He / They

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • P.S. Do we agree that Bernie Sanders is NOT divisive? That the majority of actual people agree with most of what Bernie says, and it is only a few rich interests that object?

    I think we probably agree that Bernie Sanders is correct, and that most people want for themselves what he says we should all have, but I don’t think he would necessarily be considered “non-divisive” by these standards if his social media account were more prolific.

    I think perhaps where you and I may also disagree, is that I don’t think political animosity is intrinsically bad, only misplaced political animosity. We should have animosity towards people intentionally causing harm.

    I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re seeing yet another source telling people that now is the time to defuse and become less polarized to politics, right when Trump is in the process of deporting thousands of people and setting up concentration camps.

    Yes, the real war is the class war, but even if the foot soldiers of the oligarchy shouldn’t be working class people, they are. It’s not billionaires out there in ICE uniforms, or getting deputized or joining bounty hunter groups to arrest brown people, or reporting brown people to ICE. That’s also where the “for themselves” bit that I emphasized comes in, because the truth is that there are a LOT of working class people who are opposed to helping others (especially along racial or religious lines), and helping others is the core of solidarity. Not all problems can be solved solely with class consciousness.


  • Mis/disinformation is not the same as “divisive political content”. Political content can be both true, and divisive (e.g. Trump being a pedophile). Conversely, something that is accepted by the majority may still be misinformation, while not be divisive.

    Truthfulness determines whether something is misinformation. How much something matches a group’s beliefs determines whether it is divisive: if everyone agreed that the world was flat, that would not be divisive to state, but it would be misinformation.

    Conflating them entrenches the perception that the most widely-held, non-“divisive” viewpoint must not be misinformation.

    Go check out Truth Social if you want to see what a space where only “non-divisive” (to them) but near-total misinformation looks like.




  • the sense that the entire world is on fire

    Leaving aside the massive literal heatwave and multi-state wildfires and global-warming-accelerated flooding happening just this month and all… we’re literally seeing a campaign of race-based kidnappings and trafficking by the government, the deployment of active duty military personnel in the streets, and a DOJ arguing that the President is not bound by law or court orders.

    If you don’t think the world is on at very least metaphorical fire, I don’t know what to tell you, Guardian author. “I can get my coffee in peace without thinking about that stuff” is not some brag.


  • I didn’t check Kinetic, but Larian’s is good. This is the full termination section of the EULA:

    1. TERMINATION

    This Pact shall remain in effect for as long as you use, operate or run the Game.

    You may terminate the Pact at any time and for any reason by notifying Larian Studios that you intend to terminate the agreement. Upon termination all licenses granted to you in this Pact shall immediately terminate and you must immediately and permanently remove the Game from your device and destroy all copies of the Game in your possession.

    You understand and agree that certain Services connected to the Game, and the support and access to such Services are provided by Larian Studios at its discretion and may be terminated or otherwise discontinued by Larian Studios at any time, for any reason or no reason, in its sole and absolute discretion.

    The first block is termination by the user, and specifies removal of the game if the user chooses to terminate the agreement.

    The second block is termination by Larian, and only covers “certain Services”… “provided by Larian Studios” (so likely multiplayer matchmaking), not termination of the full agreement, and no game removal.

    The places in the EULA where Larian lays out their prerogative to terminate your license to the game is based on behavior (i.e. banning you).



  • Another says that the fact Poland disappeared from the map of Europe for 123 years between 1795 and 1918 was “an unimaginable tragedy for Poles…[but] a source of satisfaction for many Jews”.

    A further one says that, in the interwar period, “many Jews openly sympathised with communism, identified with the Soviets, who were hostile to Poland”, reports Gazeta Wyborcza.

    Amongst all the boy-crying-wolf cases of people (especially Israel) trying to pass off anti-Zionism as antisemitism, this seems like a pretty clear-cut case of actual antisemitism.

