67IsTheNew69
No bio...
User ID: 4109
67IsTheNew69
6d ago
The feminist movement has definitely lost some power, but I think the shift is smaller than it looks. Companies like YouTube, Twitch, and X only needed to back off from feminism a little bit to roll back Biden-era censorship and allow anti-feminist speech to regain the same level of popularity it had in the late 2010s -- when PewDiePie, then the most popular channel on YouTube, would tell rape jokes and debunk the wage gap to his viewers.
On the other hand, women's right to vote is a lot more universally popular and harder to roll back. A lot more people support basic gender equality than support the worst excesses of the feminist movement. (In 2020, Ms. Magazine celebrated an all-time high of only 60% of women identifying as feminists, and as a footnote mentioned that 98% of people believed gender equality is important.) So while some people might performatively oppose women's sufferage as a way of making clear that they don't care what the feminist movement thinks of them, I don't think we're at any risk of women actually losing the right to vote.
67IsTheNew69
13d ago
Trump in a presser [...] was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center." I think this quote right here might be the worst strategic blunder since the Iran War. If I were the DNC, the clip would be on every station in the country
This is a bit of a tangent, but I think there's a 4D chess angle to Trump breaking from the broader Republican Party to say and do unpopular things. He's not up for re-election! It is great for the Republican Party if people believe that all of America's problems are caused by Trump personally, and that without Trump around, downballot Republicans and their 2028 Presidential nominee would do a great job running the country.
As another example, Trump recently tricked a bunch of outlets (including the Rachel Maddow Show blog) into running a story about how Vance and the White House staff wanted to make things more affordable for Americans, while Trump personally thought it was okay for gas to be expensive.
67IsTheNew69
19d ago
Could be! Most of my experience has been reading/revising text translated into English by LLMs.
67IsTheNew69
19d ago
Even if the value of someone acting as a "vessel" for Claude is greater than zero (which I'm personally not convinced of), we probably shouldn't apply the same norms we'd use for human-authored works.
Recently, a minor controversy erupted in the Apple enthusiast community when Miguel Behrer, developer of a little-known astronomy app called "DarkHours", accused a more famous developer named Terry Godier of copying his work. Godier had just released his own astronomy app called "Dark Hours" that was extremely similar to DarkHours. Behrer even pointed out a really specific bug in Dark Hours that had also been present in an earlier version of DarkHours.
If you took these developers at face value and assumed they had largely created these apps themselves (using AI "responsibly", while contributing a lot of their own skills and design taste), the obvious conclusion was that Godier totally ripped off Behrer. It was especially easy to believe this when Godier was caught in an unrelated lie about the App Store review team rejecting his app.
But, well, Godier later disclosed that his app had been almost entirely generated by Claude, and looking at Behrer's GitHub repo suggests that his app is also fully vibe-coded. So it's a lot more likely that, when two of Claude's vessels came to Him with similar requests for an astronomy app, that He chose in His superintelligent wisdom to deliver unto them pretty much the same app, bugs and all. It wasn't fair to accuse Godier of plagiarism simply because he was the second vessel to receive the app.
The best way to get ahead of stuff like this is probably to disclose the nature and extent of your AI use up front to people evaluating your work. Anthropic applying watermarks by default might help more people do that, even if they don't stop people who are determined to pass off Claude vesselry as human-generated work.
67IsTheNew69
19d ago
In my experience, yes, text translated by a general-purpose LLM tool often still sounds like it came from an LLM. Gemini will even go as far as restructuring the text into the "bullet points that each start with a bolded word or phrase" style it likes sometimes, without informing the user it's done so.
I think the ad is more effective than the music video in large part because of the context of the first minute or so (which your link skips past by default). We first see Qualley sitting in a group setting, politely smiling at some speaker slightly above and to the right of the camera. So then, when she moves into an empty room and starts looking directly into the camera and making silly faces, it feels more explicitly intimate; now that we're alone she's taking the mask off and showing us her real goofy self.
I think this general strategy of acting goofy as a way of showing that you're letting your guard down is something women do often do. But it doesn't usually involve this level of crazy Jim Carrey expressions and movements because, outside the context of a larger-than-life musical number, it'd feel unnatural and forced. (If your goofiness feels too much like a performance, that works against the idea that it's an expression of your genuine self.) But you also can find that kind of thing in anime characters, and the segment of e-girls/cosplayers/streamers that imitate anime characters, because anime also creates a context where the viewer is expecting crazy expressions.
It also helps that her silly dance involves thrusting her chest out and jiggling around a lot, things that are usually more attractive when women do them.
