GloomyBoots

Sometimes I’ll search something benign on Google, DDG, or whatever. And I won’t have disabled safe search. But it will be on moderate by default. And yet, horrifyingly, sometimes I’ll see results that are NSFW.

I mean criticize AI all you want. But it sounds hilarious to act shocked here specifically about aspects of the web that we’ve all grown up accustomed to.

Not the same ethically. I’m not arguing that. But it’s the same mechanics. Browsing a dump floating around on the Internet isn’t the same as stealing someone’s personal info.

The data is already there. You’re not depriving anyone else of it, and as long as you’re not hosting nor seeding it, you’re not sharing it, either. Most of us pretend not to see it, but it’s there regardless.

This feels like a very dated metaphor. When my older brother introduced me Napster, was I actually rifling through Lars Ulrich’s wallet and shaking out mp3s?

In this case, a clone of the wallet has been preserved for all and sundry to peruse. Is it really wrong as a genuinely curious person not to pretend it isn’t there?

There’s a lot to be said about privacy on the Internet. I don’t think there’s much to be gained by attacking those who, out of genuine curiosity, don’t abide by the same polite fictions as the rest of us. I dont like browsing random strangers’ PII. I tend to hope those who do show due respect. And don’t see any sign of malice in GP.

This is one of those situations where it becomes abundantly clear whose dedication to abstract ethics overrides their acknowledgment of material reality and respect for others in terms of real-world safety.

Even that is an incredibly vague and ahistorical definition. It’s strange how much ink is spilled over redefining ‘fascism’ in as vague a way as possible (thinking of Eco here, who remains perennially popular among those who tilt at hooked windmills).

Mussolini did a great job as delineating exactly what fascism was, and the NSDAP fit it, but in general it really doesn’t fit states outside of that particular time and place, including most regimes described as ‘fascist’ today.

The arguments for why Trump is somehow a fascist are among the most facile I’ve ever heard, and I say that having never voted for nor supported Trump, and having even more negative an opinion of him now than I did previously.

Political discourse will never be anything beyond laughable until we can get past screeching at each other over which side is the secret fascist.

Any explanation for ignoring parenthetical text? Is this maybe indirectly inherited from RFC 822?

Pretty sure in this niche a MITM is called a Lucky Pierre.

Well that seems to open up a loophole. Send them the password-protected document. Don’t send the password since it wasn’t explicitly requested. Could even use a one-time pad for good measure since it is just a really long password.

I assumed they were describing ytmnd

This is very nitpicky, but “Nazi” always seems out of place to me in historical discussions. It’s a derisive nickname mainly used by their opponents. It’s convenient, sure, and more recognizable than “national socialist” in popular culture. I use it as well, but it always feels a little goofy, like talking about “commies” in an otherwise serious discussion.

What I saw were claims (and screen recordings) of being instabanned, not mass-blocked, for statements like “there are only two genders” which is a pretty basic conservative stance. One of the sources was that End Wokeness account, so not exactly an unbiased source.

I did make an account to test the waters with such statements, and wasn’t immediately banned, so maybe it’s not true.

I’m not logged in. This is based on what I see as a potential user checking out the site for the first time.

No it wasn’t. The video didn’t make any attempt at believability, and Musk posted it with the text “this is awesome” followed by laughing emojis. The joke could not have been more telegraphed. You may as well complain that SNL is misleading voters.

I don’t care about looking fair. I care about being honest. I’m sorry if you think I’m not doing enough to support your team.

> It's because we've reached a point where the average conservative rhetoric is toxic, harmful and generally flat out incorrect.

Yes, but not particularly.

> Political lines are now about acknowledging facts or not

Political lines are about which facts you accept. On many of the social issues of today, which are far more contentious than economic ones, liberal "facts" are often two lies and a half-truth wearing a trench coat. What liberals[1] want is a monopoly over which facts are on the table, and for all discussion to take place within that framing. And accusations of toxicity, harm, disinformation, and bigotry, are employed as rhetorical tools to preserve that monopoly.

[1]: By "liberals" here I don't mean average liberal voters, but politicians, pundits, influencers, and the class of affluent, politically-engaged people who tend to set the tone generally.

I'm not signed in. Maybe that's why.

Right now I opened the home page, paged down through the top 20 or so bloots or whatever they're called, and got:

- An MSNBC video about fighting back against conservatives

- A post celebrating that a "right-wing lawsuit" to review voter rolls failed

- That BrooklynDad dude complaining about Trump supporters

- A post comparing conservatives to the Empire from Star Wars

- A post chastising White people for having opinions on some controversy involving Black celebrities

A lot of whiny us-against-them rhetoric, but it's not toxic because they are conservatives. In between those, there are cat pictures, some shower thoughts type posts, landscape photos, and comics. This was a marked improvement over the page when I opened it yesterday.

