Does anyone still 'collect' music (i.e. keep locally stored copies in some kind of organized database, regardless of format) in the current age of ubiquitous streaming?
I assume that Spotify (and the rest) has all but killed the idea of 'keeping' music on your local computer or phone amongst the youth.
As someone who has a music collection going back to when I first started obsessively ripping CDs to my PC in my teens, I find that I mostly keep doing it through force of habit, and the slight fear that things I like might disappear. Some of the older files in my collection are hard or impossible to find online these days. But with so many different streaming options and, now, an AI that can produce radio-quality music in seconds it seems like there's really no point to keeping a large local music collection unless its related to your career in some way.
So if you DO still store music locally, what are your reasons and methods?
How about "Firearm ownership is literally written into the founding document of this country as a fundamental right and thus we are literally entitled to ignore your pleas for gun control unless and until you can garner sufficient political support to amend said document."
Since "we're trying to overturn a civil right that the very founders of the country thought important enough to specifically enshrine AND ignore the actual procedure for making changes to the founding document in the effort" isn't exactly inspiring either, and it's certainly accurate to describe the gun-control movement's approach to the issue.
Or in short, the deal is that we follow the rules set forth when the nation was created, and those rules happen to include this particular provision for gun rights, so amend it or, literally, GTFO to a country that is more politically suitable to your own beliefs.
faceh
1yr ago
I mean, did you hear about his kerfuffle with Disney and the Reedy Creek Improvement District?
Desantis directly challenged one of the single most powerful private entities in his state, which is also one of the biggest corporations on the planet.
I dunno if the "voting rights" faction warrants any particular caution in light of this.
If he gets taken down, it'll probably not be due to these twenty arrests. Probably.
faceh
3mo ago
The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.
This is going to be very hard to quantify because I'd wager it's always a slow spiral that eventually takes such a sharp downturn that one party finally pulls the chute. Who pulled away first? What was the first defection? I don't think you can draw a strong conclusion as to who pulled away from whom, especially from the outside.
Is it the man 'checking out' of marriage for entirely internal reasons, or is it partially a response to the wife being less sexually available, or putting less effort into housework (esp. if housework is shared,), or has the wife become openly and constantly critical of him even if not directly abusive?
I would sincerely believe that if two people spent 10 years or more together, the ultimate destruction of the relationship is due to the two parties each reciprocating in small wounds which go untended and thus slowly kill the coupling rather than one side unilaterally having changed feelings out of the blue.
What I would guess is that the man is the one who more often wants to fix it rather than throwing it out and buying a new one, vs. a woman seeing no reason to repair what is damaged when it's easy enough to find a replacement.
It is a bit interesting to me that very, very few educational reform proposals I hear ever mention that we should be teaching and implementing epistemics as a core, fundamental aspect of any well-rounded curriculum. It seems almost self-evident and yet...
It's cliche to say that "education should be about teaching you how to think, not what to think," but I think that's actually a pretty decent goal. I'm not say you completely excise the 'rote memorization' aspects, but perhaps also provide the tools that make that rote memorization useful.
Seriously. Shouldn't we be able to at least ensure that someone who graduates high school has the ability to consider the truth-value of a statement and at least weigh whether they should incorporate the statement into their beliefs about the world or not? That they're able to make predictions based on limited evidence and reject falsehoods when there are actual consequences on the line.
And working off the assumption that not many students will be capable of autistically applying Bayes' Theorem to every new piece of evidence they encounter, it would still be pretty useful to teach the variety of heuristics that have a proven track record and teach the more blatant fallacies to avoid, and provide them with ample opportunities to learn in a controlled environment how to detect when people are lying or when the evidence isn't strong enough to support the purported conclusions, and to notice when someone is just trying to manipulate them.
Epistemics is like the ONE truly useful branch of philosophy, so it seems like making students slog through Ethical, Political, and Aesthetic philosophers without addressing the foundations of knowledge is a backwards approach to 'classical' education.
