I’m just some guy, you know.

  • 0 Posts
  • 396 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 7th, 2024

help-circle
  • Rocket launches aren’t a significant part of humanity’s carbon footprint, and there’s not much risk of that changing even with a growing space industry.

    Electricity generation and transportation, including aviation and shipping, represents 50% of global human emissions. Spaceflight is less than 0.5%.

    Let’s pick our battles. We can build rockets and reduce our carbon footprint at the same time. More importantly, if we’re going to point fingers at carbon emitters, let’s actually focus on the industries actually doing significant harm.





  • I personally think that pedophilia is genetic, or a chemical brain imbalance or something.

    Any evidence of that, or just playing armchair scientist?

    It seems a lot more likely that humans don’t have control over their attractions in general. Human sexuality has never been linked to specific genetics or brain chemistry, so maybe put the calipers away.

    You don’t choose to be straight, you don’t choose to be gay. You don’t choose to like big boobs or little boobs. You don’t choose whether or not to be attracted to muscles. You literally don’t get to choose “your type”. You have your own set of attractions that you largely discover about yourself, rather than decide for yourself.

    Pedophilia is likely no different. The only difference in practice is that most other types of interpersonal attraction can be ethically fulfilled between consenting adults. Pedophilia, by definition, cannot, as it involves someone who cannot ethically consent.

    We need to start looking at people with inappropriate attractions as people who carry a burden.


  • Knowledge = Belief + Evidence

    What really matters is how good of a critical thinker you are, and what you’ll accept as evidence, but if you’re decently educated, you should be able to manage it. The key is not accepting secondhand evidence from untrustworthy sources, and to seek firsthand evidence that you can see with your own eyes.

    As for “Objective Truth”, that doesn’t exist. Not only are our experiences obligatorily filtered through our subjective human perceptions, but relativity allows for multiple conflicting truths to exist simultaneously in spacetime, so it literally can’t exist, and even if it could, we would be blind to it.


  • This isn’t surprising, it’s inevitable.

    If you folks knew how common pedophilic fantasies are amongst the general public, you would be shocked. Just look to cultures like Japan and Russia that don’t strongly condemn such things, and you’ll find it’s about 15% of the population. It’s only less in the West because of the near homicidal stigma attached to it that makes people vigorously hide that part of themselves.

    Fortunately, this also shows that the vast majority of those people don’t offend.

    We also tend to define pedophilia as “anything sexual involving a minor”, while reacting to it as if it means “violent rape of a toddler”, so no shit, we sexualize youth all the time, the 18 year mark is a legal and social formality, not a hard limit on human attraction. Adults will find themselves attracted to teens, and they won’t reveal that because who the fuck ever would?

    If anything, the issue isn’t that people have these attractions and fantasies, it is that some portion of those people can’t separate fantasy from reality and are willing to hurt a child to get what they want, or they are sociopaths that consume child porn without feeling disgust for witnessing horrific child abuse.



  • If you think that by “toxicity” I am referring to moderators protecting their communities, you are sorely mistaken. That’s a feature, not a bug.

    I got accused of being transphobic and banned from an instance because I said that hate towards trans people is a dead cat argument.

    Good, you showed up in a trans-inclusive space and used right-wing jargon (coined by Boris fucking Johnson) that dismisses their testimony on their own lived experiences as being “shocking” and a “distraction”, when they know full well that their rights and their lives are on the line. Sorry you didn’t get a chance to correct the record on the fact that you were ignorant on the severity of the issue, but if you’re still publicly complaining about being banned on other uninvolved instances, I’d say that they made the right move.


  • I prefer allowing hashtags over site-wide search. People can use hashtags specifically when they want their post to be associated with a specific search, rather than letting people search for specific words and phrases.

    Site-wide search works way better for communities structured the way Reddit or Lemmy are structured, since people can easily run afoul of different moderation policies, and get themselves banned from communities for bad faith interactions. You have no such protections on a microblogging service.


  • I don’t even care about the “AI is content theft” arguments. No self-respecting artist would ever accuse him of plagiarism over this. It looks like garbage. The copyright office rejected his copyright claims on the grounds that he didn’t make it. Same story as the monkey selfie guy: You didn’t make the art, it isn’t your art. If a human didn’t make the art, it can’t be copyrighted.

    He claims it was a mix of Midjourney and Photoshop, but honestly, I’ve made prettier things just fucking around with SDXL on my gaming PC, and I can confirm that it took absolutely no talent or effort to do it. The hardest part of the process was setting up AUTOMATIC1111, and that’s not even very hard.

    And I would never even dream of taking credit for anything I’ve generated, because I didn’t make it. I just typed a bunch of wildcard arguments into a prompt and let my GPU dump out thousands of 4K wallpapers for entertainment. This guy thinks this one artifact-ridden generation has any actual value? It’s “famous” for pissing people off by competing against humans and unjustifiably winning. Being controversial could be valuable, if the controversy didn’t fundamentally render the “art” valueless by revealing that it is nothing more than a GPU vomiting up inference. The real villain in this story is the art contest organizers that stuck a blue ribbon on this slop.


  • My experience with BlueSky has been that it is better than Twitter because it is smaller and doesn’t cater to the far-right.

    BUT…

    It can become extremely toxic very fast because they implemented the same poorly executed features Twitter did that fucked things up. In fact, it’s way worse than that…

    The two features they copied from Twitter that hurt them the most are site-wide search and quote posts. Site-wide search enables people to “namesearch” or to monitor keywords for issues they want to fight about. Quote posts are a well understood “dunk mechanism”, that largely encourages dogpiling.

    As for being free of a central algorithm, that seems good, until you see that there are tons of community algorithms you can subscribe to instead. Now there are algorithms for things like “anti-Zionist posts” and “pro-Israel posts”, which not only let people find their preferred echo-chamber, but also provide trolls access to exactly the groups of people they want to argue with or harass.

    These algorithms can be built to detect certain hashtags and phrases, or they can just be big lists of accounts like a Twitter group. There’s no telling when you might show up in one of these algorithms or why.

    As a result, if you say anything less than agreeable about any issue, there’s a chance you’re going to hear from a bunch of accounts you’ve never met before, regardless of what side of an issue you are on, or how extreme your view actually is.

    I don’t recommend it. It’s a pro-profit company that seeks to be a wholesale replacement for Twitter. AT Proto federation is a complete joke, it’ll never expand if it doesn’t have a flagship open source server. They’ll give up on it just like Twitter did and just be another centralized, toxic, microblogging community.