adderaline

he looks like a wax figure holy shit

or maybe you don’t have some especially well considered, enlightened perspective, and people here believe the things they do for reasons that align with their life experience and education, just as with yourself. taking a centrist stance is not some objectively superior position from which to view politics. you aren’t endowed with special insight for choosing the midpoint between ideologies that contradict each other.

prefigurative politics!

its not completely wrong. getting cosmetic veneers is a pretty common practice in hollywood. they don’t cause your teeth to decay or whatever, but lots of celebs have them.

Open models is the way to battle that.

This is something I think needs to be interrogated. None of these models, even the supposedly open ones are actually “open” or even currently “openable”. We can know the exact weights for every single parameter, the code used to construct it, and the data used to train it, and that information gives us basically no insight into its behavior. We simply don’t have the tools to actually “read” a machine learning model in the way you would an open source program, the tech produces black boxes as a consequence of its structure. We can learn about how they work, for sure, but the corps making these things aren’t that far ahead of the public when it comes to understanding what they’re doing or how to change their behavior.

same. audio accounts for so much of the friction i’ve experienced on linux its crazy. it works fine for general computing (after tons of troubleshooting), but it kind of convinced me that i’d probably need to dual boot if i wanted to try music production. i’d love to be proven wrong about that.

link! i didn’t know Internet Archive had a merch store.

plenty of people?

cop got on the news and used a bike lock chain that was used to barricade the building as “proof” that the protestors were infiltrated by professional agitators, because it was an “industrial chain” or something like that. its the bike lock that Columbia University itself recommends to students.

i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.

language changes. we don’t speak like people did last century. gay used to mean happy. we can make english “nonsensical”. we have, and we are, and we will. and you can’t fucking stop it any more than you can stop kids from making slang. as much as you hate it, you know how the singular they works, and have no reason to be a little bitch about it. its in the dictionary. suck it up and stop whining.

single use plastics? there are tons of plastic materials that are embedded in things we only use once and then throw away. we don’t need the plastic on string cheese to last for longer than a few months. or plastic bottles. or bubble wrap. or the plastic coating on cans. from what the article says, its not water soluble, so it needs to be actively colonized by bacteria to break down. if we built it into reusable plastic objects, they’d just need to stay clean and dry. most natural clothing fiber is biodegradable, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna fall apart, it just means if you leave it outside something might come and eat it. the idea all the things we discard are made from things other living creatures can’t eat is a huge bummer. it would be fucking cool if we could compost all our garbage again!

i have a general distaste for the mind/computer analogy. no, tweets aren’t like malware, because language isn’t like code. our brains were not shaped by the same forces that computers are, they aren’t directly comparable structures that we can transpose risks onto. computer scientists don’t have special insight into how human societies work because they understand linear algebra and network theory, in the same way that psychologists and neurologists don’t have special insight into machine learning because they know how the various regions of the human brain interact to form a coherent individual mind, or the neural circuits that go into sensory processing.

i personally think that trying to solve social problems with technological solutions is folly. computers, their systems, the decisions they make, are not by nature less vulnerable to bias than we are. in fact, the kind of math that governs automated curation algorithms happens to be pretty good at reproducing and amplifying existing social biases. relying on automated systems to do the work of curation for us isn’t some kind of solution to the problems that exist on twitter and elsewhere, it is explicitly part of the problem.

twitter isn’t giving you “direct, untrusted” information. its giving you information served by a curation algorithm designed to maximize whatever it is twitter’s programmers have built, and those programmers might not even be accurately identifying what it is that they’re maximizing for. assuming that we can make a “firewall” that maximizes for neutrality or objectivity is, to my mind, no less problematic than the systems that already exist, because it makes the same assumption: that we can build computational systems that reliably and robustly curate human social networks in ways that are provably beneficial, “neutral”, or unbiased. that just isn’t a power that computers have, nor is it something we should want as beings with agency and autonomy. people should have control over how their social networks function, and that control does not come from outsourcing social decisions to black-boxed machine learning algorithms controlled by corporate interests.

people do nothing unless motivated

this is an assumption worth challenging. the evidence suggests, in fact, that people are almost always doing things!

there isn’t a problem to solve. the fact legislators want to do this is the problem. quibbling about how exactly they’re gonna implement the torment nexus is secondary to the goal of resisting the torment nexus.

like, if your whole thing is “this is happening, its self-evidently about surveillance, and we can do nothing to stop it” and you start proposing ways for us to be surveilled “safely, securely, and privately”, you are pro-surveillance. you are supporting the bills, right now, with the rhetoric you’re using. like, imagine doing this about any other political issue.

“i don’t support the death penalty, but we can’t stop the government from implementing it, so here’s the way I’d murder prisoners.”

