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I get that a lot of this linked article is written to (correctly) change the narrative around slavery erasure but some of it delves into baseless hyperbole that can't be anything but counter productive.
For example:
Evidence suggests that sexual abuse of slaves was so fundamental to chattel slavery that it’s reasonable to assume any histories of “kind” slave owners are complete fabrications designed to preserve the legacy of the masters.
That is either playing fast and loose with wording or an absolutely incredible claim requiring incredible proof.
On one hand, the "kind" slave owner is always a fabrication because the act of owning slaves is inherently immoral and reprehensible. This view makes the claim a borderline platitude; perpetuating an institution that enables rapists is very obviously unkind.
On the latter interpretation, you're claiming that rape was so universal that any slave owner was almost certainly a rapist (especially if they claimed they weren't). This would require some sweeping evidence, think studies on the demographics of mixed race slaves or on medical records tied to sexual assaults.
So what evidence follows? Excerpts from Frederick Douglas giving second hand accounts of rape and of Harriet Jacobs giving her first hand account. Nothing that incriminates slave owners broadly beyond Douglas's phrasing "...in [rape] cases not a few,...".
I don't even deny that the evidence might exist, and I would love to see it brought to light if it does. But the thing about slavery, and specifically the USA's commercial cotton slavery: it's fucking awful enough if you just list verifiable facts without aggrandizing. Even if everything in this article were true, it doesn't move the needle much farther beyond the baseline of American slave ownership.
If you're going to broadly claim "America's founding fathers were sex traffickers that raped children" then please, name names! Bring receipts! You can't open with...
These facts are not debatable. [Child sex trafficking] happened.
...and then lay out a single link rehashing that Thomas Jefferson was a massive piece of shit. What do we know about the other 54+ Founding Fathers?
Sounds like someone has never had to beat traffic to get to a second job... or a doctor's appointment because your boss kept you late... or pick the kids up from school on time because you can't afford childcare/after school activities... or get home to let a spouse drive the car because you can't afford two cars or...
Being poor is expensive, time consuming and dangerous.
USA is so dystopian that not having a car can very easily fuck your life up. Tbh the big brother solution is still a better idea than cutting off a person (or even a household) from transportation to jobs/groceries/healthcare.
they tell you that those are american propaganda and all lies and ONLY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT IS TELLING THE TRUTH
It's better than that: you can back them into a position that runs directly counter to official CCP policy and they'll claim that it's a "western agitprop translation" from the original language. Support it with translation and testimonials from actual Chinese citizens and those get dismissed because they're impure enough to speak a dirty western language.
Some fun ice breakers for any ML post:
- Why is it illegal to form a union in China?
- Why does the PRC constitution guarantee freedom of the press but journalists require a liscense? [Bonus: how can you quantify a requirement like "journalist ethics"?]
- Why is the number of executions in China a state secret?
Edit:
Cowbee spending 30k words in this comment section to explain how PRC citizens have so many freedoms but they can't use them because it could be counter-revolutionary but that's fine because everyone's interests are perfectly represented by the proletariat government but they don't need a vote in central government because that might undermine the state but they wouldn't vote against the CCP anyway because they're so open and transparent but the CCP shouldn't need to tell their citizens when arrests and executions happen but if they do tell you just trust that it's internal party corruption but a corruptable party doesn't give the proletariat an exuse organize themselves in other ways, which they could but they definitely...
[and also every ML insists that you don't know an AES state even if you were born in and lived there half your life, you gotta read more T H E O R Y]
As a counter: you only think you know what an apple is. You have had experiences interacting N instances of objects which share a sufficient set of "apple" characteristics. I have had similar experiences, but not identical. You and I merely agree that there are some imprecise bounds of observable traits that make something "apple-ish".
Imagine someone who has never even heard of an apple. We put them in a class for a year and train them on all possible, quantifiable traits of an apple. We expose them, in isolation, to:
- all textures an apple can have, from watery and crisp to mealy
- all shades of apple colors appearing in nature and at different stages of their existence
- a 1:1 holographic projection of various shapes of apple
- sample weights, similar to the volume and density of an apple
- distilled/artificial flavors and smells for all apple variations
- extend this training on all parts of the apple (stem, skin, core, seeds)...
