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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I think what it all comes down to is most people don’t really want rational debate, and don’t participate in debates in the hope of learning or even to help others learn. Most people participate in debates to feel superior/“own” the other side. The result is debates that are typically lazy, uninformative, and downright mean.

    I think all of us have a little bit of this desire for superiority in us and we need to consciously make an effort to suppress it.





  • “Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.

    First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”

    Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”

    Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”




  • Let he who has to deal with that friend who constantly sends blatantly false Xits to them throw the first stone. Honestly I feel like every social media post that makes a factual representation should come with a big flashing warning “THIS IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE, LOOK IT UP BEFORE YOU REPEAT IT YOU DUMMY!”

    And I’m only like 10% joking. Given the success of language models it should be moderately trivial to train one to recognize when a factual statement is made and apply the above warning. It’s not even the children and teens I’m worried about. The people who seem to have the most trouble handling this are the adults.





  • X has been toying with the idea of fully embracing adult content and has even planned a feature for adult creators that could position X as an OnlyFans rival. That plan was delayed, Platformer reported in 2022, after red-teaming flagged a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to the launch: “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale.”

    Non-consensual porn had also been a serious problem for PornHub, eventually they just nuked all unverified accounts.

    Hmm, maybe that’s the plan for X too. It’s been going in that pay-to-play direction for a while now.


  • The sheer fact that she was allowed to use a self hosted email server instead of a secure .mail.mil address means a whole bunch of people should have faced charges

    I gotta disagree on the facts with this one, I don’t like Hillary either but the attempt to make the email thing criminal was in legal terms, bullshit. I agree that she broke the law, but there’s civil law (that a court can order government officials to stop breaking, but you can’t be thrown in jail for) and criminal law (that you can be thrown in jail for). The private email server was the former, not the latter.

    This article around 8 paragraphs down goes through the specific criminal laws at issue, but the summary is these laws are clearly designed to punish actually stealing documents with the intent to conceal or distribute them (like say, if she took them to a private bathroom in Florida), not to dictate criminal penalties for an insecure email setup.

    The reality of what happened is the FBI is a very Republican part of government, Comey is himself a lifelong Republican, and no one got more hate from Republicans than Hillary Clinton. They wanted to prosecute very badly, they just couldn’t.