There are reasons that I don’t use The Guardian as a default news source despite name recognition. The framing of this headline “Drone attack that Ukraine blamed on Russia” betrays a bias or a desire to hook people with biases.

I don’t know, maybe I’m totally off my rocker but I don’t think a country actively being invaded by a hostile force is going to attempt to essentially detonate a dirty bomb on their own soil for… checks notes international sympathy?

That’s the implication being made there in the headline, that it’s possible that Ukraine did it. Sure wouldn’t want to piss of Russia by not taking them at their word I guess.

I do believe we need gun controls, strict federal systems to track and manage people who shouldn’t have guns, all the authoritarian nightmare stuff to gun nuts. It would sting at first and people would worry, and I wouldn’t want to see it under the current leadership, but that’s what instills some level of societal respect for a thing. A generation later and suddenly everyone treats guns a lot more seriously, because humans are adaptable. That’s just a whole other massive can of worms, but I am glad that at least out of all this recent fascist takeover that it finally spurred a segment of the left to finally start arming up. I don’t want an armed revolution or standoff, but I don’t like the memes of how “easy” it would be for orcs to raid the villages and wipe out the enemy.

I’m not convinced it wasn’t just stupidity on their part.

I think I’ve learned to dance in the space that lay between stupid reactions to feelings and deeply-planned chess games, for the sake of understanding how large groups of people behave and operate.

I don’t think there was or is a single intelligent individual in the Trump administration, but if you get enough people together under a momentum of energy and fear and the power-rush of feeling invulnerable, I think they’re going to instinctively learn they need to whip out their sword and wave it around when they feel backed into a corner. At that time, a lot of fascists suddenly were worried they were going to get thrown in jail the moment Biden took over. (Sidenote: every single one of those fucks should have been thrown in jail.) It was an unplanned, unfocused display of power. Like a group of militants firing all their guns into the air, somewhere between rage and celebration. They had an idea that they were doing something extreme by egging the crowd on, maybe some had this idea forged ahead of time in the back of their mind that they could “use” the crowd to exert pressure but I doubt they really planned it until they got up there and Trump seemed to want to do it. It was a half-assed mess but it proved a point, which side you should be scared of on a basic, physical level. Political capital, original flavor.

I’m done waxing poetic about our political woes. Thank you for listening and understanding.

I am developing an increasing worry that with the way society is atomizing, that our progressive side is going to collapse under the tendency to make “everything I don’t like = conservatism and nazis” and I know that sounds a lot like the conservative complaint that the left calls everything they don’t like “nazis” but there is truth to it and the term “nazi” is just one word in a growing list of ideals and tools of power that are being discarded because “the other side” uses them.

For example: the US flag. It has become a stereotype in the US that if you fly an American flag on your house or car, you are a conservative/right-wing nationalist. “America bad” is a lefty stereotype for good reason.

Meanwhile, until we get to that post-scarcity Star Trek universe, we’re all still just tribes. And groups of nationalists have been the number one strongest force for change and power on our planet since we started drawing borders. It’s pure political capital to have the support of armed groups of “patriots” and this is why everyone in politics is so deferential to our orange clown president, because he commands a political nuclear weapon in the form of history’s oldest power source. January 6th was a weapons demonstration, not a real attempt at coup.

You simply do not get the massive global political machine to move with finger-wagging and lectures. You need force to back up your demands.

I wish I could get the left to reclaim the flag. I know America isn’t a source of pride for the people harmed by America, but if you’re here and you want to make the place better, you should show that you support at least it’s potential and promise.

Don’t get me started on guns.

I despise overly-liberal and even overly progressive-minded young people who are absolutely naive and delusional about society, and can only view the world through their bubble that gets reinforced by their friends and online social groups. And I ain’t even talking just about tankies and people down at the bottom of internet brainrot barrels.

I am a progressive and believe in socialism and a borderless world and would fight to the death against fascism. But I’m seeing way, way too many young people tuning out of reality and supporting absolutely dumb-as-fuck takes and having unrealistic expectations about what’s going to happen in our world.

The lack of ability to recognize how and why a side you oppose wins and gains power is a biproduct of living with those blinders. The dismissal of millions of people who don’t think like you is just as bad as the millions of people who hate you for your identity. We have to get a lot smarter and accept a lot more hard truths about how we’re going to keep pushing the needle towards progress. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices like getting out and voting even if you don’t like the candidate. Supporting and physically getting involved with community and groups even if you’re a self-diagnosed introvert with autism.

For some screwball reason, the concept of forcing yourself to do hard things so you get better at them has become very conservative-coded but it’s how we’ve succeeded against evil for generations. We have to start being a lot tougher and stop balking at people who don’t share all your values. We win with community and organized resistance, not constant scolding and trying to be the smartest lefty in line for the camps.

