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MudMan

@ MudMan @fedia.io

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2 yr. ago

  • I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying

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  • This is a weird pattern in that presumably mass abandonment of the em dashes due to the memes around it looking like AI content would quickly lead to newer LLMs based on newer data sets also abandoning em dashes when it tries to seem modern and hip and just punt the ball down the road to the next set of AI markers. I assume as long as book and press editors keep stikcing to their guns that would go pretty slow, but it'd eventually get there. And that's assuming AI companies don't add instructions about this to their system prompts at any point. It's just going to be an endless arms race.

    Which is expected. I'm on record very early on saying that "not looking like AI art" was going to be a quality marker for art and the metagame will be to keep chasing that moving target around for the foreseeable future and I'm here to brag about it.

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    Why don't protestors who oppose Trump/ICE open carry their guns to prevent what's currently occuring in the US ie kidnapping, assaults etc?

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  • Why else would you shoot at them?

    Is that not what weapons are for? Who the hell goes to a peaceful protest expecting to be shot at with lethal weapons? What the hell? You are not protesting at that stage, you are at war, that's some Tiananmen shit. Listen to me carefully: if you think law enforcement at a protest is going to open fire with live ammunition on unarmed protesters do NOT go to that protest. Start organizing a guerrilla, see if you can get the legal system to act on the people responsible, get in touch with press and try to get international awareness on the serious breach of human rights happening on your country, but do not just show up in a protest you can reasonably expect will lead to a massacre of unarmed civilians. I can't believe I have to put this in actual words.

    I'm always so baffled by American unwillingness to take any action followed by the immediate assumption that the very next step is going to be full-on murder. Just zero escalation, in their minds it's either eat popcorn at home or be shooting at people indiscriminately.

    I genuinely don't get it. There's a mental model at play here but it may as well not be carbon-based.

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    Why don't protestors who oppose Trump/ICE open carry their guns to prevent what's currently occuring in the US ie kidnapping, assaults etc?

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  • I mean, it's a lot safer to shoot at unarmed people. I'd certainly be way more willing to shoot at someone that's armed.

    Like I said, alien thoughts in alien minds. I just can't follow US trains of thought at this point.

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    Why don't protestors who oppose Trump/ICE open carry their guns to prevent what's currently occuring in the US ie kidnapping, assaults etc?

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  • Holy shit, are they? Because from the outside looking in I assume the presumption that a gun may be present is why US police is essentially a military organization willing to shoot anybody at the slightest provocation, so I would assume if you are faced with a crowd of armed people your first instinct to stop that is to shoot first.

    I mean, my common sense assumption is that bringing a gun of any kind to a protest is a fantastic way to start a massacre of your own people, but I've lost the ability to parse how Americans understand both political action and violence ages ago.

  • ideas are not property, they cannot be stolen

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  • This is a great example of modern Internet "either one thing or what I randomly decide is its opposite is correct".

    Absolutely modern copyright is broken and unfit for purpose, absolutely the ability to correctly assign authorship is useful, absolutely there is value to exclusive monetization rights for authors, certainly the ability to assign those to corporations is overexploited in the current model.

    All of those things are true at once and I'm pretty sure the unavoidable overhaul of a trillion dollar conglomerate of industrial and cultural dependencies worldwide is not going to end up fitting in a meme.

  • "The lesser evil is still less evil." -some braindead lib

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  • Cool.

    So this presumes the rightmost party never wins.

    Instead you should have one line somewhere in there where they don't vote for the lesser evil well enough and the right side skyrockets five memes down the road, except the lesser evil next time is the same amount to the left of THAT mark now.

    I mean, you're living it, I'm not sure why I have to explain it.

    Could have saved us both some time if you hadn't decided the disingenuous out of context response was worth going around the loop.

  • "The lesser evil is still less evil." -some braindead lib

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  • I mean... not really? This presumes the right never wins.

    Instead you should have one line somewhere in there where they don't vote for the lesser evil well enough and the right side skyrockets five memes down the road, except the lesser evil next time is the same amount to the left of THAT mark now.

    I mean, you're living it, I'm not sure why I have to explain it.

  • Anti-foreigner sentiments are on the rise as Japan faces a population crisis

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  • No, I'm getting what you're saying.

    I'm saying what you're saying is wrong because it demands you consider only the statements they are explicitly making and disregard any statements they are not enumerating but that need to be included for it to follow some semblance of logic.

    You are arguing that "I believe" has the capacity to contain all the false premises and justify them as long as every action that isn't belief-based remains internally consistent.

    I am saying that... well, no, you need to assess the premises included in that belief to evaluate the entire statement.

    "I want to drain the swamp so I vote for Trump because I believe he'll drain the swamp" or "I want to protect children from pedophiles and I believe Trump will do that" are just as valid of a statement, regardless of whether Trump is a convicted criminal or a sex offender.

