merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on change_org 2 days ago:
AFAIK, Israel is actually extremely prosperous these days, and the money received by the west is just “nice to have” free money these days.
- Comment on Tea app leak worsens with second database exposing user chats 3 days ago:
So, they’re compiling and publicly releasing the personally identifying information of someone in order to facilitate stalking, intimidation or extortion? That’s not what I’d heard the app was used for.
- Comment on change_org 3 days ago:
Russia’s war on Ukraine shows you can’t stop a war in another country even with massive sanctions.
And, various empires’ adventures in Afghanistan show that even sending in troops to stop the “bad guys” will probably not work.
Sometimes people can make a change. The Apartheid governments of South Africa collapsed largely due to boycotts and people pressure. But, that only really works when the targeted country wants to be part of the community of nations, and its people don’t want to be seen as criminals by the rest of the world. IMO, that situation is rare. Most of the time the rest of the world can’t do much of anything when it comes to civil wars and border conflicts.
- Comment on Tea app leak worsens with second database exposing user chats 3 days ago:
How are you defining “doxing” here?
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 1 week ago:
According to OP “We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place.”
So, believing women is proof, and not only proof, but proof so strong that we wouldn’t even need the Epstein files. You might think that believing women doesn’t mean convicting every person who is accused, but OP sure seems to think so.
- Comment on I just shitpost🙃 1 week ago:
I’ll bear with you, but I don’t want to get naked with you.
- Comment on I just shitpost🙃 1 week ago:
If you just wanted to follow a topic, you could follow Wikipedia RSS feeds.
If you’re reading and responding to comments, you’re engaging in social media.
- Comment on kingdom come 1 week ago:
Like, a big knob of ginger? Or just ginger shavings?
- Comment on kingdom come 1 week ago:
Some sweet potatoes can be very sweet
Yeah, there are sweet tubers. But, you can’t put a raw piece of sweet potato in a fruit salad. If you cooked it to bring out the sweetness it would be as sweet as the fruit in the salad, but it would stand out for being very mushy.
Pulses are incredibly variable too in their usage.
I haven’t heard the term “pulse” before, I’ve heard “legumes”. But, yeah, that group has a lot of variety. Red beans are frequently used as a sweet filling in east Asian cooking, chickpeas as crunchy snacks, etc.
- Comment on kingdom come 1 week ago:
Yeah, that seems likely to me too. Especially because some fruits are designed to appeal to animals who will eat the fruit and then poop out the seeds somewhere, and different fruits will appeal to different animals. A fruit “designed” to be spread by birds will be different to one “designed” to be spread by a hippo.
- Comment on kingdom come 1 week ago:
It is a bit weird that we use some fruits as “vegetables”, like tomatoes and cucumbers. But, other fruits like mango or raspberry are so different from your typical “culinary vegetable” that you have to be very careful in how you use it in a savoury dish. There isn’t the same crossover for other edible plants. For example, I can’t think of any tuber that could sneak into a fruit salad unnoticed.
I guess it comes down to there being a lot more variety among fruits than other edible plant parts. Plus, humans have been tweaking edible plants for millennia. So, who knows, maybe the original cucumber was more “fruity”, but has been tuned over the years to be more “saladey”.
- Comment on salty child 2 weeks ago:
Na: I will BURN you! You put me in water, I WILL DESTROY THE WATER.
Cl: You can’t even be near me! I will get into your lungs and DESTROY them!
NaCl: I will make your food taste better unless you use TOO MUCH OF ME AND THEN IT WILL TASTE BAD AND YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE WILL GO UP A BIT!
- Comment on Gallium 2 weeks ago:
What’s weird is that when these videos first started popping up is that every one of them talked about “Astronomer CEO”. I couldn’t understand how they knew he was a CEO or why he was an astronomer. It turns out that Astronomer is a “DataOps platform built on Apache Airflow”. That’s even an area I know a fair amount about, and I’d never even heard of them. It’s strange that it wasn’t just “cheating couple caught on kiss cam”, but instead immediately it was “Astronomer CEO”.
