recovering hermit, queer and anarchist of some variety, trying to be a good person. i WOULD download a car.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Open models is the way to battle that.

    This is something I think needs to be interrogated. None of these models, even the supposedly open ones are actually “open” or even currently “openable”. We can know the exact weights for every single parameter, the code used to construct it, and the data used to train it, and that information gives us basically no insight into its behavior. We simply don’t have the tools to actually “read” a machine learning model in the way you would an open source program, the tech produces black boxes as a consequence of its structure. We can learn about how they work, for sure, but the corps making these things aren’t that far ahead of the public when it comes to understanding what they’re doing or how to change their behavior.



  • I’m not understanding a word you are saying

    that makes two of us, i guess? i don’t know what it is you’re trying to say i was saying. to be more clear, i’ve been seeing a lot of talk in this thread arguing against the “video games cause violence” claim, as if that was what the lawsuit was about. i don’t think the contents of the article present the families’ lawsuit as primarily concerning that particular claim. i then attempted to describe what i believe their actual claim to be.

    i’ve emphasized the words i think are relevant here:

    These new lawsuits, one filed in California and the other in Texas, turn attention to the marketing and sale of the rifle used by the shooter. The California suit claims that 2021’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare featured the weapon, a Daniel Defense M4 V7, on a splash screen, and that playing the game led the teenager to research and then later purchase the gun hours after his 18th birthday.

    that Call of Duty’s simulation of recognizable guns makes Activision “the most prolific and effective marketer of assault weapons in the United States.”

    the fact that Activision and Meta are framing this as an extension of the “video games cause violence” thing is certainly what they’ve decided to do, but it seems to be talking past what the complaint and lawsuit are about, which is the marketing of a Daniel Defense M4 V7 in 2021’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

    the reason i emphasized the gun model is that that seems, to me, to be the core feature of the case the families are trying to make. not that video games cause violence, but that Activision bears responsibility for the actions of the shooter because the shooter played their game, then proceeded to kill people with the specific model of gun that was being advertised in that game. the fact that the article takes the time to reference another case where the specific naming of a gun model lead to a sizable settlement, and says this

    The notion that a game maker might be held liable for irresponsibly marketing a weapon, however, seems to be a new angle.

    seems to support my reading. that isn’t the same thing as saying video games make you violent, which is the claim a bunch of people in this thread seem to be shadowboxing.

    i dunno, maybe there’s some ambiguity there? are you arguing that the lawsuit is about rehashing the video games make you violent claim, or what? i genuinely don’t know what you’re trying to communicate to me. i hope this clarified my stance.





  • so, the only way to address the problem of sexual violence in hospitals is just to divide the population in two? this is just like the bathroom bullshit. if you’re assuming that trans women are rapists, you are a transphobe. if you’re assuming that sex-segregated wards are a useful deterrent to rape, you’re an idiot. the thing stopping people from hurting patients in the hospital is the hospital. the staff, the doors, the nurses, the help buttons beside each bed, the check-ins by doctors and nurses.


  • so should we segregate our hospitals too? i’m sure you could find some examples of interracial violence if you cared to look. maybe the poor people should get their own ward, we all know the poors are more likely to be criminals! the argument you’re using right now is one that has been used against minority groups since antiquity. all people are capable of violence. that you focus only on the violence of a single case, and use that to justify discrimination? that is not “common sense”. it is prejudice.


  • its not nonsense, its a well documented part of trans discrimination. trans people are commonly treated as if they are cis, and many doctors just don’t have the kind of awareness of HRT’s effects that you seem to think is commonplace. like, more than half of trans people have experienced medical discrimination. trans people are routinely confronted with medical professionals that refuse to acknowledge their medical histories. trans people have quantifiably worse physical health outcomes even when they do get care. i have not met a single trans person who hasn’t experienced at least some kind of barrier to care. doctors refusing to perform mammograms, doctors who haven’t even heard of HRT, doctors turning trans people away at emergency rooms. there is tons of data out there about this problem that you’re refusing to believe even exists.


  • i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

    people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

    the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.



  • no, it wasn’t “more data”, it was just data. blood letting and mercury are pre-scientific treatments that were in use during the 1600s. puberty blockers were developed with a modern understanding of hormones, and extensively tested before they saw use in a clinical setting. you might as well have brought up magic as a legitimate medical practice that we eventually proved wrong. like, no duh, but it also has basically no bearing on the safety of a chemically synthesized hormone inhibitor invented in the 20th century.


