He / They

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

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  • Most concerts don’t have jumbotrons, though, and a jumbotron at a sporting event that is highlighting fans who are dressed in team colors is very different than just focusing on random people. There’s a lot of ink that’s been spilled on the creepiness of “kiss cams”.

    It can be both wrong to cheat, and also wrong for us as a society to act as though being outside your home is consent for people to take videos of you as a subject. We should all have the right to exist without being someone else’s entertainment or content.

    Was it dumb for them to be there together? Yeah, though mostly because it’s dumb to cheat.

    I am not sure how much this incident has to do with facial recognition or media surveillance.

    I think this situation is a horrifying lens into just how much surveillance and social media sharing of strangers people are accepting of.

    You say, “you can reasonably expect hundreds of cameras owned by both individuals and the venue” as though there’s nothing wrong with just recording everyone that is in public. Incidentally catching someone in a crowd is one thing, but zooming in on and singling people out is another. I don’t think it’s a particularly long leap to get from your quote to, “it’s reasonable for police cameras to see you and know where you are if you’re out in public”.



  • I’m glad someone is saying this, because frankly this whole situation is nasty as shit.

    Are cheaters bad? Yes. Should people have informed the spouses? Yes. But that’s not why people are posting memes about this non-stop, this is just schadenfreude.

    There are reasons beyond cheating why 2 people may not want to be broadcast to the world as a couple. If this was 2 men, we’d all understand the problems with this, but social media is not going to allow us the nuance to differentiate; social media’s desire to play righteous sleuth for its own entertainment and ego is not a good thing, and we can’t make it only do good.

    Is no one even considering whether their spouses want this level of attention, rather than the entire Internet deciding to make it national news for a week?




  • I’m simply seeing the article’s point in asking people to stop following the top, say, 2% most divisive voices.

    I would perhaps believe this if the article (or the study) actually listed those accounts. As it is, all they’re doing is leaving it up to readers’ perceptions who the “divisive” accounts are, and insinuating that those are likely misinformation. It’s just pushing people towards the political center.

    there were a good number of Bernie backers at Trump rallies

    In 2016, 12% of people who voted Sanders in the primary voted for Trump in the general. By the 2020 election, that demo was gone. In 2016 Trump was a rebellion vote against the rigged democratic primary, but after Trump’s first term, they’d all seen what a monster he was, and begrudgingly voted Biden.

    I honestly doubt that anyone but moneyed think tanks have much bad to say about him

    I don’t think you’ve spoken with many Trumpers (or centrist dems, but that’s another story) if you think they don’t have bad things to say about Sanders. I discussed him extensively with conservatives in my sphere. The conversation usually goes something along the lines of, “yeah, it’s great he’s pro-union and wants to fix healthcare, but he’s also pro illegal immigration and wants to raise taxes through the roof! You know he’s a socialist, right?” The better-informed/ indoctrinated ones will even bring up things like him (correctly) lauding the literacy gains in Cuba under Castro.


  • 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 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)”.