I totally agree, but I think they could have managed to capture the simple nuance of “in order to care about people and make their lives better, we make a special exception for evil assholes, and we do not care about those people or make their lives better”. If I live on an island with ten people and one of them only wants to beat up the others all the time, there’s not really much hypocrisy in me saying “I want to make everyone’s lives better, but this one jerk won’t let us have that, so I guess we have to settle for making everyone’s life better except for his”. Nothing stops the Democrats from knocking it off with the warmongering while still at least speaking harsh words about the true failings of their political opponents.

Nice strawman, but I’m not saying he’s a pussy for feeling bad for cursing. I’m saying, let me be very clear:

1. The worst in him is apparently calling for Democrats to bully Republicans, which is a silly level of worst to apologize for on account of the fact that:

2: The people he’s calling to bully are fascist, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, corrupt, evil powerful people who are currently dismantling the country

3: It’s ridiculous to say “I should have been nicer” when obviously they didn’t lose because they were mean, and if anything being more mean would have helped them, or at least…

4: Being more mean maybe would at least have driven more people to take aggressive action that may have prevented the current situation

It’s just ridiculous for someone who was 20x nicer than the victorious competition to say they should have been even more nicerer on top of that. Why? What good would it have done? Would you rather your mom be kind to a criminal trying to rob her, or hateful? (See how uncool and ineffective that is to try to drag your mom into things?)

So if I didn’t make it clear enough. I’m not looking down on anyone for “having a conscience”. I think Walz doesn’t have enough of a conscience to bolster himself to do what needs to be done and overcome the paradox of tolerance and hate the opposition enough to make himself a strong opponent rather than a polite little pushover.

I couldn’t snore harder. The worst in you is asking other people to be mean? Oh me oh my I’m quaking in my booties. I’m sure if only you had been a kindler gentler gooder boy you would have won the election. Whatever

Adventure Time lore type comic

Underrated pun

I’ve always thought of competence porn as something more like Suits or House M.D, where the entire point is to see cool smart people doing call smart things and vicariously feel cool and smart yourself by watching them do it. In Star Trek, the crew’s competence seems incidental, but at least to me it doesn’t feel like the point of the episodes is to show off how competent people are - it usually seems like either some sort of philosophical enquiry, a straightforward action/suspense, interpersonal drama, or some combination of them. So while competence does feature in the stories, I feel like it’s handled with a lot more depth and realism than straight up pornography of competence. Star Trek is like competence erotica~

I really wish this just said life before the internet.

Zooming in on tiny drops and saying XYZ PLUMMETS is my #1 pet peeve of all stock analysis

Absolutely there is, but unfortunately the solution to CP is having moderators who can delete content, and that alone is enough to cause all the problems with moderators. It seems largely intractable to me. The only thing I could see maybe working is some system where moderators can be removed by community vote, but then you rely on systems preventing fake accounts from being created or account age to stop those votes from being botted, etc… I just don’t see how to technically solve the problem of moderators having power to delete things. It’s the classic issue of who watches the watchmen. Humanity has never had a great solution to this.

The problem is that if you actually have no or insufficient moderation then people just start using the site to post child pornography. And then you visiting what used to be a site you like becomes basically illegal and dangerous, not to mention potentially traumatizing. I’m not exaggerating, there was a small game fan forum site I used to love along with many others, but someone caught on to the fact it was run by just one guy and kept signing up with fake accounts and posting child porn or links to it. Luckily I had already fallen off using the site by then, but one of my Internet friends who still visited it kept me updated on the drama. First everyone normal stopped visiting. Then it eventually got so bad the owner had to shut down the site.

People lack imagination when it comes to what will happen with no moderation. It quickly becomes horrible.

Big insult chains like that only hit home for me if each one adds a new dimension or sense to the insult. This is just saying stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again. Reminds me of le epic reddit insults like “fuckwaffle” or whatever the hell it was. I hate conservatives and fascism as much as anyone, but it’s tiring to see such circlejerky posts that basically just say “conservatives dumb, upvote below”. I don’t need my opinion circlejerked, I’m already convinced of it without some random man telling me it’s true. And there’s nothing cathartic about reading this either because of how try-hard the insult sounds. Bleh.

All these AI doing X things out of context of the prompt are super misleading. Obligatory, I hate Musk and Grok. But spreading misinformation and half-truths is, and I can’t believe I have to say this, bad even if it aligns with your beliefs.