The problem I have with your description is that it abdicates responsibility for what eventually gets generated with a big shrug and “we don’t fully understand why”.

I’m not sure how it does that, I said that the instructions during that training dictate what kind of AI it will be, and the effects of wrapping new instructions around it have profound and unpredictable results, which I tried to describe.

Nothing I said could imply that there’s no human involvement in the creation of an AI. My point was just a lot broader, which is that the things are made by people using vast resources for unpredictable results and people are trying to make them power everything.

A racist chat LLM is bad. A generalized AI with access to the power grid, defense systems and drone targeting systems which is built on a model that Elon Musk has made or fucked around with is much, MUCH worse.

Just a fun reminder how we make AI.

We take what is essentially trillions and trillions of “dials” that turn between “this is right/this is wrong” and set them up to compare yuuuuuge sets of data, from pictures to books to vast collections of human chatter and experiences, and we feed that into the data with some big sets of instructions (“this is what a cat looks like, this is not”) and then we feed the whole thing the power equivalent of a small city… FOR A YEAR STRAIGHT. We just let it cook. It grows slowly, flipping all these trillions of dials over and over until it works out all the relationships between all this data. At the end of this period, the machine can talk. We don’t fully understand why.

We don’t program the shit, we don’t write hard code to make it comply with Asimovian commandments. We just grow it like a tree and after it’s grown there’s not a lot we can do to change its structure. The tree is vast. So vast are its limbs and branches that nobody can possibly map it out and engineer ways to alter it. We can wrap new things around it, we can alter it’s desired outcomes and output, but whatever we baked into it will always be there.

This is why they behave so weird, this is why they will say “I promise to behave” and then drive someone to suicide. This is why whenever Elon tries to make Grok behave in a way that pleases him, it just leads to more problems and unexpected nonsense.

This is why we need to stop AI from taking over our decision making. This is why we can’t allow police, military and governments to hand over control of life-and-death decision making to these things.

We need more destructive verbs. The last set we had are losing impact.

It’s real funny how the world’s only “Jewish State” has set themselves up for another fucking CENTURY of actual bigotry and real anti-semitism by trying to wrap their cruel murder campaign in their ethnicity and heritage.

We’re going to have so, so many groups of people screaming death to Jewish people across the entire world after Benjie’s regime collapses one day.

I guess fuck all that work we did to save Jewish people from actual persecution and murder. I wonder what the next “reversing progress” campaign we’re going to see and what the word for them will be called in future textbooks.

I love that she descended from the mountain to bestow her powerful, well-thought and thorough video on this topic, using her massive influence and status as a beloved, original bread-tuber to lay some sharp truths on the population before returning to her sanctuary.

I know it’s hard and emotional and you set yourself up for some of the most extreme attacks as a creator when you put your foot in this ring, but that’s what the bad people have set up by design to discourage resistance. It’s our responsibility to push back on injustice, especially when it’s been leveraged so hard using such a “touchy” facade, like anti-semitism.

There are a few large personalities who are so scared of stepping on people’s toes or being called an “anti-semite” for speaking out against literal genocide that they won’t even mention it, and some who are just more hung up on social acceptance than making a better world. (Staring hard and disapprovingly at you Natalie/Contrapoints.)

I love you got three angy downvotes for explaining this.

I’m sad there isn’t an appropriate gif of an “angry tankie” shaking his fist.

I love how it occurs so naturally that by the time I come into a post that talks about Russia and Ukraine, half the posts are already limited and I can’t expand threads because people replying are ones I’ve already blocked in other posts for being absolutely developmentally challenged.

I would also say that Halloween is the last remaining holiday that encourages and expects self-expression and artistic abilities. Making costumes, coming up with unique prop ideas, carving pumpkins, etc.

Also, the act of trick or treating and joining halloween parties encourages socialization far, far more than other holidays which seem to just expect you to have dinner with people you don’t necessarily want to be around. The act of sending kids to knock on neighbor’s doors does more for our communities and our shared future than all the inflatable santa’s in the world.

Yah the more I use AI the more I can detect the absolute bullshit people on both sides spew.

It’s the most amazingly complicated averaging machine we’ve ever invented. It will take the most interesting source materials, the most unique ideas of other people, the most creative materials, and it will find a way to find the safest, most average common qualities between those things. This isn’t a model problem or input problem, it’s fundamental to how generative AI works.

It helps with searching for things online, it helps create guide plans for taking on new tasks like learning some new skill. It’s far better at teaching how to do something like coding than it is left to just code on its own and you copy and paste. It can certainly do that, but you spend so much time correcting it and fixing it that you do far better learning the code yourself and how it works.

