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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • i believe the general attitude on the threadiverse is that down votes are not a great option: they should represent low quality or untruth rather than simply dislike. given this preference, and downvote to hide might overload the downvote function: no longer is it a last resort, but it’s a normal part of browsing your feed. i’ve seen nothing but staunch opposition to overusing h the down vote feature in this manner


  • a healthy democracy requires others to have privacy. people like investigative journalists need to be able to blend in with the crowd and expose government wrongdoing

    blending in the the crowd is the important part: if everyone cares about privacy, nobody sticks out for caring about privacy… but if nobody cares about privacy, the investigative journalist suddenly looks really obvious and can be targeted much more easily

    if someone doesn’t think they have anything to hide, that’s fine (wrong, but fine) however they can help to make sure the government acts appropriately simply by not splashing data around everywhere for all to see



  • i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative

    now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms

    i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle

    ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create

    the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated

    the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated

    with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original


  • PupBiru@kbin.socialtoPolitical Humor@lemmy.mlGet out and vote!
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    7 months ago

    democrats almost always win the popular vote… the electoral college is part of the mechanism that gives smaller states that tend to be more republican greater voting power than larger states

    and as far as FPTP, third party candidate votes tend toward more democratic candidates. given the spoiler effect (a 3rd party candidate draws the most votes from the 2 party candidate they’re closest to: if they didn’t run, most of their votes would have gone to their closest candidate. given they’re unlikely to win due to how the mathematics and sociology of voting systems work, a successful 3rd party candidate is always bad for their voters), that means that if RCV or similar were implemented, on balance those votes for 3rd parties would mean democrats get more votes




  • that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this

    current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue

    id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)

    but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”








  • for clarity, i think that the worst thing anyone’s been able to decisively prove about telegrams encryption is that it’s vulnerable to replay attacks… which in the context of privacy rather than full security isn’t suuuuper problematic

    that’s not to say that there aren’t other flaws; that’s kinda the point behind “rule number 1: DONT INVENT YOUR OWN CRYPTO”: you just don’t know what flaws there are… AES (etc) has had a LOT of eyes on it

    but for the most part, the negativity with the crypto boils down to what-ifs




  • change has nothing to do with people until it does… change is just change. change when it comes to people and social systems is effective only when it effects the majority of people that are touched by an issue. voting 3rd party after not for some time is change of a kind, but i wouldn’t call it social change

    social change comes when a large number of people decide something should be different, and the mathematics and sociology behind first past the post means that it’d take something so close to impossible that it’s not worth classing in the realms of possibility for a 3rd party to have any effect on the political system

    the reality of the system is that the US is a 2 party system… the statistics of FPTP, and the game theory that leads to defensive voting, spoiler effect, and any number of other bad outcomes ensures that

    within such a system, you just can’t hope to have an outcome other than 1 of the 2 parties having any real impact, thus you have to change 1 of the parties to be the way you want it to be, or you must change the system

    you could argue that voting 3rd party forces the parties to change their positions, but historically that hasn’t really happened so i personally wouldn’t hold my breath

    vote defensively, and work to change the system… because changing the system is incremental, achievable, and less subject to the whims of a few


  • both sides support israel, 1 side is on the record as having said that israel’s reaction is overboard… no action still, but both sides are not the same

    i’m absolutely not pink washing… republicans are horrific to queers… given that you’ve even suggested that, you’re pretty much beyond reason, but i will say: just look at the don’t say gay bullshit in florida… culture wars cause huge increases in suicide rates amongst the queer community

    im not got blue no matter who; im vote in the way that’s most likely to produce a positive outcome in things you want to change… on every metric and category, right now, that’s getting as many people as possible to vote democrat… id suggest people look at republicans if they had policies that weren’t detestable around:

    • equal opportunity (queer, women, race, wealth, etc)
    • environment
    • social services

    … but they don’t