67IsTheNew69
22d ago
If reporting from Axios and CNN is any indication, the "Woke 1.0" period AOC is referring to seems to be late 2019 to around 2022 or 2023. Or, in other words... the Biden administration?
It's actually kind of incredible how, in a four-word phrase, AOC managed to convey:
-
The last time Democrats were in power, it was really bad.
-
You'll probably get a repeat of that if you vote for them again. (Calling something "1.0" implies that a "2.0" version is in the works.)
-
They think their main problem was that they got a little too uninhibited, in the way that a house party where everyone drinks too much can get "crazy". They haven't reconsidered their actual beliefs or positions at all, and are just hoping to hide them better this time around.
Seriously, if I was the team responsible for writing ads like "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them", I don't think I could have come up with a better line.
67IsTheNew69
24d ago
To be clear, I agree with all of those, I'm just being a pedant about name statistics.
67IsTheNew69
24d ago
In case other people were unfamiliar with the actual story, the link is to a tweet about Richard Russell, a white guy who worked as a ground service agent at an airport. In 2018 he stole an airplane and flew around in it for a while before eventually fatally crashing.
Supposedly people online called him the hashtag-SkyKing at the time, both because he displayed a surprising level of proficiency with the aircraft and because he became some kind of right-wing/white-nationalist talking point.
The theft appears to have been nonviolent; Russell had access to airplanes as part of his job. So personally I'd compare this to something more like a valet taking a customer's car for a joyride than a carjacking.
67IsTheNew69
24d ago
"Alex" which is normally a ~95%+ male name
This statistic is correct for people who have "Alex" written on their birth certificate, but "Alexandra" is actually a more common given name that women often shorten to Alex. ("Alexander" is an even more common male given name, but not 20 times more popular, and female names like Alexis have even beaten it some years.)
Print-on-demand services have reduced the cost of actually publishing a book on paper to nearly zero. Even if you get professionals to design your cover and typeset your interior, you're looking at single-digit thousands of dollars on the high end. The problem is getting people to notice your book, which is the main thing a publisher gets you these days. There is a decent audience of people who read books by traditional publishers, or follow critics that a traditional publisher can get you in front of, etc.
But if you already have an audience, paper books are not an especially good thing to sell them. Most authors would get more money from a $7/month Patreon or Substack subscription then they'd get if you bought all their books. So you usually see authors either treating physical books as a relatively niche merch item (like the paperback version of Unsong), or trying to leverage an online audience to get noticed by the traditional publishing industry's audience (like Fifty Shades of Grey or There Is No Antimemetics Division), and neither of those strategies involves becoming a serious alternative to the traditional publishing industry.
67IsTheNew69
24d ago
Looking at alphabetically the first profiles
This is not a very good sampling method because the profiles are sorted by first name, and women are overrepresented among people whose first name starts with A.
A more random sample does seem to agree that this website primarily lists female literary agents interested in books written by women that appeal to women, though. A lot of agents have "I'd like the next..." sections listing almost exclusively female names.
This seems like a case similar to college degrees where women are disproportionately attracted to some aesthetically prestigious thing (going to an Ivy League; reading/writing books printed on paper by traditional publishers) even as the actual value starts to move out from under it. Personally, I'm probably going to keep doing most of my reading online, in places where the great writers I like hang out, like Substack and the My Little Pony fanfiction community.
67IsTheNew69
25d ago
In other words, Audio CDs did not use audio data compression (the techniques used to make things like MP3 files smaller, at the expense of making the audio sound slightly distorted), but did often use dynamic range compression (an audio editing technique used to make the volume of a song more consistent, by making quiet sounds louder and/or making loud sounds quieter).
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
Not really; the original video seems to be from a guy who was wandering around filming a bunch of street fights and arrests, and he was focused on a different arrest until roughly the start of the social-media clip.
You can hear someone yelling something like "Move away!", but it's not clear how the confrontation started.
I think most people are just reacting to the social-media clips, but https://youtube.com/watch?v=9t8qVtCm3Js&t=320s is the original video of the incident. (The video is a compilation of various street fights in Birmingham; this particular incident starts at about 5:20 and continues for about four minutes.)
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
It does seem almost criminal that nearly all American students are exposed to Shakespeare, but hardly any of them end up with the skills necessary to understand what the text of his plays actually says.
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
Gender ideology holds that these definitions, and the boundaries of what's acceptable, are obvious and self-evident. They're just what Good People believe, and if you don't believe them you're a Bad Person.
