âPeople should pass a test before being allowed to have kids.â âIsnât it scary how white people have this inborn capacity for evil?â âIâll never pass because males and females have different skull shapes.â âAutistic people have a stronger sense of justice than anyone else.â âI donât want AMABs in my space because theyâre dangerous.â âYou shouldnât have access to hormones if you dress like THAT.â âAnyone who does something that awful isnât human.â âSome people really shouldnât be allowed to vote.â
This is eugenics. This is phrenology. THIS IS NAZI SHIT, YOU ARE A LEFTIST BUYING INTO NAZI SHIT. YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO NAZI SHIT.
Y'all know phrenology and craniometry aren't the same thing, right? Studying the shape of the skull as a geometric object is craniometry. It only becomes phrenology when you try to infer things about someone's mind from the shape of their skull.
If I say that people are going to think a particular face belongs to a man because of the thickening of the frontal bone buried in it, that's a statement at the intersection of cognitive psychology and craniometry. If I say people only perceive the face that way because their skulls have a bump in the occipital bone, that's phrenology. See the difference?
I Executed The Demon Lord With One Flawless Strike And After A Brief Power Struggle The New Demon Government Is Substantially More Committed To The War Because Of Some Reason I Don't Know
I Successfully Overthrew The Demon Lord And Instituted Demon Democracy But They Voted For A Commie So The CIA Not Some Fantasy Equivalent The Actual CIA Who Have Known About Magic And Alternate Realms The Whole Damn Time But Won't Just Unisekai Me Launched A Counter Coup And That's When Things Really Went To Shit
today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.
#this is nice but i have questions#for instance what if they see shit thatâs not for kids because the computer canât tell theyâre underage#i feel like a better solution is to likeâŠkeep kids off the internet
Then we should try to live in a world where kids see shit they aren't supposed to on the internet and can be taught what to do when that happens, rather than a world where we've installed a massive surveillance apparatus to supposedly solve the problem and kids keep seeing shit they aren't supposed to on the internet anyway because every security measure has a workaround if you look hard enough. You cannot promote child safety by making a giant list of underage internet users and all their personal information that tech companies pinky promise to keep safe. You cannot realistically keep children off the internet in a world that is progressively built more and more around the internet and children's social lives outside of school and home are constantly curtailed. You cannot keep children safe by treating the ability to use computers in general as a forbidden fruit, because suddenly "browsing facebook or tumblr" and "sending pictures of yourself to strangers in DMs" are being treated as the exact same kind of taboo, and when you violate the first one and predictably don't get hurt as a result, the second one isn't going to set off the alarm bells that it should.
The solution is to teach childrenâin advanceâbasic internet safety rules like never giving away personal information and never assuming that the person on the other end of the screen is actually who they say they are and has your best interests in mind (both of which, funnily enough, laws like this also fly directly in the face of) and that if something does happen, they can come to parents or other trustworthy adults and go 'hey, I saw something/wound up in a situation that made me feel weird or uncomfortable, how do I protect myself from it happening again?' rather than letting it spiral. You treat kids like the peopleâalbeit still learning onesâthat they are and deal with them honestly, being up front about any concerns you have for them and the fact that using tech is a privilege that comes with certain benefits, risks, and responsibilities. You don't treat them as criminals-by-default needing to be stripped of freedom and call it protection, because if you do, you're priming them to get manipulated by the first person to show them (or pretend to) a modicum of actual respect.
I wasnât trying to say that companies should keep lists of underage users, nor that all kids should be off the internet forever, period (although I do think if youâre under 13 you have no business being on social media for any reason). I agree with everything youâre saying, though. Iâm anti-authoritarian parenting through and through. Iâm kind of surprised my take was interpreted as me not thinking kids are people, and I hope you reblog my clarification so people donât see me as something Iâm not!
The issue I see, and the thing Iâm concerned about, is that many parents still do not do their jobs. They donât teach kids tech rules and they arenât safe to talk to about bad stuff they saw online, and no one takes that seriously. âJust make a better world,â though I agree with you we should ALSO do that, doesnât stop permissive parents or authoritarian abusers. I donât see how having age verification on certain sites, especially ones that are actively predatory toward children like porn and social media sites, is much different from a liquor store making people show their IDs before buying alcohol. The laws could be reformed around it so itâs basically the same. I donât know if this is what the OS aims to do, but I see both sides of the argument here.
