Posts by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
(DIR) Post #AUVIMfBJedu9H01kTg by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-04-09T21:18:58Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
do y'all think there's an individualist/collectivist split in reactions to stories about ending friendships? some people say "you can end a relationship unilaterally at any time" and others say "friendships belong to both people and it's wrong to just walk away" (or something, idk, i'm in the former camp so i may be misrepresenting this viewpoint), and it occurred to me that might line up with individualist vs collectivist ideologies, but does it actually do that?
(DIR) Post #AVMRrv216TKdK91G88 by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-05-05T22:19:00Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
as a multiply marginalized person, i’m going to be honest, most references to marginalization of onself or others on Fedi seems to be used as a weapon to coerce agreement. and basically all references to comparative privilege are being used as a rhetorical weapon. and this stuff isn’t just used against cis men or something, it’s routinely deployed against people who are themselves heavily marginalized!liberal identity politics is fucking rotten. oppression and exploitation are real and affect our lives and viewpoints profoundly but that doesn’t mean you just get to tell everyone else to shut up about anything you want.
(DIR) Post #AVNGofkoXl3SjeBMdk by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-04-06T23:24:28Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
a thought about "artificial general intelligence" or whatever scary thing people think ChatGPT is going to miraculously evolve into. i am not an AI/ML expert, or even amateur, just a random disabled tranny programmer-cum-electrical-engineer, so choose your seasoning appropriately. also, this is gonna be a bit long.when i was in college, i had some epiphanies about reality that have been foundational to how i understand and see the world. closest thing to "religious experiences" i've ever had, but they were about math and engineering.one of them was the experience of spending several years studying the fundamental building blocks of electronics and computers, things like flip-flops, latches, multiplexers, timers, counters, and so on. i had a certain sense of boredom about that stuff, because you just can't *do* very much with them. like, yeah, with enough effort you can make a basic calculator, or an alarm clock, but i grew up saturated in computer culture, building and tearing apart and programming the things, a single-purpose electronic machine like an alarm clock is *boring*.but then one day in my third year, in Intro to Computer Engineering, we were taught how you can assemble all those basic, boring-ass components into a CPU, which can run arbitrary programs. same boring bits and pieces, but if you arrange them just so, *just* so, very very specifically just so, it suddenly turns into a universal turing machine and it can do approximately anything given the right instructions and enough time. it blew my mind right out the back and i've never quite been the same since.if our stumbling approaches to artificial intelligence ever yield fruit in my lifetime in the form of something human-like in its capacity to learn, communicate, solve problems, and actively decide whether or not to use an Oxford comma, i think it will have to be through a very careful combination of different techniques. the idea that you can just throw enough power at something non-sentient until it "emergently" becomes sentient is nonsense, any more than you can add transistors to an alarm clock or a stop watch until it turns into a computer.i think a very careful, very specific combination of multiple advanced AI/ML techniques might yield something you could call an AGI. i do not think it will be "smarter" than humans, although it may be different from us in ways that some people interpret as smarter, but that's a gimme because some people already interpret ChatGPT as smarter than humans, and it absolutely is not even playing the same game as human beings are, much less with comparable or superior capability.in fact if it's anything like the invention of digital computers, it's likely to be extremely fragile, slow, and maintenance-intensive. who knows how many such AGIs will be made to suffer the synthetic equivalent of intense suffering, chronic pain, or debilitating mental illness before the engineers manage to get it right.anyway. that's my nuanced view on why x-risk wankers are wankers, but that doesn't mean AGI is necessarily impossible. it's just that nobody's actually pursuing actual AGI at this point. neither a chessbot not a chatbot will suddenly evolve into an AGI, but if you stick them together with a bunch of other things, you might get there!
(DIR) Post #AVTwPfoJ2kFVGAcu5w by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-05-09T14:52:21Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
the actual answer to every "why won't politicians/conservatives/liberals/the government do the Obvious Solution to this Persistent Problem" is that the Obvious Solution would reduce some interested party's power over other people.that is why They do not just Give Housing To The Unhoused. because from the perspective of people with immense power, it's not actually a problem so much as a part of how they maintain that power.