I say all this already knowing that even if we taught all students how to ascertain truth, the real lesson of high school is how to navigate complex social environments and to identify where you are situated in the hierarchy and, from that, what beliefs you need to adopt and which signals you need to send in order to maintain or improve your status.
And that's a core of human psychology that has been engrained into us over millions of years, so any lessons about how to think better will, in most cases, be suborned to the innate need to fit in with and protect the tribe.
So it's not like I expect teaching epistemics to produce a generation of enlightened thinkers, it just seems like its a bare minimum that ought to be done to ensure education isn't merely brainwashing/propagandizing with some math and science tacked on.
(Yes, I know that from the perspective of the state and ideological actors, the brainwashing is in fact that point)
I'm going to take something completely unintended from this article and ask:
Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?
And thus, shouldn't the suggested solution to Yeshivas underperforming state requirements be to give them more money?
I could swear that the argument regarding, e.g. Baltimore, St. Louis, and yes, New York was that there was simply a large gap between how much money the schools needed and how much they actually received.
Perhaps it is fair to peek into how that money is being spent and closely examining the type and quality of instruction being provided to judge the value of such spending?
I'm not trying to make any larger point with this besides noting how interesting it is that the NYT takes up a story which tacitly admits that funding is, itself, not the end-all be-all for improving education outcomes, as the state tends to measure such outcomes.
If the fear is that organized groups with goals orthogonal to those expected of the school system may be seizing too much control and funneling that money towards priorities other than education on the topics society generally considers important, then we can certainly open this debate up to other groups with similar power.
Do we see those effects in societies which have almost no guns available? Are there stats on relative frequency of such crimes in e.g. Japan or Australia?
Japan has virtually no violence to speak of at any rate, so I don't know what you'd even expect to measure, there.
But suffice it to say, there is a reason The Yakuza can function so easily. They have the capacity for coordinated violence, and your average citizen has no means to resist them even if they wanted to.
Of course, in Mexico the Cartels also function pretty easily but engage in far, FAR more violence than the Yakuza do... despite guns also being nominally banned there.
So perhaps the problem is more that Mexican culture and Japanese Culture have different norms around the use of violence.
This gets to the REAL point at issue: the driving force of violence in any given nation is NOT the availability of weapons.
First of all, I'm not certain the armed populace are not themselves being tyrannical or supporting tyranny. History is littered with pro-tyranny rebellions against the government such as the US Civil War,
I'm going to resist my first instinct to accuse you of bad faith and just ask:
How is a nation actively choosing to separate itself from a government that it no longer wishes to participate in, and to thus secede from participation in said government "pro-tyranny?"
By this literal, exact logic the original American revolution was also 'pro-tyranny.'
Armed defenders of liberty against state tyranny is one possible dynamic, but armed forces of tyranny against the democratic state is a pretty common one too.
Seems like a good reason to allow pro-democracy forces to keep weapons? I dunno what examples you're thinking of in particular.
Second, I don't think it's true that there's a correlation between stricter gun laws and backsliding on democracy or basic civil rights, and I'd like you to support that claim.
North Korea, 2009:
"N. Korea enacts rules on regulating firearms"
North Korea has had a gun control law since 2009, recently obtained data showed Monday, in what was seen as an effort to tighten control over the society at a time of power succession.
Venezuela, 2012:
"Venezuela bans private gun ownership"
Afghanistan, 2021:
"Taliban in Afghan capital Kabul start collecting weapons from civilians"
Saudi Arabia, 2023 (timely!)
"Saudi Arabia announces new gun laws, restrictions on ownership"
Even if we don't assume that banning guns = slide into tyranny... the actual tyrants seem to think that banning guns is helpful to their ends.
Here's a fun exercise for you, can you point out any country that is heavily tyrannical and has very little democracy or protection of basic civil rights... and yet allows broad gun ownership?