You can go as far as you like, giving this person a PhD in botanical sciences, just as long as nothing they experience is a combination of traits that would normally be described as an apple.
Now take this person out of the classroom and give them some fruit. Do they know it's an apple? At what point did they gain the knowledge; could we have pulled them out earlier? What if we only covered Granny Smith green apples, is their tangential expertise useless in a conversation about Gala apples?
This isn't even so far fetched. We have many expert paleontologists and nobody has ever seen a dinosaur. Hell, they generally don't even have real, organic pieces of animals. Just rocks in the shape of bones, footprints, and other tangential evidence we can find in the strata. But just from their narrow study, they can make useful contributions to other fields like climatology or evolutionary theory.
An LLM only happens to be trained on text because it's cheap and plentiful, but the framework of a neural network could be applied to any data. The human brain consumes about 125MB/s in sensory data, conscious thought grinds at about 10 bits/s, and each synapse could store about 4.7 bits of information for a total memory capacity in the range of ~1 petabyte. That system is certainly several orders of magnitude more powerful than any random LLM we have running in a datacenter, but not out of the realm of possibility.
We could, with our current tech and enough resources, make something that matches the complexity of the human brain. You just need a shit ton of processing power and lots of well groomed data. With even more dedication we might match the dynamic behavior, mirroring the growth and development of the brain (though that's much harder). Would it be as efficient and robust as a normal brain? Probably not. But it could be indistinguishable in function; just as fallible as any human working from the same sensory input.
At a higher complexity it ceases being a toy Chinese Room and turns into a Philosophical Zombie. But if it can replicate the reactions of a human... does intentionality, personhood or "having a mind" matter? Is it any less useful than, say, an average employee who might fuck up an email or occasionally fail to grasp a problem or be sometimes confidently incorrect?
Well there's two different layers of discussions that people mix together. One is the discussion in abstract about what it means to be human, the limits of our physical existence, the hubris of technological advancement, the feasibility of singularity, etc... I have opinions here for sure, but the whole topic is open ended and multipolar.
The other is the tangible: the datacenter building, oil burning, water wasting, slop creating, culture exploiting, propoganda manufacturing reality. Here there's barely any ethical wiggle room and you're either honest or deluding yourself. But the mere existence of generative Ai can still drive some interesting, if niche, debates (ownership of information, trust in authority and narrative, the cost of convenience...).
So there are different readings of the original meme depending on where you're coming from:
- A deconstruction of the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence -- funny
- A jab at all techbros selling an AGI singularity -- pretty good
- Painting anyone with an interest in LLM as an idiot -- meh
I don't think it's contrarian to like some of those readings/discussions but still be disappointed in the usual shouting matches.
Love the meme but also hate the drivel that fills the comment sections on these types of things. People immediately start talking past each other. Half state unquantifiable assertions as fact ("...a computer doesn't, like, know what an apple is maaan...") and half pretend that making a sufficiently complex model of the human mind lets them ignore the Hard Problems of Consciousness ("...but, like, what if we just gave it a bigger context window...").
It's actually pretty fun to theorize if you ditch the tribalism. Stuff like the physical constraints of the human brain, what an "artificial mind" could be and what making one could mean practically/philosophically. There's a lot of interesting research and analysis out there and it can help any of us grapple with the human condition.
But alas, we can't have that. An LLM can be a semi-interesting toy to spark a discussion but everyone has some kind of Pavlovian reaction to the topic from the real world shit storm we live in.
In general people need to learn better aggressive interview techniques. Hostile/gotcha media has been around for at least as long as live interviews have been a concept.
You don't have to be perfectly infallible or witty. Have two or three prongs of attack, a few different phrasings, and some rejoinders or counters to their likely responses.
Don't bite with "did you just call this woman a man", pivot to a different phrasing on the same question, keep hammering and don't let them control the conversation.
Some faces have a strong jaw but that looks more like a jaw with a weak face
First, I think it's stupid in general that we all think it's fine to record people in public and upload their image so that it can be shared in perpetuity, no matter the setting.
