Excrubulent
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
- Comment on So um, america just started another war in the middle east. We're going to need a shit ton more memes to americans from the nightmare they are enduring. Thanks in advance... 1 hour ago:
Iran getting nuclear weapons would be an immense boon to peace and stability in the Middle East.
I think you just put your finger on exactly why the US doesn’t want that to ever happen.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 16 hours ago:
That was me, actually, and I didn’t run out, it is still valid. You are denying that we should criticise the dems for their genocide, and you haven’t gone back on that. That is a kind of genocide denial.
Your entire point in calling me a pedophile was that you literally could not substantiate it. You were talking out of your ass. You were done with any sort of argument.
It’s amazing that you don’t see what that says about you, just like you don’t seem to see what an absolute repudiation of the democrats it is to say that it is useless to accuse them of genocide because the choices in your “democracy” cannot exclude genocide.
And you wonder why so many people stayed home.
It was already turbo genocide, and the idea that what’s happening now is somehow worse is just your fantasy.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 21 hours ago:
I just want to point out that you’ve given up trying to make an argument and are now simply calling the other person a pedophile. That’s about the biggest admission you can make that you have nothing to say.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 1 day ago:
At least you didn’t spend that comment on genocide denial, so let’s call it an improvement.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 1 day ago:
That’s weak, doesn’t explain anything, and I think I’m done giving oxygen to a genocide denier.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 2 days ago:
I think you think the electorate likes genocide, or at least you said so, so I don’t understand why you think accusing Joe of genocide would have lost an election.
This isn’t hard to figure out, but I guess my brain isn’t broken by genocide apologia so I maybe I can’t understand.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 2 days ago:
But every time we said the dems were doing a genocide we were supposed to say that Trump would somehow be worse, but when complain about us talking about the dems’ complicity in genocide, somehow you don’t have to mention that it’s a genocide? Because you didn’t do that.
And despite the fact that you acknowledge the dems are complicit in genocide, you have no criticism of that becuase… something about democracy?
Also if the elctorate wants genocide that badly, then why is it bad if we put the genocide at their feet? Aren’t we helping them in that case? What are you upset about then?
If the American people really didn’t want genocide they would elect candidates in primaries that were anti genocide (they didn’t) or they would vote for the candidate who wanted to just maintain the genocide as it is instead of accelerating it (they didn’t).
You should say, “Yes, that’s my favourite genocider! A vote for Joe is a vote for genocide!” Waves tiny US flag.
Your genocide apologia is breaking your brain.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 2 days ago:
So are you mad at the dems for making the genocide even worse by doing a genocide which helped them lose an election thus making the genocide worse?
Why is it leftsts’ fault for telling the truth and not dems’ fault for making it true?
Why do we have to be fair to the dems to agree that Trump’s genocide would be worse when the dems worked so hard to make “worse” virtually unimaginable?
Why do we have to be fair to you by always saying Trump is worse but you don’t have to be fair to us by acknowledging that there is an actual genocide?
Just because you have some mental gymnastics to explain why the dems’ genocide is somehow something we shouldn’t talk about doesn’t mean you’re not denying it.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 3 days ago:
If mentioning a genocide helped elect Trump, then doing the genocide helped Trump far more, so I don’t know why you’re not attacking the dems for that.
The genocide charge wouldn’t carry any weight if it wasn’t true.
You’re a genocide denier. You’re not denying it’s happening, you’re just denying it’s worth talking about, which is maybe worse.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 3 days ago:
Also apparently leftists have to temper our criticism of a genocide by mentioning that Trump is always somehow worse despite there being no evidence that it is materially any worse under him - that’s literally a counterfactual - but somehow this person gets to criticise us for mentioning a genocide without acknowledging that it is actually a genocide.
It’s genocide denial, but they’re not denying it’s happening, they’re just denying that it’s worth talking about, which is maybe worse?
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 3 days ago:
You’re angrier at leftists for correctly calling out the dems’ genocide than you are at the dems for their genocide.