Seems almost facially obvious to me that banning civilian-held guns is a DEFINING FEATURE of tyrannical nations, and that ONLY places with functional democracies (e.g. Switzerland) end up having permissive guns laws.
Yes, I have to admit feeling confusion generated by the reaction to that particular character.
I have encountered zero evidence that the transwitch is characterized poorly, or is made out to be a bad person, or that any other character in the game reacts as if their existence is absurd, offensive, or subhuman. The contempt sometimes shown in-universe to 'mudbloods' seems vitriolic in comparison.
So the stated objections to her depiction are literally her appearance, her voice, and her name, of all things. And actually the name thing is a little weird because Sirona Ryan does imply someone intentionally leaned into the character's identity when choosing it.
But the HP universe is fucking PACKED with weirdly offensive naming conventions, from the Weaselys (I intentionally mispelled for emphasis), to Draco Malfoy, to Luna Lovegood, Rita Skeeter (who literally turns into a bug), and Draco's henchmen, literally named Crabbe and Goyle.
I would argue Sirona's name is completely within the expected conventions of HPverse names, and that even if it was intentionally meant as a nod to her character's nature that isn't good evidence that it's trying to undermine the character.
The appearance, as it happens, doesn't strike me as overtly masculine, although she's certainly on the more butch side if I were to describe it. The voice is also a presumably deliberate choice, but as mentioned the complaints seem based on a Catch-22 wherein if the voice is too feminine then it's erasure, but making it 'non-passing' you're apparently calling attention to their nature as trans?
I get the sense that there is not any way to satisfy the complaints here since 'trans representation' presumably means adding in characters that resemble actual trans people and I'd guess that most transwomen are close to Sirona's phenotype.
And so making the transwoman extremely feminine such that the only way to tell they're trans is to have them straight up say it would come across as erasure.
or should they have gone completely the other way, and had Sirona display full on stereotypical male traits, including a beard, and just had them claim they identified as a woman without a hint of irony?
I think the complaints are based entirely on a bad faith reading of developer intent and thus working backwards to interpreting this character as a malicious, stereotypical depiction meant to demean the trans community. And of course attempted mind-reading like that is a process that tends to reveal one's own biases.
And going against my own advice, I would naively read the developer's intent here as simply normalizing a trans character's existence inside the HPverse by portraying them as what the player might expect a trans woman to look like, and not leaning into caricaturization whilst also avoiding idealization so that the character can stand on her own merits and thus not be a source of controversy within the game. i.e. if all the other characters treat it as fairly normal, there's no need to call extra attention to them or make it a plot element.
And I gotta say, I wonder how one even maps modern gender theory onto wizards, given that there's a clear binary between wizards and muggles, those who have magical power and those who don't, and while there's terms for certain subclasses of each (muggleborns and squibs) I can't think of any way the concept of a 'transwizard' would make sense. A muggle who identifies as a wizard would presumably not display any magical powers.
And with the existence of animagus and polyjuice potions and transfiguration, even if wizards consider gender to be fundamentally binary, they are probably less likely to care about someone modifying their own bodies to conform to any kind of identity different than the one they were born with.
And do you think that other corporations in the state are more or less likely to take open positions disfavoring legislation passed by the state government during that time?
Again, Meta level. Disney spoke out against the "Don't Say Gay" (sic) bill at the behest of lefty/democrat activists. Then Desantis took the fight to them. Disney has since shut the fuck up about said bill.
Showing that you're willing to fight the biggest guy in the prison yard is a good way to keep other, smaller guys from messing with you going forward.
I appreciate you linking directly to the argument.
However, the presented tweets, especially removed from any greater context, barely budge the needle from what I already believe, as stated above.
It still reads like she's simply sticking to her guns under heavy, withering attacks against her in a battle she never invited but is, at this point, willing to fight. Her guns being that women's rights are a distinct, important cause worth upholding and that redefining 'woman' starts to erode those rights in a subtle way.
