• 2 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • Ugh. Yes. The gotchas are totally a pacifier.

    “Hmm, nice genocide. Unfortunately for you I found this Twitter post you made ten years ago which proves you are acting hypocritically. Another victory for my cause!”

    Like…you have achieved nothing by identifying and publicizing these hypocrisies. Only very logical people care about hypocrisy. Most people just want what they want, and will pick up any reason for it as long as it comforts them, then discard that reason and replace it with a mutually exclusive one later as needed. The only people that care about hypocrisy are logical, and as a general rule, the logical people already agree with you.



  • Yeah very true! It’s just too bad that then it wouldn’t be a core/universal feature, but I agree it makes the most sense on the client. I just wish it was possible to make it more universal, since this seems like a feature that would be useful to average users, but selecting clients based on these features seem more like a power-user level of concern. I suppose that would just be a matter of clients all copying useful features from each other if it gets popular.





  • Sorry, I can see why my original post was confusing, but I think you’ve misunderstood me. I’m not claiming that I know the way humans reason. In fact you and I are on total agreement that it is unscientific to assume hypotheses without evidence. This is exactly what I am saying is the mistake in the statement “AI doesn’t actually reason, it just follows patterns”. That is unscientific if we don’t know whether or “actually reasoning” consists of following patterns, or something else. As far as I know, the jury is out on the fundamental nature of how human reasoning works. It’s my personal, subjective feeling that human reasoning works by following patterns. But I’m not saying “AI does actually reason like humans because it follows patterns like we do”. Again, I see how what I said could have come off that way. What I mean more precisely is:

    It’s not clear whether AI’s pattern-following techniques are the same as human reasoning, because we aren’t clear on how human reasoning works. My intuition tells me that humans doing pattern following seems equally as valid of an initial guess as humans not doing pattern following, so shouldn’t we have studies to back up the direction we lean in one way or the other?

    I think you and I are in agreement, we’re upholding the same principle but in different directions.


  • But for something like solving a Towers of Hanoi puzzle, which is what this study is about, we’re not looking for emotional judgements - we’re trying to evaluate the logical reasoning capabilities. A sociopath would be equally capable of solving logic puzzles compared to a non-sociopath. In fact, simple computer programs do a great job of solving these puzzles, and they certainly have nothing like emotions. So I’m not sure that emotions have much relevance to the topic of AI or human reasoning and problem solving, at least not this particular aspect of it.

    As for analogizing LLMs to sociopaths, I think that’s a bit odd too. The reason why we (stereotypically) find sociopathy concerning is that a person has their own desires which, in combination with a disinterest in others’ feelings, incentivizes them to be deceitful or harmful in some scenarios. But LLMs are largely designed specifically as servile, having no will or desires of their own. If people find it concerning that LLMs imitate emotions, then I think we’re giving them far too much credit as sentient autonomous beings - and this is coming from someone who thinks they think in the same way we do! The think like we do, IMO, but they lack a lot of the other subsystems that are necessary for an entity to function in a way that can be considered as autonomous/having free will/desires of its own choosing, etc.


  • Many interesting takes in this thread. The biggest thing I want to add here is that this type of neckline is actually not designed for larger breasts. Large breasts would pinch and bulge around the sides, which while maybe desirable in a purely sexual context like for lingerie or pin-ups, is not usually considered desirable from a fashion standpoint. These curved flat necklines are meant to emphasize the natural curvature of small breasts. I see this sort of shape often on runways and models with smaller breasts. (Granted, that body type is the norm for runways. Nonetheless, it means that’s not a concern.) For instance, these similar dresses are both modeled by women with similar body types: https://www.prettylittlething.us/black-diamante-strap-detail-puff-ball-dress.html https://www.lucyinthesky.com/shop/aila-rhinestone-babydoll-dress-in-black-64892

    So the issue here is not your body, but I think you are correct to think something is off with the dress. You look good in the dress, which is all most commenters are checking for, and that’s a good bar. I agree it at least looks flattering, but from a fashion design perspective, it could be improved (I say this not as a fashion professional but as a fashion nerd who spends too long looking at runway shows and analyzing clothes). The positioning of the neckline itself on your torso is a bit too low, not because it’s revealing, but because that sort of neckline typically is positioned about level with the armpits, but on your dress it is lower. This makes it look like it’s a child sized dress, just with strangely long straps that allow it to hang low enough on an adult to cover their hip area. Do you see what I mean? The straps are about a third of the height of the body of the dress, but normally they are about a fourth or less, I think. This could work so far, if not for the depth of the cut in the neckline simultaneously being too shallow. If that cut was deeper, down to the belly area, then it may make tiny, low-worn aspect of the dress seem intentional (see this dress by Schiaparelli https://pin.it/PO7V3jtHg), but because the cut looks like a typical summery dress depth, it reinforces the feeling that the whole dress is just being worn low. I have an urge to tug the dress downwards from the back so that, like a pulley, the front moves upwards.

    No offense to your husband or the other men commenting, but, of course they like it - it’s showy and it does fit you well. But this is only the minimum bar for a dress to clear. Models could look good wearing a potato sack, but that doesn’t mean a potato sack is a good dress. Luckily your dress looks a lot nicer than a potato sack! Whether I’d keep this or not depends on how demanding you want to be with your wardrobe. It looks very good, really. Much better than the average dress, and the whole outfit is lovely and very iconic looking. But if you’re the type of person who wants to own only a few outstanding garments, this does not clear the higher bars of great design, in my unprofessional opinion. I think that your doubts about the dress may be coming from you picking up on that and mistakenly attributing it to yourself rather than the design.




