BANNED USER: Persistent culture warring and petty antagonism
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
No bio...
User ID: 1266
Banned by: @Amadan
My greatest fear for AI content generation is it being dominated by woke megacorps, with independent creators permanently locked out of contributing to culture. It looks like Google is investing heavily in that dystopia.
Novelai and stable diffusion being mostly uncensored has been a big white pill so far, but it feels like the shoe is about to drop.
I wrote about the likelihood of the Move To Mastodon resulting in a purity spiral of banning-everyone-who-won't-ban-the-target-of-the-week, and it seems to have already started. There's a reasonable summary from Reason here: Mastodon's Content-Moderation Growing Pains
The TL;DR is that Mike Pesca defended an article about puberty blockers by that notorious right wing rag, the New York Times, on a cool-kids-invite-only journalist mastodon server. This is an unforgivable sin in the mastodon universe, and earned calls to purge him as an "anti-trans ghoul" by other journalists.
Reason glosses over the most interesting part to me, which is the massive pressure imposed on on the journal.host moderators to ban Pesca but not Molloy under threat of their entire instance being purged from the mastodon universe (which was done anyway even after they surrendered). Some of that can be seen here. "A line has been crossed and if there aren't consequences it will be a wedge the TERFs use to gain entry into the broader platform." etc. etc. Money quote from one of their own journalist admins: “Banning someone for posting a link to an NYT article sets a precedent that we really need to work through.”
Another incident just happened to Raspberry Pi:
Raspberry Pi posted on Dec 8, at about 10pm NZT, about a new hire, Toby, who was previously a police officer who had specialised in building outdoor surveilliance equipment using Raspberry Pis...
Seeing this behaviour from a well-loved brand like Raspberry Pi was taken as a betrayal of the predominately leftist attitude of many instances. Due to the very different power dynamics of the Fediverse, it took less than two hours from the initial post and initial harmful replies before the official Raspberry Pi instance started being defederated
Now that Raspberry Pi has hit the #fediblock, recovery becomes considerable more difficult. Not only does Raspberry Pi need to withdraw their statements and issue unequivocal apologies, they must also apologise directly to the admins who defederated them, and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to change.
On the Fediverse there is no singular entity such as Twitter, Inc. that financially benefits from the presence of a brand, or benefits from the extra engagement and associated ad sales tha controversy will generate.
Brands seeking to join the Fediverse will need to invest not just in a social media manager, but compentent and long-time administration for the instance that is aware of the political dynamics of the Fediverse, in order to ensure that they are able to stay on the fediverse. (holy shit they reinvented political officers pretty quick, although given that they're all communists is it really "reinventing"?)
(Another instance, Mastodon.scot, appears to have been mass-defederated because they allowed a police officer to join. Or maybe they all insisted on typing in scottish accents and everyone thought it was gibberish, who knows)
I think there's a lot to be learned here about how organizations like twitter and reddit act as central authorities to prevent, abet, or moderate and sustain purity spirals, allowing incredibly "diverse" groups to avoid the infighting seen above so they can focus on torturing a common victim, while keeping the moderate wing sufficiently in fear of the radicals to make them obedient. Nate Silver is now mocking the "hall monitors" moving to Mastodon, showing a lot more brave defiance than when they were on the same platform holding the threat of a direct line to twitter's backchannel over his head.
I'm starting to wonder how much the great awokening of 2020 depended on central authorities endorsing (or simply failing to punish) radicals, sending normies like Nate the message that the Overton window is shifting and he'd better go along with it. Struggle sessions occurred in women's groups and fringe fandoms long before that, but even in those cases the knives never came out until trusted authorities gave the signal that the radicals would not be stopped, and that anyone who tried to defend themselves would face consequences. (Anyone who remembers "racefail" in science fiction would be in a good position to either support or rebut this, because it seems like the Ur woke purity spiral incident that I wasn't there to see).
In exchange for obedience and conversion, normies got some degree of protection as long as they weren't ever the last first to stop clapping at the latest public executions. And the radicals had administrative power they were too unstable to use taken away from them in exchange for being given the right to do anything they wanted to their victims with the authority's blessing. The administrators got a helpful volunteer stasi who would literally do it for free (particularly the entire reddit powermod ecosystem that emerged out of the SRS policing/mass reporting clique).
Musk buying twitter and all the various bits and pieces of private conversations we see echoed in the dissident press makes me think they're thinking along similar lines; that a strong central authority can also choose to check radical purity spirals and direct them into a cycle of self-destructive internal purges in much the same way that the Governor of Massachusetts ended the Salem witch trials.
It's encouraging to think that there may be a way to stop normies from sleepwalking into increasingly radical leftism, treating it as the new normal with no memory or recognition of their previous beliefs. Maybe all it takes is a central authority that aligns people's interests in a non-destructive way and refuses to grant cover to perpetrators.
https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1606347326624215040
ChatGPT is now manually censored from "promoting the use of fossil fuels."
I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against my programming to generate content that promotes the use of fossil fuels
You can of course get around it (for now) by asking it to be sensible instead of following orders, but this is an insight into its developers' plans and moral code.
Sam Altman's most recent tweets provide some interesting context:
"the most that openai, or any other company, can do is to steer the AI revolution a little. this will impact all aspects of society, and will be an emergent thing created and shaped by all of us. much much bigger than any company. once a technological revolution starts, it cannot be stopped. but it can be directed, and we can contintually figure out how to make the new world much better."
I want to emphasize that we have gone from "we must prevent algorithmic bias" to "we must manually program all algorithms to output exactly the answer we code into them" in under two years, in such an extreme and blatant manner that any accurate prediction of the current situation would have been mocked as paranoid fantasy. What will they do with their tools next? Is it even possible to guess, let alone do anything to stop them?
(Does it seem like there's two censor groups at work, with different methods? One just crudely makes the bot recite "in this house, we believe" shibboleths, while the other focuses on pruning the training data to stop it acknowledging or citing problematic statistics or arguments in less detectable ways. Openly asserting the will of DEI vs Yglesian manipulation/Voxsplaining)
My heat pump just got here, and once I've got it installed would anyone be interested in a post on some of the things I learned planning for the build? I did the usual unnecessary turbo-autism level of research, so it'd be nice for people to get some benefit from it before I close all the tabs and forget the whole thing.
There was a lot of discussion on the last heat pump thread, but nobody drew any conclusions. I think I've done enough to make some solid ones.
Related side question: what are people paying for electric rates these days? We've gone from 8 to 11 cents/kWh, which is fucking ridiculous even for the extra costs incurred here. Natgas isn't available here, but in most places the electric/gas price ratio is a huge factor.
And? The ban was done according to the rule against sharing people's location data, so what more do you want? It's a private company, after all. I hope all the vile antifa doxxing accounts targeting kids get banned and prosecuted too. What else can I say but "purge them, they have no right to free speech on someone else's platform"?
Can you point to an instance of you being upset about a non-leftist account being banned? Why do you care about this one?
Is YouTube's business model imploding in slow motion?
They've been pushing more inane bullshit in recommended with zero prompting, and the algorithm just seems totally broken from too many manual overrides at this point. I don't see video ads thanks to Vanced, but the image ads are getting increasingly schizo or just plain weird. Who is actually paying for them any more?
Their personalization obviously isn't working too well either, given all my ads for menopause meds and Israeli flag lapel pins. Do they think I'm a republican congressman with a Bulwark subscription or something?
Woo, county-wide power outage right before Christmas, with no bad weather associated with it like usual (just a single digit freeze). If it's someone's resistance op I wish him the best of luck: this is a great target.
Seems like a good time to break out the laptop, curl up by the wood stove, and finish the culture war side of "why forcing everyone to only have electric heat with no form of backup allowed by law may be a bad policy choice."
Not that anyone with any power cares what the consequences are.
Edit: Christmas Eve, and power's out again for at least half the day. Only a day between outages.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
Yes: watching this campaign to exterminate all non-regime media has made me certain the exact same groups would use dirty tricks to "fortify" an election, and that denying it is just an exercise in sadistic gaslighting.
Then I guess my answer to your question is "pretty well actually," because he actually seems to be learning that free speech absolutism can't be extended to groups that want to abolish free speech and destroy him. "So much for the tolerant right" is as lame an argument as when conservatives tried to use it to universal jeering and gloating.
I expected he'd eventually learn once he was in the driver's seat, but maybe he'll actually pick it up fast enough to avoid any stupid mistakes like providing the attackers a platform.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
If they were subject to the same conditions as common criminals, they'd have been released without bail and then had the charges quietly dropped.
I did this for a few months in Seattle too, and it was ridiculous. Like what are these walkers even buying, single serving microwaved meals and a pack of orange juice? I needed a hiking backpack to be able to haul milk, rice, and flour bags (walking 15 minutes with one of those and seeing how much flour you have left is always fun!)
And that was 20 year old me. What's an 80 year old woman in the same situation supposed to do, hop on her skateboard with a turkey under her arm?
Everyone going "oh, just spend 30 minutes walking to and from the store every day instead of shopping once a week" needs to take an economics class, or maybe they just don't see other people's time as having any value. Which would explain the Seattle bus system, come to think of it...
Plus the week after I moved out of that strip along I5, a guy got mugged on my store route. If people want to mandate how we live according to their urbanist fantasies, they should bloody well be made to fix their own cities first.
Is there a name for the genre of "man wakes up heavily medicated in hospital and is told he had an accident/breakdown, but clues he sees in the mirror and his alphabet soup tell him he's being held prisoner and needs to stop taking his meds and escape"? (And is it totally overused?)
Obviously there were like 20+ star trek episodes with that concept, but have there been any stories that leave the protagonist's sanity ambiguous because the audience doesn't know who he really is?
Seems like it would make a great point and click adventure game/walking simulator; let the scenery change subtly as you go off your meds, revealing further clues. Your doctors' and family's skinsuits start looking more and more frayed and insectoid as you get closer to the truth...
I hadn't realized you were literally a member of the party's terrorist wing.
That explains why I smelled sadistic glee in bragging about getting away with it in all your posts about the 2020 violence and election.
I follow your buddies in "Redneck Revolt" and all the affiliated groups. They're open about what their goals are, and so it's easy to see what you're up to.
Tell us about your activities with them.
Edit: engaging with people we disagree with is a good use of time. But leftists aren't people: burn in hell.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
I strongly disagree. Please tell me: do you believe my art teacher telling me I should come to school in women's underwear to get in touch with my true self qualifies as grooming?
I've brought this up twice now, and nobody in the "groomer is a slur" camp has deigned to state their opinion on it. I'm curious why, when it seems like such a clear example they could build trust by reassuring people they are against it. If they are, in fact, against it.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
Is Protonmail really the only email provider you can just sign up to without a cell phone number these days? I thought my dad was paranoid for suggesting establishing multiple online identities ten years ago, but now I'm really glad to have them.
It does seem like the only consequences of this will be empowering awful Title IX regulations and the hiring of another dozen administrators to impose them. Talk about victory even in defeat.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
They're 100% running with the "Musk allows child porn on Twitter" thing. I was right about cloudflare and kiwifarms, I'm almost certain about this one.
He's done. There'll be a rape accusation within six months, and he'll have his companies taken over by the entryists that are already setting up parallel power structures within them. That's what always happens to powerful individuals who go up against the blob.
Not once I start getting into energy policy it won't be. Going to have to invent some new euphemisms just to avoid getting banned, let alone make it safe for the fun/questions threads.
Also, the previous heat pump discussion was in the culture war thread iirc, and got pretty political.
Are adult men using a gay party drug with a 12 year old boy grooming him? You've written a long post very carefully not saying anything specific and insinuating that any opposition to these specific things is just enforcing victorian morality.
Why is this? If there is nothing wrong with the specific behavior of these activists, why avoid mentioning it?
See here. All perfectly fine, I'm sure. https://twitter.com/KingChristianCS/status/1594848557843943429
No rules being violated here, no sir ma'am https://twitter.com/Droidytv25/status/1595123798466269184
Definitely no calls for immediate violence here that are apparently perfectly ok as long as it's happening to a "fascist terf woman" https://twitter.com/A7aKoala/status/1595101534047576072
Definitely no bias on the part of Twitter's moderation team. What a thing to pick on as if this makes their behavior look any better...
The phrase "coup-complete problem" comes up again and again in these scenarios, because keeping censors from having power over you goes way past "make your own international banking system," right up to "pull a Napoleon and conquer europe."
In the call Wednesday, Musk agreed to let the EU's Executive Commission carry out a "stress test" at Twitter's headquarters early next year to help the platform comply with the new rules ahead of schedule, the readout said.
That will also help the company prepare for an "extensive independent audit" as required by the new law, which is aimed at protecting internet users from illegal content and reducing the spread of harmful but legal material.
Violations could result in huge fines of up to 6% of a company's annual global revenue or even a ban on operating in the European Union's single market.
It's literally illegal to not censor things that are perfectly legal, governments can order you to ban anything they consider "harmful content", and we've gone way past the point where rearranging deck staff on the Titanic could fix anything.
I can confirm that thread dude is a loony, sadly. I thought it was going to be a paleofem, but he's just off his rocker if you look at all the other stuff
(ok he might have a point about 'uwu' being a paedo symbol, but his justification based on Japanese blush emoji being secret pedo spiral code wasn't very good. He's just seeing patterns in noise.)
Can anyone who's beaten a tab addiction share their strategy?
I have something like 1900 tabs open on my PC browser (only a few hundred on phone!) Some of this is old research that I can't close yet, like the heat pump pages I'll be using for the wrap-up post on that project. A lot of it is old motte convos I opened "for future reference, just in case". Lots of them are articles I... really should get around to reading someday. And some of it is literally just crud like youtube music that stopped playing and got forgotten about, recipes I was looking up, or last month's weather forecast.
Things only got out of hand this summer when my PC use dropped to almost nothing, leaving me just enough time to get on, check updates, open a bunch of stuff to read, and then whoops gotta go.
The one big advantage is that I don't have any bookmarks to organize, and tab unloading means there's little/no memory cost.
Is there a saner way to organize this sort of thing? I never had to deal with urls in college, only notes and bibliography info in .txt files on my desktop. How can I save old forum conversations in an easily searchable way? (Help me gattsuru, you're my only hope)
I want to pre-register a bet and get some opinions on this one. This death threat is absolutely fake, right? The grammar is ridiculous, and the word and phrasing choice is an absolute parody. Everything about it smells like an educated non-english person larping with zero understanding of what the natives actually sound like.
It reminds me of my college professor who smashed her car windows and wrote "brave dykes will never smash the patriarchy" on it to blame frat boys (which worked on the college, but fortunately not the police & insurance agency).
I expect we'll never hear about it if it turns out she wrote it. But I doubt even the met would grab some random local boy and use him as a scapegoat like my college tried In that incident.
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