• 4 Posts
  • 166 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Yeah. I hear you there. Problem I usually have is that the odds of an accusation tend to scale less with posting style in my experience and more with level of disagreement, or whether or not the poster has personally witnessed something. Basically, “I didn’t see this with my own two eyes/dislike you, so this is obviously bot behavior.” It’s a conspiracy theorist-like attitude, and it’s predated LLMs entirely.

    Nonetheless, I’m not happy that an entire new form of bot scrutiny has been introduced, and I absolutely cannot wait for GenAI/LLM hype to die the fuck down.













  • Yes, and? The money Gates makes from capital he owns comes from somewhere, and I firmly believe that it comes disproportionately from the poor, as that is how America tends to work. So for all he may or may not donate, that money is circulating right back to him. It’s like if a slumlord “donated” $200 to you right before rent was due. You might find it preferential to not getting a de facto $200 discount on rent that month, but he’s still a slumlord and nothing about the “donation” makes him ethical.

    As for being better than Musk, I really don’t care. “Better than a Nazi” is not a defense.




  • I understand why you’re frustrated, but you’ve got to realize that the presence of resources that can break you out of bad thinking doesn’t mean it’s easy to break out of bad thinking, nor does it absolve those who duped you into the bad thinking in the first place. Cults work for a reason.

    Just as an example, consider how hard it is to:

    • Find time to learn when you’re struggling to work enough to afford rent
    • Find a way to learn that works for you if you’re disabled
    • Consider your thinking to be in need of challenge when everyone you listen to tells you otherwise, and you trust them
    • Listen to opposing viewpoints when you have thorough hatred for the people telling you them

    This is just a smattering of ways a path out of broken thinking can be more fraught than it looks. There are plenty more, so even in cases where these specific ones don’t apply, that doesn’t mean the person in question is intentionally ignorant or malicious.

    If you’re angry, be angry. I don’t judge that whatsoever. I only ask that you be angry at the people deliberately trying to make everything worse, rather than the those who they’re tricking. Get mad at the influencers, not the audience.



  • I agree with your second paragraph, and find your third to be understandable (though I would contend that propaganda has been a problem for a long time now and wasn’t made meaningfully worse by tech, just different). Where I lose you completely though is this comment’s first statement.

    Neither of your other points stated here back up a lack of empathy. In fact, they counter it, as you’ve provided two far better things to get mad at. I hope you haven’t abandoned empathy because it didn’t change minds, because empathy isn’t supposed to be contingent on getting people to agree with you.