Itâs also why I side-eye anyone whoâs against age verification for PornHub, especially those who are treating unfettered internet access for minors as some kind of human right and free speech issue. Iâm concerned they will be targeted, and itâs easy to say âletâs create a world where kids see shit they arenât supposed to and know where to goâ when you arenât the one dealing with your kids seeing CSAM, pornography, and other things. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say. But I would ban porn tomorrow if I could, so thatâs where Iâd be coming from.
Anyway. Iâm not taking a side. I can see the merits of the Debian system despite my concerns. Both age verification laws and it come from a place of wanting to protect kids. Iâd just prefer if there werenât insinuations that Iâm authoritarian or donât see kids as people, especially as a survivor of emotional child abuse. But ig you can say whatever you want on your own blog.
The problem, as I see it, is that we're not doing pure age verification in the least intrusive possible way and almost nobody wants to. We're doing mass surveillance with age as part of the personal data being grabbed. Realistically the liquor store isn't saving your driver's license to a giant database to keep forever and sell to Peter Thiel and cooperate with the feds. They're just looking at the birthday and making sure you kinda resemble the picture. Whereas if you cooperate with the age verification on Discord or Pornhub, there's a fair chance they're selling your personally identifiable information to Palantir.
A great way to handle age verification would be to have liquor stores sell slips of paper with codes printed on them for a nominal fee and let you type in the code off one of the slips of paper to prove you're an adult. If you ever get worried about Peter Thiel tracking you by the repeatedly used code and selling your data, just go pay the $1 for a new age verification code. The only person who needs to see your ID is the liquor store employee selling it to you. If a parent gives a kid their age verification code and the kid gets hurt, that's a bad parenting decision that might merit individual punishment for the parent, not an argument for sweeping new legal restrictions on everyone -- just like if a parent gives a kid their bottle of absinthe and the kid gets hurt. Unfortunately, no politician would ever sign onto such a privacy-respecting system of age verification because they're really interested in an excuse to surveil everyone -- they're only saying "think of the children" to scam other people into cooperating.
Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks Iâve known whoâre against single-payer, itâs not even funnyâŠ
This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.
Because theyâve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.
This explains a lot. Â And itâs a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism â always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce. Â Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often thatâs the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that youâre not even aware of. Â
And never think youâre too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesnât work like that. Â Similarly, donât think people who are fooled by something are stupid. Â Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information theyâre given. Â It doesnât take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.
I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, itâs enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby thatâs pretty interesting:
Yesterday I had to go to the hospital cause I injured my eye, Iâm frankly dreading what the bill is going to be, but what made me balk was being told in the pharmacy that my insurance was denied for the antibiotic eye drops and itâd be over $100 out of pocket. So I didnât get my eyedrops.
Iâve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.
Itâs the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. Itâs downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.
US healthcare is certainly far more expensive than its actual cost, but people in this thread seem to be making the opposite mistake. Just because you paid an amount, doesnât mean you paid the full cost, any more than it means you paid nothing but the cost.
Working out the true costs itâs probably very difficult.
If I were to buy eyedrops from a shady overseas pharmacy and ignore prescription requirements and insurance systems, a bottle of (fluoroquinolone antibiotic) plus (corticosteroid) eyedrops would cost about $6 plus shipping. No way will India's health system give socialized medicine to a foreigner buying through a shady mail-order pharmacy. So I'm pretty sure 7 GBP is actually in the ballpark for the true costs.
iâm doing all this research on when âlikeâ is used as a filler vs. âumâ or âuhâ or whatever & iâm really loving this
basically my fav pattern so far is how these teen girls use âlikeâ pretty exclusively when theyâre sharing these concepts that are unknown to them or  just guess work, ya know?Â
theyâll say âhereâs the, um, living roomâ but then theyâll say âin this picture my brother is, like, howling or somethingâÂ
& i love it i mean i love the way they use âlikeâ to express uncertainty and idk pensiveness? âumâ expresses a break in a sentence, some disfluency. but âlikeâ holds actual semantic meaning and is an indicator that expresses what follows isnât gonna be totally accurate but just to the speakerâs best estimation.
i mean, heâs, like, howling or something, right?Â
No but weâre all like âwow, wouldnât it be cool if there were a language with explicit markers for epistemic uncertainty? That would be the Most Rational Languageâ and hey would you look at that
here lies an alternate usage! âto be likeâ as a verb similar to âto sayâ which tbh has been my biggest problem in trying to use âlikeâ less in conversation.Â
And it needs to be said that âto be likeâ is importantly different from reported speech! It can be used just to relate what someone said, sure, but itâs much more versatile. For instance, it can relate internal speech or thought. Consider âHe just stared at me like âwhat is this guy doing here?ââ. That is super clumsy without 'likeâ. What have you got? âHe just stared at me as if he was wondering what I was doing thereâ? And that doesnât capture the shades of meaning you can put into the phrasing and delivery of the reported speech/thought. Because âhe was likeâ does not mean âhe saidâ, it means âhere follows a short impression of him at that momentâ, and that impression can be reported speech, reported thought, a non-verbal noise, a gesture, a facial expression⊠itâs extremely versatile and honestly Iâm not sure how we ever managed to communicate clearly without it.
