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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • This was not personal interest, though it is an incredibly interesting text. It was fascinating to discover he devoted ~2.5 chapters to the importance of the same kind of simple, yet powerful finger-pointing rhetoric used by right-wing ideologists to this day. I joking say it’s one of the earliest texts on meme theory, and it’s only half a joke.

    I still find it funny that just a few years ago a feminist social work journal called Affilia published an article that was essentially a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf in terms of sex and with some “fashionable buzzwords” included under the title “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” Especially since the bit is spelled out right in the title (for anyone who doesn’t know, “Mein Kampf” literally translates as “My Struggle”). It was part of the grievance studies affair.


  • I think I have a mutation in a taste bud or something, but Sucralose is really a prominent and nasty taste to me in anything it’s in.

    The only artificial sweetener I get a nasty aftertaste from is saccharine. But I get a really absurdly foul aftertaste from saccharine, I can’t even compare it to anything because it’s easily the worst thing I have ever tasted in my life and I can’t think of anything even sort of similar. Glad basically nothing uses it any more, but it was more of an issue as a type I diabetic kid decades ago. Sucralose doesn’t give me an aftertaste at all though, neither does aspartame or acesulfame potassium.

    My preferred sweetener though is stevia (I used to go to the local new age shop and buy just dried stevia leaves for my tea and such during the time it was legal to sell in any amount for any purpose as an herbal supplement so long as you didn’t mention it had a flavor which turned it into an unsafe food additive because fuck NutraSweet corp). It took such a ridiculous time to get approved because of NutraSweet, when stevia really should have fallen under GRAS status for the same reason things like tomatoes did - New World plant used in food forever by the natives, but wholly new to Europeans when they came to the Americas.





  • If AI didn’t exist, it would’ve probably been Astrology or Conspiracy Theories or QAnon or whatever that ended up triggering this within people who were already prone to psychosis.

    Or hearing the Beatles White Album and believing it tells you that a race war is coming and you should work to spark it off, then hide in the desert for a time only to return at the right moment to save the day and take over LA. That one caused several murders.

    But the problem with ChatGPT in particular is that is validates the psychosis… that is very bad.

    If you’re sufficiently detached from reality, nearly anything validates the psychosis.



  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldLinux as the true Trojan!
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    18 days ago

    Really it’s actually capitalism that supposes people are too dumb to make their own choices or know how a business is run, and thus shouldn’t have say over company choices.

    Really it’s actually that businesses with that structure tend to perform better in a market economy, because no one forces businesses to be started as “dictatorships run by bosses that effectively have unilateral control over all choices of the company” other than the people starting that business themselves. You can literally start a business organized as a co-op (which by your definitions is fundamentally a socialist or communist entity) - there’s nothing preventing that from being the organizing structure. The complaint instead tends to be that no one is forcing existing successful businesses to change their structure and that a new co-op has to compete in a market where non-co-op businesses also operate.

    If co-ops were a generally more effective model, you’d expect them to be more numerous and more influential. And they do alright for themselves in some spaces. For example in the US many of the biggest co-ops are agricultural.




  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldWinning
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    22 days ago

    I understand at a nuanced and historically informed level what’s happening at a political and geopolitical level here, and all of my bleakest predictions keep coming true

    Let’s test this: Make some specific predictions for various points over, say, the next 5 years (start near future and work your way out). Put them somewhere where they can remain generally fixed but available (say on a pastebin or lemmy post or something). Then come back to look at them after those times have past and see how accurate you are. This would let you see your actual rate of accuracy as opposed to just the ones that stand out because they ended up true), which would ideally lessen your panic or alternatively if you really are getting it right in a consistent fashion we can start calling you gravitas_deficiency the Bleak Prognosticator.

    For example just glancing at your profile one you seem to be doubling down on a lot recently is that there will be either no US presidential election in 2028 or no peaceful transfer of power in January 2029. That is easily verifiable in four years time. How do you imagine this will happen? Is it enough to satisfy this if the election happens and the GOP wins with a non-Trump candidate? Do you think opposition to the GOP will simply be made illegal? Do you think they will push an amendment to let Trump run again? Do you think Trump will just run again regardless and argue that the Constitution doesn’t apply to him because seemingly no other law does?



  • You’re not wrong. There’s nothing that requires the two parties be Dems and GOP. But you’re not going to overturn one or the other in a single election, and that means losing to the farthest big party from you, likely a few in a row, while that gets resolved. Especially if you try to do it top down instead of building support from local/county offices up.

    Basically, if you could get enough third party support, you could either supplant one of the existing parties or force them to shift to stay competitive. The argument is that trying to do so with the office of president when doing so promotes a fast track to outright fascism is a painfully bad tactic.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlSchrödinger’s China
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    28 days ago

    What exactly does “should” mean in this context?

    I think the implication is that it’s essentially being prevented from collapse because it’s so ingrained in international trade that if it were to collapse it would hurt you and your allies too much, so you don’t allow it to collapse when it otherwise might.



  • To be clear, when you say “seeded from” you mean an image that was analyzed as part of building the image classifying statistical model that is then essentially running reverse to produce images, yes?

    And you are arguing that every image analyzed to calculate the weights on that model is in a meaningful way contained in every image it generated?

    I’m trying to nail down exactly what you mean when you say “seeded by.”


  • OK, so this is just the general anti-AI image generation argument where you believe any image generated is in some meaningful way a copy of every image analyzed to produce the statistical model that eventually generated it?

    I’m surprised you’re going the CSAM route with this and not just arguing that any AI generated sexually explicit image of a woman is nonconsensual porn of literally every woman who has ever posted a photo on social media.


  • A lot of this kind of thing happens. There’s limits on bunch of food contaminants that are higher than zero because zero is unrealistic (for example on the amount of rat feces in grain). Generally, the ones closest to the limits will be the ones chosen to be processed further into something where them being second-rate is less obvious. The pretty produce gets sold raw, somewhat uglier produce goes into shredded or finely chopped goods where you can’t see the difference. The flour that’s closer to the limit for rat shit content get processed into factory baked goods where it won’t be as noticeable, etc.