    As long as you are willing to collapse all incorrect arguments into "belief", you can justify the logic of any premise at all by just assuming the speaker is incorrect somewhere else that you're not evaluating. It's entirely tautological at that point. All human action follows some perceived set of incentives. Not all human action makes sense.

    You're also presuming that the incorrect statements that make sense to you are fixable, which they absolutely are not. None of these people are working down that logic chain that you're stating. Let me be clear, you won't convince an antivaxer by changing their factual basis. Their factual basis is built to reach the conclusion they want to reach.

    It's also important to point out that even if that was possible, "we have a population crisis so we need to close the borders" is a contradiction, and it's exactly what these guys are saying. They aren't saying "we prefer the effects of the population crisis to the changes to our culture immigration brings". That's not the statement in the first place.

    The statement is fundamentally incongruous because it's incomplete and backwards. The real train of thought here is as follows:

    "I hate foreigners" "Our population is shrinking" "I miss when women worked for me having babies and cleaning after me" "Foreigners are coming here because our population shrinking creates demand for them" "If women worked for me again having babies and cleaning after me we would be able to grow our population without creating demand for foreigners I hate"

    The statement being provided is strategic. They won't say what they want, they will act to reach it. That includes misrepresenting their argument.

  • Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before"

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  • I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn't go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.

    If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.

    And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they've been historically I can't help but think there's a fair amount of projection going on.

    Here's my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they're going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old "make more money this quarter than last quarter" thing.

  • Anti-foreigner sentiments are on the rise as Japan faces a population crisis

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  • That's... not how that works when you make statements about the world. Your unicorn example is all well and good in a universe where there are only hypothetical animals, but you're eliding big chunks of that chain. "Unicorns are pink" is a valid statement in the abstract, but if you're arguing about animals in the real world that's not where the chain starts. The chain goes: unicorns exist, unicorns are pink, all pink animals eat clouds.

    And of course in this situation you need to evaluate each statement. Unicorns exist is going to be a big fat FALSE, which means you can't claim all unicorns eat clouds and argue it's a logical statement. It's a meaningless statement by itself because it depends on a false assumption.

    Which is my exact point. You are claiming the argument is logical because you're assuming the only requirement is that it is internally consistent when all their premises are accepted. But the premises are false, so it's not. I appreciate that you're getting stuck when the chain of statements they cherry pick changes over time (see the free speech example), but they're not meaningfully different. If you let them cherry pick the clauses they need to verify and ignore everything else they can make a consistent argument in the moment about anything, including vaccines and flat planets and jewish space lasers.

    I mean, no they can't because they suck at this. But still, they can make something close enough to one that if they speak fast and loudly enough on the Internet they can get more morons to follow their channels than to block them, so... here we are, I suppose.

  • Anti-foreigner sentiments are on the rise as Japan faces a population crisis

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  • Sure, but that's taking the concept of what's "logical" to absurd extremes. Any sort of paranoid delusion is logical if you accept all of its premises.

    Is being antivax logical? Not at all. It requires amazing mental gymnastics to ignore centuries of scientific research. Things that are "logical if you believe them" is a great way to describe things that aren't logical. Vaccines do not, in fact, by all available measures, cause more dangerous issues than the diseases they prevent. If your "logic" requires a rejection of the entire epistemological framework upon which shared scientific kknowledge is established it's not "logic", kind of by definition.

    This is the same thing. Its internal consistency isn't "logic". It can be shown to not be logical. If you suspend yourself from that conversation, deny the parameters of anybody who disagrees with you and cherry pick your values to specifically support your instinctively desired conclusion, then it doesn't matter how well you can through your train of thought, it's still indefensible.

    I think that's why the MAGA thing stumps you a bit. Their train of thought isn't any better or worse than this. It's, in fact, identical. Information that supports it gets magnified, information that disrupts it is ignored. They are fun about it in that they add this cool temporal dimension, where that selection is applied regardless of how it was applied before, so they're all for free speech when people tell them to shut up, all for limiting speech when people criticise them. But that's not different to the fundamental contradiction of being concerned about a population crisis when you are trying to turn women into walking incubators but concerned about the massive influx of people when you're trying to be racist.

    It's a lot of things, but it's not logic.

  • Anti-foreigner sentiments are on the rise as Japan faces a population crisis

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  • It is only logical if you're... well, a supremacist.

    I mean, it requires a mental framework of how culture and identity work that is fundamentally supremacist.

    Culture works by aggregation, it's entirely unrelated to borders and it is in perpetual shift. This assumption requires misunderstanding culture from a very specific perspective.

    So no, not logical.

    Internally consistent, yes: make women into reproductive vessels and men into the defenders of a fossilized culture enforced through violence. That's a consistent worldview.

    But not a logical one if you apply it to reality. The difference matters.

