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Cake day: June 10th, 2024

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  • Contributions from russians make up a sizeable portion of Linux and GNU tooling. A myriad of foundational software, from nginx to strace, were created and are currently maintained by russian citizens.

    While there has been a lot of brain drain (hello), russia is still a country of 140 million people and the remains of great soviet theoretical education. In such conditions there will be both a bunch computer science geniuses and a small army of half-competent coders which would allow you to roll your own OS, let alone a distro, if the efforts were organized enough.



  • I think it’s a fair question/point. Different factions within feminism will give different answers to that. Personally as a cis man I am fine with feminism focusing primarily or exclusively on women’s issues (it’s in the name), we should have other movements to deal with the way those same issues affecting other genders. Activism and organizing is almost never a zero-sum game, someone can be a feminist and an LGBTQ activist and a socialist for example.

    The way this ties into the OC is that it is OK for feminist activism to take away privileges from men if that means improving rights for women. Even if there was a dichotomy of “there are fewer hetero relationships but women are safer from sexual harassment” as presented by OC — which, to be clear, is a false dichotomy and not actually what the vast majority of feminists are advocating for — it would be a fine step to take.


  • To expand on what @FishLake@lemmygrad.ml said, this analysis ranges from reductive to completely ahistorical.

    Women have been part of the productive workforce long before the notion of equality was even on the table. The idea that women were exclusively bearing and rearing children before the industrial revolution is nonsense, women were crucial workers in agriculture and manufacture and it was impossible for a family to be fed only by the patriarch.

    The relationship between capitalism and feminism is actually partly the other way around from what you are presenting. Industrialization required centralization and urbanization, which meant it was easier than ever for women to organize with their colleagues and comrades and demand equal rights. It also eased access to weapons, which allowed for direct violent action to force the ruling class to pay attention. Capitalism accelerated or even sometimes spawned feminist movements, which were always in direct contradiction with the actual capitalists who were entirely male at the time.

    The idea that women haven’t won anything is just bullshit. You are right that they didn’t “win” the “right to work”, because they had that “right” forever. But what they actually did win is a smaller gender gap in pay and economic opportunities, access to better education, right to political representation, legal prohibitions on some kinds of gender violence. If you think all of this was somehow “granted” by (male) capitalists because it is profitable, that’s just untrue, most of it was directly or indirectly hurtful to the ruling class when those measures were first introduced.


  • Brushing away “sexual harassment going down” as not an actual improvement is a real tell on yourself. I’d wager if given the choice most women would prefer to not be sexually harassed even if that meant they wouldn’t have a “serious relationship”, or at least they need to be able to make that choice.

    has it improved the relationship between men and women?

    You seem to be making things about men again. Men are already an exceptionally privileged demographic compared to other genders, feminism does not need to help them, it needs to help women.

    women today all have mental illness.

    I’ll ignore that part to keep the discussion good-faith and I sincerely recommend you to remove it from the comment

    that comes from instagram, where they learn that the world is bad and they have to fear everything. women get told that the circumstances are unacceptable, that other people are out to hunt you, that you can never be satisfied. all of it contributes to an general unwellness.

    Actual statistics and history back up the fact that the world is bad. Men have systemically oppressed women for centuries and still do, which lets them get away with some awful shit. Men are more likely to be trusted by police or courts, they generally have more wealth and power, they are on average stronger than women. Men are statistically way more likely to engage in abuse and violence, both psychological and physical. It is reasonable for a rational woman to take precautions when interacting with men, even those she knows already.

    it has just caused women to be angry at men all the time for being “predators” or something.

    One in three women have experienced sexual violence at one point in their lives. About 15-20% have experienced rape. Almost every woman has experienced some form of sexual harassment. The vast majority (>90%) of perpetrators of those crimes are men.

    It is not unreasonable to be angry all the time when you are being sexually harassed, assaulted, or raped, and the society enables and protects the perpetrators. In fact it would be totally unreasonable to ignore an issue as serious as this.








  • Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.

    The problem with them is two-fold:

    1. There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
    2. They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.

  • Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about

    Has this not been the case for the past 25 years already? No real need for “AI” when you already have an obedient and trigger-happy military with plenty of remote-controlled toys and your populace is brainwashed to believe “brown person = terrorist”.

    way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders

    What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order? If anything, the military is full of assholes who are happy to kill for fun. See: Graham Platner

    Will AI make it easier and/or cheaper? Probably, sadly. But it won’t be a qualitative change.


  • five minutes earlier: “hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you’ll get a huge golden parachute”.

    Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?

    Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it’s good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation and scams. And it’s much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil than by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.







  • You are once again completely ignoring the material reality and instead focusing on whether or not that woman “deserved” to be raped (that phrase has terrible connotations btw, this whole thread needs a large CW on it).

    Whether or not someone deserves something is basically emotional and thus idealist, but its material roots are in the total social advantage of giving out a benefit or punishment to a given person. Therefore this is the angle we should take.

    If we examine the material outcomes resulting from an active US military member being raped by a colleague, there is very little positive results there. For the victim, trauma does not prevent one from being violent and aggressive, if anything it exacerbates it. The perpetrator meanwhile will be enabled and mentally prepared for even more atrocities against their other victims. For everyone else, it normalizes a horrible behavior that has no place in society.

    Then again, even form an idealist angle, I don’t think anyone deserves to be raped. Unlike killing, it is never a valid method of defense, because it requires that the target is already overpowered by the perpetrator. It does not serve any possible function other than satisfying the sexual/sadistic/controlling desires of the perpetrator at the expense of the victim.