In practice this means that they're set by the people who have enough persuasiveness/social power/etc to successfully ostracize the people who don't believe in them. To the extent that gender ideology internally acknowledges these people at all, it mostly credits them in the same way you'd credit a mathematician with "discovering" or "communicating" some inherent property of numbers that was true even before the mathematician published the proof.
I think that both "you can identify as a cat" and "you can't identify as a cat" are within gender ideology's Overton window at the moment. I lean "can't" at the moment, but it's better to avoid committing to that in case new obviously self-evident truths get discovered in the future.
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
I played through Wanderstop, the "cozy game" from the writer of The Stanley Parable.
The gameplay's pretty fun, in a boring cozy-game kind of way, and the writing has a lot of good moments, but ultimately the overall story kind of failed to land with me. I'm not sure whether the
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
To be Jesus: Jesus needs to actually be the religious figure he is depicted as in the Bible. (Or, I guess it's possible that Jesus was just an ordinary guy, but reincarnation is possible more generally.)
To be Black: The definition is usually something like "My ancestors were born in Africa [during some specific time period]", but it is more difficult to nail down, and different people often mean slightly different things.
To be a cat: Some people do accept that you can be a cat in the same purely-internal-identity way that you can be a woman. Other people would draw a line based on genetics or physiology in a way that's acceptable to do for species but not gender.
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
You say that race and nationality incorporate physical traits. Are you claiming that gender does not?
Yes. Gender ideology axiomatically defines "gender" as not requiring any physical traits. Some physical traits are typical of some genders, but they're not a requirement.
(FWIW I think nationality is often primarily a historical question, along the lines of "what country were you born in" or "what country has granted you citizenship", which is also something that "gender" is defined as not being.)
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
Sexuality is definitely another one of those unobservable things that you have to take people's word on.
On the other hand, weight is straightforwardly an observable physical trait, and age is a straightforward historical claim (the date on which you were born). Race and nationality are social constructs that are hard to pin down, but generally people agree that they involve some combination of physical and historical traits.
"Racial identity" does exist, but it is not considered very useful most of the time; it's mainly used as a tiebreaker when the physical/historical facts don't fit nearly into the categories. A lot of gender ideology boils down to a values claim that "gender identity" is a much more important concept that everyone should care about.
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
So it seems there is nothing to distinguish trans people from those who self-report as being Jesus; or who self-report as having been abducted by aliens; or who self-report as having been spoken to directly by some deity; etc. Agreed?
These other claims all, to varying degrees, depend on external facts to be true. For example by asserting you've been abducted by aliens, you're asserting that aliens exist.
Gender ideology views gender claims as being more similar to someone saying "I had a dream about aliens last night." If you're talking to some weirdo who's never had a dream before, you may need to convince them that it's possible, but to most people it's obvious that the claim is both plausible and not really possible to disprove.
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
What's the evidence that "gender" exists in the way you have defined it? Is there any evidence other than self-reporting?
There have been relatively low-quality MRI studies that attempt to draw physical evidence of the concept of gender identity, but mostly it is by definition a self-reported trait, so the fact that people are self-reporting it is the evidence.
A common argument is to ask the person you're arguing with, "If you woke up this morning and found you had been transformed into a stereotypical example of the opposite gender, how would you feel about that?"
-
If you would prefer that to your current body, this means that you are transgender.
-
If you would feel negatively about this change, this demonstrates that you have an innate gender identity, and it's at least possible to imagine your body not being aligned with that identity. It just so happens that your body happens to be aligned with your gender identity. Lucky you!
-
If you would genuinely feel ambivalent (are you sure you're not repressing anything?), then... okay, that probably exists and is a valid category of gender identity. But lots of other people do have strong feelings about that, and gender ideology is the most inclusive way to support those people.
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
(1) Yes.
(2) Yes.
(3) Yes, with the caveat:
straight men or lesbian women who refuse to date this person would be considered "transphobic."
This works similarly to anti-discrimination law. You're allowed to refuse to date any individual, but you aren't allowed to refuse to date people because they're transgender (or, more broadly, because you do not accept their gender identity). You can express preferences based on gender identity, and you can sometimes get away with expressing preferences based on physical traits, but you can't express preferences based on transgender status or things that obviously correlate with it (like "gender assigned at birth").
(You can't even express preferences in favor of them, that's called being a "chaser".)
They were reporting on a Pew Research study, but I used that link because Ms. Magazine called it an "all-time high". The feminist movement had never been supported by a supermajority of women, much less people at large. There was always opposition, even on TV, on networks like Fox News. So to correctly model the world, you have to account for the fact that women got a lot of equality regardless.
More options
Context Copy link