"Rowling is an extremely outspoken opponent of trans rights. This has been her main issue for several years now."
Yeah, so right around the time trans rights were made into a central social issue in the culture wars. Could it be that it's just her being consistently pro-woman in her beliefs and responding to just the latest attacks on women's rights as she would on any other matter? I don't think she's been harboring hidden anti-trans beliefs all this time, or that she arbitrarily decided to turn trans rights into her defining cause in the past few years. How does one differentiate between someone who started singling out trans people because they hate them vs. because trans people have been getting much, much more attention than previously?
Also, maybe because she believes that there's an inherent contradiction between what trans-rights activists want and what is good for women as a class?
You can't square that circle unless you agree "trans women are women" which... J.K. by all appearances honestly believes is not the case.
"Rowling doesn't ask her audience to think; she asks them to fear"
And HOLY SHIT if that's the standard for determining who is a bigot and creating '-phobias,' then there's a laundry list of mainstream personalities who are apparently spreading, among other things. incelphobia, Russophobia, and constant, CONSTANT androphobia.
Maybe explain why she's not allowed to invoke anger and emotional pleas while everyone else throws them at her, and happily invokes them on other issues?
As with other groups, this starts to read as a special pleading. "The mere fact that you're criticizing [group] at all indicates you must hate them." But why is THAT group thus immune to criticism in a way others are not?
Why do I even feel like defending J.K. Rowling? I just get really sick of this whole "we picked a fight against someone and they didn't take a dive in the first round as planned, so we've doubled, tripled, quintupled our efforts and HOW DARE they continue to fight back" approach employed by activists.
I am honestly amazed with how quickly the 'vice' of gambling has seemingly become accepted as a mainstream practice with virtually no pushback from the either main political party, even the one that would presumably see gambling as exploitation of vulnerable populations (I'll let you decide which one that is!).
Seems like for the longest time sports betting was this shady thing you could only do via bookies in Vegas, then seemingly overnight there were DraftKings ads EVERYWHERE.
I'd add on to that all the hype around the Powerball and Poker championships these days.
Oh, add in that Gambling sponsorships and livestreams were becoming so ubiquitous that Twitch had to ban them. Fucking KIDS being advertised at here.
Can't forget that the EU is trying to reign in video game lootboxes, which also have become insanely common. Again. Kids.
ESPECIALLY when you put all this against the backdrop of the Crypto market being called out as just one big complicated casino.
Well, guys, if you're absolutely fine with college students taking on debt to bet on sports teams, you really can't complain if they're taking on debt to bet on magic internet dollars with Shiba Inus or fancy jpegs of apathetic monkeys. The complaint really seems to be that you're not getting a cut of the action.
And, finally, you've got the CFTC refusing to approve prediction markets for elections, for completely opaque reasons. Plenty of approved markets for literal natural disasters but something as important as an election vote count? NOPE.
All in all, a very confusing environment regarding what is gambling and what isn't gambling, and which types of gambling are legitimate and accepted and which are, I guess, sneered at and relegated to seedier venues.
Male suicides per capita have been largely static or declining in almost all Western countries including the US.
OBJECTION! Break it down by age group:
Suicide among the ages of 15-34 demographic has increased, if there's an overall decrease it is because rates among 50+ demos (i.e. boomers) is decreasing.
But young people killing themselves is, ceteris paribus, MUCH more concerning than older people offing themselves. It should be extremely alarming if there is any significant increase in suicide rates among teens and young adults. And there is. This cannot be shrugged off.
The CDC confirms that the AGE ADJUSTED suicide rate has increased in the past 20 years!
For 2000–2016, the age-adjusted suicide rate increased 30%, from 10.4 to 13.5 per 100,000 population, increasing on average by about 1% per year from 2000 through 2006 and by 2% per year from 2006 through 2016.
For females aged 10–74, suicide rates in 2016 were higher than in 2000.
