Schadrach

@Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org

This is a remote user, information on this page may be incomplete. View at Source ↗

⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.”⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, the thing a lot of people seem to miss is just how major of a geographic barrier the Sahara is. As a consequence, northern Africans weren’t generally very black for most of history.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The ones and zeros and tens⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

This was not personal interest, though it is an incredibly interesting text. It was fascinating to discover he devoted ~2.5 chapters to the importance of the same kind of simple, yet powerful finger-pointing rhetoric used by right-wing ideologists to this day. I joking say it’s one of the earliest texts on meme theory, and it’s only half a joke.

I still find it funny that just a few years ago a feminist social work journal called Affilia published an article that was essentially a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf in terms of sex and with some “fashionable buzzwords” included under the title “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” Especially since the bit is spelled out right in the title (for anyone who doesn’t know, “Mein Kampf” literally translates as “My Struggle”). It was part of the grievance studies affair.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Prices are out of control⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

I think I have a mutation in a taste bud or something, but Sucralose is really a prominent and nasty taste to me in anything it’s in.

The only artificial sweetener I get a nasty aftertaste from is saccharine. But I get a really absurdly foul aftertaste from saccharine, I can’t even compare it to anything because it’s easily the worst thing I have ever tasted in my life and I can’t think of anything even sort of similar. Glad basically nothing uses it any more, but it was more of an issue as a type I diabetic kid decades ago. Sucralose doesn’t give me an aftertaste at all though, neither does aspartame or acesulfame potassium.

My preferred sweetener though is stevia (I used to go to the local new age shop and buy just dried stevia leaves for my tea and such during the time it was legal to sell in any amount for any purpose as an herbal supplement so long as you didn’t mention it had a flavor which turned it into an unsafe food additive because fuck NutraSweet corp). It took such a ridiculous time to get approved because of NutraSweet, when stevia really should have fallen under GRAS status for the same reason things like tomatoes did - New World plant used in food forever by the natives, but wholly new to Europeans when they came to the Americas.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You could get anything you wanted and it was FREE⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
You never hung out on IRC warez channels getting stuff by DCC or by trading dodgy FTP servers? Young whippersnapper!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You could get anything you wanted and it was FREE⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.

Napster was feature poor though. CuteMX was much, much better and out while Napster was still running, but it closed down after Napster lost the court case. Feature set was closer to Kazaa, including filters and being able to browse a user’s shares.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You could get anything you wanted and it was FREE⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

If it was obscure, uncommon, niche, and other synonyms, if you did find it 90% of the time it was simply given an incorrect name and wasn’t actually what you wanted.

This is literally how I got introduced to several bands I never would have heard otherwise. Missing one track off one album, downloading…this definitely isn’t the right track, but who is this? And now I need to download another 8 albums by that band…
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

If AI didn’t exist, it would’ve probably been Astrology or Conspiracy Theories or QAnon or whatever that ended up triggering this within people who were already prone to psychosis.

Or hearing the Beatles White Album and believing it tells you that a race war is coming and you should work to spark it off, then hide in the desert for a time only to return at the right moment to save the day and take over LA. That one caused several murders.

But the problem with ChatGPT in particular is that is validates the psychosis… that is very bad.

If you’re sufficiently detached from reality, nearly anything validates the psychosis.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Winning⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

I understand at a nuanced and historically informed level what’s happening at a political and geopolitical level here, and all of my bleakest predictions keep coming true

Let’s test this: Make some specific predictions for various points over, say, the next 5 years (start near future and work your way out). Put them somewhere where they can remain generally fixed but available (say on a pastebin or lemmy post or something). Then come back to look at them after those times have past and see how accurate you are. This would let you see your actual rate of accuracy as opposed to just the ones that stand out because they ended up true), which would ideally lessen your panic or alternatively if you really are getting it right in a consistent fashion we can start calling you gravitas_deficiency the Bleak Prognosticator.

For example just glancing at your profile one you seem to be doubling down on a lot recently is that there will be either no US presidential election in 2028 or no peaceful transfer of power in January 2029. That is easily verifiable in four years time. How do you imagine this will happen? Is it enough to satisfy this if the election happens and the GOP wins with a non-Trump candidate? Do you think opposition to the GOP will simply be made illegal? Do you think they will push an amendment to let Trump run again? Do you think Trump will just run again regardless and argue that the Constitution doesn’t apply to him because seemingly no other law does?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
To be clear, when you say “seeded from” you mean an image that was analyzed as part of building the image classifying statistical model that is then essentially running reverse to produce images, yes?

