On Authority is a pointed response to the thought-terminating pejorative of “authoritarian.” If you haven’t read it, you should! It’s short and important =)
You want a change in society? You don’t care that fascists don’t want that change? Then you’re an authoritarian. Everything after that is a matter of degree.
Is considering sex work generally non-consensual a SWERF thing? I’d guess most people who think that don’t at all want to exclude sex workers…it’s not a criticism of sex workers. I also don’t think it precludes that some people might not have a coercive experience with sex work. Im sure there are plenty of people selling feet pics on instagram and feeling great about it, and maybe that’s fine…but I don’t think that’s the norm!
Maybe I’m wrong though; I don’t intend to be a swerf, but I do think sex work is generally non-consensual. Most paid work is probably non-consensual on some level but I think sex kind of has a special place in non-consensual activity.
Sex work is obviously something many people feel forced into. 73% of sex workers have at least one disability; maybe they feel they have other options, but it looks like that’s not most people’s experience: https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/nearly-3-in-4-sex-workers-live-with-a-disability-rare-bc-report-finds/
Or we can be part of making that a condition of the democrats doing well. Not supporting a genocide isn’t something we can or should “strip out” of our expectations of politicians. If you’re right, then burning the system down is the only feasible thing. Nothing else is feasible.
It’s infeasible to expect decent people to rally around genocidiers.
Don’t let the people with power tell you what is or isn’t feasible. Not supporting a genocide is easy for them. They may lie to themselves about it, but it’s obvious.
I just kinda gently jostle her a little until she stops. Its usually about the angle of the head in my experience (at least for my wife!)
Put Linux on your existing computer and shift some stuff you don’t need as frequently to an external hard drive! You’re not gonna get the experience you want from a $150 computer
I agree it’s scummy to wish death upon a stranger you know nothing about. In this case, the guy thinks he knows the stranger is a fascist. I think that’s jumping to a conclusion, plenty of non-fascists do really dumb stuff with regard to health. This particular dumb thing with regard to health was popular among fascists, so it’s not totally nuts to think he might be.
Anyway, wishing death upon a fascist (stranger or no) is not scummy. Only a bootlicker would think it is! That said, I also don’t think you have to be a bootlicker to think we shouldn’t assume someone’s a fascist because they want ivermectin.
What RSS readers do people like? I used to love Google Reader!
It’s to stop all the SEESEEPEE spies from slacking off at work…that’s gotta be it!
Sweet, this makes me immediately want to go buy a kobo! I love ifixit.
He doesn’t let his PR hacks tell him what to do!
They are, for sure. I mean in some sense, the explain-ability is why it’s correct…you might need to explain why it’s correct to a judge one day!
Ah, well in that case I won’t take your word for it that it’s good. I’ll take your word for it that it’s working for you for now… Again in a legal context, that’s like “I got chat GPT to write this contract, and it’s working great,” but of course…it won’t be when things go wrong haha!
I have to take your word for it because I don’t know what good code looks like lol. Again, to compare to what I’m familiar with, you can also ask an LLM to draft you a purchase agreement for shares of a private company, and if you’re not a lawyer it’ll look good…and it’ll be able to sound like it’s explaining to you why it’s good…but it will not be good haha
I’ll have to take your word for it! “figuring out” sounds like a higher-order process than a large language model is capable of to me, but if what they do is as good, then great.
I think I’m just skeptical because of how horrendously bad LLM output is in my field of expertise (despite looking fine to a lay person), so I immediately analogize that to other areas. The output of law and coding are both really about language, and the process of creating that output on the part of a lawyer or coder are really about language, so I can see how one might think LLMs would be able to recreate what lawyers and coders do. But boy it doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible that LLMs will ever get there, at least for law. I have no doubt some yet-unimagined technology could get us there, but “next word prediction” just isn’t gonna be it.
I’m not a coder, so I can’t speak to the quality of code generated by these models. I am a lawyer, and every time I see stuff that lay people think is impressive in my field, I can’t help but guffaw and think “none of this is going to function, and no one will know for years. We’re so fucked…and then one day we’ll have to clean all this up and it’s gonna be so much work.” I kind of assume it’ll be similar for code? Like…it’ll obviously be somewhat better because there is a lot of testing you can actually do, whereas in law “testing” takes many years…and by the time you find out something doesn’t work, the burden of having done it wrong all this time, thinking it was right is catastrophic (which is why lawyers are so conservative about language that they “know works.”
I can see how little features can get added and these tools can deliver on those projects fast…but like…can they do bigger things with consistency? Can they like…set things up well? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but…I guess i’m thinking about Go. It took a long time for neural networks to get to be good at 19 x 19. They got good at 9 x 9 pretty fast. But as the game gets more complicated, it’s way WAY harder to do good long-term strategy. And the machines got there, no doubt. But the entire universe of Go is a 19x19 grid, on which the spaces are black or white or empty. How much more complicated is a language? Even a programming language? infinitely more complex, of course!
So I worry that we’re going to have individual features that work well, but systems that cannot function…looking like the uhhh…weasley house in Harry Potter…but without the magic to hold it up lol.
Joke went way over my head; thanks for the context!
This but unironically? lol the US is bad. do china next!
But I think most MLs would assume everyone already knows this and would instead want to argue about whether the bad things china does are actually “imperialist,” technically.
IDK maybe this is an accurate depiction of some kind of rabid sinophile…I haven’t had the joy of meeting any.
I’m so used to seeing the joke version of this that I was confused by the traditional version lol
Delete the gym, hit a lawyer, facebook up.
If you’re willing to do something about that wish, then you’re an authoritarian too.
And FWIW, casting it in personal terms makes that wish tautological. No one wishes for a system where they have to cater to the whims of someone else. I’m sure you meant to say “no one has to cater to anyone else’s whims,” and that’s all well and good. Still authoritarian if you’re willing to see anything at all done to overcome the desires of the powerful to maintain the status quo (and in case it’s not obvious, that’s a good thing to be authoritarian about).