honestly the devil is in the details, and it's also possible erect what was supposed to be a social safety net which actually makes things worse, and if someone wanted to make a coherent argument for why this or any other specific thing was an instance of that, I'd be fine to talk about that. But I've been progressively learning on Lemmy that when someone gives a one-sentence non sequitur partisan response, taking it at face value and trying to be detailed and factual in your response is a mug's game. The number of people who would genuinely be interested in that conversation seems pretty upsettingly small.

  • Are you calling what's being done in this story welfare? Because if so, I can cite this time.