stabby_cicada

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Webre added that he does not expect to criminally charge the young girl.

“Due to the totality of the circumstances, we chose not to pursue charges on the female student,” he said.

What the fuck. Why is this is a question. Why would it even be possible to criminally charge the victim. Why are you acting like you're doing her a favor by not "pursuing charges". WHAT fucking charges would you be fucking pursuing.

I don't expect commenters to know the answers to this. I just want to emphasize how American cops hate women so fucking much that when they have a 13-year-old female victim of a sex crime they ask themselves what crimes they can charge her with.

And men wonder why women don't report.

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stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 4d ago

A really simplified explanation: the wind pushes the kite, which unreels the kite string, which spins the generator shaft to generate electricity.

When the kite string runs out, the kite folds up or changes its orientation so the wind isn't pushing it anymore, and the generator reels in the kite string. This takes less power than the kite previously generated because the kite isn't pushing against the wind while it's being reeled in.

When the kite string is reeled in far enough, the kite catches the wind again, the kite string starts unreeling again, repeat as long as there's wind.

It's actually, I think, a really creative implementation of wind power.

stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 5d ago

Economics, as a science, has generally been used to measure and describe capitalist economies, since economics as a science has only existed as long as capitalism.

Which is fine.

Economics has had a bad habit of universalizing its descriptions of capitalist economies as if they were fundamental facts about human nature.

Which is not fine.

So, for example, economists talk about the "tragedy of the commons", as if it was a law of nature that publicly owned resources are necessarily used to destruction by selfish individuals, and only private ownership enforced by law can prevent this destruction. When, in fact, publicly owned resources have been maintained by societies ever since society was a thing, the commons in England existed for thousands of years before capitalism was a gleam in Adam Smith's eye, and the term itself was popularized by Garrett Hardin in 1968 as a justification for abolishing welfare and letting poor people starve.

But hey, our colonial ancestors took millions and millions of acres of "unowned" land from native peoples, auctioned it off to private landowners, and turned the native people into slave labor to farm it, and isn't it nice to tell ourselves that we're using that land more efficiently and protecting it from overuse and mismanagement by privatizing it?

I mean, look, if I said to you "making profit is the highest good, and it is morally right for me to use every legal method at my disposal to make as much profit as I can from you", you'd say I was evil or insane.

But if I said to you "making profit is the most important goal of my business, and it is morally right for me to use every legal method to make as much money as I can from customers" you'd probably nod and smile and agree.

And that's the corrupting influence of economics, which has confused efficiency and morality so greatly that it's convinced us that capitalism is the most moral form of social organization because a capitalist economy is the most efficient form of economic organization. Neither of which is true.

And this ties into fascism, and dictatorships, and Belgians in the Congo, and all sorts of monstrous human rights violations in the name of profit, because monstrous human rights violations naturally occur when you reduce human beings to commodities and tell yourself the highest form of morality lies in using those commodities as efficiently and profitably as you can.

Economics is not exclusively used for fascism, sure, but it's done more to promote fascism than any other single science I can think of.

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stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 5d ago

But people already have a public place to appeal. This sub, the sub you linked, pretty much any other instance that has a meta discussion community. But posting here, or there, isn't an actual appeal process - it's just publicly complaining about administrators.

And that was the answer to OP's question: that there's no single fediverse-wide place to appeal a ban, you have to follow instance specific appeal procedures, if they exist, and/or contact the instance's administrators directly.

Which is a good thing, because it helps keep the verse decentralized.

I think, if there was a single location where the fediverse started telling people "if you get banned, post here to appeal", users would expect some sort of formal response to their post, and get upset when people tell them posting there doesn't actually do anything. Which would be bad. And if that location could do anything to encourage administrators to reverse ban decisions, via peer pressure or otherwise, that would also be bad, because it would compromise the independence of instances. That is to say, a fediverse wide appeal community would be at best useless and at worst harmful to the fediverse.

So I think the only appropriate response to "I was banned, what can I do" is "that's between you and the people who banned you".

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stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 5d ago

I think any sort of fediverse-wide appeal community, or process, would risk compromising the whole point of the fediverse, ie, decentralization. The fact that admins have the final say on their own instances is part of what keeps the largest instances from controlling smaller ones and keeps the fediverse free of centralized control.

I mean, can you imagine a coalition of the largest instances coming together and telling a small instance "the appeal community agreed this user was banned unfairly, unban them or we'll all defederate you"? Because I can imagine that sequence of events, if an appeal community got any kind of formal backing from the big instances, and that would pretty much end decentralization.

stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 2w ago

Yeah, and how does that Tamil farmer fact check their black box audio interface when it tells them to spray Roundup on their potatoes, or warns them to buy bottled water because their Hindu-hating Muslim neighbors have poisoned their well, or any other garbage it's been deliberately or accidentally poisoned with?

One of the huge weaknesses of AI as a user interface is that you have to go outside the interface to verify what it tells you. If I search for information about a disease using a search engine, and I find an .edu website discussing the results of double blind scientific studies of treatments for a disease, and a site full of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and supplement ads telling me about THE SECRET CURE DOCTORS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW, I can compare the credibility of those two sources. If I ask ChatGPT for information about a disease, and it recommends a particular treatment protocol, I don't know where it's getting its information or how reliable it is. Even if it gives me some citations, I have to check its citations anyway, because I don't know whether they're reliable sources, unreliable sources, or hallucinations that don't exist at all.

And people who trust their LLM and don't check its sources end up poisoning themselves when it tells them to mix bleach and vinegar to clean their bathrooms.

If LLMS were being implemented as a new interface to gather information - as a tool to enhance human cognition rather than supplant, monitor, and control it - I would have a lot fewer problems with them.

stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 2w ago

Enshittification squared. Create a service that customers come to rely on. Then turn the service into shit to squeeze more profit out of it. Then create a new service that replicates the functionality of the old service customers relied on. Then enshittify that. And so on.

