wpb

@wpb@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm gonna mute this one⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Both? 17.8 billion dollars to murder children with seems pretty pointlessly cruel to me. All jokes aside, are you not seeing these in the blue states? They don’t have these in New York?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm gonna mute this one⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  What makes you think that? Do these not exist in blue states?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm gonna mute this one⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Hygiene.

• ⁨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:

  If I have to be completely honest with you, and this is and indictment of their research, it seems heavily dependent on what the protest is for or against.

• ⁨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:

  They consider it non-violent.

• ⁨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:

  This refers to Chenoweth’s research, and I’m somewhat familiar with their work. I think it’s good to clarify what non-violent means to them, as it’s non-obvious. For example, are economic boycotts violence? They harm business and keep food of the tables of workers. I don’t think that’s violence, but some people do, and what really matters here is what Chenoweth thinks violence is, and what they mean when they say “nonviolent tactics are more effective”.

  At the end of “civil resistance: what everyone needs to know”, Chenoweth lists a number of campaigns which they’ve marked as violent/nonviolent and successful/unsuccessful. Let’s look at them and the tactics employed tonfigure out what exactly Chenoweth is advocating for. Please do not read this as a condemnation of their work, or of the protests that follow. This is just an investigation into what “nonviolence” means to Chenoweth.

  Euromaidan: successful, nonviolent. In these protests, protestors threw molotov cocktails and bricks and at the police. I remember seeing a video of an apc getting absolutely melted by 10 or so molotovs cocktails.

  The anti-Pinochet campaign: successful, nonviolent. This involved at least one attempt on Pinochet’s life.

  Gwangju uprising in South Korea: unsuccessful, nonviolent. Car plowed into police officers, 4 dead.

  Anti-Duvalier campaign in Haiti: successful, nonviolent. Destruction of government offices.

  To summarize, here’s some means that are included in Chenoweth’s research:

  • throwing bricks at the police
  • throwing molotov cocktails at the police
  • assassination attempts
  • driving a car into police officers
  • destroying government offices

  The point here is not that these protests were wrong, they weren’t. The point is that they employed violent tactics in the face of state violence. Self-defense is not violence, and this article completely ignores this context, and heavily and knowingly implies that sitting in a circle and singing kumbaya is the way to beat oppression. It isn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Paraphrasing, but: “testing can only show presence of bugs, not their absence”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s kind of indirectly related, but adding a query parameter udm=14 to the url of your Google searches removes the AI summary at the top, and there are plugins for Firefox that do this for you. My hopes for this WM project are that similar plugins will be possible for Wikipedia.

  The annoying thing about these summaries is that even for someone who cares about the truth, and gathering actual information, rather than the fancy autocomplete word salad that LLMs generate, it is easy to “fall for it” and end up reading the LLM summary. Usually I catch myself, but I often end up wasting some time reading the summary. Recently the non-information was so egregiously wrong (it called a certain city in Israel non-apartheid), that I ended up installing the udm 14 plugin.

  In general, I think the only use cases for fancy autocomplete are where you have a way to verify the answer. For example, if you need to write an email and can’t quite find the words, if an LLM generates something, you will be able to tell whether it conveys what you’re trying to say by reading it. Or in case of writing code, if you’ve written a bunch of tests beforehand expressing what the code needs to do, you can run those on the code the LLM generates and see if it works (if there’s a Dijkstra quote that comes to your mind reading this: high five, I’m thinking the same thing).

  I think it can be argued that Wikipedia articles satisfy this criterion. All you need to do to verify the summary is read the article. Will people do this? I can only speak for myself, and I know that, despite my best intentions, sometimes I won’t. If that’s anything to go by, I think these summaries will make the world a worse place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  These best boys

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I love how, for a everyone, media literacy seemingly goes straight out the window the moment North Korea is mentioned. I remember a few years back every mainstream media outlet reporting that sarcasm was banned in NK, and that everyone had to get the same haircut as Kim Jong Un. Journalism at its finest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do you think freewill truly exists?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a hard enough time accepting it* for myself, and I can’t expect a stranger on the internet to do so quicker than I did. I hope that some day you can reflect back on this conversation and realize you’re being a bit of a dick about this.