- Comment on Deserved? Poll inside 2 weeks ago:
It’s one of those things that works in movies because it’s something you can get away with if you’re incredibly attractive. There’s a whole stock images category involving girls licking their fingers, mostly in a seductive style. But, in the real world, it’s something you do with your husband or long-term partner, not a random cow-orker.
- Comment on Deserved? Poll inside 2 weeks ago:
“Touching his food” can run the gamut between:
Take one of his potato chips and eat it
to
Stick my thumb in his soup
If a friend or family member took one of my potato chips and ate it, I’d probably be fine with it. At worst I’d be a little annoyed. If an acquaintance or cow-orker did that it would be a little more strange, but not the end of the world. But, the other end of the spectrum is much weirder.
Grabbing a potato chip, if done carefully, will mean not touching anything else. Any dirt or germs on the toucher’s hands aren’t going to get spread around the rest of the food, but touching a liquid or something with sauce on it is different. IMO, touching someone’s pasta is definitely on the germ-spreading end of the scale.
- Comment on USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA 3 weeks ago:
Yeah man, they’re completely nuts!
- Comment on USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA 3 weeks ago:
From Mr. Lovenstein whose website unfortunately doesn’t seem to work, except to redirect you to Meta-owned socials. Ugh.
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 3 weeks ago:
Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 3 weeks ago:
Seeing the underwater world was so much fun. I got it to play in VR and only did that a couple of times, but I completed the original and Below Zero because the exploration and underwater scenes were just so good.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, saying “it’s the companies (that I buy things from) that pollute and not me” is like saying “I don’t contribute to climate change because I don’t cook red meat, I go to the restaurant and order a steak and they cook the meat. It’s the restaurant that’s destroying the environment!”
- Comment on Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes 3 weeks ago:
Absent Indians using AI? The AI ouroboros?
- Comment on Viewers like you 4 weeks ago:
Even before that there was Walter Cronkite, then Peter Jennings.
That was back in an era where everyone watched the same “influencers”. The good part of that was that for the most part, these influencers were rigorously fact checked so the people who watched them agreed on the same set of facts, and those facts were more or less true.
On the other hand, there were times when these “influencers” were biased or even hid the truth. The bias was often something they even had trouble noticing. Like, they all believed communism was a big threat, or that police were trustworthy. As for hiding the truth, sometimes when a politician got in trouble the news would drop the story because of their deference to power. They’d also sometimes try to repeat whatever the government said as truth without checking it, or not investigate bad things the government was doing overseas because they saw that as being patriotic.
Overall, I think it was better when everybody agreed on most things, even if sometimes the news / “influencers” were biased. At least it meant that the government was more or less functional. At least it meant that people were relatively civil with each-other.
- Comment on What are the chances 4 weeks ago:
The 1950s economy was the result of:
- The New Deal
- A world war which destroyed the infrastructure of every developed economy except for the US.
The New Deal was only possible because of the Great Depression. Only that level of chaos was enough so that left-wing politicians could push through radical reforms that moved power from the elite to the workers. The reforms of the New Deal remained in place after the war, at least for a while.
The second world war saw the destruction of the industrial capacity of the UK, Germany, France and the USSR. Meanwhile the only attack on the US was an attack on military targets at a Navy base in a distant territory.
So, if you want an economy similar to the 1950s, arrange for a world war which somehow leaves the US unscathed but destroys every other similarly developed economy, then arrange for a great depression which destroys the economy to such an extent that radical reforms can be enacted to hand power to the average worker.
Yes, of course nothing bad would happen if we switched to a 20 hour work week. But, the people with the power aren’t going to just allow that to happen. The 40 hour work week only happened with a massive series of strikes that were brutally put down by the cops. The change to a 20 hour week isn’t just going to happen because some workers think it would be cool.
- Comment on What are the chances 4 weeks ago:
That’s absolute bullshit. When the 40 hour workweek was “invented”, men were working 12 hour days in factories and their wives also worked. The wives sometimes worked in factories, often worked as domestic servants for richer people, or did home-based work. Home based work was often laundry or cooking for other people, not just their family. They’d sometimes also finish goods that were produced in a factory. Both partners were working 12+ days. And, while women did most of the home cooking and cleaning, it wasn’t as though that’s all they did.