  • I do think the real world has some differences that make it more difficult. Mostly that whoever is coordinating the larger groups is very likely to have access to more power and resources and therefore is corruptible. And then that’s one of the systems that brings about that Pareto distribution sort of imbalance among people. Some inequality in terms of power is not destructive, but too much is almost guaranteed to end badly. But online, the sort of power and resources that are accrued are ultimately just less likely to eventually reach a point of being able to exert full control over the smaller layers of the community. I mean sure, someone could start acting despotic with their own “fiefdom” as another commenter aptly put it, like has sometimes happened with open source repositories or forums, but it’s hard for someone’s website to get so popular that they’re somehow able to directly force changes upon your website (not impossible, I know).


  • Yes, I like it smaller! Ideally you have a sort of fractal structure of a bunch of smaller, tighter communities, which are also bound up in larger but looser communities. Then you can get the benefits of broad exposure and resource sharing from large communities, as well as the benefits of meaningful individual engagement and respectful kinship from smaller communities. I think that personal sites along with forums and the rest of the Internet really can do a great job of bringing this about.

    As with many things, the responsibility ultimately lies on the individual to protect themselves and resist falling into bad patterns. Most primarily, maintaining your small community takes effort, and it’s much easier to just be a passive part of a very large community that subsists on infrequent uninvested involvement from many people. It’s even easier to be part of a “community as a service” like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. where all the incentives behind community building responsibilities have been supplemented with real income or fame. But of course then the people making posts, suggesting ideas, steering trends, managing communities, etc. are all in it for reasons that are not necessarily aligned with the well-being of community members. Hence the platform becomes a facade of a healthy community. Really good community upkeep seems to need to be done out of a love for the community, and any income you collect is to support that, rather than the other way around. But love for a community is often not sufficient fuel to power someone to serve huge groups out of the goodness of their heart, when they don’t even know 99% of the members. Not to mention that even if someone really is that altruistic and empathetic, the time and resources become unfeasible. So ultimately, a fractal model or an interleaved model seems to be the only one that could work.

    Don’t get me wrong. Large communities are awesome in their own ways and have their own benefits. They have more challenges, though. Ultimately the best way to build a good large community is by building a good small community.


  • Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it’s on a “big evil” service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it’s easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there’s other ways to find things than search engines, and there’s other search engines than the big ones anyways.

    There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people’s writings, link them, sign their guestbook.

    Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don’t sign up for services with it aside from fediverse ones. People do still run phpbb style forums, too. You’ll find some if you poke around the small web enough.

    A lot of these things are not lost or dead. They just aren’t the default Internet experience, they’re hard to find by accident. But they are out there! And it’s very inspiring and comforting.






  • Sorry, my examples maybe didn’t make clear what my issue with the post is. The fact that public support for Israel in Western Europe is at the lowest point ever recorded, is not really a “YSK”, it’s not a piece of advice or tip that I can use in my daily life. It’s good information, but it belongs under News, or Politics. It’s not, as the sidebar says “things that can make your life easier”, unless you went to argue that it psychologically makes my life easier, in which case then I can fit just about anything into this community, in which case why do I even have the community? If everything belongs in the community, then the community may as well not exist.

    Just think of how much better and more honest this post would have been if it had been made in a news community with a title that was just the title of the article and then a link to the article. But by being posted here in this manner, it comes across as engagement bait - and yes, the title is definitely contributing to that. Is it really news to anyone that people don’t like genocidal murderous bastards? Is that really something “I should know”?

    Technically anything that’s news could also be posted here, if we take the definition of the community at its most literal level. But if that’s the case, why should we have a separate news community and a ysk community? Clearly, there should be some sort of distinction between things that belong in ysk versus in the various news communities.


  • But in all practicality, every Lemmy user already knows about Israeli genocidal behavior in Gaza. If every community just becomes format-differentiated reposts of the same stuff, all of Lemmy becomes one big content-blob.

    Even if I totally agree that, for example, Elon Musk is obnoxious, and I want to hear some news that he got punched in the face - I don’t want to open Lemmy and see:

    You should know Elon Musk got punched in the face

    Mildly interesting: Elon Musk got punched in the face

    Mildly infuriating: Whoever punched Elon Musk in the face didn’t punch him hard enough

    Map porn: Countries where Elon Musk has been punched in the face

    Gaming: Would you play a Punch Elon Musk In The Face Simulator?

    Am I the asshole: for thinking Elon Musk deserved to be punched in the face?

    Programmer Humor: if(isElonMusk){punchedInFace = True;}

    Privacy: If it’s illegal to punch Elon in the face why is it legal to punch my privacy in the face with tracking?

    LinuxMemes: sudo punch Elon Musk in face

    Uplifting news: Elon Musk punched in face

    Depressing news: Elon Musk not punched twice in face

    Television: Just watched this character get punched in the face. Remind you of anyone?

    Classic Rock: “Facepunch” - 1982

    Piracy: Links to movies where billionaires get punched in the face?