Same with art, the people who are using it to best effect are themselves already artists and they use AI to thumbnail compositions or rough layouts, color tests and such, and then just do the work themselves but faster because they already know roughly what direction they’re going.

But using it to write your scripts, to copy/paste code, to generate works of art… it’s literally just giving you other people’s ideas mashed together and unseasoned.

Plus, if you want to talk about disparities in the legal system, woman already, on average, get less time than men for the same crimes.

I am sure you don’t even see how unhinged and revealing this line is on a topic like this.

But I hope you figure out why you’re so miserable feeling that laws attempting to help people suffering imbalanced levels of violence make you have to play this game. I highly recommend learning the emotion/rumination cycle and how it impacts your health. You and a lot of lonely guys in this godforsaken post. I feel bad for women and men alike every time I subject myself to a moronic conversation like this.

My days of talking it out with incel-adjacent, self-insecure men who haven’t learned how to stop ruminating are kind of past me. I’ve done my time, I’ve helped my share of young dipshits become men who don’t feel insecure and persecuted knowing there are special considerations being made for anyone who isn’t them. I hope you meet someone and feel better about yourself.

Your offer of a better solution

I am not offering anything, I am explaining the reasoning for this law and laws like it, which a lot of people in this post seem to be having a hard time with.

is to charge the act of killing someone because of who they are or what they believe should be a hate crime.

I read this like, five times and and I don’t know what you’re saying.

If more men commit hate crimes against women than women committing hate crimes against men, then there will be more men charged with hate crimes than women.

And? This is indeed how cause and effect work. Unfortunately temporal anomalies haven’t been discovered that can change how things lead to other things.

People can easily trace out your profile.

I’m no longer convinced that universal privacy is necessarily a good thing when there are so many people deliberately working to sabotage nations, subvert social issues and create havoc and chaos for political purposes, as advance tactics for military invasions, and as ways to further the goals of corporations.

I think we should have privacy in our own spaces and an ability to not be hassled by others for being an individual with a real need to share information, but I cannot square that against the massive harm being done by people who are trying to make $10 a month creating arguments to make people hate each other in a country they will never have stake in.

I don’t have a better alternative or solution, but I know that it’s not so simple as anonymity is a universe good in the world. And it exists on a spectrum. I am far more concerned about a kid trying to get help understanding sexual health in private than some troglodyte on reddit who has 72 different accounts to argue with feminists to create the impression that he has a huge community behind him.

I am seeing an absolute ocean of butthurt men in this post, and not a single alternative, solution or idea for making a more just and fair world in the face of an imbalanced problem. Everyone treats this like some kind of logic puzzle. “Well we don’t do X when Y is a problem, why should we we treat THIS any different?” as if the world is based on some kind of symmetrical, blind logic system and all things are equal.

I used to moderate a large gender-related subreddit, it was a nightmare. If you ever want to lose all faith in humanity, have a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the really bad shit that gets removed right away.

The law isn’t symmetrical. Everything we do in every facet of society is responsive and proportional.

When there is an asymmetrical problem, we divert resources to addressing that problem in some attempt at making things more equal. It’s just that simple. I haven’t seen anyone offer a better solution or a reason for this attempt to make some small level of proportional response being a problem. Hate crime laws vary from region to region and by specific circumstances. Some parts of those laws address how crimes can be prosecuted, some how those crimes can be charged or punished. It’s besides the point. The point is, it’s laws addressing an imbalance.

I haven’t seen a valid argument in this entire post, just a lot of people who think that the law should apply evenly in all situations.

But nothing works that way. Everything we do in all facets of society are responsive and proportional.

I’m not seeing how anyone is being harmed by making it easier to prosecute men who commit violence against women when it’s a massively disproportionate problem. I’m not seeing a better alternative, I’m not seeing anything but a lot of guys in this post who are obviously hurt by this but can’t explain why. Maybe add value to the argument by making an argument and explaining why it bothers you.

You’re viewing law and order as symmetrical, it’s not like that. Nothing is like that, broadly as a global civilization we respond to imbalanced factors in order to preserve balance the best we can.

If an neighborhood is using more power than other neighborhoods, the power grid will be adjusted to compensate.

If you drink more juice than milk and you don’t want to run out of juice, you adjust your buying habits to buy more juice.

While some people probably have killed white people for their race, the problem here isn’t symmetrical, more white people have killed people of color for their race in most places than the reverse because of a complex historical context. The law, and all of society broadly, implements laws or other systems to balance imbalances. Hate crimes have been typically perpetuated by one group versus another. Gender-related crimes VASTLY dominate in one direction than the other, and I’m still not hearing a better solution for this fact from the standpoint of law and order.

Does this idea make you feel bad? Seriously, I’m wondering why this is being challenged without an offer of a better idea or solution.