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BertramDitore

@ BertramDitore @lemm.ee

Posts
1
Comments
545
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles

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  • Just try a little empathy exercise: what if you were arrested for a heinous crime, that you know for certain you didn’t commit, but you don’t have an alibi and there’s enough evidence that points to you, that you end up being tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death.

    You know that you didn’t commit the crime, but nobody else believes you or can properly make your case. In carrying out your sentence, the government is murdering an innocent person who was wronged by the justice system. If you had been sentenced to life in prison, there’s a good chance some new facts might have come to light and exonerated you. This happens all the time.

    Why does the government get to kill people, when killing people is one of our worst crimes? To me, the death penalty is state-sanctioned revenge. It’s the government saying it’s entitled to commit an awful crime, in order to punish an awful crime. Sometimes it’s committing the very same crime the person was sentenced for. That logic has always been completely confounding to me.

    Still curious what’s wrong with the death penalty?

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.

  • Wells Fargo Is Plotting to Privatize the Post Office

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  • Fuck, I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s ridiculous that every victim of their fraud wasn’t at least made whole, but in addition to the people who should have gone to prison, you and all their victims honestly should have been given a modest fortune as proper restitution for these crimes.

  • Wells Fargo Is Plotting to Privatize the Post Office

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  • Damn straight.

  • Wells Fargo Is Plotting to Privatize the Post Office

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  • No doubt. If fines and settlements are all we can muster, then there needs to be real personal consequences for those responsible as well as the corporation taking responsibility. Until we fully decouple money and politics, I have a hard time imagining that kind of proportionate punishment ever being doled out.

  • Wells Fargo Is Plotting to Privatize the Post Office

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  • Totally. It wasn’t close to being enough. The entire board should have been arrested for fraud, at the very least. At least it wasn’t some laughably low amount like we’re used to, I’m surprised it was even this high.

  • Wells Fargo Is Plotting to Privatize the Post Office

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  • Reminder that Wells Fargo was caught opening millions of accounts without permission. This company should not be trusted with anything.

    One of the rare cases where a company actually paid a huge $3 billion settlement.

  • Mexico Recognizes Palestine: A Historic Gesture of Solidarity

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  • Fuck yes. This is leadership.

  • The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

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  • That’s an interesting article, but it was published in 2022, before LLMs were a thing on anyone’s radar. The results are still incredibly impressive without a doubt, but based on how the researchers explain it, it looks like it was accomplished using deep learning, which isn’t the same as LLMs. Though they’re not entirely unrelated.

    Opaque and confusing terminology in this space also just makes it very difficult to determine who or which systems or technology are actually making these advancements. As far as I’m concerned none of this is actual AI, just very powerful algorithmic prediction models. So the claims that an AI system itself has made unique technological advancements, when they are incapable of independent creativity, to me proves that nearly all their touted benefits are still entirely hypothetical right now.

  • The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

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  • The article explains the problems in great detail.

    Here’s just one small section of the text which describes some of them:

    All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.

    (I originally put this as a top-level comment, my bad.)

  • The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

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  • ‘More than just an AOC’: Michigan Dem defends her lack of Musk pushback

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  • 100%

    That’s why it’s so dangerous for Democratic leadership to keep ignoring and actively pushing against AOC’s popularity. The ideological distance between Democratic leadership and the voters that put them in power is vast. That’s a serious problem that they don’t seem to be reckoning with.

  • ‘More than just an AOC’: Michigan Dem defends her lack of Musk pushback

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  • Sure, go ahead and demean one of the most popular and beloved politicians in office. That‘ll totally make people listen to you. AOC is the single best communicator the Democrats have on their bench. Other Democrats need to be learning from her and making more space for her style of leadership, not talking shit about her. That’s yet another thing they failed to learn from the 2024 election.

    I think it’s pretty telling that to much of the progressive and leftist base, Slotkin comes across as a Republican from the 1990’s (with all her Reagan-worship crap) and is generally not a particularly popular politician outside of neoliberal DC power circles. While on the other hand, AOC is incredibly popular across the nation, and is widely liked and respected not only because she comes across as a real genuine human being, but because her ideas and political approach appeal to almost everyone, including many Republicans. I heard some interviews with Trump voters where they were asked how they felt about AOC, and a surprising number of them said they agreed with a lot, but not all of her opinions, but they consistently said they respected her because they believed she meant what she said and that she seemed to genuinely care about the right groups of people.

    From the end of the article:

    Ocasio-Cortez “best reflects the core values” of the Democratic Party, a CNN poll of voters recently found.

  • Underrated pizza toppings?

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  • Charred fatty goose breast.

    Blew my mind.

  • Trump will order a plan to shut down the US Education Department

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  • Cool. Then I’ll just go ahead and ignore all those emails from the Department of Education telling me my student loan payments are about to go way up.

  • Today’s breakfast

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  • That’s one good-looking plate!

  • German national with U.S. green card detained at ICE facility, family says

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  • Fuuuck this is infuriating. Thanks for the extra details.

  • German national with U.S. green card detained at ICE facility, family says

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  • He required medical attention at some point during the interrogation and he was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, Senior said.

    What the fuck?!

    So “interrogation” just automatically means physical violence to ICE?? Not sure if there’s a better way to read that. I doubt he coincidentally came down with a bad cold in the middle of an interrogation. Fucking thugs.

  • The Internet Desk

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  • Your description of those desks totally knocked some of my old memories loose. I remember going to a friend’s house in the late 90s when the first smallish “all-in-one” PCs started coming on the market (before the iMac claimed that space in ‘98). They had their new all-in-one PC set up on a tiny desk in the hallway outside their office. It was there so everyone in the family could use it, but I remember being shocked at how small it was, and so impressed that it didn’t need the whole corner of a room.