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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I understand your point, but I think the logic you are presenting is what is enabling these people. Ask yourself - what is the nuance in the Ukraine war? Fence sitting, and talking out both sides of your mouth about how we should condemn Putin yet also accept there is nuance to these issues is dangerous. It’s not complicated. If you don’t condemn Putin’s actions, you are implicitly accepting/agreeing that Ukraine should be wiped out.

    Putin relies on the populace accepting that there is “nuance” to the Ukraine war. Russia has conditioned (or at least is trying to condition) the population (in the west) into adopting this logic but the reality is that there is no nuance to this issue. What nuance could there be to an aggressor invading someone’s land?



  • Israel (at least in large part) is why they’re pushing the tiktok ban now. It is a little hard to connect the dots on this because the China-reasoning seems strong on the surface. I agree that China is bad, but there has not been any stellar evidence to show that China censors or otherwise manipulates users on the platform. You can easily go to tiktok and find videos discussing how awful the Chinese government is, information about tiananmen square, Winnie the Pooh jokes, etc. In comparison, the data that came out of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal was far more concrete, and Congress did nothing. Certainly there were not 81% of house members coming together to force Facebook to sell. Tiktok has even offered to make major concessions about data privacy.

    Israel’s war in Gaza is deeply unpopular and the fascists in Israel and here in the US are concerned that they are losing popularity. Tiktok has 100+ million active users in the US and the heaviest anti-Israel sentiment (the government and the US’s relationship with the Israeli government, not the Israeli/Jewish people) is heaviest on Tiktok, which is dominated by young millennials and gen Z. This is leaked audio of the director of the anti-defamation league (a very pro-Israel organization) speaking about this. He basically tells his audience that they have a “major major major… problem” and specifically says that they have a “tiktok problem and a gen Z problem.” Listen to the audio- you can agree or not with his reasoning, but he’s essentially saying that the spread of ideas on tiktok is causing their polling issues.

    People like this want to stop the spread of ideas on tiktok because young people are organizing, boycotting, and putting dents in the system. They do not like that young voters are having a larger and larger influence. These young people are also boycotting major companies like McDonalds and Starbucks who have taken pro-Israel stances, and these companies have lost profits from this. All this to say - I don’t think there is any lack of motivation by people with lots of money to destroy the platform where these people are organizing.

    It is incredible how much money Israel pumps into our politicians, both Democrats and Republicans. Joe Biden himself is the largest recipient of this money. There are anti-BDS laws (specifically for Israel) in 37 states. I don’t think many people are aware of just how much influence Israel has in the US. It is surprising and disturbing, but I am equally surprised/disturbed at how little attention these topics have received on Lemmy of all places. I don’t think it takes a genius to start making these connections and to start asking questions - maybe this isn’t the full picture but there is a lot of stuff here to be skeptical about. That said, I absolutely do think this kind of information is suppressed on other platforms, and they want to suppress all of tiktok because it’s dangerous to them.


  • The guy who leads this group is extremely vocal (almost weirdly so) about white privilege and systemic racism. He is also white. It’s true that many AI models have white-bias. The reasons for this are multi-faceted. Our datasets are grossly imbalanced against racial minorities. I also think I understand that for some darker-skinned races, it is more difficult for the model to extract relevant features from the shitty Flickr photos they scrape for these models.

    That said, injecting words into the users prompt to force the model to generate minorities more often is an extremely naive approach. Kind of like if Google added “reddit” to all searches just because it worked for some specific test cases, but ignoring that you now no longer get any site except reddit. Probably the solution here looks like paying a lot of money for high quality datasets as well as investing in user education and more AI explainability of these tools.


  • Bro he’s saying that you’re supposed to realize how fucked up it is (and ideally be revolted) that corporations - who don’t give a shit about you or anyone else - team up to prevent bright young adults from having a career and affording to live as payback for exposing their inhumanity/making them look foolish.

    Instead you’re over here like “yeah I lick corporate boot and will gladly accept being stepped on if I get to keep my career.” This girl is a hero for standing up to the likes of cloudflare and we should all aspire to have her courage.


  • I see this argument a lot, and I am absolutely a hardliner on genocide. That said, I am also aware that a second Trump presidency will be the end of our nation as we know it. It used to be so simple when voting for candidates - it was “evil” vs “more of the same”, but now it’s “evil” vs “genocide as a foreign policy.”

    What is the exit strategy for us as a nation? How many times can we stave off a Republican presidency? Even voting blue we are slipping right - how many times can we vote for the Democrats until we’ve made so many concessions that the blue guy is just exactly equivalent to the current red guy?

    I’m really trying to argue in good faith. If someone has a decent answer to this, I’d love to hear their side. Otherwise it seems to me like we are headed for some kind of civil war in this country.