• 2 Posts
  • 228 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • “Someone asking for donations” maintains their dignity and communicates the point clearly…

    It really doesn’t though, in my opinion. If you talk about “someone asking for donations”, I’d think of a volunteer collecting money for the local animal shelter. So if you actually wanted to communicate clearly, you’d have to go for something like “a person, typically a homeless one, who lives by asking for money or food”. That’s literally just the Oxford definition for “beggar” though. If you put that in the title of this question, it probably wouldn’t even fit.

    Like, I’m 6’4", if someone that’s 6’6" walked up and said “Hey shorty, what’s up”. I won’t give a single fuck. If I was a 5’2" man, I might be offended, and if I said a 5’2 man had to be ok with it because I was, I’d be a jackass.

    Firstly, I don’t think that “shorty” is a good comparison, as that’s an unambiguous (if mild) insult.

    Secondly, it’s not like anyone here is talking to any particular person calling them a beggar. If someone who was talking to me just called me “the German” instead of my name, yes, that might be a bit reductive and potentially rude. But if someone goes on Lemmy to ask “Why do Germans drive so fast on the Autobahn?”, that’s an entirely different thing. In that context it’s simply a word that clearly conveys a meaning without having to use an entire sentence to explain it.


  • So something like “begging person” or “beggarly person”? I guess I can see where you’re coming from. I’ve never heard people talking like that though, so it might not be as universal to western society as you think.

    Personally, if you called me a German, a furry or a vegetarian, I wouldn’t mind, even though none of these attributes encompass my entire existence. I guess the difference is that being a beggar carries a negative connotation, but I’m not sure that saying the same thing using slightly different phrasing really makes any appreciable difference.




  • I don’t want to debate your diet, just want to add my voice of disagreement to it (i.e. downvote). There was nothing systematic about any of my votes. I came upon your posts without seeking them out, read them and thought they shouldn’t be promoted, so I downvoted them to reduce their algorithmic visibility and voice my general opposition. I upvoted people who argued against your points, as I agreed with them and wanted to promote their viewpoints. In my opinion, that’s quite a normal way to use this platform. Otherwise, do you also ban people who only upvote you without stating why they agree with your points?


  • I also got banned from some communities for “systematic downvoting”. I’d estimate I’ve downvoted maybe 5 or so posts by a moderator promoting a harmful diet, which was apparently enough for being “systematic”. The mod also banned me from other random communities I had never interacted with in the first place. But oh well, nothing of value was lost for me. Just kinda sucks that mods can use this to make it seem like their statements are less controversial than they are.














  • So let’s assume the AI actually does have safety checks and will not display holocaust denial arguments without pointing out why they’re wrong. Maybe initially it will put notes directly after the arguments. But no problem! Just tell it to list the denialist lies first and the clarifications after. Take some screenshots of just the first paragraphs and boom - you have screenshots showing the AI denying the holocaust.

    My point is that it’s easy to manipulate AI output in a variety of ways to make it show whatever you want. That’s not even taking into consideration the possibility of just editing the HTML, which can be done in seconds. Once again, why should we trust a nazi?