  • “It” meaning the inability to shape my social life the way “normal” people do it, and simultaneously live a happy and healthy life
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do you think freewill truly exists?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah my bad, I thought you were complaining about people not wanting to engage in small talk, and I thought you were suggesting that people should just suck it up and talk about the weather even if they don’t want to. I’m a bad communicator, and I sometimes misread stuff like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do you think freewill truly exists?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s great that it worked out for you, and I’m happy for you, but we don’t need to force everyone to fit the same mould.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do you think freewill truly exists?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re probably joking, but know that there’s a subset of us that gets pathologically anxious and confused by small talk. Autistic people for example. Different folks, different strokes. Not everyone deals well with talking about the weather, and that’s ok. There’s billions who do deal well with it, and that’s ok too! Be a mensch and talk to them instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 5 stages of Charles Manson⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Top right Ricky Gervais.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do you think freewill truly exists?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Such weather we’re having huh?”

  Truly peak romance

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People who deny genocides (either the current ongoing one in Palestine as committed by Israel, or the one carried out by the Germans in WWII) are the lowest of the low. Absolute scum. To see people make excuses for atrocities as the Nakba, Sabra and Shatila, and the Holocaust in real time, as one is happening has been the most disturbing development of our age.

  I don’t think downloading things illegally is OK, and I also don’t think spending money on genocide deniers like Irving is ethical. I also don’t think reading Irving will help you in any way, because genocide deniers are pretty much all the same. If you still wish to see genocide denial and defense of people who say stuff like “Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live”, and the denial of that which is obvious, you’ll find plenty of it available for free in modern day conservative shitrags talking about the ethnic cleansing Israel has been carrying out for 77 years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Techno feudalism, here we come⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I try, every now and then, and I’m fairly consistently disappointed. Every time I end up finding out that the output is wrong. Not in the sense of aesthetics or best practices, but truly incorrect in the sense that it either doesn’t work or that it’s a falsehood. And there’s two explanations for this that I can think of.

  The first is that I’m using them wrong. And this seems likely, because some people I respect swear by them, and I’m an idiot. Instead of asking “how does mongoDB store time series data” or “write a small health check endpoint using Starlette” maybe there’s some magic invocationsor wording that I should be using which will result in correct answers. Or maybe I’m expecting the wrong things from LLMs, and these are not suitable usecases.

  The other possibility is that my prompts are right, and I’m expected to correct the LLM when it’s wrong. But this of course assumes that I already know the answer, or that I’m at least well-versed enough to spot issues. But then all LLMs automate away is typing, and that’s not my bottleneck (if it were, what a boring job I would have).

  I think a key thing I’m doing wrong is occasionally forgetting that this is ultimately fancy autocomplete and not a source of actual knowledge and information. There’s a big difference between answers and sequences of words that look like answers, but my monkey brain has a hard time distinguishing between the two. There’s an enormous, truly gigantic, insurmountable, difference between

  “Ah yeah we’ve used terraform in production for 5 years, best way to go is really not putting your state file under version control for …”

  and

  “Sure! When using terraform it is generally considered a bad practice to put your state in version control for these reasons <bunch of bullet points and bold words>”

  But I’m only human, and it’s really easy to trick me into forgetting this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't ask for more pixels⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s better to avoid the axiom of choice in discussions about sexuality, as it seems to upset the conservatives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone, like me, confused by the title: no verdict has been reached, and the trial expected to last for about seven more weeks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For me, it's going to be Fediverse or nothing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think In all honesty that we have different notions of what the word leftist means, and I’m not super keen on a discussion on semantics. Personally, I attach a very specific fixed non-relative set of ideals and principles to the word “leftist” (an acknowledgement that capitalism is neither fair nor efficient, a focus on building a state for the proletariat, cooperation over imperialism, etc etc). From your comment I get the sense that you have a more relativist approach. Whether or not someone is a leftist depends (additionally) on the political context in which they operate. In this light, you call Biden, a staunch neoliberal capitalist, a (lesser) leftist in the same breath as calling Belgian Marxists leftists. I am in no position of telling you that you’re using words wrong any more than you are in the position of telling me I’m using words wrong.

  But there are some things you mentioned that I do think are worth discussing, under the assumption that we would both label the mainstream part of the democratic party as liberals. Because they do not support the policies you would label as socially leftist. The last time universal health care was part of a mainstream candidate’s campaign was Obama’s first campaign (17 years ago), and what we ended up with was essentially a handout to insurance companies, a very far cry from UH. No major mainstream candidate since even mentions it.