MechaHitler has mecha in it, which of course makes it more appropriate to be chosen in some sense. You could rerun even the same prompt and likely get different answers. It’s totally meaningless. And don’t let the battleground of whether Musk is a Nazi or not shift to whether Grok says Nazi shit or not. That’s a stupid battleground with lots of ambiguity. The existing battleground of Nazi shit that Musk directly says and does is enough. It’s a stronger ground to stand on for that position. Desperately trying to append even the weakest evidence to your position just gives you more weak points that the other side can use to make you look stupid and ridiculous. Stick to the strong points, we eat too good with Musk’s direct behavior to stoop to nibbling up scraps like this.

Yeah given that this is Lemmy I assumed it was being posted in that sense! Just thought I’d call attention to the ambiguity.

I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I’d rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word “Allah”, etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don’t want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I’m not going to take that into consideration, because that’s not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

Lastly, all other things equal, I’d rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let’s be honest, especially developers) won’t want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that’s reasonable or not, it’s hard to deny. It’s certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

Gross implications of this post unless I’m misreading it. The implication of course being that the FBI is protecting Epstein’s clients but has it out for the Jan 6th people, which proves the deep state is aligned with the liberals!!!

No, the government is aligned with the powerful. The FBI can name that ICE tracking app guy, they can name all the people arrested at the BLM protests, No Kings protests, etc. The common thread is being a nobody, not political affiliation. This is because the system doesn’t have a political affiliation. Its only affiliation is with power itself.

This is very thought provoking. Their biological nature misleads them into pursuing artificial surrogates, until eventually the concept of the surrogate totally displaces the original. But because the surrogate is cast in the mold of the original, the desire for the original is perversely rediscovered through the lens of the surrogate. Was anything gained or lost? Is there any difference?

Yeah same. I respect the huge amount of work it takes to make a suite like that, but… I’m lucky I’ve worked with Blender a lot to give me a good impression of open source software. If Libre was my first thing I experimented with in the open source world (and I think for many, many people it probably is), I would probably think “wow open source software is a joke, I guess you get what you pay for after all”. It really makes a horrible impression. I wonder why LibreOffice has so many usability pains vs Blender, despite the fact that both applications have very high demand. Maybe it’s just that LibreOffice seems really dull to contribute to?

Yeah, and this is before we even get into availability heuristic biases that would screw over people who do understand percentages. Most people are very bad estimators. If they live in a town with 40% Hispanic people, they’re gonna overestimate the total % of Hispanic people.

For sure. Many Americans are confused by percentages. They do not understand that 20% is equivalent to saying “in a room of 100 people, 20 of them are trans”, and even if they did understand that, they wouldn’t have the proactive reasoning to make sure their percentage estimates add up/overlap in a way that makes sense, e.g not implying that 20 people in the room are all Hispanic Asian atheist Catholic bisexual transgender millionaires.

I do think that “the system” (not any particular person or group of people, but the more abstract social meta-organism) is evolved, all systems are, to integrate and channel possible destabilizing forces into neutralized or even system-reaffirming forces. The system does not “platform” people who would legitimately threaten the system as a general rule. Jon Oliver is a pressure release valve, if he was to propose solutions that threatened to alter the system too much (systems see significant alterations as akin to death), he would be deplatformed organically. Again, I must stress that it is not an actual person or organization explicitly setting out to do this, like some sort of shady Comedy Central Illuminati. It’s just the same as how our body has a bunch of independent organs and cells that all work together without exactly trying to or knowing that they’re doing so.

Unfortunately Bernie is largely the same sort of thing. We can be assured of this by the fact that he is influential. Almost without exception, the more influential someone wants to be, the more pro-systemic they must be. In Bernie’s case he may not even realize how pro-systemic he is, he likely sees himself as more anti-systemic. But he is anti-systemic in the same way as a white blood cell is anti-systemic - that is, not at all, and only in appearance without inspection of the bigger picture. I suspect this is why he ends up not proposing any clear course of action. His role, although again I think he is unaware of this, is to create the sense that establishment dissent exists and is possible, that change and reform is possible. I say this without taking a stance on whether it is actually possible or not. Both in a system where it is possible and in a system where it is not possible, there would still be a flag bearer for that possibility regardless of its actual existence.

What I mean to say is that the system self-selects for the type of people who acknowledge problems but not the type of people who make proposals to fix them. It wants to appear to be investigating the desires of its constituents while not actually doing so - the system only cares about its constituents in so far as its constituents lead to the system’s well-being as a whole. The system does not intrinsically care for its constituents well-being. So while systems do indeed evolve and legitimately investigate ways to improve their own well-being, they will only appear to investigate ways to approve the well-being of their constituents, if they can help it.

All just my impressions of course, I hate talking in an authoritative voice about my ideas, but it’s better than prefacing every sentence with “I think”, “it seems like”, etc.