Non-rhetorical question, did English used to have other ways to smoothly embed quick impressions into speech?
I think "like" might be replacing "as if to say" in some of those examples. I'm pretty sure "He glared at me like 'I hate you too much to bother talking to you'" and "He glared at me as if to say 'I hate you too much to bother talking to you'" mean the same thing.
I can't answer this without a clarification of what you mean by dangerous. Are illegal drugs presumed to be more dangerous because of the substances themselves or because of the dangers imposed on users by law enforcement? Statistically speaking, alcohol is the most lethal drug on this list. Why are synthetic opioids grouped in two different categories depending on whether or not they're prescribed? A lot of unexamined biases showing up here.
The closest I've ever been to unfixable injury from a drug was on a psychedelic, so that's the one I'm marking as most dangerous. Statistically alcohol is pretty lethal to the average person, but I've never used it in a way that put me in any significant danger.
COVID shots were given away for free because they saved lives other than the life of the customer and the life of the seller. It was a textbook Pigouvian subsidy for behavior with positive externalities. The same sort of argument would support government funded sick leave (if you stay home when sick you won't infect other people) but not government funded insulin (nobody will catch your untreated diabetes from spending time near you).
I'm for socialized healthcare in general, but socialized infection prevention measures ought to appeal even to people who love neoclassical economics a lot more than I do.
an author was just found guilty of child abuse for writing a fictional book about age play and will be sentenced in april.
if you agree with this, youâre agreeing and siding with fascism. there is literal no other way to put it. itâs not about your moral fucking code or your own feelings towards the content. people are being persecuted for fucking FICTIONAL books.
This is why it's so important to clearly distinguish actual recordings of the sexual abuse of physically existing children from the broader category of erotic material about kids.
The thing that's bad is hurting an actual human child. Using the excuse of that to criminalize other stuff you think is gross and evil and weird but which is not actually harmful to any actual human is profoundly illiberal and positively regressive for the actual defense of actual children.
I can see a decent argument for criminalizing very convincing imitations of recorded child abuse, based on similar reasoning to why California tried to criminalize selling Alligator mississippiensis leather (until the law got struck down in Federal court) under a state Endangered Species Act even though A. mississippiensis isn't endangered. California thought there shouldn't be a market for the products of killing endangered crocodiles and A. sinensis. But it also recognized that a police officer usually can't tell at a glance which species of crocodilian a piece of leather came from. So to eliminate any market for killing endangered crocodilian species, California thought the best method was banning all crocodilian leather, whether or not it's from an endangered species.
So the argument would be that we should ban photorealistic AI fake videos that look like they record child abuse because if a cop sees what seems to be a recording of child abuse on someone's phone we want them to act on it promptly rather than waiting to figure out whether it's real or fake. That's not to say that a free society should ever have laws against harmless obscenity on the basis of "gross and evil and weird." But sometimes the best way to prevent harm involves casting a net of criminalization slightly wider than the actually harmful conduct it's trying to stop.
TL;DR: Australia is clearly in the wrong here, but I think you may have slightly overstated the case against it.
I just discovered that there was a person who was afab and ended up joining the russian army by the name of Alexander Durov in 1806.
Born a woman, Nadezhda Durova (birth name) ran away from home and joined a light cavallery regiment dressed as a man.
After his identity was uncovered, the russian tsar summoned him to the palace at St. Petersburg, where he impressed the tsar so much that he awarded Durov the Cross of St. George and promoted him to lieutenant in a hussar unit.
He always referred to himself as a man and was upset when people called him a woman.
He signed letters with his male last name.
He expressed feelings of disgust towards his sex and how that worried him a lot.
He never married willingly and adopted many dogs and cats.
He only danced with women when attending a ball.
He asked to be buried under his male name Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov but the church did not agree to that.
I never saw him in "historical transmasculine people" compilations and only discovered his story coincidentally.
Unfortunately, historians still adress him with female pronouns, although he did not want that.
