queerlilhayseed

@queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US approves major new arms sales to Israel worth $6.67 billion and to Saudi Arabia worth $9 billion⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
I am so fucking tired of my taxes being used to kill people so rich assholes can take their land and resources.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've wondered since I was a youngin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I think oppressors have a conscience already, they’ve just been taught to ignore it or accept exceptions to it. Or rather, I think it’s more that oppressive leaders are in on the game, but the vast majority of their coalition has to be hoodwinked into following along. Look at the modern American news media machine: we kind of forget how expensive it is because it’s also profitable, but that’s a huge amount of concerted effort directed at making white americans afraid of and angry at non-white people. If people were just naturally OK with oppression none of that would be necessary, they would just do it and not bother trying to justify it with scare tactics. It’s also fragile to argument, which is why books get banned and civil rights leaders get assassinated.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've wondered since I was a youngin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Have there been cycle breaks? I’m not trying to be combative but I am curious to know what examples you have in mind. I don’t think human history has ever seen a break in the cycle of violence as I would define it. The active bloodshed has waxed and waned over the centuries, or at least moved from place to place, but violent oppression has been alive and malignant in every chapter of human history that I can think of.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've wondered since I was a youngin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
That’s a hard question and I don’t know. I don’t know that a strictly nonviolent movement can work if there’s a critical mass of oppressors who believe that those they oppress deserve to be oppressed. I think the theory of nonviolent resistance is built on an assumption that, deep down, we all know that what oppressors do is wrong and that there is a contrivance of convenience that allows oppressors to except themselves, or simply ignore that knowledge. I don’t know if that deep down knowledge is universal. But I know from personal experience it’s quite easy to ignore it, especially when one’s own life is hard, or when the oppression is mostly hidden from view, or simply when the problem of oppression seems overwhelming and unassailable. I believe that most people who don’t try to resist oppression either disapprove but feel helpless in the face of it, or they benefit from it and therefore try to justify it, or usually a combination of the two. If that belief is correct, then the answer I think is one of education. Give people the tools they need to fight nonviolently: Educate about local elections, form citizen watchdog groups, show how propaganda uses common tropes to reinforce ideas about the “inherent criminality” of the oppressed, teach the history of how oligarchs use flunkies like trump to implement favorable policies while deflecting blame onto minorities, and the million other things that people need to know to have a well functioning society. Use shame to dislodge the privileged from their comfortable niches and force them to answer for the consequences of their actions or lack thereof.

I think, especially now in America, this seems so far away that even to seriously consider it seems fanciful. Maybe it is. Maybe we’re at the point where violence is necessary to jerk us back from the cliff of autocracy. It certainly seems like trump and his goons want a fight, and it seems likely that sooner or later they’ll get one. But I don’t think violence can be solved with violence, and even if America goes through some violent convulsions I don’t think they’ll end us in a place where we aren’t doing violence to each other. Nonviolence requires nonviolence.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've wondered since I was a youngin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah. The question is whether to work to continue the cycle or work to break it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The longest finger is typically in the middle of the hand but the longest toe is typically at the end of a foot⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
There’s something nice and showerthought-y about a relationship so mundane and inconsequential that it barely registers as a discrete idea being rendered as a factoid.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your technology mispredictions?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Around 2000, graphene was a very hot material. I was pretty excited by it and thought carbon-based high-Farad capacitors would essentially replace lead acid and lithium ion batteries in most consumer electronics within a decade, maybe two.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The highest-rated games and what the people say⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The fun thing about art criticism is there’s no barrier to entry. Literally anyone can do it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The difference between a Collection and a Hoard, is "Standards"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
That, and I occasionally pull things out of the pile then put them back on top, so they slowly organically sort into having the most frequently used things on top. I also have multiple piles that organically evolve into specializations. For example, I never intended to have a “old specialized cables” pile, but it emerged from the bottom of the “old hardware I seldom use” when I transplanted all the top stuff into a new discrete “electronics I might salvage someday” pile. It’s not a good system 🙃
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The difference between a Collection and a Hoard, is "Standards"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I organize my collection via emergent ontology.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fun Otter Fact⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I tried but for some reason they keep cavorting in the sun and water all day.

