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The last time I recall having engaging, thoughtful discussions on the internet was way back in the days of forums. And that was so long ago I’m skeptical of my own memory of it.
Lemmy comments may be different from Reddit comments, but they’re not better. I’ve concluded it’s structural. This format simply does not produce useful conversation.
None of the other social media formats produce it either. Perhaps it’s the result of optimizing for attention, which all social media does, whether by deliberate design or natural selection. Platforms that get attention grow. Those that don’t, languish. It may be that things which gather attention to themselves best are repellent of deeper, slower, more careful thinking.
Actually, maybe I can think of one example. I’m stretching the definition of social media, and I haven’t firsthand experience, but the way that Wikipedia operates may be a clue toward how to build a platform that produces useful dialogue.
5·7 天前I don’t know, and I even briefly tried looking it up.
For those of us whose German is not up to par.
4·22 天前Just in time for Grijalva to be sworn in
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/nx-s1-5606350/adelita-grijalva-swearing-in
Sounds like an issue of joint correlation. It makes sense that homogenous communities are better at building unions. Building solidarity with people who are different from oneself is more work than with people who are similar.
And it’s been found that exposure to different people and cultures reduces racist beliefs, so it also makes sense that homogenous communities would be more racist.
So the causal feature would be homogeneity, and the correlation between racism and unions would be effects.
17·26 天前I know a lot of hockey fans would be mad at me, but I would ban hockey fights. I’m not really a sports guy, but I can enjoy hockey and its socially useful to follow at least one sport. But hockey fights just make my eyes roll.
91·29 天前That experiment has been pretty thoroughly discredited.
71·1 个月前I am also not a frontend dev, but you got me curious, so I did a little digging. Sounds like if you think you may ever turn it into a mobile app, choose React. Otherwise flip a coin between Vue or Svelte.
Modern replicas of many of these historical weapons are often twice as heavy as the real thing. A field Zweihander would have been somewhere around 5 lbs.
If you are what you do, then what determines what you do? Random chance? I don’t see how one can argue that people don’t have an essence and explain why they act at all. Rousseau said it was benign. Hobbes said it was wretched. It has to be something. If people were perfectly free of compulsion, would they do nothing?
142·1 个月前Does anything other than the style of the skull and crossbones of his ex-tattoo suggest that he is in any way a Nazi or fascist?
641·1 个月前Finally got my last PC switched off Windows. It feels good.
I think there may be more opportunity for success here than your argument seems to suggest.
I agree with the focus on inequality. The sense that society is fundamentally unfair has a corrosive and a radicalising effect on politics. People can react to it in very different ways, from redistribution to out-group scapegoating, but the underlying motivation is that people see that there is vast wealth available in our society and they’re still struggling.
Where I may disagree is that most people are non-ideological. Not everyone, but a healthy majority. They aren’t focused on the philosophical roots of a candidate’s policies. They care that the candidate
- Sees, likes, and cares about themselves and their group
- Has a vision that gives them hope for something better
Many people can find that in candidates with a variety of ideological positions. The overlap between people who supported Bernie after the great recession, and went on to support Trump is bigger than one would expect.
So the equation is much less zero sum. You don’t lose one reactionary for every radical you bring into your camp. There really aren’t that many committed radicals and reactionaries.
The most toxic message today is the economic moderate. “Hey, it’s not so bad. Things could be a lot worse.” This is the zero sum relationship. You can’t keep both the people who are doing well and like how things work, and the people who are struggling and want the life they deserve. The material difference isn’t left vs right, it’s status quo versus change. There’s a lot more room for flexibility in the change camp.
https://www.redwingshoes.com/heritage/ I have a pair of the iron rangers that I’m moderately pleased with.
Fucking cool, and also remember to leave your phone at home, or at least on airplane mode.
21·2 个月前I’m just commenting on the book. I find YouTube videos pretty insufferable. I guess it’s a tangent.
I’ve listened to a couple interviews with the author about this book, and I have not found them persuasive. I can accept that there’s a possibility that artificial super intelligence (ASI) could occur soonish, and is likely to occur eventually. I can accept that such an ASI could choose to do something that kills everyone, and that it would be extremely difficult to stop it.
The two other arguments necessary for the title claim, I see no reason to accept. First that any ASI must necessarily choose to kill everyone. The paper clip scenario is the basic shape of the arguments presented. I think it’s probably impossible to predict what an ASI would want, and very unlikely that it would be so simple minded as to convert the solar system into paper clips. It’s a weird proposal that an ASI must be both incomprehensibly capable and simultaneously brainless.
Second that the alignment problem can not be solved before the super intelligence problem with current trajectories. Again, this may be true, but I do not think it’s a given that the current AI techniques are sufficient for human-level, let alone super-human intelligence.
Overall, the problem is that the author argues that the risk is a certainty. I don’t know what the real risk is, but I do not believe it is 100%. Perhaps it’s a rhetorical concession, an overstatement to scare people into accepting his proposals. Whatever the reason, I’m sympathetic to the actual proposals; that we need better monitoring and safety controls on AI research and hardware, including a moratorium if necessary. The risk isn’t 100% but it’s not 0% either.
Pretty sure they’re typically publicly owned. Maybe some places lease them. Couldn’t find a national survey, but here’s at least one example of a county that bought some machines and a service contract.
Maybe a car fleet is a good example. Ford designs and builds the cars. Counties buy them, and often buy service and maintenance contracts to keep them running. The counties still own the cars.
I suppose counties could receive the source code, have it audited, and then compile and load it themselves.
I thought about this for a second, and I don’t actually think being open source would do any good. It’s not like we can compile and run our own voting booths. There’s no way to know what’s actually running in the machine at your polling place.
And voting machines are publicly owned, but perhaps you meant designed and manufactured by the government?
Identity politics is a diversion for class politics. Can’t have class solidarity if your political position is a specialized configuration of all your various identity characteristics.