Second, just because we live in a dystopian surveillance state doesn't mean we should shrug and keep feeding the beast. If a state actor wants to track movements from 3 miles away and cross reference that footage with some other shadowy data then make them do that. It costs them time, resources and political capital that could be spent elsewhere. Don't carry their water by donating data.
Third, there's more malicious things that can be done with your image than just putting you on a list. Suddenly you get dragged into court and these close shots of you at a protest have been leveraged to inject you into a bloody riot or any other concocted scenario. A state actor has a ton of visual data but there's no guarantee they have fresh, high resolution content on any given person (think anything that might have changed since your last photo ID: facial hair, thinning hair, scars, etc...).
Fourth, building off the last point, the state actor is not the only thing that matters in our threat model. Maybe some random xitter shitbag decides to use Grok to inject you into CSAM or some shit. That stuff doesn't need to hold up in a court of law to ruin your life.
Even worse the MAGA nut from down the road recognizes someone and decides to take vigilante justice into his own hands. Hell, he might even be wrong and now some third party is dead for no reason.
I'm not saying that everyone needs to go black block to protests, I think there's a ton of power in showing support openly to your neighbors and allies. But the message should be in the solidarity of the crowd and not the identities of the people. If you really want to shout "I'm not afraid of you" to the state then I've got good news: you can call up your senator or the Whitehouse right now from the comfort of your home!
But until we all can chill on the self doxxing then I probably wouldn't show up anywhere sensitive without taking the basic steps to protect my privacy.
Can we please stop recording faces...
strong authentication which is open for unique human users only
Unless you completely ditch anonymity, this can only turn into a state captured propoganda platform. Whoever controls access/auth will have the keys to the content.
Neat, appreciate the source. None of that refutes anything in my source and in fact the two paint the same picture. Obama's policy decision to formalize removals put more cases in the court docket. This (and other factors) put a massive backlog on reviews and they cut corners for the 80% of ostensibly open/shut cases.
Could Obama have done way better? Absolutely. But compared to the previous two administrations keeping things off book, it was still a step in the right direction to bring those to light in the formal process.
You keep saying "brunch" which I assume is to imply that everyone who's mad now was blissfully unaware of any problems 10 years ago. Not only is that not true but it's massively disingenuous.
DACA was a bandaid, but even as a gesture it showed an entirely different atmosphere around immigration and reform. Somehow Obama using his executive power to mitigate a problem is the same as Trump telling DACA kids to self deport while ethnically cleansing entire cities?
Gtfo you clown
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
They're way past that already, try to keep up
Lmfao who's ass did you pull that from?
I'm not an Obama Stan but the immigration policy was pretty tame during his administration.
There was a shift from voluntary removals (aka tossing them back over the border) to formal proceedings and a change to prioritize recent arrivals, those caught at the border and felons. By 2013, 87% of removals were in this top priority category.
So contrary to whatever edgy narrative you're imagining in your head, immigration enforcement was nothing like this before.
The vibe perfectly matches the business casual slacks and off brand sneakers
Again, the irony here is palpable. You clearly don't know shit about history if you think the Qing dynasty wasn't "getting way out ahead" of dozens of threats with the same ham fisted violence. That tends to work right up until it doesn't.
Interesting to make the parallel of the inept, corrupt and teetering late-Qing dynasty to the modern CCP... Losing their grip on power via economic mismanagement and triggering a bloody civil war by lashing out at the people that fill the vacuum. Very bold stance for a tankie.
In the late 1840s, the movement at first grew by suppressing groups of bandits and pirates in southern China. Suppression by Qing authorities led it to evolve into guerrilla warfare and subsequently a widespread civil war.
So looking a fraction of an inch beneath the surface we find it's like every other rebellion in history: a charismatic leader pitches a grass roots solution to the material problems of a neglected population, the population rallies and the state retaliates. This leader just happened to have a Christ-themed psychotic break.
If you read up more you'd find out how that Christian messaging was counter productive, generating resistance from both the traditional rural/Confucian population and the more modern/liberal upper classes.