Prophet

The guy who leads this group is extremely vocal (almost weirdly so) about white privilege and systemic racism. He is also white. It’s true that many AI models have white-bias. The reasons for this are multi-faceted. Our datasets are grossly imbalanced against racial minorities. I also think I understand that for some darker-skinned races, it is more difficult for the model to extract relevant features from the shitty Flickr photos they scrape for these models.

That said, injecting words into the users prompt to force the model to generate minorities more often is an extremely naive approach. Kind of like if Google added “reddit” to all searches just because it worked for some specific test cases, but ignoring that you now no longer get any site except reddit. Probably the solution here looks like paying a lot of money for high quality datasets as well as investing in user education and more AI explainability of these tools.

Right. And they dismiss these really valid concerns as right wing propaganda or both-sides-isms. Polls right now show Trump polling marginally better than Biden. Shouldn’t this be sounding the alarms for more of us? Biden should be stomping Trump in polls but instead they’re neck and neck. And this is the guy that they’re determined to push.

I don’t even agree that Biden is “the best we got” but somehow everyone is convinced of that. I have a sad theory that DNC strategists see Biden as the most viable candidate because he’s a white male from a rust belt town. This profile lines up with many conservative voters that they think they need to win elections. This explains why they wouldn’t run someone “woke” like Whitmer or Newsome or maybe Michelle Obama. In other words, there aren’t any good ole boys left in the democratic party, or at least any popular enough to actually win (e.g., Joe Manchin).

From the perspective of an ordinary citizen though, Biden didn’t win because of conservative voters. He won because of a large coalition of different kinds of people - moderates, women, minority races, and leftists. Biden has upset that coalition by not pushing harder for codified reproductive rights, his stance on Gaza, and a weak relationship with labor. I worry that while moderates will turn out, that has never been enough to win.

I’m sorry you’re being downvoted for this comment. What you’re saying is absolutely true, the moderates just don’t want to hear it.

It’s the candidate’s job to assuage voter’s fears and convince people to vote for them. If Biden is too frail to do interviews, how is he going to do an election campaign? How is he even able to do this job? We have other people, why does it have to be Biden?

I liked how Jon Stewart put it - when the barbarians (Trump) are at the walls, you want Conan up there leading the charge, not a feeble old man who’s afraid to appear in front of the public.

Not a swifty but if she wasn’t a billionaire, I don’t think she would have less “political power.” She is just that popular. I think the distinction between swift and your run-of-the-mill oligarch is that they specifically use their money and power to expand their political power (e.g., buying political party members, burying any dissenters). Could she do that? Probably, and that in and of itself is problematic. I think that this is maybe what you were saying though.

I would dispute your claim about there being a “circular firing squad.” The firing definitely comes from a very specific direction. Politicians like Joe Biden run on progressive ideas (cancelling student loans, legalizing marijuana, healthcare reform, etc) and then all but drop those promises once they get into office. This is the real “backstabbing” in my opinion. These democratic politicians take massive donations from corporations, Israel, billionaires, etc. Who is going to get the most representation from these politicians? The voters or the donors? Four years later, liberals wonder why progressives aren’t willing to jump in and vote for their guy again.

It’s like a cycle. We get a blue wave thanks to young, minority, and progressive voter turnout, then those same voters become completely disillusioned after four years. Why? Personally I think it’s because liberal (especially white middle class) voters subscribe to “vote blue no matter who,” and it’s been going on since well before Trump. They see the success of right wing candidates with total voter unity and think they can do the same thing with their superior numbers. However, these liberal voters get too invested with can we do this when they should be thinking about should we do this.

I personally think this mentality has given Democratic politicians a license to ignore their voters, because they essentially have a monopoly on votes from anyone who is not a crazy fascist. This in turn leads to the same repeated stalled progress and disillusionment. As long as Dems don’t piss off their base too much, they can maintain this position forever while also providing a ton of value to their donors.

All of this has led me to believe that ranked choice voting may be the best thing we could do to turn our country around, because it would give third party candidates an actual shot and force Democrats (and maybe Republicans) to actually compete for votes because voters would feel more freedom to vote their conscience without pissing their vote away. If there are any initiatives in your state to put ranked choice on the ballot, please get involved.

To add to this, genocide (as defined by the UN) does not just include directly killing a particular group:

Definition Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group; 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

So in addition to killing 20k+ Gaza civilians, Israel’s response has displaced countless others with their intense and indiscriminate bombing (see points #2, #3, possibly #4). NYT and other sources claim that up to 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced, which NYT claims is 80% of their population. This is in addition to the conditions Gaza was already being subjected to, such as being denied water and electricity (#3) by Israel.

The evidence overwhelmingly shows that this is genocide. “Figurative” is such a sleazy doublespeak way of excusing the behavior here.

Edit: sorry my link should work now

It’s true. Even in the comments on this post there’s someone adamantly claiming (without evidence) that masks don’t work, despite being presented with a full literature review of studies showing that they do work.

It shouldn’t even take a full scientific study to convince someone that covering their nose and mouth helps to prevent the spread of airborne illness. Their egos are so fragile that any critical introspective examination of their viewpoints would destroy their entire identity. What even are they without their vitriol and hatred for the truth?

Funny that you don’t even try to deny that Trump may have been involved in inciting/leading an insurrection. It’s only that he hasn’t been found guilty of it by the courts. How will the goalposts shift if he is found guilty?

Thanks for the catch, I edited the comment.