Honestly, I've thought about signing up for Bluesky on a similar basis, that a lot of the people I want to follow for my hobbies are there.

I'm not sure what you mean about the rape threats. Is there a documented increase in such things on Xitter?

That's exactly the kind of thing I'm criticizing him for. Musk posted an obviously satirical deepfake of Harris. It was clownish. It was unprofessional. Jack wouldn't have done that.

And yet, the response to this from liberals wasn't to chide him on that alone, which would have been plenty enough. It was to pretend that this wasn't obvious satire, that it was an attempt at spreading misinformation. The reaction was far more disingenuous than the bad joke.

Every time I've opened the bluesky homepage it's been highly political. Not even in the sense of "here's a topic I feel strongly about". It's just "fuck conservatives" over and over. At the same time, even the most mild conservative opinions result in a ban. That's not a platform that one goes to for an escape from toxicity. It's a platform that one goes to so that they can burn strawmen with like-minded toxic people without worrying about getting blowback for it.

That was true previously as well. The most substantial difference between Jack and Musk is that the former was better at maintaining a professional demeanor. His biases were no fewer, his tenure at Twitter was markedly more censorious, but he was better at presenting himself. This seems to be the main distinguishing feature of American liberalism as opposed to conservatism. The point about misinformation is another place this can be seen. There's a lot of misinformation from both mainstream political camps in the US, but liberal misinformation is more dressed-up whereas conservative misinformation is downright clownish--Alex Jones being a good example.

There’s also the phrasing “compatible with Jewish origin”. That doesn’t mean that he definitively has Jewish DNA either, especially given that there are no specifically Jewish haplogroups. This whole thing seems very premature until autosomal analysis is performed.

I’m ambidextrous as well, but always was I guess. Most things feel more natural to do with one hand or the other, and I just do that. I never felt like ambidextrous was accurate, so I say weird-handed.

The reason I write right-handed is that my friend kept “correcting” me when we were learning. I still hold the pencil like a lefty, though, which gets funny looks.

I’ve run into similar “features” like copilot refusing to complete anything that includes references to gender.

Is this true? I’m not saying it isn’t, but I buy Blu-ray’s pretty regularly and my player is offline but hasn’t had any issues. I mainly buy older films, so maybe I’ve just been lucky in avoiding protection used for new releases.

Are you fine with desecrating the bodies of others against their wishes?

If people speaking a certain dialect tend not to work in a particular role, an LLM is only being accurate in deprioritizing that occupation when guessing what they might do.

It does make it not bias when an LLM is accurately representing reality.

They’re pretending that an LLM recognizing patterns that exist in reality reflects a problem in its training data. So much of the conversation around “reducing bias” really means intentionally introducing biased data to “socially engineer” LLMs (and by proxy their users) so that they have a less accurate picture of reality.

> Sex doesn't have a goal, neither does biology more generally.

I’m trying to take this in good faith, but I’m struggling, and it feels like a convenient way to divert this conversation into meaningless hair-splitting about whether by biology you mean the science itself or the processes biologists study, and whether by goal you mean an consciously intended outcome or a mechanistic one. Neither of which topics has any real bearing on what I said.

> Reproduction as distinct from sex might be a safer argument, but reducing sex to reproduction is inapt, particularly in a discussion of human social behavior.

It’s impossible to disentangle reproduction from sexual behavior, and, again, I’m having trouble taking this in good faith.

It’s more troubling since I specifically voiced my distaste for the reduction of sexuality to mere biological processes. I’m in the middle ground between the extremes of biological essentialism and positions like your own that biology has no meaningful relation to human sexuality.

> The active vs passive voice is depicting the angst as a choice, a reaction which is under voluntary control. No one is required or forced to feel social distress, certainly not by advertising or philosophy.

This, again, seems to be a very extreme and basically religious position to take. People are affected, whether they intend to be or not, by those around them. None of us is a being of pure reason divorced from the world around us, or anything even close to it. We can’t choose to be unaffected by our social environment any more than we can choose to be unaffected by our physical one.

> Read this from the perspective of a woman, but especially a slut. You have invented a whole philosophy based on the idea that women have some sort of numerical rating

That’s the nature of the world today. Everything is quantified, everything is transactional. It’s not particularly true of women.

> and that sex is some kind of competition

I find the reduction of human sexuality to mere biological competition distasteful, but there’s no denying that it is competitive.

> Women often have impossible beauty standards marketed towards them, with the intent of making us feel bad so we spend money on self-improvement. This is the masculine equivalent. Nothing is tearing the "social fabric", you're tearing at yourself.

Note the difference in passivity with which you describe women and men. This is done to women, whereas men do it to themselves.

There are extreme, systemic problems affecting both, which is exactly what tearing the social fabric describes.

Florida recently passed HB 269 in which acts that are generally uncontroversially categorized as speech were criminalized. There are also anti-BDS laws, etc.

I accidentally linked the trailer. The full documentary is here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM