CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
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User ID: 641
There is a phenomenon i notice in media but never hear named. Call it, "Representation As Inherently Problematic."
Examples: There are no mentally handicapped people or trans people on shows that are not specifically about these topics. The reasons for this for mental disabilities are fairly obvious: mental handicaps are considered intrinsically undignified. If you show a mentally handicapped person doing or saying something dumb on a show, this counts as mocking a protected group. Thus: total absence.
Similarly: If you have a trans person on a show you need to make it clear to the audience they are trans, which either requires it to be a plot point (making it a sort of Very Special Episode) or making the trans person not pass (which is undignified and thus opens the writers up to criticism.) Thus: total absence.
Similarly, morbid obesity is undignified, and the morbidly obese are close to being a protected class (being as it is a physical disability). Thus, having them on a show is undignified and opens up the writers to criticism. Thus: total absence.
Another example: land o' lakes mascot, a native American woman, gets criticism for being stereotypical, which is synonymous to being visually identifiable as a native american. So she was removed from the labeling.
Another: Dr. Seuss gets criticism for visually identifiable depiction of a Chinese villager; book gets pulled as a result.
A similar-feeling phenomenon is This Character Has Some Characteristics Of A Protected Group, Which Is Kinda Like Being A Standin For That Group, Making That Character's Poor Qualities A Direct Commentary On That Group. Examples: criticisms around Greedo and Jar Jar Binks being racist caricatures; criticisms of goblin representation in Harry Potter as being anti-semitic caricatures.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
For prisons: there is basically a hierarchy of strength where if men and transwomen share a prison, the transwomen will get raped a whole bunch; transwomen with cis women will result in the cis women getting raped a whole bunch by the trans women; and trans men with men will result in the trans men getting raped a whole bunch.
Which means as far as i can tell the whole discourse around this is just about shuffling around who is doing the raping and who is getting raped.
The core problem here is obviously that prisons either cannot or will not stop prisoners from raping each other. If it weren't for that fact none of trans prison discourse would even matter.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
/r/art, having a normal one:
https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1610669909842825222
If you'd prefer not to click, it's a screenshot of a mod communication in /r/art where a mod, believing that a particular user had uploaded AI art, has banned the user, and the user is appealing on the grounds that he did not use AI and in fact has a large DeviantArt portfolio in basically that style. The mod in question responded:
I don’t believe you. Even if you did “paint” it yourself, it’s so obviously an AI-prompted design that it doesn’t matter. If you really are a “serious” artist, then you need to find a different style, because A) no one is going to believe when you say it’s not AI, and B) the AI can do better in seconds what might take you hours. Sorry, it’s the way of the world.
This led to a predictable backlash resulting in /r/art temporarily going private, which appears to have lifted as of today.
I suppose I don't have too much useful commentary except to note that identifying what art is or is not ai-generated is probably an unsolvable challenge in the general case, and that forum bans for posting it are definitely going to get a lot of false-positives. You could probably do a 90% solution where you require that all art be accompanied by Photoshop .psd files; no current art generation system makes these (though I wouldn't put money on future systems not generating .psd files from text prompts). Though of course such a rule stops users from uploading anything that wasn't done in Photoshop.
I anticipate this problem will very rapidly worsen since Emad (the Stable Diffusion guy) posted https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1610811234676346880?cxt=HHwWgMC8sZKS4NosAAAA , which supposedly is a very-soon-to-be-released system that resolves most of the worst problems exhibited by image generation systems (such as malformed hands, an inability to grasp prepositions, and warped text.)
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
9mo ago
Guys! There is a simple explanation for this that explains everything:
This is an outage. Twitter's load balancers or whatever are fucked and they can serve a small percentage of typical traffic. This is damage control, i guess to avoid acknowleging an outage?
It feels likely this is in some way related to twitter not paying their google cloud builds as has been reported by various sources.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
The whole vaccine rollout had the theme of "all that is not compulsory is forbidden." That is: adults were banned from taking vaccines until the FDA had satisfactorily hemmed and hawed over the trials; afterward, vaccines became compulsory for quite a lot of everyday activities. This was similar (though more dramatic) story as masks-- masks were heavily discouraged by the CDC right up to the point where the CDC began mandating them.
In general the FDA and CDC are really really bad at expressing any epistemic attitude that isn't "utter certainty", even in the frequent occasions that the info available doesn't justify certainty.
For that reason I think it's basically coherent to say that the FDA was too restrictive and too pushy about the vaccines.
EDIT: This was also true of boosters! Boosters were forbidden roughly until the FDA began mandating them in order to be "fully vaccinated".
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
did a control-f on this thread for the word "china" and nothing came up, so I'll just point out that before Musk took over Twitter China had no leverage over the platform to censor views they find objectionable, given that Twitter is already inaccessible in China. But Musk has a lot to lose if China were to pull their support for Tesla, since so much of Tesla's manufacturing capacity is located there.
Which means that if China were to, say, take offense at the views of people who are pro-Taiwan or anti-Xianjing-concentration-camps and wanted those views taken off of Twitter, they have a really tempting point of leverage! "That's a nice Tesla business you've got there, Musk, shame if something were to happen to it."
This is definitely the sort of thing that's already happened to other businesses over which China has had leverage-- see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy for when Blizzard fired a bunch of people for being vocally pro-Hong Kong on stream, presumably to avoid China financially penalizing Blizzard in retaliation.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
7mo ago
It's more Unity's an adtech business with some game engine sales on the side; last I heard they had maybe 2/3 of their revenue coming from advertising. App Tracking Transparency savagely brutalized that business model, sadly, and I think Unity's frantically flailing around in search of a different one.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
7mo ago
Realistically I think what happens is Unity goes up to Nintendo and says "please pay me 100 million dollars for all these installs I see using my proprietary methods" and Nintendo is like "i will counteroffer with this Twix bar" and Unity looks at the Twix bar, compares it to the prospect of a lengthy and expensive trial vs the Nintendo legal team, and accepts the counteroffer. Repeat with Microsoft et al.
Huh! Guess i underestimated the willingness of authors to go with the solely informed-characteristic "hi i am trans btw" method of representation.
On reflection, yeah, the "spiritually trans" thing is pretty weird for the transmutation-heavy Baldur's Gate universe, which should probably be used to a more transhumanist school of thought: "i decided i wanted to be a dragon so i bought this scroll of permanent polymorph for my life savings. If anyone makes fun i eat them. Wanna see my sweet hoard? Look, don't touch."
In summary: "I identify as an attack helicopter" lands different if the identified can in fact fly and launch hellfire missiles at their detractors.
This is hardly a one-off-- there was a nearly identical incident with an NBA player (see https://time.com/5694150/nba-china-hong-kong/ ). There was also an incident with Disney putting a pro-Dalai Lama movie out which China took umbrage at, the result of which was that Disney apologized and promised never to do it again: https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Disney-s-magical-thinking-won-t-keep-politics-away-from-Mulan . I have not bothered to dredge up further examples, but seems like there's a lot of them, and the net effect is even greater given that the way to avoid getting embroiled in similar scandals is to never offend China in the first place.
china having a similar level of 'influence' with many other executives and companies in america due to the very deep trade ties between us
They do indeed have that level of financial influence and it is indeed significant in practice; the fact that China's influence is felt in a huge number of other places in the US economy is not a reason to feel better about China having similar leverage over the owner of Twitter.
EDIT: from incidents where China has exerted leverage in the past the response from American politicians has not generally been anything more than worried hand-wringing. I see no particular reason it'll be different for China exerting influence over Twitter, especially if it comes in the form of Twitter algorithmically downplaying stuff China might get offended by.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
So something I don't really get is this:
As far as I can tell the AI art generation thing has been pretty exclusively led by tiny startups; this is because unrestricted text-to-image for the masses is the mother of all adversarial environments where your AI will, regardless of the safeguards you put around it, inevitably be shown to have drawn or said something embarrassing, and if you're a tiny startup you have the luxury of not giving a shit. Not so for the big players, which is presumably why Google's never released any of their fancy text-to-image or text-to-video tech demos.
(One exception: DALL-E 2 was released by OpenAI, but they only did that after Stable Diffusion and Midjourney threatened to make it irrelevant-- that was basically a forced move.)
So. How does this not explode almost immediately in Microsoft's collective face? And why would Microsoft be leading the generative-art charge instead of Google, given Google's massive lead here?
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
There is, i feel, a degree to which cancel culture is just... Twitter culture. Where do mobs find stuff to hate? Twitter. Where do they organize? Twitter. Where are the employers nice and easy to contact via, essentially, short form open letter? Twitter again.
Don't get me wrong, cancel culture can still exist without twitter, but i expect it to be far more of a minor and localized phenomenon.
Anyway, this is a silver lining if shit all goes south and Twitter dies. Though for my part i still gain value from Twitter and i'd be bummed out.
And on reflection, cancel culture is just the dark mirror of legitimate accountability-- MeToo would not have gotten off the ground without twitter, nor would protests over various police abuses of power.
A failed Twitter would have lots of cultural consequences.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
Gender dysphoria and its similarities to more general body dysphoria
So consider the /r/loseit subreddit. There are a ton of people on there who hate their appearance and would like it to be different. Consider also the community of people who get plastic surgery.
Hating your body is a very universal human experience! An experience that sucks! The interesting thing here is how the different types of "hating your body" are perceived radically differently by wider society. As in:
(1) Consensus is that weight-based body dysphoria is reasonable and you should fix it by dieting. (It can also be fixed by medication-- semaglutide/tirzepatide, in particular-- but this has not achieved widespread social acceptance.) There is also a fat-acceptance movement, but this is niche and is discouraged by obesity being comorbid with a ton of medical issues.
(2) Consensus is that age-based and (more broadly) ugliness-based body dysphoria is something you should just get over instead of addressing directly. Plastic surgery exists, but it does not have widespread social acceptance, and it is socially acceptable to make fun of women whose plastic surgeries are bad enough to be noticeable.
The common line of "cosmetic surgery won't make you feel better about yourself" is contradicted by pretty clear evidence on average; a cursory google scholar search gets us https://academic.oup.com/asj/article/25/3/263/227685 , which claims the following:
Eighty-seven percent of patients reported satisfaction with their postoperative outcomes. Patients also reported significant improvements in their overall appearance, as well as the appearance of the feature altered by surgery, at each of the postoperative assessment points. Patients experienced significant improvements in their overall body image, their degree of dissatisfaction with the feature altered by surgery, and the frequency of negative body image emotions in specific social situations. All of these improvements were maintained 12 months after surgery.
(3) Gender dysphoria has, of course, gotten a huge amount of play in the media since addressing it optimally requires surgery and hormones in adolescence, when we mostly accept that people have not yet reached their full capacity for judgement. Plus, even in rich countries bio-engineering has not reached nearly the place it would need to in order to make neogenitalia function properly, or for "passing" to be easy for transitioners.
Is the current push for social acceptance of gender-based body modification something that will spread into other kinds of artificial body modification, such as plastic surgery for appearance or medications for weight loss?
I certainly hope so!
I think the most likely explanation is that at some point in the past they were a legitimate business that ran out of legitimate funds, probably due to their known penchant for highly leveraged bets. Then they deluded themselves into believing that if they dipped into customer accounts they could gamble their way out, return the customers money, and have nobody be the wiser. Cut forward some undefined span of time and the hole gradually grew to 8 billion dollars and the whole thing collapsed.
I mostly say this because most people aren't sociopaths and this seems like the most likely route this could have happened if Bankman is not a sociopath. If he is a sociopath and planned the elaborate fraud from the start, i guess nevermind. Feels less likely, though.
Anyway, I don't think we're looking at anything more or less than a polycule of stim-abusing rationalists with a gambling problem, good PR, and access to several billion dollars with which to gamble.
I think that the main lesson here is that you can't trust people just because they use lots of ingroup shibboleths and donate lots of money to charity, even though (to be honest) that would be kinda my first impulse.
Have you considered that physical appearance is one of the most malleable things about a person, particularly for a person with a high income? I have no specific knowledge of what about you is unattractive, but you have the following options open to you:
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plastic surgery if it's an unattractive face or jawline or your ears stick out or whatever
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weight loss drugs if you're overweight
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testosterone replacement therapy + personal training if you have a severe lack of muscle mass. (Girls mostly really like muscle mass.)
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that leg-lengthening procedure if your problem is height
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wigs or medical hair replacement (dunno the clinical term) if you are balding.
This is an entirely serious comment. Western society has a stigma against trying to change your appearance in these ways, but if your appearance is an impediment to you living your best life, you should change it if you have the money, which it sounds like you will.
Do these have side effects? Yeah, probably. Life is full of tradeoffs. Still, given current medical tech the OP reads a bit like a (more expensive) version of "i am worried that no woman will ever love me because all of my clothes are ugly. Should i resign myself to dying alone, or just really go hard on settling?" My dude! Just buy some new clothes!
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/openai-backs-norwegian-bipedal-robot-startup-in-23m-round/
Quite aside from the god-inna-box scenario, OpenAI wants to give its AIs robot bodies.
sci-fi scenario
My dude, we are currently in a world where a ton of people have chatbot girlfriends, and AI companies have to work hard to avoid bots accidentally passing informal turing tests. You best start believing in sci-fi scenarios, To_Mandalay: you're in one.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
The latter is a more 'rigorous' approach where students are taught the fundamentals such as data types, structures, flow, interpreter vs compiler, etc first; Then they are made to write programs. These programs are sometimes gamified but not to the extent as the former[...] I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method.
I realized as an adult that I do not retain knowledge if I am given that knowledge before I have any way to apply it. I suspect I'm not alone in this; but regardless, I strongly prefer the teaching methodology where you are made acquainted with tools by being given problems which necessitate using those tools. By "tools", here, I refer to algorithms and data structures, among other things. (I think this is why, even though I loved my Algorithms and Data Structures courses, I hated Operating Systems and whatever one it was that taught us assembly language. I retained very little of those and do not count them among the good or useful courses I took.)
I'm aware that this "knowledge-first-to-use-it-later" approach is similar to how the hard sciences are taught; I hated it there as well.
My actual start in programming came from hacking around in the Civilization 4 Python codebase, where I built mods for Fall From Heaven 2 and by necessity had to learn programming syntax-- I was only formally educated in programming later. Contrary to what your argument above would predict I was by far the strongest coder in my graduating class, and went on to get a job in FAANG (where I was, in my judgement, roughly at the top 20% of programmer strength in the company.)
So I don't know the total of what my "ideal programmer education" consists of, but I'm pretty sure a big chunk of it would involve writing a self-designed mod for the game Slay The Spire.
Okay okay, hear me out, this has a number of advantages:
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Slay the Spire is entirely programming-first. There is no "editor" interface, as a Unity game would have.
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Slay the Spire modding has, as its first step, decompiling the codebase. This gets your student exposure to "the act of having to understand somebody else's extremely nontrivial code".
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The codebase is also written using fairly reasonable best practices, particularly for a gaming studio-- it uses polymorphism to deal with all the myriad cards and their effects, which allows you to see very intuitively how polymorphism is used in the wild and why it's valuable. (I know that in my own programming education all of our programs were trivial enough that interfaces and abstract classes seemed weird and pointless, and none of my instructors could give what felt like adequate explanations for their use.)
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You can get something pretty cool out the other side-- a game mod! Having something cool and nontrivial that you're in the process of building is worth any number of credit points in inspiring motivation to actually learn programming.
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It's Java, which is a very standard programming language which features automated memory management.
So I think if I were designing a programming practicum it would feature game-modding as a big part of it, with perhaps some Code Combat or similar coding game in the first couple of weeks to familiarize students with the basic syntax and philosophy around programming in some reasonably entertaining format. And, of course, some problem sets later that showcase situations where students are given no choice but to use the standard data structures and algorithms.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
Yeah, it's probably fair that your point deserved more care and elaboration than argumentum ad XKCD can provide. Which: sorry about that! I was overly flip.
So!
Fundamentally software is a rickety tower of abstractions built on abstractions built on abstractions. At the lowest level you've got logic gates, and if you put enough of those (and some other stuff) together in the right configurations you can make stuff like arithmetic logic units; and if you put enough stuff of basically that abstraction layer together, you have yourself a CPU, and that and some other bits gets you a computer; and then you have the BIOS, the OS on top of that, and the language runtime of the stuff you're working on on top of that, and your program running on top of that. Obviously you already know this.
And the reason this basically kinda works is that a long time ago programmers figured out that the way to productivity is to have hardened interfaces at which you program; the point of these interfaces is to avoid having to concern yourself with most of the vast underground of abstractions that form a computer. Which means that most programmers don't really concern themselves with those details, and honestly it's not clear to me they should in the typical case.
That's because making maintainable software is about ensuring that you are, at all times, programming in the level of abstraction appropriate to your problem domain, neither going higher (resulting in perf issues, typically) or lower (resulting in bugs and long implementation times as you re-invent the wheel over and over). For every guy who tanks the performance of an app by not respecting the garbage collector, there's another that decides to implement his own JSON parser "for efficiency" and hooks it up to the [redacted] API, resulting in several extremely-difficult-to-debug issues in production that I personally burned several hours in fixing, all to shave milliseconds off an hourly batch process' running time. Not that I'm bitter.
So I guess that sort of statement-- "you're only a good programmer if you've used a language with manual memory management"-- feels like unjustified programmer-machismo, where someone chooses one of those abstraction layers between bare physics and the language runtime more-or-less arbitrarily and says "ah, but only if you deeply understand this specific abstraction layer can you truly be a good programmer."
Admittedly I work in distributed systems, where 99% of things that actually matter for performance occur over the network.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
I think there's an interesting phenomenon where if somebody says "I'm pretty sure X will happen" then people are like "yeah, okay, I could see that" or "nah, I don't think that's true" whereas if somebody says "I think there's an 80% chance that X will happen" people will respond with "WHOA there, look who's larping as an economist with his fancy percentage points"
Reality TV definitely gets a pass from these dynamics since there are no writers who can get flak for representation decisions; as a result, you not only see trans people on reality tv, you also see obese and extremely dim people.
EDIT: Additionally, "he's actually trans and we just didn't mention it" is entirely legitimate if you're talking about a real-life person but considered cheap and shallow to do offscreen for a fictional character. See also when JK Rowling claimed that Dumbledore is actually gay.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
Finding links between IQ and genetics is crucial if we ever want polygenic screening for IQ to work well. Shouldn't we want smarter children?
I dunno, the parent comment by sulla strikes me as basically calling out a similar (though more inflammatory) situation. We have two possible meanings of the term "bias" in common use, and these two meanings are:
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Not faithfully representing statistical realities present in the data.
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Not faithfully representing the statistical outcomes that we would like to see in the data-- most commonly, which reflect reality except for not showing differences based on race or gender.
These are, of course, mutually exclusive definitions; e.g. as pointed out in your article the president of the United States should always be drawn as male using definition (1) and should half the time be female using definition (2) . Likewise, classifiers determining how likely someone is to commit a crime ALSO have to make a decision between definitions (1) and (2) while facing the complicated issue of how to avoid public controversy over admitting that these are different things.
You suggest a third, equally plausible definition (3): "Not faithfully representing the statistical outcomes present IN REAL LIFE (as opposed to just the data being trained on)."
That actually strikes me as brutally difficult, running into the same basic issues as fact checkers do now-- evaluating what is true or false in real life is really hard and intersects with political agendas in such a way as to make it even harder. And how do you even evaluate if you succeeded? Don't get me wrong, i think it's reasonably likely that some generative models will get fine-tuned on specific datasets curators will have labeled as similar to "real life" along various dimensions. But I would not anticipate that this will end up becoming the norm.
As an aside, I think it makes a lot of sense that fundamentally the problem being solved by companies is "how do we stop journalists from agitating about our platform", not anything more interesting or important, and the "debiasing" solutions put in place reflect this reality.
CeePlusPlusCanFightMe
Self-acceptance is bunk. Engineer that shit away.
1yr ago
This is very disappointing. Polygenic screening is going to need this kind of data linking genes and IQ if it's ever going to work well; it would be ironic and shameful if the NIH, by attempting to hide gene-to-IQ associations, ended up sabotaging the very groups such a censorship regime was meant to protect.
Society is fixed, but biology is mutable, and this is only going to become more true as AI foundation models bring more of biology under our explicit and direct control. If any one group did end up being lower-IQ than others, that is the group that has by far the most to gain from this kind of technology and (by extension) from this kind of research.
Agreed that C and C++ bloooooow as starter languages. You want something with reasonable error messages and stack traces. And good IDE support-- I think statically typed is actually lower-frustration than dynamically-typed while learning because the compiler tells you if you've fucked up in a particularly obvious way before even running the program.
EDIT: Also if I never again have to write a conversion function between (pick any two) char *, wchar_t *, _bstr_t, CComBSTR, CStringA, CStringW, basic_string, and System::String it'll be too soon.
I think an underappreciated aspect of this whole situation is that according to https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/U/income-statement , Unity Technologies is losing a billion dollars a year and is already 3 billion in debt, with their total market cap being 15 billion. This is a company that's circling the drain; this seems transparently like a hail-mary play that probably fails but maybe brings Unity to profitability.
Legally, I have no idea how big a grey area retroactive ToS changes are; the fact that Unity's doing it implies that they're not obviously illegal but I'm also aware that, in kind of a brute legal realism sense, different domains of law have judges that feel very differently about contracts where the fine print states "also we are allowed to fuck you in arbitrary ways defined by us, no limits, neener neener"
Like: apparently (based on what I've read in Matt Levine articles) corporate debt courts are really really specifically about the letter of the contract; someone puts in the fine print "also we can fuck you at any time" and the judge looks at it and is like "well, it's in the contract, guess you shouldn't have signed that one" which is in large part because corporate debt contracts are assumed to have been extremely well-vetted by lawyers on both sides. Everyone is assumed to be extremely saavy. My suspicion (not a lawyer) is that this is less true of consumer-facing EULAs (like Unity's); if I have a bunch of reddit posts saying "Unity will never fuck our users who sign this contract" and I have a EULA saying "Unity will never fuck our users. Also Unity, in its sole discretion, reserves the right to amend this contract" and then I do the obvious thing-- amend the contract retroactively to allow user-fucking, and then proceed to fuck our users-- I'm not sure how it would fare in court but it's not obvious the judge would love me for that?
Of course, there's also the legal-realism idea of "Unity probably just settles out-of-court with anyone big enough to challenge them, and hoovers up money from indies that can't afford ruinous court fees". Which is of course deeply unethical and also vibes like they're eating their seed corn (since who wants to go into business with a company that has, historically, not been willing to honor contracts.)
My expectation is that this ends with Unity sticking to its guns and declaring bankruptcy in a couple years.
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