A lot of people in the comments are saying how this won’t hold up or how unconstitutional it is but 35 fucking states have already passed anti-bds (boycotts, divestment*, and sanctions) laws that do the same thing as this bill but Israel. If the politicians are sufficiently bribed enough, they won’t care what the laws actually are.

I also really like these things. I read the article, and I got the sense that their rationalization for picking BG3 as GOTY was based exclusively on the actual game design, and before I say anything else, I agree that the design is fantastic. But, I would love to see Larian get more credit for the transparency during development, their commitment to delivering an experience of the highest quality, and the fairness and respect they give to their player base.

Whether or not a person likes games like BG3 or thinks it deserves GOTY, this stuff alone should be the bar for all games, not the scummy greedy practices we’ve become so used to seeing. Thank you Larian Studios!

Obama’s presidency was the first presidency with a truly contrarian congress. Dems should have done more when they controlled both houses, because once they lost the senate, Republicans blocked Obama’s agenda in every conceivable way, and that has been their modus operandi ever since.

Just for reference, Obamacare was supposed to be fairly close to single-payer insurance, with both public and private options (which would force private insurance to compete with the government). What we got in the end was a neutered, emaciated shell of what the original bill was supposed to be, but at least insurance companies couldn’t deny you based on preexisting conditions anymore. This was considered a huge win at the time. It’s laughable though, because this was when everyone was pointing at Canada and claiming they had death panels because universal healthcare couldn’t handle all the patients (complete bullshit/propaganda), as if our own insurance companies weren’t doing exactly this.

deleted by creator

I think you have the right idea but came to the wrong conclusion. Why would anyone buy office space if there is no value in employees coming to the office? Hint: they wouldn’t.

Edited to add: these properties may become a liability on their books which would impact their ability to apply for or pay for loans, as well as other negatives for the company.

Microsoft didn’t “absorb” open ai, they have a partnership where Microsoft pays assloads of money to sustain openai so that Google doesn’t get it. Ironically, this might be considered “long term thinking” but I wonder how long shareholders will tolerate such a hit to the books. There is supposed to be a profit sharing model here eventually (up to a certain point) but Microsoft isn’t getting chatgpt, otherwise bing would have replaced chatgpt. I have to wonder if, by the time chatgpt is profitable, if there will already be better models produced by other groups (maybe even open source), especially given the pace of AI innovation. I would not be surprised if this was a net loss for MS. GPT is amazing but it has numerous drawbacks at the moment. I admit that, if they figure things out quickly, this could be a huge win for them. I would go so far as to say that this is not anti consumer at all and is exactly how the free market is supposed to work.

As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it’s for boomers and don’t use it. I’m a little older and (to your credit) I check in about once a month. I know that meta has a very powerful user data harvesting business (arguably more valuable than Facebook), but Facebook’s user engagement will continue to slide if they can’t capture younger users and keep millennials and gen x users on the platform. This devalues their ability to make money from ads directly, and again, they did this to themselves by destroying their reputation for short term gains. They will eventually become like Yahoo! or AOL, both of which have almost zero brand value.

I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to say these companies aren’t destroying themselves though. Are they just going to explode and die all at once? Probably not, but they will likely fade to obscurity like IBM or HP (two powerhouses of the last century). I agree that exploiting customers is how they make money hand over foot (and we just roll over for it) but the point is to make the largest possible short term gains, not to maximize profit. It’s important to maximize short term gains because it makes big shareholders happy, and the shareholders (e.g., the CEO and the board) want to enrich themselves. The issue with optimizing for short term gains is that you miss out on the dividends of long term effort, which is usually significantly greater.

Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt. Chatgpt is the single greatest innovation in search in almost 3 decades. Google’s whole business relies on users needing Google’s search platform to find information. Google gets to place ads here, and that makes up the largest part of their revenue, but chatgpt threatens to upend that whole business. There is the potential for a whole new generation of advertisement technology to be baked into chatgpt that delivers an unprecedented level of ad targeting. In case you need a translation, that is massive $$$$$$$$, because advertisers want their ads to be placed in front of people who will actually buy the product (and they will pay a premium for this!), not the spray and pray strategy you see today.

So yes, in a way, Google and other companies that rely on simply extracting wealth rather than innovating/building wealth risk losing billions of dollars and eventually fading to irrelevance. I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard, and has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.

You can see how those two things are a little different though, right?

No, not really. Contrary to your point, Bethesda has worked quite closely with Xbox a number of times (especially back in the oblivion days) and Sony has never been interested in Bethesda’s ideas about games (support for Skyrim was abysmal on PlayStation and mods on PS3/4 were a joke).

Is MS a huge jerk for yanking starfield out of the hands of the majority of console gamers? Yeah totally, but Sony is also a huge jerk (and has been) for a long time when it comes to negotiating exclusivity deals, which they have been able to do because they are the number 1 console. It’s really not hard to extrapolate how much leverage Sony has over the industry when you see that they have sold 75% more consoles than xbox (35 vs 20 million units sold PS5/XS). I believe the previous gen was even worse. The outcry over this would have been much smaller if the roles were reversed, because it would have just been business as usual for every gamer.

Since the starfield exclusivity thing started, this point has always stuck with me: PlayStation owners buy PlayStation because of the expectation that they will get the best exclusives (and even most other games first). It was so bizarre to see them so brazenly attack Xbox over making starfield exclusive. They couldn’t see that they were beneficiaries of these same tactics for so long that they just accepted it as “the way it is.” Logically, why would you ever buy an Xbox if PlayStation gets better exclusives and the other great games first? No one should be surprised when TES6 is Xbox/PC exclusive.