For males aged 15–74, suicide rates in 2016 were higher than in 2000.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db309.htm
INCREASED 30 fucking percent.
THERE'S the data.
It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.
Maybe there's one bank/payment processor that holds out and willingly acts to handle the 'controversial' transactions, but that just removes things one layer back, as other banks and processors will eventually blacklist that bank. And thus rendering that bank mostly useless for any other purpose. If it doesn't shut down it'll struggle to remain solvent.
Lets say that some pornography company was wealthy enough it could 'become its own bank' and processes payments on behalf of users and extends credit and otherwise runs all its own transactions and only has to interface with the financial system to purchase the services it needs to operate. Once it is known as the 'porn bank' it'll probably be impossible to find any other financial services willing to interface with them unless they comply with all the sames restrictions the other banks are working under... which defeats the purpose of 'self banking' to begin with.
It comes down to the fact that the financial system is a tightly connected web, and the main value any bank or payment process can provide is access to the network, so maintaining that access is their primary concern.
From the moral standpoint, it bugs me when there's very little evidence(indeed, I've seen none) that digital artwork depicting heinous, illegal, or otherwise disgusting acts is actually causing harm to nonconsenting parties. The reasons we find CSAM objectionable and worthy of legally crushing are generally not present when it comes to digital art. One party or group wants some art, the artist produces it and gets paid, nobody else even need be aware of what it contains!
It'd be nice to think of our financial system as mostly as set of dumb tubes that transmit the data representing our money around without caring much about the start and endpoint... with a lot of protections in place to mitigate fraud, theft, and user error. But ultimately a financial company is operated by humans who are subject to legal jurisdiction of some country or other, and have to maintain access to the global finance system if they want to take that money to any other jurisdiction, so in reality the 'rules' are set based on what all participants are willing to tolerate.
Anyhow, this is ultimately the impetus for the protagonists in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon to create a private, heavily anonymized bank/data haven in a location outside of the U.S.' sphere of influence. And in order for them to pull it off it required a chain of events that seems even more fantastical now than it did then, such as finding an island nation that is independently wealthy yet also politically stable enough to act as a headquarters for such an endeavor.
faceh
8mo ago
Well, him and approximately 60% of men in their 20's
He is hardly alone in this particular struggle.
So his point is probably more directed at what he sees as a society-wide issue.
In short, no. he, and literally millions of other guys, are not 'ok.'
faceh
11mo ago
I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially.
Mostly because it's a truism.
Real question is how many gun deaths would occur in the process of trying to enforce the confiscations.
Estimate about 50 million gun owners in the U.S., conservatively estimate 1% of them decide to put up a fight rather than comply. Conservatively estimate that in 10% of such encounters that at least 1 LEO is seriously injured or killed.
50,000 casualties. Out of ~800,000 police officers in the U.S.
And this is assuming large-scale compliance by gun owners, and a relatively low rate of LEO injury. Granted it'll probably be spread out over the course of years.
And one cannot ignore the fact that 3D printers can turn anyone into a gun manufacturer too.
This part actually jumped out at me:
80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around.
This seems unexpected because if there were any social group that had a gender imbalance of that degree, AND all the women in question were self-described as looking for love, you'd think this would lead to men joining up to exploit the imbalance until it was wittled down some.
I notice I am confused. Even accounting for women in general being more drawn to weird spiritualist remedies.
Sure the premise that you're looking for one specific person kind of limits the playing field, but that rarely stops motivated males.
Also, the basic description of the group made it seem less cult-like than the central example of cults, but upon looking at some of their background beliefs and their youtube channel yeah, this is definitely a classic-style cult with some slick presentation.
Like, I'm actually willing to tolerate psychic matchmakers because they basically take all the standard tactics and tricks to finding a mate for someone and dress it up in some woo language to make it more palatable.
But the harms being done in the Twin Flames Universe seem pretty obvious even before the coerced transition, and most of the other hallmarks are there.
faceh
10mo ago
I think I've made similar statements before, but I certainly will add that thought next time I see a thread on it.