Let's remember him together. We won't allow him to be forgotten.
I'll probably add onto this post later or make a better one but you can read a lot on this wikipedia article:
god the poor man. being more or less "out" to many people during his lifetime got him misgendered almost constantly, he made his feelings on the matter clear...and scholars still won't stop doing it
Aleksandrov was irate, writing to Pushkin âthe name which you called me [his deadname], dear sir Aleksandr Sergeevich, in the preface haunts me! Is there no remedy for my grief? You called me by that name that makes me shudder, and soon 20,000 people will read it and call me by it too!â
pronouns and name expressed in life are the person's correct pronouns and name! respect them!
Because if you try to save the habitable planet we live on using terraforming techniques rather than environmentalism, it's called geoengineering, and everyone already knows all the terraforming enthusiasts are willing to try geoengineering. But the environmentalists aren't willing to sign on for geoengineering because it could cause environmental disruption, and the billionaire terraforming enthusiasts won't sign on for any environmentalism that impedes what they want to do, so we end up doing approximately nothing.
âGeneral Organa Solo! Admiral! I â thereâs something you need to know!â
âWhat is it?â Leia replied, frowning for a moment at the Duros in front of her. âYaral, correct?â
âYes, General,â Yaral confirmed. âGeneral, Iâve been going over the implications of the operation that took place on Starkiller Base, and⊠I think Iâve got it.â
â...got what?â Holdo asked. âYouâre not making sense.â
âI â ah, sorry,â Yaral mumbled, and put down his datapad. âItâs⊠so, ah, one of the extant problems in Hyperspace theoretics for the last several decades at least is that we canât predict what routes will work and what routes wonât. It should be a settled science, but the fact that it only semi-reliably produced results matching empirical observations is a major clue that what weâre working with is actually an approximation⊠and not a good one. Thereâs plenty of models that were supposed to solve this, but none of them were⊠ah⊠they didnât properly allow for the psuedovelocity-hypervelocity transition, for example, or they produced results that seemed to indicate that actual hyperspace travel was impossible, or they werenât reliable with results.â
âIs this important?â Leia asked. âI mean you no insult, Yaral, but we are currently being pursued by a First Order ship capable of tracking us through-â
She stopped.
â...is that relevant to this?â she asked.
âIt might be,â Yaral said. âAt least â it might be if theyâve got a general solution to hyperspatial field theory, if itâs the same as â so, Iâve been working from the way that the Millennium Falcon jumped under the Starkiller Base shield. That indicates that the former understandings about mass shadows were not correct and could not be correct, and that gave me a hint so I tried using a different model on the way that mass impacts hyperspace. Specifically, itâs not the mass itself that impacts hyperspace, itâs the energy of the gravity that impacts hyperspace. The very energy bound up in the gravitational field, the, the warped space time is what is causing the impact, and normally thatâs essentially the same but it becomes different under certain circumstances. Frame dragging around black holes, especially multiple black holes, is one of the places where it becomes particularly noticeable, but itâs not the only one â and Starkiller Base was suppressing the mass that it contained as it charged up, which changed the calculations!â
The duros sounded terribly excited, and he flicked through several pages of notes. âAnd this results in â it all falls out of equations from the seven-fifties, one of the old models that was rejected for improper agreement with evidence, but if I plug in the new corrections then it fits all known observations. And the effect of firing a large bolus of energy through hyperspace has the same impact!â
He showed them the next page. âSee?â
Admiral Holdo and General Organa Solo exchanged glances.
â...we⊠donât have qualifications in theoretical hypermetrics,â Holdo said. âWhat are we looking at, exactly?â
âThis is what happens if you fire a large beam of pure energy through hyperspace,â Yaral explained. âSee this term here? Because the pure energy beam has energy, and that energy is the same kind of mass-energy that impacts hyperspace, then in addition to exiting hyperspace at the target location it suffers superluminal bleed â the normal scattering that you get with light moving through a medium, it still happens, only the light moves outwards at faster than light speeds. Thatâs why the beam could be seen while it was in transit!â
His voice was full of passion. âYou see? This must be correct, because it exactly replicated observations I wasnât even trying to explain. Itâs the grand unified theory of hypermetrics!â
âMarvellous,â Holdo said, sounding slightly frustrated. âBut what does this mean on a practical level? What can we do with it?â
Yaral looked at his notes, then at Admiral Holdo.
Then back at his notes.
