Lmao, k

Software As A Surprise

If the question is things “only” old people say, you have to exclude phrases old people say that were repopularized through media.

“Heavy” (meaning important, grave)

For example this is a really quotable line from Back to the Future, so kids would pick it up.

No one should be told they’re purity testing for criticizing the democrats.

Purity testing would be saying someone can’t be an ally in criticizing the democrats with you because they’re an enemy for voting for them.

Someone put a coin in my hand and said “heads is genocide, tails is genocide in a different way” and I really cared about not doing genocide so I asked “can I choose none” and they said “you can walk away, but then the coin will be flipped randomly”.

If you walked away from that coin flip and left the consequences to chance, I really don’t have a lot of patience hearing you judge me for all the burden and anxiety I put on myself researching which option was worse so I could make the least worst choice.

Walking away seems the easy choice here. You didn’t stop the genocide, you just washed your hands clean of it.

Criticizing me for choosing, instead of being an ally, saying “that was a tough choice, but don’t give up **here’s what we can do next” is useless.

Instead of saying we should stay home and not vote, suggest something we can do. The endless criticizing of powerless people just trying their best in a shitty situation is why you’re being accused of purity testing.

This is the perfect example of the purity test OP was talking about.

Two people who couldn’t be more clear in their comments how disgusted they are by this obvious ongoing genocide, but yet completely powerless to do anything about it.

One person wants to use the little power they have to steer the country as far away from genocide as they can, and the other who sees that the game is rigged and wants no part in the government claiming their consent.

What’s unfortunate is that you’re directed all you anger at each other since neither knows how to direct it at the people in power.

Democrats give Palestinians no better chance of fighting another day, that just give liberals a license to pretend the genocide isn’t happening.

“Democrats” are not a monolith. Criticize the democrats all you want when they deny the genocide, but when we have candidates saying the following, it does feel like you’re being overly pessimistic about what allies you actually do have available to you inside this broken party:

“As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her speech Friday. “A famine that is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government.”

“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like,” the New York Democrat added, “open your eyes.”

genocide is not something you negotiate away.

Genocide is not something you stay at home for and hope it goes away on its own.

You don’t get to claim the ally if all you did was nothing.

OP criticized people who stayed home (choosing to hold on to their purity) instead of voting for the candidates least likely to perpetuate futher suffering.

Going “oh no this trolley problem is so terrible I refuse to even look at the lever” is prioritizing your own moral superiority over the people tied to the tracks.

I believe that’s “whataboutism”?

Great answer.

the “somewhere elses” all have their own fucked up problems, like algorithms that optimise for combativeness, and corporate control of various debates

I think keeping this in mind is key. When corporations have full control of these debates we realize maybe we’re wasting our time trying to appeal to their algorithms and should just build a new space without it.

Inherently the new space will be a little smaller and reach less people, but we value that because it gives us a bit more room to speak.

Yea not serious.

Authority means force.

Your dentist does not have the ability, to force you to do anything. They are an “authority” in the sense they know a lot about teeth so we willingly ask them for help.

That is clearly not the same type of authority being discussed in authoritarianism.

Stop comparing Hitler to your dentist.

I think that’s a bit of a false dichotomy.

I never intended to imply you only have to consider this one thing, but I think if a good faith comment exists, it’s one that respects the human on the other side of the screen they’re talking to and assumes good intent.

As human beings in good faith we give the benefit of the doubt and when someone crosses that line well then we do the calculus on how to respond without being a pushover

I would agree with you there are certain bad faith comments out there that aren’t worth responding to in good faith and that’s the scenario OP was trying to point out.

What? Take the discussion seriously.

We don’t confer power to them. I am the authority and I consent to the dentist cleaning my teeth but the second I say “no” their ability to operate is taken away.

Try telling “no” to a cop trying to arrest you.

A dentist has no authority over you. If you choose not to brush your teeth they can’t force you to, they can’t do dental work unless you willingly seek them put and consent.

A plumber has not authority to enter your home or mess with your plumbing unless you invite them in.

You’re misusing the word “authority” and applying it out of context.

Given what you said, how do we make headway in shaping opinions publicly by disengaging and allowing their opinions to freely go uncontested

To engage you’d have to go into those public spaces, go back to reddit, YouTube comment sections, Facebook groups, etc.

If online debate is a waste of time, why are the just powerful and richest people investing in shaping it while you tell others to disengage

Because the powerful and richest have more money and power than you do.

If you’re interested in shaping public opinion I think you need to ask yourself why you are on Lemmy instead of somewhere else?

The intent is to get the message to those not yet brainwashed

You can still directly and genuinely rebut their dumbassery.

I know the idiot won’t be swayed by the truth

You aren’t talking about “good faith” comments.

You’re imagining someone has already made a bad faith comment and you now have justification to be bad faith in return.

It’s a “motte” FYI

It’s not about convincing the person toy are directly opposing. It’s about getting the counter arguments in a bigger forum so less brainwashed people might be able to avoid getting brainwashed.

I would describe this as the epitome of “bad faith” commenting.

You are not replying to their actual comment, you are grandstanding to the echo chamber.

This is entirely correct, and it’s deeply troubling seeing the general public use LLMs for confirmation bias because they don’t understand anything about them.

People aren’t interested in “learning about LLMs”, especially people like artists.

They’re interested in telling Elon Musk to “fuck off”, and when Grok says something bad about Elon it’s very cathartic for them.

They might know it’s feeding their own thoughts back to them, but they don’t care. To people who aren’t in the know, this box Elon is promoting as “objective truth box” is criticizing Elon. That’s a very powerful narrative in a world where he’s taking over the world.

It’s hard to disagree. Elon can go fuck himself. What’s more important to the average person, stopping Elon or understanding the nitty gritty of machine learning?

When artists say AI is stealing, they’re not interested in an explanation about how “its really not”. And if you tried to, they’d feel you’re missing the forest for the trees because their problem with AI isn’t metaphysical philosophy, it’s that it’s hurting their job opportunities.

Where do you get the real data, though? They just scrap data from websites

Great question… Do they “just” scrape data from websites?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/

Keeping it clean would require hiring people to scrub contamination from the data sets.

That’s exactly right.

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

The point I was trying to raise that wasn’t semantics was that if the majority of the full training data were synthetic, it could lead to model collapse.

But luckily (or not?) a small amount of finetuning can be very effective in correcting the range of responses.

Open LLMs are finetuned on partially or fully synthetic data all the time

That’s what I was suggesting.

You explained to me you weren’t talking about “finetuning”, but training on completely synthetic data.

(Fine-tuning happens after the LLM has already been trained)