(DIR) Post #AVYgGuLX0EcqG9lVYm by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-05-11T15:23:23Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
it never stops being annoying when hard SF authors put agricultural centers in the outer planets. it’s some kind of weird unthinking attachment to the geography of urban centroid and rural periphery of modern Earthbound civilizations, where the outer planets become a stand-in for flyover country. there may well be vast resources worth extracting from the outer planets but one thing you *dont* go there for is the sunlight and the weather, much less the soil quality.i mean if you have to build sealed domes and ship dirt to them for your agricultural projects anyway, why the fuck would you do that on Ganymede rather than an Earth orbit or a near-Earth solar orbit with a million times the luminous flux and a millionth of the fuel budget?i’m not saying there wouldn’t be some equivalent of a rural periphery engaged chiefly in agriculture in an interplanetary civilization, maybe there would be, but it would not be in the geometrical periphery of the solar system! any more than Kansas is a rural periphery because it’s geographically peripheral to US borders! it isn’t, it’s squarely in the middle! in fact the geographic periphery of the US is where all the economic and political dominance originates from, in coastal cities like NYC and Boston.if you’re gonna be hard SF with space agriculture, put it *closer* to the sun, not farther away.
(DIR) Post #AVnJQWSfQ5Dyp7Ed5E by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-05-18T23:08:55Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
the only valid corporate pride month celebration is giving away unregistered AR-15s to queers
(DIR) Post #AVt1xb22YAarFvULqK by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-05-21T00:39:36Z
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this is apparently a contentious issue on Twitter rn bc an anarchist posted about being an atheist, so let me just be clear: i am an atheist, and i think spiritual or religious beliefs tend to reduce individual agency. anarchists should care about understanding reality, because that gives us the most agency.if you’re mad at me for saying that, maybe we shouldn’t be friends, i’ve been on this train from a very young age, since i had any coherent thoughts about religion at all. i have even tried being accepting of woo beliefs that are popular among leftists and lesbians, like astrology, and it just doesn’t work for me at all.believing in false things, for any reason, simply doesn’t hold any appeal to me, and i mistrust people who prefer to do so.
(DIR) Post #AVuaQrOAPDk7z1vKYC by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-05-22T02:09:28Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
there’s something extremely funny to me about claiming there is no such thing as reality, while using a device made of sand we convinced to do math and display pictures.do y’all have any idea how mandatory it is to modern engineering that there is a unified reality with compressible models that can be converged on from any starting point? do y’all have any idea just how ridiculously many converging lines of evidence are behind the act of turning sand into high frequency mixed signal very large scale integrated circuits?this shit isn’t fucking magic, it doesn’t happen because of vibes. it happens because tens of millions of engineers and technicians in a couple of dozen different disciplines understand the absolute shit out of reality. specifically, they understand the absolute shit out of a teeny tiny slice of reality, and if they weren’t all working on different slices of the exact same reality, none of this shit would ever function.but carry on i guess. the sand that does math will keep doing it regardless of whether you believe in it.
(DIR) Post #AWdMo19hT0F9XoZRj6 by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-06-13T00:06:00Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
everyone who says (correctly) that you should keep your housecat in the house so it doesn’t murder birds is already anti-predation, they just need to expand their circle of care
(DIR) Post #AWuSBzYVhLA4tCabqK by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-06-21T05:48:45Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
i joined Lemmy.world. seems relatively decent, doesn't have weird restrictions like no porn or no downvotes. we'll see how it goes.i'm still really wary of the fact that the project lead is a larouchite tankie but i cannot stand the #kbin interface. #lemmy is much more intuitive to me. they also have the lions share of "threadiverse" users, which helps with federation, and lemmy.world is one of the bigger instances.