  • puberty blockers are used explicitly to delay having to go through puberty. they are used for kids who have precocious puberty (puberty that starts too early), as well as for trans kids. there are some marginal risks associated with them, you might grow a bit shorter, or just generally develop differently that you might have if you had allowed puberty to progress on time, but there aren’t specific health challenges people who use them face. the reason you take them is to explicitly prevent somebody from going through irreversible changes they might not like before they can make an informed decision, or before it is healthy for those changes to occur.

    interestingly, most of the poor health outcomes of precocious puberty are psychological and social, not physical, which is, i think, an interesting parallel to the trans experience.


  • the assumption i’m making is if you’re broadcasting “any position right of center”, that you’re voting for politicians right of center. and if you’re doing that, then you’re supporting people who are actively pursuing all the things i am describing, especially if you’re in the united states. trying to attribute hate, bigotry, and violence to that assertion is wholly projection. you do not tolerate intolerance. no matter how much you fearmonger about how “violent” this rhetoric is, the stats are clear. it ain’t lefties who are shooting up schools, storming the capitol, and showing up to queer community events with guns and nazi flags.



  • “extremist rhetoric” eh? was it the mere recognition of systemic oppression that got you? or am i supposed to play nice with folks who are actively trying to make life worse for me? i’m expressing political perspectives that are informed by the modern realities of life for people like me. queer people are fleeing red states. right wing politicians are actively stripping away peoples’ rights as we speak. there’s nothing neutral about your position, there’s nothing “moderate” about standing at the sidelines and turning away from the ongoing human cost of the politics you are right here making accommodations for.

    your refusal to recognize the clear and present danger that right wing politics and policy poses to the lives of people worldwide is a kind of radicalism. there is proof, exhaustive bodies of academic literature indicating that so many common right wing positions do not align with observed reality. to presume “moderation” in your politics is to deny that evidence, and that is a deeply political act.


  • sure buddy. expressing my resentment towards a set of ideological principles that have directly harmed me and the people i love, and are continuing to pursue even greater harms towards me and my loved ones right now, that’s the real problem, not the ideologies that are pushing for those harms!

    i don’t buy your marketplace of ideas bullshit. if you vote for or associate with modern right wing political movements? you are in action a racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, climate denialist, book burner, and christian nationalist, because the people you are putting in power are actively pursuing policy which is verifiably all of those things, and the people doing them are not shy about saying what they believe. it’s not a debate, its not a matter of opinion.

    i flirted with right wing politics when i was young, i think a lot of people do, but there’s a reason why boys specifically are falling for the bullshit, and its because men are the beneficiaries of the systems of oppression that we’ve built up over the centuries, and oligarchs are pouring money into bolstering fascist movements that see democracy explicitly as a barrier to their supremacy. that just isn’t an attractive political perspective for people who aren’t already on the top of the hierarchy. its not because left wing people aren’t more attentive to the precious little feelings of people who can’t see beyond their own personal comfort, its because right wing ideologues can piggy back on hundreds of years of patriarchy to convince impressionable teen boys that they should strive to maintain their supremacy over all the people who aren’t like they are.


  • if you’re a person who has any kind of sympathy to queer people, poor people, people of color, women, men, disabled people, immigrants, recognize the verifiable facts of climate change and its effect on our biosphere, are even vaguely interested in a better world, or are just baseline concerned for the health and wellness of your kid, right wing ideologies are self-evidently a problem.

    the world that right wing politicians want is bad, the things they think about other people are cruel, and only people who already believe the stupid, evidence poor bullshit right wingers believe would look at the shit online right wing communities get up to and not immediately be concerned for the welfare of their child. i mean, even being a mom is explanation enough. right wing ideologies treat women poorly. its not complicated, and most people reading an article like this are not seriously examining whether or not “equal rights”, “feminism”, and “human kindness” are things to be debated. they aren’t.



  • Eh, can’t win em all. I will say, just as a parting thought, the things you’ve been saying are also ideological. Believing clean separations between ideas and concepts are possible, appealing to existing systems as a way of validating the moral rightness of other systems, even believing that there is an objective “good and truthful answer” is an ideological position. I’d say one of the more pernicious ideological positions a person can take is to believe they do not have an ideology. It makes it very difficult to think about or discuss why you believe the things you believe.