- Comment on I'm gonna mute this one 3 days ago:
Calling a genocide a genocide is not a partisan issue, and if you think we need to temper our discussion of genocide so that your preferred genocider can win a fucking election then you are a genocide denier.
The way for the dems to dfferentiate themselves was to stop doing a genocide. They couldn’t do that, and so they enabled the worse option because they were just too horny for killing brown kids.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 3 days ago:
Asking for a historical example is not inciting violence, telling people to start shooting and put their money where their mouth is, is inciting violence, even if you’re being sarcastic.
I wonder what you would consider as not “all talk”? Someone posting evidence? Gee, I wonder why people don’t do that. I wonder if that’s exactly what people engaging in direct action should never do.
I wonder how I can tell the difference between what you’re doing now and how a fed would talk.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 3 days ago:
You want receipts?
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 4 days ago:
And it’s you, not the person you’re accusing.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 4 days ago:
There’s only one person here who’s actually telling other people to get violent.
- Comment on WhatsApp is officially getting ads 5 days ago:
Facebook has had a strategy for a long time of monopolising the internet of countries that previously had very little internet. They essentially subsidise internet infrastructure and make that subsidy dependent on facebook being a central part of the network.
So I’m not surprised to hear this. They obviously have found ways to inveigle themselves into key infrastructure in lots of places, even if they couldn’t build it in from the ground up.
- Comment on Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Used Data Broker Sites to Find Targets’ Addresses 5 days ago:
They are obviously not in a reasoning place. I wouldn’t try logic, but they are susceptible to emotional manipulation. That’s how they fell for fascist propaganda in the first place. I would go for emotional truth.
You have to judge if you’re safe to do this, but the next time they’re screaming about their absurd conspiracies, I would get a really sad look on my face, make direct eye contact, shake my head and say, “You’re so full of hate, and it’s really sad.” Just go full sincerity and show them how you see them.
You can even set them up for it. Next time you try telling them some fact that they’re going to have this hateful response to, you can have this in your back pocket. You start with a simple fact, they respond with hate, you reply by telling them they’re being hateful.
This is a modification of this strategy: youtu.be/tZzwO2B9b64
Basically, don’t waste time arguing with fascists, just point out that they’re being assholes.
Now, I say you need to judge how safe you feel doing this, because you might be surprised how ballistic they go. People stuck in abusive behaviour patterns hate nothing more than having that behaviour simply described to them. But when they do lose their shit, you can just describe it again.
Sometimes they will just short-circuit and try to ignore you, or chastise you for speaking out of turn. The authoritarian personality is deeply connected to autoritarian parenting attitudes. Just persist over time, and maybe they will notice that they can’t stop you from reflecting their ugly selves back at them.
I don’t know how old you are, how physically big you are, how prone they are to serious outbursts, but again, pay attention to your body and how much you’re feeling your flight instinct. Only if you feel safe.
I do this with my parents sometimes. Like if my mum is fussing over my kids in some way that I think is invasive, - this was a sore point in my upbringing, she has no filter and no boundaries - I don’t engage on the facts of what she’s saying. I don’t tell her, “That tiny red spot you’ve noticed isn’t a big problem,” because that’s also being invasive and speaking on their behalf. I say “People don’t like to be scrutinised like that. If that’s a real problem they can tell us.”
It’s honestly astonishing how fast this resolves some situations. That might have been a perennial argument about some fussy detail of my child’s appearance, all the time adding to the boundary-crossing scrutiny they experience, but shutting it down by pointing out her behaviour really makes her stop, and it communicates to my kids that they don’t have to put up with it. It teaches them that they have autonomy.
It’s taken many years of demonstrating to her that I won’t be pushed around or intimidated for me to get to this point though. It’s not an easy road, and often the way to know the tactic is working is by watching how unpleasant someone gets when you do it, at least at first.