The dating market in the U.S. is far worse than it was even 15 years ago, and if you've been out of said market for a while you probably don't realize how the combination of women raising their standards to absurd levels while simultaneously having less to offer in a relationship... SIMULTANEOUS with (and related to) millennial white women becoming far more politically liberal than average has made it absolute hell for your average guy to navigate, and has likely killed many mens' hope of ever finding a suitable long-term partner. Not just creating incels, mind, but creating the type of guy who ends up in Andrew Tate et al.'s orbit because at least they offer a positive view of masculinity and some hope of getting laid.
And literally nobody seems to have any plans on how to improve the situation. Indeed, the not-so-subtle cultural zeitgeist instead tells women that they're doing everything perfectly and don't need to settle... ever, and telling men to suck it up and stop whining.
So my TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL thought experiment: how might this dynamic shift a bit if we intentionally imported, say, a few hundred thousand attractive and eligible female Ukrainian 'refugees?'
faceh
11mo ago
I often find myself wondering why brands that already have complete saturation in terms of awareness and a dominant position in their respective market bother with ubiquitous marketing campaigns.
Coca Cola, for example, is so utterly ingrained in U.S. (and other country's) cultures that they could basically run a 3 second ad with the logo that said "You know who we are." and it'd have just as much impact as some Oscar-quality short film.
I do assume that marketing successes are measured on a power-law standard. Most ad campaigns won't be particularly successful, but sometimes you get one that takes off and produces crazy outsized visibility and cements the brand in the public culture for years to come.
So marketing budgets are devoted to hunting for that one big hit, even if most of the money is 'wasted' in the meantime.
I can't wait for the deep philosophizing about precisely how much 'human' authorship is required for copyright to attach.
Because whatever it is, the current state of AI art lets you sprint right up to that line, stop on a dime before crossing it, and then stick your pinky toe over it if you want.
Seriously. If the human does the basic sketch outline of a given concept and feeds the sketch into the AI with a detailed prompt of what they want that sketch to eventually look like, how much of the authorship is theirs?
Or the reverse. Have the AI produce the basic sketch of the concept and then the artist develops it from there. Or the artist develops a sketch, has the AI turn it into a Paint-by-numbers picture, and the artists, following the AIs instructions, paints in the final details.
Or the AI produces the concept from scratch, but the artist goes in and modifies every part of it in some way such that every pixel of the image has been 'manually' changed, even if the base image is recognizable.
Or do the classic 'cheater' move of having the AI produce something originally, place some paper over the image with a backlight, and trace over it manually and claim the work as your own. Tracing over photographs is generally frowned upon, at least if you're a professional artist, but at least that's actual human hands producing the end result.
The AI can aid the artist to almost any degree in any stage of the process. It's parameters can be adjusted with finely grained particularity to have as much or as little influence as the law claims is required.
It's even crazier for written works. If an AI produces an essay that effectively conveys the ideas the 'writer' has in their head such that they are satisfied with publishing it with minimal edits, does that somehow invalidate the ideas as written? How much editing to make the AI's words 'your' words, especially if the AI's words already convey your thoughts in a perfectly cromulent manner? What if the writer just uses those 'predictive text' programs that lets them write faster by filling in the words it thinks the person wants, but the writer manually approves each one?
(Note, as a matter of pride I would still want to physically type out most of my correspondence, including comments like this. It seems like that is a fair expectation when you communicate with other humans whilst representing yourself as a human presenting their own ideas that you not filter it through a middleman. But again, what does 'filter through a middleman' mean in practice?)
And I'll even agree that it is 'wrong' to represent yourself as having artistic skills if you rely on the AI to actually produce the work, I'll agree that you shouldn't say that an AI work is 'yours,' certainly not without disclosing the fact that AI was involved.
But this particular angle of attack, making AI-produced works exempt from copyright, is not going to stem the tide that's coming and will only produce a lot of serious-sounding but absurd-in-practice rules and enforcement mechanisms that will waste a lot of people's time.
Artists are definitely NOT effectively winning people to their sides by being so whiny about the issue, rather than attempting to suggest reasonable policy prescriptions that might at least be politically viable.
If significant parts of your work can be represented as a cognitively taxing transformation of a symbol sequence into some other symbol sequence – you should start thinking how it feels to be on the receiving end of those arguments.
I've been thinking on this matter for a little under two years now, whenever GPT-3 came out.
Consider the field of law, where easily 90% of the industry is "cognitively taxing transformation of a symbol sequence into some other symbol sequence", and there's already an existing, HUGE databank on which to train possible models to handle legal work, specifically.
My honest bet is that any student currently in their first year of Law School will be unable to compete with AI legal services by the time they graduate. Certainly not on cost. The AI didn't incur 5-6 figure loans for it's legal training.
Put another way, the AI will be as competent/capable as a first-year associate at a law firm inside 3 years.
If you are considering law school as a career choice, stop. If you're currently in law school (and don't have a job locked down), drop out, or angle for a job outside the field.
Any field where the writing is less cognitively demanding than law will also be on the chopping block.
How can I get a date with a hot girl?
Interesting choice on that question, given another rather dystopic prediction I'm currently making:
There will be AI bots which are specifically tailored to chat with women on dating apps and convince them to go on a date. And they will be really good at it. Hell, since image recognition is already a solved problem with AI, it'll probably be able to scan all the photos of a given potential match and select only those that have the features the guy finds attractive and then chats them up.
I don't know how the average woman would react to learning that she thought she was getting attention from like twenty attractive dudes at once but in reality they were letting the AI chat her up while they were lifting or playing video games and only got pinged when she either agreed to a time and place for a date or sent a nude.
This based on the news that AI can now beat humans at Diplomacy using straightforward negotiation tactics.
Given the current state of the dating market, this application feels inevitable.
faceh
1yr ago
Are you implying that the LARGEST MEDIA CONGLOMERATE ON THE PLANET had it's ability to exercise free speech threatened by this action?
Is there anything at all stopping them from using their dozens of channels to air 24/7 anti-Desantis ads if they chose?
Do you think that a Corporation that disagrees with legislative actions taken by a representative government are entitled to continue enjoying special privileges conferred by that government?
Should a liberal society allow corporations to receive special privileges from the government in the first place?
I dunno. I think there's a clear distinction between an action like "dissolving the Disney Corporation and seizing all the assets it has in the state before imprisoning its executives" and "dissolving the special district that is, by definition, a political subunit of the state itself but happens to be politically controlled by the Disney Corporation."
I would find it a bit absurd if Disney were able to prevent the state from exercising authority over it's special district should the legislature decide to act.
I'd love to live in the world where my government doesn't directly interfere with legal corporate activities and corporations didn't take active political stances on contentious legal issues.
But the loudmouth activists, and the mentally ill, have captured the microphone and are the ones getting all the publicity, and then you have the cis 'allies' who want to be patted on the head as one of the Good Ones who are marching right alongside them in the increasingly bananas demands.
Most likely. But that position blows up the claim that its the right who opened up this particular culture war front.
The left, once they won on same-sex marriage pivoted to this specific battle and pushed it forward with aplomb, anything the right did was directly in response to that.
One thing I've contemplated about the approach to estimating historical grievances that must be repaid later on by the nominal 'victor' at the time is that it would seemingly create some unfortunate game-theoretic implications when engaging in a particular conflict.
If you wage a successful campaign of complete annihilation/genocide, leaving behind no survivors to later complain about your past misdeeds, then you have less risk of ever being made to acknowledge or have to compensate for said annihilation. So any time you engage in conflict, you should probably go for broke and try to completely eliminate the opponent from the gene pool, assuming you can define them tightly enough to do so.