  Then there’s the support for LGBTQ rights. I would like to focus on the T part first. Not only was there no countermessaging from the democrats to Trump’s virulent anti-trans rhetoric; after the race was lost, the MSNBC talking heads and major democrat campaign strategists were on national television claiming that part of the reason Harris lost was that she wasn’t tough enough on trans people. The transgender support by democrats is skin deep, and ready to be dropped when it becomes politically inconvenient. If the transgender folks are that easy to drop, don’t doubt the other letters won’t drop either. To finish off this section I’ll leave you with a nice Biden quote from 2006: “marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that”

  Another policy you mention is environmentalism. I won’t be verbose. Big part of Harris’ campaign was that she was more pro-fracking than Trump.

  Next women’s rights. Four years of Biden, nothing done to fix Roe v Wade. All these words about supporting women’s rights and here we still are with 12 year olds carrying their rapist’s babies to term. Actually, we don’t even get words, there’s a nice website which kept track of whether the Biden admin used the term ‘abortion’ in a press release (they did, once, more than a year in).

  I’m going to take some liberty into what else you might consider socially leftist positions, namely a pro-immigration stance, and an anti-war stance.

  War first. You can go back to the Senate and congress voting records. Democrats consistently vote in favor of bombing the middle east. The Biden administration pumped billions into the Palestinian genocide. During the Harris campaign, Waltz said that the expansion of Israel was crucial to the success of America. During the recent Signal gaffe from the Trump administration where a group chat leaked where they were planning to bomb Yemeni schools and hospitals, democrats were outraged not by the fact that the US would be bombing civilians, but rather about the fact that it leaked.

  Immigration next. The kids in cages at the border that we were all (rightly) upset about during the Trump admin? Not only did the Biden admin do nothing whatsoever about this, the number actually increased during his presidency. The messaging from the conservatives is simple: the immigrants come in, they’re criminals, they take our jobs, and we need to do something about this. This is of course false, if you look at the actual statistics, undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than citizens, and the addition of immigrants to the workforce (and to the market as consumers) is actually a boon to the economy. Did the Harris campaign do any countermessaging on this, citing the statistics, and looking at reality? No. A big part of her campaign is that her border policies would be tough, and that she was tough on crime.

  I’ve taken the US as an example, but the same pattern applies in Europe, at least in the countries I’m most familiar with (Germany and the Netherlands).

  Finally, you mention that the extreme right wing is similar to the extreme left wing in Belgium, and that conservatives are left wing on an economic level. I can’t speak much for Belgian politics. I went to the Wikipedia pages of the leftmost and rightmost parties I’m aware of (PvdA and Vlaams Belang) and all I can say is that I don’t see it. I see stark differences on policies on a social level (one being incredibly pro multi-cultural) and on an economic level (one being very pro union and worker, and the other somewhere between neoliberal and protectionist). But again I know very little of Belgian politics.

  But I can say something about the conservatives portraying themselves as socialists. Please do not fall for it. This is a trick as old as Hitler. They put the “Socialist” in nazi only to trick workers into voting for them. They ended up privatizing more than any government before them (something I hope we can agree on isn’t very leftist), slashed minimum wage, culled unions, and put socialists in concentration camps. Not very left wing. Same with the current far right in power in the Netherlands. Portrayed (successfully) as economically leftist during the campaign, but every policy they’ve put in place is economically right wing. They tried putting a flat tax (unsuccessfully so), they’ve gutted public services, and they increased income tax while leaving corporate taxes fixed. They do this every time, do not fall for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For me, it's going to be Fediverse or nothing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not leftist infighting if one side isn’t leftist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A bit of salt makes it taste more savory⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This smug denialism is what got us Trump the first time around and it’s what got us Trump the second time as well. At least the guy acknowledges there’s a problem (even though his solutions are designed to make it worse). The Dems piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining. They dropped the ball by trying to play diet republican, and losing the election is on them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A bit of salt makes it taste more savory⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And that’s how you recognize a Russian election interfetterance bot, because it’s categorically false. The genocide Drumpf is carrying out is millions times worse and very different from the special military operation in Palestine that the Biden administration really had nothing to do with if you think about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky says it won’t train AI on your posts⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “we promise ;)”