towhee [he/him]

@ towhee @hexbear.net

Posts

23
Comments

261
Joined

3 mo. ago

towhee [he/him] @hexbear.net 2d ago

I don't generally throw around the word dialectic but "be normal" seems like one, and this same thing comes up again and again in mass-based politics. The end goal is to build a world that is - among a lot of other things - inclusive of people with all sorts of non-hegemonic sexual & gender identities. The people who most desire that world are specifically those people who are shut out of the current one. However, getting to the better world requires getting normies on board (questionable premise?). And many normies will be put off by things too far from their worldview. This is changeable (here's where the democrats lose the plot, they don't believe this)! But the process of change can only be started by meeting normies where they are & presenting yourself as near where they are, hence "be normal". But being normal requires a movement to be outwardly less inclusive of the people that are its most dedicated supporters. So it's a contradiction, but as we know here contradictions don't just make things disappear in a puff of logic. Things lurch forward unevenly in a way that is propelled by the contradiction. Running too far ahead or trailing too far behind the people, etc. People take you more seriously if you are conventionally attractive, successful, competent, articulate, calm, well-liked by others, and so on. Achieving these requires conforming to hegemonic norms while ultimately desiring to replace them. So it goes when you Live in a Society.

I feel like anti-furry stuff specifically in this post is pretty passe. Like maybe don't show up in your fursuit to the rally (or do? idk I'm not the ultimate authority) but it isn't the mid-2010s anymore, furry stuff is moderately mainstream at least in large coastal cities.

2d ago

Are these USB "AI edge accelerators" useful for running models locally?

towhee [he/him] @hexbear.net 2d ago

Roughly speaking, each token requires the computer to fetch & iterate over the entire model in memory. So memory bandwidth is usually the constraint. If you put a 10 GB model on it and the memory bandwidth is 10 GB/s (number made up) it will be one second per token. If you have multiple compute cores, each perhaps with their own 10 GB/s memory bandwidth limit, then you can divide one second by the number of cores to get the time per token.

Idk why you would use a USB stick and not just run it in CPU/RAM on an ordinary computer. Small models are shit anyway though (even against the baseline of large/frontier hosted models being shit).

5d ago

Waymo turns out to be using remote operators from the Phillipines

is... AI & automation & robotics all just a plan to get PoC to serve them without having to physically be near PoC

5d ago

Zionism is over-emphasized when talking about US foreign policy

I have lived in the US for like 15 years (including the South) and never once run into one of these people. Met a lot of zionists though.

5d ago

Zionists be like: "noo your antisemitism ad doesnt say Free Palestine is antisemitic, you are an antisemite!!!"

I think the ad is fine. Conversion of disgust at Israel's actions to dislike of Jewish people generally is inevitable as every western Jewish organization leader is like "no seriously I support all that genocide" and normie Jewish liberal zionists shrug their shoulders. At a certain point the obvious question becomes why bother carefully separating Jewish people from zionism if all the Jewish people you see & know don't seem to want the separation. Add in extremely overt TikTok censorship and Epstein being a weird Jewish supremacist and this really will become a phenomenon. So in conclusion yeah, basic "don't be racist" ads about Jewish people that doesn't link it Palestine is good.

5d ago

PSL hurts our movement

idk, all I know about it is whatever Timnit Gebru posts. I don't think I would have heard about it otherwise.

6d ago

If fascism is capitalism in decay, what was feudalism in decay? Is the extreme reactionary response to the birth of the new mode of production a necessary feature of the process of revolution?

towhee [he/him] @hexbear.net 6d ago

lol understandable, I did finish it & was glad to have done so but thought it was a slog that was carried by its amazing themes & setting much more than its gameplay. Also, why did they have northern cardinal birdsong in the middle of europe

7d ago

If fascism is capitalism in decay, what was feudalism in decay? Is the extreme reactionary response to the birth of the new mode of production a necessary feature of the process of revolution?

towhee [he/him] @hexbear.net 7d ago

I am not sure exactly what you are referring to here. Maoists in the Philippines?

1w ago

If fascism is capitalism in decay, what was feudalism in decay? Is the extreme reactionary response to the birth of the new mode of production a necessary feature of the process of revolution?

Recently played the game Pentiment, which is excellent in bringing this time period to life - albeit very boring as a game. Part of the plot involves peasants revolting and demanding the twelve articles. These came out of the German Peasants' War of 1525, which was put down brutally as the nobility slaughtered 100-300k peasants.

In the modern context I think this is interesting to think about. Probably 1 person in 1000 has ever heard of the 1525 German Peasants' War. 300k people being killed during a revolt in the modern day US, achieving none of their demands, would be a cataclysm. But generations endured that period and the ones before & after it. To me this is an antidote to some of the eschatological thinking I often encounter on the left that is like "this can't go on for much longer"; it will indeed go on for longer. Much longer than you think.

1w ago

Westerosi Genetics 101

One thing I'll give GoT (spoilers for first season/book to follow but whatever): I love the scene where ned stark shows up in the throne room to lever king joffrey off the throne by appealing to the RULES and then is promptly arrested by the person controlling all the people with weapons. A lesson there, perhaps!

1w ago

Solarpunk: When your ideology is pictures

never forget this banger by the cruelty squad dev:

Cruelty Squad uses Godot by the way. It's good. Play it!

1w ago

No way they actually said it out loud

1w ago

How different would the world be if covid never happened?

not getting into nebulous culture impact stuff but many millions of people would still be alive which seems good

1w ago

Someone told me to take comfort that the crimes of the ruling class will haunt their conscience and deep inside they will be tormented by awareness of the lives they lived