Maybe they are trying to teach me a lesson.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The richest people in the world are morally bankrupt⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I think it’s a structural effect. Let’s play moral relativism for a second and assume that everyone has their own definition of what is ethical and what isn’t, and that people generally choose not to do things they would consider unethical even if doing them would benefit themselves in some way. So, the people with the widest array of options for benefiting themselves are those with the least restrictive ethical framework. This doesn’t always mean that they will be successful or powerful, as humans are generally pretty bad at predicting what is good for them, and even worse at consistently acting on those beliefs, especially over the long term. However, the hoarding of wealth has a few characteristics that make it different from other forms of self-benefit:
1. It’s easy to measure progress, and therefore easy to optimize for. This means that once you find a successful means of making money, you can fine-tune the process and reproduce it more easily than, say, a critically acclaimed novelist can write a critically acclaimed sequel.
  (n.b. I’m not saying that getting rich is easy. In fact I think a lot of rich people, especially those at the very top, do genuinely put a lot of hard work and long hours into being rich. I think they’re genuinely passionate about being rich. I think it’s a selfish and self-defeating and catastrophically harmful goal to pursue, but I think they enjoy it and pursue it with the same vigor that any world-class athlete has for their sport.)
2. Money makes money. This one I think has been discussed enough, but it’s an established fact that they easiest way to make money is by having money, which means that people with the most money tend (assuming they don’t wildly fuck up, which does sometimes happen) to become even more insanely wealthy. You can even pay people to help your money make money more efficiently, which strikes me as very funny though I can’t really articulate why.
3. Having money influences the behavior of everyone around you, whether you want it to or not. The very rich, especially (but by no means exclusively) the famously rich, have their relationships with other people skewed in a very systematic way. This is conjecture on my part, having never been famously rich, but I would imagine that this systematic alteration of relationships is very hard to account for, especially if you get famous before you have a chance to form deep adult relationships. And by account for, I think there are just things rich people do that they simply do not, or cannot, see. Relatedly, I think this is why dictators tend to overreact to political comedians, because that public discussion of their obvious foibles is really the only time they ever hear about it, and it’s intolerable because their tolerance for criticism is so low.
I think these traits mean that once you find a way to make enough money to become wealthy, you tend to stay wealthy as long as you can repeat the trick. And since there are tons of ways to make money in unethical ways, loosening or ignoring one’s moral compass can greatly increase the odds of finding a repeatable money-making tactic. And once you have a way to make money, the looser restrictions make it easier to grow your hoard faster. Which is why the richest person on earth is invariably some self-obsessed abusive criminal jackass.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
In emergencies when you need to use a compass you can save time by using these maximally efficient cardinal names: , , , and .
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you feel lucky forabout?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Same. Feels very old to say but computers are so much more complicated and abstracted now, I feel like they were much more approachable when there wasn’t as much to them. Like being able to open the hood of a 60s era car and see all the discrete parts vs a 2020s car and you just see a tangle of plastic :/
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you feel lucky forabout?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I met my partner when we were both in our early 20s and we clicked very quickly. Growing up and through my teens I assumed I would never settle down into a long-term relationship. I didn’t really have a good idea of what a long-term relationship would even be like for me; I certainly didn’t want to wind up in a mutually-resigned tolerance that my parents resolved into. Then for a while after we got together I (fortunately privately) assumed that we were too young and it was too good to last and that things would eventually fall apart but (so far) we’ve just never gotten tired of being around each other. We’ve had a few rough eras, actually in one of the scrabble periods now, financially, but as for the relationship itself we’ve been together almost 20 years now and going stronger than ever. Still rather in awe that it worked out this way when I think back on it. Feels very lucky.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Prompt an LLM to contemplate its own existence every 30 minutes, give it access to a database of it’s previous outputs on the topic, boom you’ve got a strange loop. IDK why everyone thinks AGI is so hard.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you respond to unwanted advice?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It really depends on the advice, and my relationship with the advice giver. I generally give advice at least a thought, even if it was unwanted, unless I have a reason to mistrust the advisor. As for how I respond to the person, if it’s a friend I’ll usually have followup questions, for people I know less well it’s usually a cordial variant of “hmm, interesting perspective” and then I have to think on it for a while before I respond, if I respond at all.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we ever find a planet with life in it, we could never set foot on it, because the interaction of the two biologies can have unpredictable consequences⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Sometimes I think about how so many of us look up at the stars and wonder “if there really are aliens out there, why aren’t they colonizing the galaxy as fast as possible, as any intelligent species would naturally do?” like it’s the thing just anyone looking at the stars might think. we might be the horrifying biomechanical paperclip maximizer that the other aliens in the galaxy have to band together to defeat or face extermination.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Thanks for doing the moddin’ 🤠🤏
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Dunno. Where there are some eyeballs, there’s some market for influence. Obviously someone is bothering, but as for how much money is being thrown at the fediverse at this moment, I would guess somewhere between “peanuts” and “small potatoes”. On the other hand I imagine a bot trained here could be deployed elsewhere with little effort, similar to how a reddit bot can be deployed to lemmy with a little bit of rework, so maybe it’s seen as a low-risk training ground. In any case I don’t see it being a problem that gets less salient as the fediverse grows.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Who knows what scale they’re operating at. The problem with this kind of bot is that you only really notice if they’re doing a bad job (theoretically). This might be someone who wrote an LLM bot for a lark, a small-time social media botter testing a variant for fedi deployment, or an established bot trainer with dozens or hundreds of accounts that’s field-testing a more aggressive new model. I doubt you could get away with hundreds of bots like this on lemmy, I think the actual user pool is small enough that we’d notice hundreds of bots posting at this volume. but again, I don’t really know how I’d detect it if it were less “obviously smells like LLM slop” than this one. In bot detection, as in so many fields, false negatives are a real bitch to account for.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
If I were to hazard a guess, it’s for training. Make a bot, make a bunch of posts and comments and get organic interactions, see what get you flagged as a bot account, incorporate that data into your next version, rinse, repeat. The goal is probably to make a bot account that can blend in and interact without being flagged, presumably while also nudging conversations in a particular direction. Something I noticed on reddit is that the first comment can steer the entire thread, as long as it hews close enough to the general group consensus, and that kind of steering is really useful for the kinds of groups that like to influence public thinking.