    Those are clearly making the argument of why Poles would have reason (with the first quote even leaning towards justification) to participate in the pogrom, while at the same time the others are arguing they didn’t participate.

    “We didn’t take part… but here are some reasons why we would have wanted to… but we definitely didn’t! But Jews were totally happy that we weren’t a country, for some reason! But that’s unrelated to the pogrom, because we didn’t do anything to them!”

    Hmmm.





  • I think Anubis is really focused on scraper-bots feeding AI models, rather than posting bots. It’s based on requests to non-standard endpoints in your own app, which you specify for Anubis in a couple places (e.g. leaving out of /robots.txt or /.well-known).

    If you’re using e.g. a python bot that uses headless chromium executing JS to post stuff, you’re probably going to code in known-good endpoints for comments and posts, rather than hitting random ones like a scraper bot would.

    Anubis is good for stopping the n-request-per-second spamming of scrapers, but not so much for just blocking non-human bots that post at normal rates.

    My last employer was a Fortune 50, and we did automation detection through behavioral mapping, like posting locations, times, and even word patterns (a very cool experimental project that I got to work on, which used a database of normalized English word frequency to detect bots based on language that was too-similar across users, or even too “perfect”, though this was only used as an indicator and never considered definitive). It is extremely difficult to detect human-impersonating bots based on raw network traffic alone.



  • By the way, is there a rule to how these short forms are formed?

    Yep! Most Japanese verbs (with a few exceptions like ‘shimasu’ becoming suru) use one of the ‘i’ variants (‘i’, ‘ki’, ‘ni’, ‘mi’, or ‘ri’) after the kanji, that indicates they are verbs.

    Yakimasu (to burn/ cook), shirimasu (to know), arukimasu (to walk), arimasu (to be), shinimasu (to die), yomimasu (to read).

    Ki will become ku in the shortened version, ri will become ru, ni -> nu, etc:

    yaku, shiru, aruku, aru, shinu, yomu

    I believe the verbs that don’t end in one of those like tabemasu (to eat) will default to ‘ru’ (taberu), but I don’t know if that’s a rule off the top of my head, or if I just can’t think of any others right now.

    In the cases where rendaku applies, such as oyogimasu (to swim), the end kana will also have rendaku applied, e.g. oyogu. Ki -> ku, gi -> gu.



  • I don’t use streaming at all, I buy every song I own on iTunes or other services that give you DRM-free files. I have a thing (call it a compulsion) about not using “other peoples’ things” when there’s an alternative.

    As with all AI, I’m not intrinsically opposed to AI music as a concept, but I don’t want to use it now when the services that make it are leeching off of artists without paying them. I don’t get “into” bands (e.g. I can’t tell you the names of almost any musicians in the bands I listen to), and I don’t usually like concerts, so it’s not like I’ll be missing out on those like some fans would be.

    I’m sure “AI” can produce perfectly milquetoast music, but are you ever going to want to listen again? I have tracks I’ve listened to hundreds of times because they mean something to me emotionally (and often have a temporal element wherein I remember where I was living and what I was doing the first time I heard it) – and most of my tracks do not have lyrics.

    Layering nonsensical lyrics atop forgettable melodies sounds more like torture than a service providing any value.

    I suspect this is mostly an artifact of our current early AI music models. Just like we got past the days of 8-finger monstrosities in newer image models, we’ll get more ‘context-aware’ and sensical lyric models for music. We just won’t be getting there ethically.





  • Yes, 君 is ‘kun’ when used as an honorific.

    海 is ‘umi’, or sea/ocean. You are correct that the second half of the kanji (母) is the same as the standalone character for mother, but it’s base radical is ⽏, which also just means mother. The first radical, ⺡, means water/ liquid, so you can sort of infer that “water mother” = ocean. Not all kanji work out this nicely with their radical structure, though.

    Last part is spot on, ikou (行こう) is the shortened (conjugation?) of iku or ‘to go’ that expresses a suggestion to do, i.e. “let’s (go)”.