Again: only if you feel safe.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 1 week ago:
This is an online forum. It’s words. Your idea that the people you’re talking to are all talk is unfalsifiable. If anyone did post on here about pulling a trigger you could attack them for being all talk for exactly that same reason.
On this forum, you are also all talk. There is literally nothing else you can do on here.
But go off, everybody around you is all talk, all the time. That certainly isn’t a feature of the place you chose to express your vapid rants.
People who are organising on the ground are under no obligation to keep you in the loop by posting about it publicly, especially given you clearly aren’t interested in helping anyway.
My guess is your accusations are all a projection of your own feelings of powerlessness. I mean there’s not going to be another election for about 4 more years, and your only method of change is useless until then.
Gee, I wonder if that’s by design?
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 1 week ago:
I agree broadly with the idea that the state’s legitimacy relies on the appearance that they wield their violence justly, but I think you’re giving the state too much credit when you frame it as a fair and considered exchange of power.
The state has had all of us under its purview since birth, it has pumped us full of pro-hierarchy, anti-autonomy, anti-social propaganda and it wields its violence more to prevent insurgency than it does to protect us.
There is no “social contract”, nothing that I ever signed anyway, and even if there were, contract law invalidates any contract signed under duress. The concept of the social contract is just yet more hierarchical propaganda. It’s a vague, handwavey vibe to obscure the fact that we really aren’t given a meaningful option to leave.
The state relies on not just the appearance of legitimacy, but the appearance of absolute power. Both are illusions, and can be opposed by organised people directly building mutual aid on the ground. The more we meet one another’s needs for security the less we need the state and the more people can see it for the charade that it is.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 1 week ago:
The radical flank effect:
- Comment on A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"? 1 week ago:
Honestly less frantic gameplay sounds good to me, I got sick of the “oh god they’re after me now I fell oh well try again” parts of the gameplay. I might take a look. Thanks!
- Comment on A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"? 1 week ago:
I played the first game and thought it was okay but not great. What were the changes? Maybe they’ll suit me since I’m not so attached to the original.
- Comment on Could this be the death of Australia's nightmarish welfare system? 1 week ago:
It’s neoliberal politics. Basically after WWII it was obvious people didn’t like fascism and politicians couldn’t openly embrace it. But it was too useful for portecting capitalist interests, so a bunch of neoliberal experiments were run in south america to figure out the best way to use fascism to oppress workers without creating that world-war style blowback.
And one of the techniques they landed on was to keep scapegoating the vulnerable, but to use sanitised language. So it’s not “dirty n-----s, g-----s and k----s polluting our precious blood and soil”, it’s “immigrants taking our jobs”. It’s not “useless eaters withering the soul of our nation” it’s “welfare recipients mustn’t be allowed to freeload.”
It’s the same ideas dressed up to sound a bit more respectable and not trip the fascism alarm, but they work nearly as well to strip the social safety net, which lowers wages.
- Comment on I'm looking for an article showing that LLMs don't know how they work internally 2 weeks ago:
We don’t have the same problems LLMs have.
LLMs have zero fidelity. They have no - none -zero - model of the world to compare their output to.
Humans have biases and problems in our thinking, sure, but we’re capable of at least making corrections and working with meaning in context. We can recognise our model of the world and how it relates to the things we are saying.
LLMs cannot do that job, at all, and they won’t be able to until they have a model of the world. A model of the world would necessarily include themselves, which is self-awareness, which is AGI. That’s a meaning-understander. Developing a world model is the same problem as consciousness.
What I’m saying is that you cannot develop fidelity at all without AGI, so no, LLMs don’t have the same problems we do. That is an entirely different class of problem.
Some moon rockets fail, but they don’t have that in common with moon cannons. One of those can in theory achieve a moon landing and the other cannot, ever, in any iteration.
- Comment on I'm looking for an article showing that LLMs don't know how they work internally 2 weeks ago:
If all you’re saying is that neural networks could develop consciousness one day,, sure, and nothing I said contradicts that. Our brains are neural networks, so it stands to reason they could do what our brains can do. But the technical hurdles are huge.
