wpb

@wpb@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A bit of salt makes it taste more savory⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ;)”