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stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 3w ago

AI is a parasite. It can't come up with anything a human didn't create first. It eats our thoughts and regurgitates them.

We kill AI by limiting our use of the Internet, renouncing social media in particular (and yes, I recognize the hypocrisy), and communicating with actual human beings through encrypted messenger apps that AI can't scrape for new training material.

Think of AI like an online troll. Don't feed it, don't engage with it, and it will be irrelevant to you until it finally gives up and dies.

But the social media machine wants you not to talk to actual human beings, it wants you to be lonely and isolated, so you'll consume its product - and AI is just a part of that machine, making you lonely and then providing you with the illusion of a real person to talk to.

Gardening is a great way to fight that, especially community gardening, because you literally have to be out there in person with your hands in the dirt talking to other gardeners.

So I agree with this post and strongly recommend anybody who doesn't have space to garden go looking for a community garden, or volunteer at a food bank (which often have ties to community gardens and can point you at opportunities), or help at a Food Not Bombs event, or otherwise get yourself involved in the real live in-person work of feeding human beings, and reclaim your brain from the social media algorithm feeding you AI slop.

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stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 3w ago

I don't know who the people around you are. I won't tell you you're wrong to be afraid of interacting with them.

But I do know that social media is designed to make you feel that way.

Social media algorithms find the angriest, the most hateful, the most radical, content on all sides and feed it to you. So you're going to see people on your side saying the other side wants to kill you, and you're going to see people on the other side saying they want to kill you, and you're not going to see the vast majority of people who don't actually want to kill you.

Because the more afraid you are of your actual human neighbors, the more time you'll spend on social media watching ads and being force-fed algorithmic slop. And that slop makes you even more afraid of your neighbors, so you spend even more time online, and so on and so forth.

So I'd ask you to ask yourself: if you believe people in your community want to kill trans people and enslave blacks, how much of that belief comes from what people in your community have actually said and done, and how much of that belief comes from stuff you've heard online?

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stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 4w ago

I think "we" (secular Westerners) are more likely to appropriate spiritual indigenous narratives, take them out of context, and trivialize them into meaninglessness - as the article describes we did with the concept of mindfulness - than we are to erase them. And I think this will happen because we, secular Westerners, are living lives devoid of spiritual meaning, and it's terribly tempting to steal other people's beliefs in the hope we can find a fraction of their meaning in life.

And though I'm sure people online are going to go full Reddit atheist on me and tell me belief in a higher power is ignorant and primitive, every society in human history that we know anything about has either had some sort of belief in higher powers or has aggressively suppressed such belief, and that belief served a function of social cohesion that a lot of the left no longer have.

Honestly, I think part of the reason Trump won - and part of the reason populist, religious nationalism is surging worldwide, Trump being just one example - is that the secular West threw out its own spiritual narratives without replacing them with anything. We condemned Christianity as ignorant, bigoted, and repressive, but we didn't create anything in its place to serve its role. We walked away from the churches, which were the "third places" of our towns, the centers of our social and cultural lives, and we replaced them with what? Coffee shops?

People need something to believe in, and we told them "do your jobs and vote blue, but it won't matter anyway because the environment is fucked".

The environmental left needs the warning not to engage in empty spirituality because so many people in it are desperate for the kind of meaning spirituality gives.

stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 4w ago

I have a serious question. Who thought Reddit Answers was a good idea? What's the actual benefit to the company? Did they get a ton of venture capital funding to build it, or are they trying to jump on the AI hype, or what? Does anyone actually know?

One of the biggest reasons, I think, for Reddit's popularity in the 2010s was that its comment threads often had advice and information and product recommendations from real people - as opposed to, say, Amazon reviews, which were full of bots even back then. A ton of people still search for topics on Google using the site:reddit.com modifier, because searching Reddit bypasses all the SEO and AI-created spam sites that dominate Google results, and Reddit is still one of the biggest open source databases of actual human advice and conversation.

And Reddit has decided to dilute its most valuable contribution to the internet with AI spambots?

It's some sort of stage 3 enshittification, obviously - cannibalizing its core use case for short term profit - but I'm morbidly curious who thought this was a good idea and why.

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stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 4w ago

Music puts shoppers in a better mood so they spend more money. No, really.

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stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 1mo ago

One: the original Axios article requires you to log in.

Two: The researchers were aware of the limits of AI detectors, and tested the one they used. From the article:

We should also take the judgments of AI detectors with a grain of salt, since their reliability is up for question. In its own testing of Surfer’s accuracy, Graphite had the detector analyze a sample of AI-generated articles and another sample of human articles, finding that it labeled human-written articles as AI-made 4.2 percent of the time — a common problem with these tools — but only mistook AI-written articles as human 0.6 percent of the time.

And really, judging from the quality of search results these days, I would have expected a lot more than 50% of new online articles to be AI generated, so from that standpoint the article might be good news 😆

stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 1mo ago

It's like the old economist joke.

Two economists are walking in the park. The first economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the other, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50. Later on, the second economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the first, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that pile of dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50.

The first economist says, "I can't help but feel we just ate dog shit for nothing." "Nonsense," says the second economist, "We just contributed $100 to the economy."

stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 1mo ago

Yeah. Two years ago, mainstream studies were estimating 3°C by 2100 - and it's well documented at this point how climate scientists deliberately underestimate predicted rates of warning to avoid being seen as alarmist.

At this point I agree with 2°C by 2040 and bet on 3°C by 2050. 5°C by 2100, 10°C if some of the worst case feedback loops exist.

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stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net 1mo ago

One of the freedoms the American military purportedly protects is the freedom to talk shit about the American military.