And you are arguing that every image analyzed to calculate the weights on that model is in a meaningful way contained in every image it generated?

I’m trying to nail down exactly what you mean when you say “seeded by.”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
OK, so this is just the general anti-AI image generation argument where you believe any image generated is in some meaningful way a copy of every image analyzed to produce the statistical model that eventually generated it?

I’m surprised you’re going the CSAM route with this and not just arguing that any AI generated sexually explicit image of a woman is nonconsensual porn of literally every woman who has ever posted a photo on social media.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I had no idea y cunt was this powerful⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

and I became a vegetarian.

That’s just the estrogenization keeping itself active through phytoestrogens.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

was seeded with the face of a 15yr old and that they really are 15 for all intents and purposes.

That’s…not how AI image generation works? AI image generation isn’t just building a collage from random images in a database - the model doesn’t have a database of images within it at all - it just has a bunch of statistical weightings and net configuration that are essentially a statistical model for classifying images, being told to produce whatever inputs maximize an output resembling the prompt, starting from a seed. It’s not “seeded with an image of a 15 year old”, it’s seeded with white noise and basically asked to show how that white noise looks like (in this case) “woman porn miniskirt”, then repeat a few times until the resulting image is stable.

Unless you’re arguing that somewhere in the millions of images tagged “woman” being analyzed to build that statistical model is probably at least one person under 18, and that any image of “woman” generated by such a model is necessarily underage because the weightings were impacted however slightly by that image or images, in which case you could also argue that all drawn images of humans are underage because whoever drew it has probably seen a child at some point and therefore everything they draw is tainted by having been exposed to children ever.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

97% of the internet has no idea what Matrix channels even are.

I’ve been able to explain it to people pretty easily as “like Discord, but without Discord administration getting to control what’s allowed, only whoever happens to run that particular server.”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

A more apt comparison would be people who go out of their way to hurt animals.

Is it? That person is going out of their way to do actual violence. It feels like arguing someone watching a slasher movie is more likely to make them go commit murder is a much closer analogy to someone watching a cartoon of a child engaged in sexual activity or w/e being more likely to make them molest a real kid.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
…and most of the people who agree with that notion would also consider reading Lemmy to be “trawling dark waters” because it’s not a major site run by a massive corporation actively working to maintain advertiser friendliness to maximize profits. Hell, Matrix is practically Lemmy-adjacent in terms of the tech.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

eventually they want to move on to the real thing, as porn is not satisfying them anymore.

Isn’t this basically the same argument as arguing violent media creates killers?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

They have to deal with old men masturbating to them getting raped online.

The moment it was posted to wherever they were going to have to deal with that forever. It’s not like they can ever know for certain that every copy of it ever made has been deleted.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

it says “this hidden site”, meaning it was a site on the dark web.

Not just on the dark web (which technically is anything not indexed by search engines) but hidden sites are specifically a TOR thing (though Freenet/Hyphanet has something similar but it’s called something else). Usually a TOR hidden site has a URL that ends in .onion and the TOR protocol has a structure for routing .onion addresses.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Even then, a common bit you’ll hear from people actually defending pedophilia is that the damage caused is a result of how society reacts to it or the way it’s done because of the taboo against it rather than something inherent to the act itself, which would be even harder to do research on than researching pedophilia outside a criminal context already is to begin with. For starters, you’d need to find some culture that openly engaged in adult sex with children in some social context and was willing to be examined to see if the same (or different or any) damages show themselves.

And that’s before you get into the question of defining where exactly you draw the age line before it “counts” as child sexual abuse, which doesn’t have a single, coherent answer. The US alone has at least three different answers to how old someone has to be before having sex with them is not illegal based on their age alone (16-18, with 16 being most common), with many having exceptions that go lower (one if the partners are close “enough” in age are pretty common). For example in my state, the age of consent is 16 with an exception if the parties are less than 4 years difference in age. For California in comparison if two 17 year olds have sex they’ve both committed a misdemeanor unless they are married.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
It also likely gives you the best $ spent/children protected rate, because you know the producers have children they are abusing which may or may not be the case for a viewer.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We are so cooked⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

I don’t think pesticides or ultra processed foods make kids transgender.

Of course not. That requires being infected by a trans first - they work under vampire rules which is why we need to keep trans and children away from each other! /s
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FL wants more child labor⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

No. Or any other kind of break.