This system ended because the workers used their power and went on strike. The result was the Haymarket Affair and is the reason that most countries, other than the US, celebrate a worker’s day on May 1st. The striking workers were attacked and beaten by the cops, and then because a bomb was thrown at a cop, the leaders of an anarchist group were rounded up and hanged after show trials.
Eventually the striking workers got what they were working for: an 8 hour day. But, it took decades after the Haymarket Affair for it to happen, and it wasn’t something that happened because everyone agreed it made sense. It was a long and bloody fight where that was the compromise that reduced the bloodshed.
If you want a 20 hour work week, join a union, prepare to go on strike and prepare to be beaten by the cops.
- Comment on Facts and minds 4 weeks ago:
Except that may have been a fluke:
- Comment on Facts and minds 4 weeks ago:
I try too, but it’s frustrating. I just wish I knew of a good technique that didn’t involve out-and-out lying. Because it’s hard to compete when someone’s being spoon-fed misinformation and disinformation that’s carefully crafted to bypass all their filters, and you have to try to fight for the truth by being honest and using facts.
- Comment on Facts and minds 4 weeks ago:
It can happen, but often you can predict when someone will be utterly unwilling to change their mind, despite mountains of evidence.
If it’s something that someone doesn’t really have a stake in, they’re likely to follow the evidence.
But, it’s different when something is a big part of someone’s identity. Take an American gun nut: Someone who spends a lot of free time on gun-related forums. Someone who goes shooting sometimes with buddies. Someone who listens to podcasts about guns, and has a gun safe filled with favourites. That’s the kind of person who is never going to be swayed by rational arguments about guns.
Too much of their self-identity and too many of their social connections are gun-related. Changing their mind wouldn’t just mean adopting a new set of facts, it would mean potential conflicts with all their friends. It would mean leaving a social group where they spend a lot of their free time. They’d not only have to accept that they’re wrong, but that all their friends are wrong too.
Of course, there are ways to change the minds of people who are in a situation like that. Unfortunately, it mostly happens due to tragedy. Like, a gun nut will change their mind, but only when a family member kills themselves with a gun, either on purpose or accidentally. That new, and incredibly personal data point is enough to compensate for all the social difficulties related to changing your mind.
- Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent 5 weeks ago:
The other thing that most people don’t focus on is how we train LLMs.
We’re basically building something like a spider tailed viper. A spider tailed viper is a kind of snake that has a growth on its tail that looks a lot like a spider. It wiggles it around so it looks like a spider, convincing birds they’ve found a snack, and when the bird gets close enough the snake strikes and eats the bird.
Now, I’m not saying we’re building something that is designed to kill us. But, I am saying that we’re putting enormous effort into building something that can fool us into thinking it’s intelligent. We’re not trying to build something that can do something intelligent. We’re instead trying to build something that mimics intelligence.
What we’re effectively doing is looking at this thing that mimics a spider, and trying harder and harder to tweak its design so that it looks more and more realistic. What’s crazy about that is that we’re not building this to fool a predator so that we’re not in danger. We’re not doing it to fool prey, so we can catch and eat them more easily. We’re doing it so we can fool ourselves.
It’s like if, instead of a spider-tailed snake, a snake evolved a bird-like tail, and evolution kept tweaking the design so that the tail was more and more likely to fool the snake so it would bite its own tail. Except, evolution doesn’t work like that because a snake that ignored actual prey and instead insisted on attacking its own tail would be an evolutionary dead end. Only a truly stupid species like humans would intentionally design something that wasn’t intelligent but mimicked intelligence well enough that other humans preferred it to actual information and knowledge.
- Comment on Never easier to kidnap people in the USA 5 weeks ago:
Ah, so you believe ICE?
- Comment on Never easier to kidnap people in the USA 5 weeks ago:
There are a lot more, I just grabbed the first few.