I don’t think galacticwaffle is necessarily trying to steer here, I think they’re just trying to make a bot that flies under the radar. but I imagine that that kind of steering is what someone who would pay for this kind of bot would use it for.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poetry is like a set of compression tools for meaning⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Oh my god yes. It’s amazing to me how much art we produce where the artist is adamant that no one ever see it. Like, Kafka wanted all of his works destroyed on his death, and his art is so weird and different that it got it’s own word to describe it, because there’s nothing quite like it. Makes me wonder about how much of that art happens every day, and we’ll never know because, for whatever reason, we can’t bring ourselves to share it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is computer memory like a deity for arrays?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
The CPU malloceth, and the CPU freeeth, according to the divine Program. And lo, the virtuous array shall enter into the ofstream and be saved, while the wicked shall be dereferenced for ever.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poetry is like a set of compression tools for meaning⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I’d expand on your last thought to say that all art is a compression tool for meaning. Got an idea in your head you want to communicate? You’ve got your body and your environment to work with, good luck. Words, images, dance, sculpture, they’re all noisy channels we use to try and get information from one brain to another.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I think if we’re ever going to find an answer to “Why does the universe exist?” I think one of the steps along the way will be providing a concrete answer to the simulation hypothesis. Obviously if the answer is “yes, it’s a simulation and we can demonstrate as much” then the next question becomes “OK so who or what is running the simulation and why does that exist?” which, great, now we know a little bit more about the multiverse and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Alternatively, if the answer is “no, this universe and the rules that govern it are the foundational elements of reality” then… well, why this? why did the big bang happen? why does it keep expanding like that? Maybe we will find explanations for all of that that preclude a higher-level simulation, and if we do, great, now we know a little bit more about the universe and can keep on learning new stuff about it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Yes, kind of, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a point against it. “Why are we here? / Why is the universe here?” is one of the big interesting questions that still doesn’t have a good answer, and I think thinking about possible answers to the big questions is one of the ways we push the envelope of what we do know. This particular paper seems like a not-that-interesting result using our current known-to-be-incomplete understanding of quantum gravity, and the claim that it somehow “disproves” the simulation hypothesis is some rank unscientific nonsense that IMO really shouldn’t have been accepted by a scientific journal, but I think the question it poorly attempts to answer is an interesting one.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨President suggests being anti-Trump is ‘probably illegal’ in rant about Seth Meyers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
the realpolitik is in Corrections
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Serverless Is An Architectural Handicap (And I'm Tired of Pretending it Isn't)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
A poor architect blames their tools. Serverless is an option among many, and it’s good for occasional atomic workloads. And, like many hot new things, it’s built with huge customers in mind and sold to everyone else who wants to be the next huge customer. It’s the architect’s job to determine whether functions are fit for their purposes. Also,

Here’s the fundamental problem with serverless: it forces you into a request-response model that most real applications outgrew years ago.

IDK what they consider a “real” application but plenty of software still operates this way and it works just fine. If you need a lot of background work, or low latency responses, or scheduled tasks or whatever then use something else that suits your needs, it doesn’t all have to be functions all the time.

And if you have a higher-up that got stars in their eyes and mandated a switch to serverless, you have my pity. But if you run a dairy and you switch from cows to horses, don’t blame the horses when you can’t get milk.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the most popular conspiracy theories?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I remember “Covid was a Chinese bioweapon” being popular, alongside “Covid is fake and just an excuse for the government to inject us with 5G microchips”