I thought there was a federal requirement for shifts over a certain length to get a break of a certain minimum length? It’s not much, it’s not remotely good, but I’m pretty sure it exists.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FL wants more child labor⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Got clips? I’m assuming one is the bit about Elon being “good” with vote counting computers and that’s how they won Pennsylvania in a landslide, but I’m not familiar with the other time he he stated on camera that the election was rigged in his favor.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that if you lose your Social Security Card (USA) more than 10 times, the Social Security Administration will have to, by law, refuse to issue anymore replacement cards, for the rest of your life.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

Any random 9-digit number can be a valid SSN.

Not true - there are whole ranges that specifically aren’t in use (mostly specific values for the first three digits that are intentionally not used). Outside those ranges though, yeah, basically any 9 digit number. Add one to the last digit of your SSN and if you were born before 2014 you likely get someone born in the same hospital on the same day.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
An LLM is roughly as smart as the corpus it is summarizing is accurate for the topic, because at their best they are good at creating natural language summarizers. Most of the main ones basically do an internet search and summarize the top couple of results, which means they are as good as the search engine backing them. Which is good enough for a lot of topics, but…not so much for the rest.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This speaks for itself⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I’ll just go ahead and throw out as a starting point that the definitions used by NISVS specifically discount male rape victims and female rapists by essentially defining away anything that a woman is most likely to do when sexually assaulting a man into a subcategory of “other”. This is a common wrinkle in a lot of the stats, and it goes back to some old and toxic ideas - to the point that I can find you a clip from a prominent sexual assault researcher (Mary Koss, many of the survey instruments used descend from her work, she’s also the origin of the “1 in 4” stat that’s oft quoted and coined the term “date rape”, etc) describing a woman drugging a man into compliance in order to have intercourse with him as not “rape” or “sexual assault” but “unwanted contact.”

There’s a further issue with lifetime survey stats (which is what gets focused on in that link), which is pretty simple and obvious if you look at the data. There’s this weird gap between what previous year numbers look like and what lifetime numbers look like that’s very obviously off, specifically that once you account for weirdness in definitions the previous year numbers are much closer than the lifetime numbers - so either the rates used to be dramatically higher for women and have since equalized for some reason or for some reason men are less likely to report older incidents in the survey - either way previous year numbers being much more similar than lifetime numbers needs some explanation. If you’ve been told time and again that what happened to you doesn’t count as assault, that you must have wanted it because men always do, etc, etc until you internalize the messaging, how do you think that impacts survey reporting long term?

I personally suffered from this one for a long time, and only literal decades later can wrap my head around not being “lucky” due to what happened to me. If I’d been asked to be a participant in NISVS ten years ago I would have answered very differently than I would now, despite the incident having happened long before that, because I’d mentally filed it away as not an assault because men always want it, at least from a woman so clearly what happened couldn’t/didn’t count, right? An even a casual look around would lead to realizing I’m not remotely unique in this. And yes, I’m implying that lifetime sexual victimization rates in men specifically are massively under-reported because social narratives surrounding the idea are heavily internalized by the men themselves. And I have no idea how you’d fix that because it fundamentally is a mental block on the part of the men themselves, an unwillingness to see themselves as victims or what happened to them as violation.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This speaks for itself⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Again, maybe you should look at a racial breakdown on the same, and then ask yourself why you don’t consider that trustworthy but are fine with using conviction numbers for men as proof of what reality looks like.

Again, the criminal justice system broadly speaking shits on black people and men (and as a consequence black men even moreso) in similar ways and by most measures to similar degrees. And by “shits on” I mean is more likely to charge, more likely to convict, gives longer sentences, is more likely to shoot, etc, etc.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brave CEO rants about "lefties," "glowies," George Soros⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Not quite. KiwiFarms is older than 8Chan. KiwiFarms was originally called CWCki and was dedicated specifically to Chris-chan because Encyclopedia Dramatica wasn’t quite what some of that person’s harassers wanted it to be. 8chan wouldn’t open for another 8 months after CWCki was founded but before it was renamed KiwiFarms.

Let’s be clear here - Chris-chan has been systematically harassed for literal decades, has a bunch of problems at least some of which are consequences of that. Chris-chan is also probably the single most documented human being in history as a consequence of the massive and dedicated “fan” base.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brave CEO rants about "lefties," "glowies," George Soros⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Pretty sure there’s at least one quote of Davis himself using the n-word to refer to federal agents before describing how bright they glow…
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This speaks for itself⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

Not analogous in any meaningful way.