â...well, this means that itâs possible to predict the exact moment at which the superluminal transition takes place,â he said. âAnd, in fact, to demonstrate that the hyper velocity generated by the hyperdrive does not have to take place only after transition. It would in fact be possible to tune a hyperdrive so that it makes a very good approximation of hitting lightspeed while still in normal space, though the downside is that the whole ship would be converted to an energy packet in so doing while still in normal space instead of tachyonic space. It would completely destroy the ship if it hit anything, and itâd make a mess of whatever it hitâŠâ
He flicked forwards another page. âAnd it would make it possible to hit hyperspace anywhere! Without restriction, in fact â once the calibrations were done to more correctly align a hyper envelope with the energy structure of the ship, you wouldnât even need to take off. You could jump to hyperspace while standing on the ground.â
âAnd tracking through hyperspace?â Leia asked.
â...possibly, butâŠâ Yaral said, flicking back, then tapped out a few more calculations.
âI think I can see how theyâre doing it,â he said, eventually. âItâs something about the energy signature of a specific ship, theyâre tracking the vector and energy levels on hyperspace transition and they can then simply follow it until it stops. But thatâs a branch conclusion of the theory, it doesnât require the full unified theory.â
Holdo nodded.
âThank you,â she said, catching Leiaâs eye. âGeneral. This is our answer â we retune the hyperdrive of the Raddus to do that superluminal transition in realspace. Iâll stay on board to drive it in, but the rest of you need to evacuate to transports⊠thereâs a world not far away. We can get in range of it, then everyone else evacuates and I ram the Raddus right down Snokeâs throat.â
âYouâd die,â Leia pointed out, which was an understatement.
âI did not join the Resistance because it was safe, General,â Holdo replied. âAnd we need to get Yaralâs knowledge off this ship and to the New Republic. We need the Resistance to survive. That is the highest priority.â
As noted in other reblogs, it really doesn't fucking matter, bc Whisper (the most common note-taking AI in medical spaces) is prone to the exact same massive hallucinations as ChatGPT, and we genuinely don't know where the data goes, bc it's all black-box shit.
Yes they're different companies.
They have the exact same problems, and if you give a fuck about your privacy, you really should not let them touch your medical records.
The sad thing is that I've met doctors who reason at a level comparable to AI. They'll imagine that I said something I didn't say but that shares some words with what I said and would make sense for me to say in context. It'll be difficult to get them to reason about certain topics without using the right keywords to bring up the subject. And there's a simple endocrinology question several doctors have gotten wrong at me that ChatGPT gets right.
There's all these news stories about LLMs being better at (some cognitive task) than humans that seem implausible when you've seen the mistakes LLMs make. And then you meet the humans who should be outperforming LLMs and the news stories start to seem plausible again. Man, people suck. Experts should be way better than a random autistic person with a decent education who's watched a few relevant youtube videos.
The privacy stuff is still concerning. I'd rather give my personal information to a person who could face consequences for misconduct than to Someone Else's Computer (which can never be held accountable), if they're both going to do mediocre reasoning.
Does anyone else notice how the word "unaltered" is doing a lot of heavy lifting? Anabolic steroids lower testosterone and improve athletic performance. If you meet a cis man with no LH or FSH to speak of, less testosterone than a typical healthy woman, no HDL-C, no symptoms of hypogonadism, and large amounts of muscle, you can safely infer that he is now or was recently on testosterone-mimicking PEDs that don't show up on your testosterone test. And that's the case whether or not he admits to the killjoys at WADA and the local police department that he altered his testosterone level.
Elite athlete with all the biomarkers of cheating at sports claims not to have cheated at sports. News at 11.
You don't have to pretend you don't know doping exists. We can all see that kicking a few unlucky women out of women's sports is a bad policy, and you don't have to trick us into agreeing.
That sounds kinda like an experience I've had a number of times. I'll be thinking about two things, and then something disrupts my thought process (e.g., nearly fall asleep, stand up too fast, experience a drug effect, ...), and I'll find myself concentrating on a thought composed of random pieces of both precursor thoughts mashed up into one mass. And it seems normal for a second or two, until I try to reason based on it and the pieces fall apart at the seams.
So for example:
thinking about a story with betrayal in it
also thinking about what ice cream to get at the store
stand up too fast and get lightheaded and momentarily lose track of what I was doing
find myself thinking about how ice cream will respond to betrayal
a few seconds later, the thought falls apart at the seams and I'm left thinking WTF was that
Or is this the object personification "my teddy bear will be sad that I didn't play with it" thing? IMO that's not nearly spicy enough to deserve talking about "deeper insanities."