You need at least two things to get there:
- Enough computing power to support it.
- Insight into how consciousness is structured.
1 is hard because a single brain alone is about as powerful as a significant chunk of worldwide computing, the gulf between our current power and what we would need is about… 100% of what we would need. We are so woefully under resourced for that. You also need to solve how to power the computers without cooking the planet, which is not something we’re even close to solving currently.
2 means that we can’t just throw more power or training at the problem. Modern NN modules have an underlying theory that makes them work. They’re essentially statistical curve-fitting machines. We don’t currently have a good theoretical model that would allow us to structure the NN to create a consciousness. It’s not even on the horizon yet.
Those are two enormous hurdles. I think saying modern NN design can create consciousness is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we can get to the Moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made in the last few years”.
Moon rockets are essentially artillery science in many ways, yes, but Jules Verne was still a century away in terms of supporting technologies, raw power, and essential insights into how to do it.
- Comment on Time sure flies. I remember pausing my N64 to watch the news coverage. 2 weeks ago:
GodFUCKINGdamnit please don’t remind me how easily I trust random commenters to report information.
At this point even if I click on it there’s no guarantee one of you fuckers hasn’t vandalised the page.
- Comment on I'm looking for an article showing that LLMs don't know how they work internally 2 weeks ago:
You’re definitely overselling how AI works and underselling how human brains work here, but there is a kernel of truth to what you’re saying.
Neural networks are a biomimicry technology. They explicitly work by mimicking how our own neurons work, and surprise surprise, they create eerily humanlike responses.
The thing is, LLMs don’t have anything close to reasoning the way human brains reason. We are actually capable of understanding and creating meaning, LLMs are not.
So how are they human-like? Our brains are made up of many subsystems, each doing extremely focussed, specific tasks.
We have so many, including sound recognition, speech recognition, language recognition. Then on the flipside we have language planning, then speech planning and motor centres dedicated to creating the speech sounds we’ve planned to make. The first three get sound into your brain and turn it into ideas, the last three take ideas and turn them into speech.
We have made neural network versions of each of these systems, and even tied them together. An LLM is analogous to our brain’s language planning centre. That’s the part that decides how to put words in sequence.
That’s why LLMs sound like us, they sequence words in a very similar way.
However, each of these subsystems in our brains can loop-back on themselves to check the output. I can get my language planner to say “mary sat on the hill”, then loop that through my language recognition centre to see how my conscious brain likes it. My consciousness might notice that “the hill” is wrong, and request new words until it gets “a hill” which it believes is more fitting. It might even notice that “mary” is the wrong name, and look for others, it might cycle through martha, marge, maths, maple, may, yes, that one. Okay, “may sat on a hill”, then send that to the speech planning centres to eventually come out of my mouth.
Your brain does this so much you generally don’t notice it happening.
In the 80s there was a craze around so called “automatic writing”, which was essentially zoning out and just writing whatever popped into your head without editing. You’d het fragments of ideas and really strange things, often very emotionally charged, they seemed like they were coming from some mysterious place, maybe ghosts, demons, past lives, who knows? It was just our internal LLM being given free rein, but people got spooked into believing it was a real person, just like people think LLMs are people today.
In reality we have no idea how to even start constructing a consciousness. It’s such a complex task and requires so much more linking and understanding than just a probabilistic connection between words. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were more than a century away from AGI.
- Comment on Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit 2 weeks ago:
Some real “steel is heavier than feathers” energy coming off this teacher.
- Comment on Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit 2 weeks ago:
Not only that, the two statements in the premise are simply given. How is the child to know one of them is false? At that point, why not say Marty ate more than Luis and therefore the fractions must be different? Maybe the fractions are wrong and Marty ate more.
Just an absolutely terrible question if that’s supposed to be the answer. I’d guess the teacher didn’t write the question and didn’t understand the answer.