“we can’t stop them from banning abortion, and I hate that, but I’ll suggest we put the limit at 10 weeks. that seems reasonable, right?”

your idea for “solving the problem” involves doing the thing that both restricts what information people can access, and tracks their legal identity, but in a way that is maybe marginally less stupid than tech illiterate legislators can manage. the fact that you would be fine with the bills if the intent was just to ensure kids can’t access “pornography” in a private way kind of reveals your biases here. it would not be a good idea even then.

what counts as pornography is socially defined. a tool which allows the selective restriction of pornography is also by definition a tool that encourages the redefinition of pornography to encompass whatever it is governments don’t want people to learn about. especially in the US, it would become a tool for the censorship of minorities, the banning of books, and the removal of queer people from the internet. that’s why these laws are being proposed. its not ambiguous at all. like, even if it is inevitable it will pass, the priority doesn’t then become “how do we make this bad idea more efficient?”, it becomes “how do we subvert this unethical restriction on our communications?”. assuming that we can do nothing to stop this ensures that we won’t. its a good thing nobody’s buying your bullshit.

if you think bills like this aren’t at their core designed to erode user privacy, you’re fooling yourself. there is no “privacy based approach” to destroying user privacy, and the ultimatum you’re proposing is not real. stupid laws fail all the time. the fact that people are trying to make ID verification a thing doesn’t make it inevitable it will become a thing, and in fact, opposing it is the best chance we have at making it fail.

your argument to the inevitability of shit-eating just makes you an advocate for the legislators who want us to eat shit.

because adopting open source software is a societal good? the idea that it won’t grow is kind of bleak. the industry standard for android device OS is dogshit for user privacy and a private monopoly and that’s something we should want fixed. unless you like living under constant corporate surveillance.

if that’s the core concept, how do you explain how Christianity has functioned in practice throughout most of human history? mass indigenous graves, inquisitions, the treatment of religious minorities, the many justifications of slavery, the christian nationalist far-right, the open rejection of queer identities, conversion therapy camps, treating women as property, raping children? nothing about the christian ethos in practice leads to good outcomes for people who aren’t Christian, and not for the people who are, either.

“perversion” isn’t a thing. things are what they are observed to be, and for many queer people, christian institutions have been observed to be openly hostile to their existence. contend with the fact that there are many people who have never seen the Christianity you seem to think exists.

Are you just yelling out random fallacies until you find one that comes close to describing my argument?

come on, i said one fallacy. the no true scotsman fallacy, which is often used to deflect from bad behavior in Christian communities. there is no “misusing” Christianity. the things that Christians are and do is what Christianity is. the fact that corporal punishment, restrictive gender roles, misogyny, homophobia, and bigotry are more prevalent in Christian subcultures is observable, and it is linked to the belief system these people follow. the harm being done by Christians to marginalized people is ongoing. the opportunity to “heal” is precluded by the fresh wounds being made at the direction of Christian lawmakers.

asking people to set aside their anger at the present and growing danger that christian nationalism poses to their lives and livelihoods is telling marginalized people that their pain doesn’t matter, or at least, that the way they respond to that harm is incorrect.

I’m telling them that hatred will not heal their wounds and in fact make them worse

the wounds are getting worse, healing or not. Christian subcultures continue to pursue right-wing agendas at the expense of marginalized people, and i think its justifiable that the people being targeted by that kind of abuse would be angry at the belief system that legitimizes and supports that kind of harm.

in any case, Christians often make appeals to “forgiveness”, both internally towards abusers within their communities and externally towards people who express criticisms of the faith, but forgiveness is only a virtue to other Christians. people are not obligated to forgive those who have wronged them, especially if they haven’t stopped. not forgiving isn’t a sin, its a choice, and in some scenarios its the best choice a person can make. this appeal to forgiveness as a moral good is itself one of the many problems with the Christian worldview. its not uncommon for patriarchal figures in Christian cultures who abuse vulnerable people to expect forgiveness from their community, or demand it from their victims.

I know because I used to blame the existence of religion for all that was wrong in the world, but then I grew up and realized it’s not so simple.

it isn’t so simple, yes, but deflecting blame away from the institution itself and to the individual people living in it is no better. Christianity, and religion, is not all that is wrong in the world, but it is some of it, especially if you aren’t a straight white man. the fact that you aren’t very willing to allow Christianity as a concept to be tied to the behaviors of the people who worship it, and the way you seem certain that despising people who have demonstrated over and over again that they are wiling to hurt you for their god is wrong, kinda gives me Christian vibes, even if you say you aren’t one yourself.

that’s a no true scotsman. Christianity is not an ideal, its whatever people who call themselves Christians do. and in the US, evangelical Christianity is the core of the republican party, the most likely to be anti-vaxxers, the most likely to be bigots, the most likely to interfere with other people’s rights. the belief system the people trying to drag us back to the middle ages hold to is absolutely relevant to understanding why they hate queer people, immigrants, poor people, homeless people, black people, jewish people, muslim people, asian people, women, and themselves.

i don’t know what you get out of telling people who have been repeatedly and consistently victimized by people and governments that call themselves Christian that they do not know what Christianity is, that they are wrong for seeing the institution that treats them like shit as something to be dismantled. the harm being done by self-professed Christians to marginalized people is real and getting worse, and forgiving somebody when they have not changed their behavior is just enabling them to continue doing harm.