If you seize the land out from under someone, and kill any and every person who might claim to be the rightful beneficiary of the land, you're effectively shoring up your own claim to the land such that nobody can really claim to have a morally superior right to it than you do, if only because nobody alive can trace their lineage to someone who used to own the land. Granted you may have to kill thousands upon thousands of people, but if the alternative is you end up being forced to return the land or pay massive compensation decades down the line...
Or try to reduce it to an absurd hypothetical: let us say that there is particular [minority group] that experienced hundreds of years of oppression and suffering inflicted by others, and then a systematic campaign to exterminate them down to the last man. This campaign failed about 100 years back, but it came so close to succeeding that in the present there is only one (1) surviving descendant traceable to that group. Rough estimates for the rightful compensation for the pain and suffering inflicted on these peoples is 1 trillion dollars. Is it somehow appropriate to award that full amount to this one surviving descendant, thereby rendering them the richest person on the planet, by far?
Would it be bad to just wait another 50 years until that person dies with no heirs and consider the debt 'extinguished?'
If nobody survives who could seemingly make a claim for reparations, then what possible method could you use to impose accountability in the present?
Practically speaking your odds of success in going the full genocide route are likely low enough that this 'strategy' becomes VERY high risk/high reward, at best. But man, ethics seem to get spotty in these "all or nothing" scenarios, where you carry the full moral blame and consequences for your act if anyone survives, whereas if your evil plan succeeds in full you're home free.
The other thing to contemplate is the question of why misdeeds/debts should be carried forward to be paid back later by one's descendants, whilst positive achievements/credits aren't?
Perhaps we can gain some insight into Desantis' mindset by looking at the 2018 election:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Florida_elections
Desantis won by the veritable skin of his teeth by 33,000 votes out of 8 million cast.
Rick Scott won his Senate race by about 10k votes.
Nikki Fried, the ONLY Democrat to win an executive office, won by 6,000 votes.
These are outcomes that could be swung, potentially, by one county in the state being manipulated or screwing up a count.
And guess what happened in Broward County in 2018?
https://archive.ph/Qc9Tt
And the money quote:
Oh, and lets not forget that Rick Scott very directly claimed the election was being stolen. He and Stacey Abrams were two years ahead of Trump on applying this tactic.
Broward singlehandedly delayed the final outcome of multiple races and from the look of things had gaping holes in their system that COULD have been exploited. Oh, and it's heavily and reliably a blue county.
Actually, Palm Beach County also delayed it. Also another heavily blue area.
One of Desantis' first actions upon taking office was removing and replacing the Broward and Palm Beach County Election supervisors.
And, 'strangely,' Broward and Palm Beach County had no discrepancies or delays in the 2020 election. Further, Florida went more heavily Republican than usual, including more towards Trump than expected.
Broward County has almost 2 milllion citizens, this is not a small podunk area that we're talking about. Palm Beach has 1.5 million.
And while Desantis is going to walk to an easy victory this time, I can't imagine he wants to allow ANY room for doubt in the sanctity of the election should any races come down to the wire.
So in light of all this, perhaps it makes sense why Desantis might conclude that arresting 20 people is worth it for the possible upside of dissuading electoral shenanigans throughout the state?
I dunno. I think he cares very little that those twenty guys got misled, but cares a lot about ensuring he doesn't have to worry as much about catching electoral fraud after the fact.
So this action is a cheap way to possibly pre-emptively solve an issue that could arise.
Going along on the premise that because voter fraud has not been detected in the past and therefore is not likely to occur in the future seems like an unwise tactic in an environment as adversarial as this one.
It's not like there's not ample historical precedent of organized efforts to fraudulently influence election outcomes. Oh, also recent precedent.
Just because it's 'rare' doesn't mean, when it happens, it won't have significant impact.
Can't imagine why you'd want to chance it in a state where races can be extremely close.
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