Let’s try it. I’m thinking of a group of people. This group of people is disproportionately subjected to police violence, including police shootings. This group is more likely to be prosecuted when accused of a crime, is more likely to be convicted when prosecuted, and gets harsher sentences when convicted. What group am I describing? Hint: The answer is that all that applies to both black folks and men, and usually to similar degrees (close enough that some measures have a wider sex gap and others have a wider race gap). And that’s not even a complete list of similarities.

By the vast majority of measures the way men are treated by the criminal justice system compared to women and the way black folks are treated by the criminal justice system compared to white folks line up (other non-white racial groupings tend to end up somewhere between). Race and sex also both apply, meaning that black men get treated the worst and white women get treated with kid gloves. Depending on the specific measure, sometimes the gender gap is actually wider than the racial gap but that again depends on the specific measure (for example black folks are more disproportionately killed by police than men are but mostly because that would require more than 100% of police shootings to be men instead of merely 95%, while men get disproportionately harsher sentencing for a given crime than women to a larger degree than black folks do compared to white folks).

I personally know a white woman from here who got busted for drugs in another state, was released on her own recognizance pending her hearing, fled back here, was eventually picked up, spent a few days in jail while the other state decided it wanted to extradite her and made arrangements to transfer her, went before a different judge and was released on her own recognizance pending her new hearing date a second time, despite demonstrably proving she was a flight risk. That’s doesn’t happen unless you are a white woman, preferably a young, pretty one because those traits both carry further privileged treatment by criminal justice.

Unless you want to argue that men are underprivileged in society.

I’d argue you are operating from a bad model. The core problem is that a lot of social justice models are ultimately built upon a bedrock of Marxist class conflict, with people being assigned into roles of bourgeois-analog “oppressor” and proletariat-analog “oppressed”. The problem is that the degree to which Marxist class conflict actually works as the basis for a model is basically the degree that whatever feature you are basing it on functions as a proxy for economic class. For race, it does well enough in the aggregate that it works, albeit imperfectly. For sex, however it’s a poor fit.

The trick is that to justify fitting sex into a model based on class conflict you lie to yourselves by looking at the sex distribution at the very top and pretending that that tells you anything useful about men as a whole (this is a fallacy of composition). Or to put it another way, Nancy Pelosi and ~~turtle lich~~ Mitch McConnell have more in common with each other than either of them does with men or women as a general class.

A consequence of this is a whole series of apologetics and the like to try to justify why the model still holds even when evidence seems to run counter to it. Like using epicycles and deferents to try to make a geocentric model of the solar system fit reality. Except it;s all things about how “the patriarchy hurts men too” in exactly the way you wouldn’t say “capitalism hurts billionaires too” and that kind of thing. Like why in a system allegedly built on male supremacy would men be treated worse by criminal justice than women, in all the same ways that this same system that is also allegedly built on white supremacy treats black folks worse than white folks? The short answer is that it’s unfalsifiable, the model can be stretched to fit any measurement of reality.

A better though still imperfect approach is the concept of malagency which seems to do a better job of actually predicting how western culture actually treats people with respect to sex. The core notion of malagency is that society treats men as hyperagentic (that is men are perceived to have greater agency/responsibility than they actually might) and women as hypoagentic (that is women are perceived to have less agency/responsibility than they actually might). Applied to criminal justice, this directly explains things like men being given higher bail and longer sentences for the same crimes - men are seen as more responsible for their crimes, and so “deserve” a longer sentence. Even when a man and woman do a crime together, the man is often subject to higher bail or a longer sentence, which makes no sense as “privilege” but makes all kinds of sense if men are treated as having greater agency. When having lots of agency/responsibility for your actions is beneficial, this leads to better treatment for men and conversely when having greater agency/responsibility for your actions is not beneficial, this leads to worse treatment for men.

So for example, imagine we both saw a news headline on Reddit or Lemmy about a young woman throwing her newborn baby out a window, leading to it dying in the ambulance. Presumably under a model of privilege and male supremacy, we’d expect lots of blame directed at her and her behavior because she’s a woman and any comments questioning her guilt or supporting her to be downvoted. Under malagency, you’d expect people to immediately start looking for ways to diminish her responsibility for throwing her child out a window and maybe even poking at the possibility of the father being at least partly to blame in some fashion for the baby killing and downvoting anyone laying responsibility for the killing squarely on her, because the slant is minimizing her agency for what she did and if possible assigning agency to a man.

What do you think we’d actually see in those comments? Hint: this isn’t a hypothetical, it’s a recent news story that’s popped up on Reddit and you should take a look. It…strongly resembles what you’d expect under malagency.