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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • Je sais pas trop ce que tu veux dire par variété quand tu proposes de remplacer des trotskistes (qui sont léninistes) par des maoïstes (aussi léninistes) et des ML (toujours léninistes), ainsi que des anarchistes (ensemble ultra grand avec des centaines de tendances très différentes)


  • Because “garbage in, garbage out”. Statistical models will by design reproduce any bias in the training data.

    For instance, in 2018, Amazon scrapped a hiring AI tool because it discriminated against women. It did so because it was trained on previous Amazon hires which, it turns out, had a sexist bias. It’s a testament to the power of these statistical methods that the tool managed to discriminate against women in spite of gender having been stripped from the data: the model managed to reconstitute the information based on other elements to a statistically significant degree.

    Applying this to crimes, can you think of any biases in police action or the justice system that could be reproduced by the AI? Communities that get unfairly targeted, or others that benefit from blind spots?

    Furthermore, there are some other issues.

    One is confirmation bias: if the AI predicts there will be crime in an area and a patrol car is sent, it will confirm the prediction… In that police tends to find crime wherever it goes. If this data is then again used as input, over time this will bias the AI more and more.

    Another issue is dilution of responsibility. If a human being gives an order that turns out to be illegal, they are legally responsible and can be prosecuted. If however that same person tells their subordinates to obey the AI, and that AI gives illegal orders, who is responsible? In truth, the same people are still in charge – they can feed and train the AI however they like, and ignore its output if it isn’t as they wish. But it is a legally and mediatically gray area that would be very useful for enforcing illegal orders without risking prosecution.




  • He was trying to reproduce the dynamic of the OK hand sign.

    What happened then is that neonazis online thought it would be hilarious to use the innocent sign as an in-joke. Leftists caught on quickly since they are obsessed with fascism coming back and the whole thing was quite public. Then the OK sign spread gradually from online self-professed neo-nazis to real life hard right politicians. Finally, when leftists said “this is a neo-nazi symbol”, they got laughed at in the media by these rightist politicians along with the apolitical neutral commentators.

    This had two effects : first, it paints the left as a bunch of crazies and the hard right as relaxed funny types by comparison; second, it acted as a shibboleth. What I mean by that is that if became possible to know people’s politics by simply showing them the sign and asking “what is this?” — you’d get either a puzzled look, a denunciation of far right politics, or a knowing chuckle and wink.

    Musk tried doing the same thing with his nazi salute : build some plausible deniability with the “I give my heart to you” comment, and then immediately afterward tweeting stuff like “the Nazi attack is sooo tired”. The hard right base recognized the drill and started using it as a shibboleth too.

    But it was too much too fast, the whole of MAGA wasn’t ready to commit to literally Nazi salutes, so it was written off as Musk being a weirdo.

    You can tell it wasnt a simple mistake because then Musk would have produced some kind of blabd corporate apology afterward, not immediately made nazi puns on social media


  • Most European languages are some almagation and standardization of a patchwork of dialects. English destroyed scots, Tours french destroyed occitan, hochdeutsch largely displaced bavarian, etc. The reason is the dramatic increase in state power in the 19th century (therefore giving importance to the language of administration), combined with policies of “cultural unification” and nation building. So there in fact very much is artificiality in language that is predictable.

    The reason Esperanto wasn’t adopted by states when it was invented is because internationalism was seen as either an utopia or a threat by states. The reason it isn’t adopted by the UE now is because it would be a highly visible and unpopular move that would take decades to bear fruit and therefore politicians will never support it. The entire UE therefore learns english, massively increasing the influence of people who brand themselves its enemies.



  • Sure, this is a gross oversimplification, and SM is very wide; but the impact of two thousand years of Christianity really is very significant to the western psyche, even among the non-christian.

    Things like being bad and deserving punishment or suffering leading to ascension are so close to christian concepts (sinning and hell, the passion of Christ) that it would be surprising for them not to be connected.

    And there’s also christian influences in sexuality outside of SM obviously. Stuff like Temptation Island on TV, or just sex being “dirty” in general (as in, engaging in sex lowers one’s moral worth).





  • Does it though? Where does the “need” in your sentence come from?

    How come the supply chain has no slack to allow for (inevitable) hiccups and accidents? The answer is two part. It used to have them but they were optimized away. It still has them, but you are led to believe they aren’t there because putting this pressure on you allows your bosses to extract more work out of you.

    And how come the supply chain is so stressed? Is everything that goes through it so essential that a single late ship is a catastrophe? The answer is obviously not, we are shipping gigatons of drivel across the world that gets immediately forgotten in a drawer or tossed in the bin once it reaches its final destination.

    If you are shipping essential goods then there is a safety net of supplies at the destination to absorb any issues in shipping (if there isn’t, clearly these goods were not essential). If you aren’t shipping essential goods, then it’s already factored in global insurance markets, and late shipping is merely someone’s bank account getting bigger at a lesser rate.