  • Anti-foreigner sentiments are on the rise as Japan faces a population crisis

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  • I keep hearing racist nationalists say stuff like this worldwide, and not matter how hard I squint it remains a non sequitur.

    I mean, "we have a population crisis" and "don't let people come here" seem entirely contradictory unless you are... well, a supremacist.

    Which they are, it's just the leap that gets me. So obvious, so rarely called out and never addressed.

  • Install Gentoo

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  • I can give that a whirl if it's not set up like that already, but the monitor is VERY slow on its own. It basically never wakes up in time for the BIOS bootscreen and any signal interruption sends it on a wild goose chase of signal searching around its inputs that can take ten seconds at a time. It's not a cheap monitor, either, which I assume is part of the problem, as it wants to be super smart about a bunch of things and has to contend with a bunch of options and alternatives that maybe a simpler setup wouldn't.

    Still, worth a shot to try to tune grub and double check if it's swapping modes unnecessarily between the bios image and the menu. I hadn't considered it. Like so many Linux features and app there's a bunch of stuff you can config on it that I keep not looking into because it's only surfaced in documentation, if that.

    EDIT: Tried, didn't help. The motherboard rebooting gives the monitor just enough time to search its display port input, decide it's been unplugged and shut down, so by the time another monitor picks up the slack it's too late and the timeout has expired unless you're mashing down to stop it. The changes do make the second monitor come up at its native resolution instead of changing modes, but the mistake happens elsewhere.

    I could just set a longer timeout, but I'd rather have a faster boot when I'm sticking to the default than wait for the whole mess to sort itself out every time. Been mashing bios entry buttons and bootloader menus since the 90s, what's a couple decades more.

    Still dumb, though.

  • Install Gentoo

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  • I don't know about Gentoo, but as a serial dual booter I know this pain well.

    I swear about two thirds of the time going through grub on every boot adds to the process are waiting for my monitor to figure itself out. Half the time it doesn't get there on time at all.

  • Do you recognize this guy playing video games?

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  • 80s micros consistently look better than any modern computer OR modern keyboard. I'll fight you on this and I'll win.

  • Across the World, People Say They're Finding Conscious Entities Within ChatGPT

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  • I imagine being convinced that a loved one is trapped inside ChatGPT the same way I imagine believing they're trapped on the TV or the telephone. I mean, yeah, ChatGPT can generate text claiming this is the case, but ultimately the whole thing requires a fundamental disconnect with the technology at play.

    I'm less concerned with the people who are in that situation and more with the current dynamic where corporate shills are pushing fictions around that idea while media and private opposition is buying into that possibility and accepting the wild narrative being passed by the other side because it's more effective to oppose the corpse-trapping semi-sentient robot that makes you go mad than it is to educate people about the pretty good chatbot.

    The shills aren't helping, the people who made their entire personality to fearmonger about this online aren't helping, the press sure as hell isn't helping. This is mostly noise in the background of a pretty crappy state of the world in general, but it sure is loud.

  • Across the World, People Say They're Finding Conscious Entities Within ChatGPT

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  • I'm perpetually mad at having a global conversation about a thing without understanding how it works despite how it works not being a secret or that complicated to conceptualize.

    I am now also mad at having a global conversation about a thing without understanding how we work despite how we work not being a secret or that complicated to conceptualize.

    I mean, less so, because we're more complicated and if you want to test things out you need to deal with all the squishy bits and people keep complaining about how you need to follow "ethics" and you can't keep control groups in cages unless they agree to it and stuff, but... you know, more or less.

  • Across the World, People Say They're Finding Conscious Entities Within ChatGPT

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  • I mean, of the fictions you can build around this tech this is one of the least harmful ones, except when it's GenAI corpos hyping their stuff up unreasonably.

    I'll say that the concern is people not understanding what they're using, which honestly has been the case since the Internet went mainstream and I just don't have good solutions for it.

  • BritCard ID Now Mandatory — What Happens if You Refuse?

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  • I have not lived in Germany, and never thought to ask any of the Germans I know about this because it's a rather dumb argument that isn't that important, but this is what Wikipedia has to say about their ID card status:

    A German identity card is compulsory to possess but not carry for all German citizens aged 16 or older; a passport can also be used in lieu of an identity card.

    While police officers and some other officials have a right to demand to see one of those documents, the law does not state that one is obliged to submit the document immediately. Fines may only be applied if an identity card or passport is not possessed at all, if the document is expired or if one explicitly refuses to show ID to the police. If one is unable to produce an ID card or passport (or any other form of credible identification) during a police control, one can (in theory) be brought to the next police post and detained for a maximum of 12 hours, or until positive identification is possible. However, this measure is only applied if the police have reasonable grounds to believe the person detained has committed an offence.[127]

    This gels with the rules in the handful of places where I've lived that have mandatory ID rules. With the important corollary that ID cards typically fit in your wallet and passports are big fat books you have to store separately.

    Either way ID is ID.