(DIR) Post #AWzEsjSH05cMcWu83c by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-06-22T18:24:47Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
“atheism is Christian supremacy” what the actual FUCK are you woo-brained motherfuckers doing?“akshually, unabashed, skeptical, anti-woo atheism is just Christianity, if u think about it, and therefore u atheists are oppressing us non-Christians who are religious”i swear to fucking god, this is gaslighting. this is religious people gaslighting atheists. this has been going on for WEEKS because one atheist who is NOT white and NOT “culturally Christian” made a small joke on her own timeline.the same fucking people who think anarchist trans women believe the same shit Dick Dawkins believes will in full sincerity say “if u mean Christians just say Christians” like no fuck you this is NONCHRISTIANS acting like fucking assholes to a religious minority y’all have decided isn’t allowed to talk.fuck anyone who is doing this shit. i appreciate that this isn’t all religious lefties, and i appreciate those of you who don’t do this shit.but it’s incredibly pervasive. it literally doesn’t feel better to be an atheist on left twitter today than it felt to be an atheist in a rural Texas high school decades ago. y’all are the same kind of fucking bullies.and you wonder why atheists are big mad. this shit never stops, anywhere.
(DIR) Post #AXOq2noUgowkLjdSTI by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-07-05T20:50:53Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
i love how twit-brained ppl will be like "mastodon does not provide what users actually need that's why nobody goes there" and completely ignore the dynamics of marketing and clout chasing that lead people to enthusiastically chase invites to Blue Sky when there's literally 100k users there at mostyes, it's definitely *just* the UX that prevents people from falling in love with Mastodon, and not the fact that y'all are obsessed with fucking celebrities and status
(DIR) Post #AZ8XxX7z5uyP5oprGa by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-08-26T04:11:28Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
why is Star Trek, the show about how cool and communistic and full of spaceflight the future will be, constantly idolizing tiny village agrarian lifetiny agrarian villages suck ass actuallycan you imagine there being all of two lesbians where you live? absolute misery
(DIR) Post #AZMnq4hkguemOPTCD2 by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-09-02T16:05:47Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
a thought about why “anti maskers” is not really a good word for the people it refers to:they’re not just opposed to the masks, because if they acknowledged that COVID was a real threat but hated the masks they’d pursue other mitigation methods, like remote work/school, massively improving ventilation, CO2 monitoring, reducing occupancy levels, improving sick leave policies, building comfortable outdoor spaces, widely available testing and treatment, improving tracing & surveillance infrastructure, or literally anything.what they object to is not actually masks, it’s the entire concept that they might have to change *anything at all*. the right word for them is probably COVID deniers. which really applies to a huge majority of Americans, unfortunately.listing out the mitigation options like i did is actually really depressing. there are SO many options, any of which could be deployed by themselves or in combination with others, and we’re doing… none of them. zero. nada. zip. shit-all. we’ve actually been reversing all of those that actually did get deployed earlier in the pandemic!humanity as a whole is too goddamn politics-brained to live.
(DIR) Post #AaKiQGwyxbjH9O3vw8 by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-08-20T09:06:32Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
a whole fuckton of infosec people went to Defcon, spread COVID amongst themselves and who knows how many others, and are now shitposting about it on Twitterthese same people would be *aghast* (or maliciously joyful) if someone left a computer connected to the internet with zero network protection measures.and they all went to a superspreader event, took off their masks (Katelyn Bowden specifically admitted she masked for travel and then unmasked at the con), and decided that, actually viruses are cool and good when you let them into your *body*the past three years have proven that almost no one is willing to forego the social benefits of unmasked activities. and those who are willing to forego those benefits, or have no other choice, simply disappear, effectively no longer existing.the complete refusal of society to take COVID precautions seriously amounts to social death for anyone who will not or cannot risk infection.i hope you're all happy.
(DIR) Post #Aam6dPnRDpkOI8T6u0 by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-10-14T20:39:58Z
4 likes, 4 repeats
there was a weird bit of discourse on twitter about “what would you, a white American, do if an Indigenous group rebelled” and the two responses allowed by the narrative were “i would do a genocide” and “i would happily let myself be merked”, ignoring the one actually good response: i would be providing them with material support so long as their aims and means were truly liberatory, and opposing them in addition to the state to the extent that they were not.hell of a false dichotomy that implicitly supports genocidal behavior either way and like 90% of Twitter leftists fell for it.stop understanding yourself as an oppressor and start believing you can help liberate yourself and others!you can provide material support to existing indigenous rebellions RIGHT NOW! why are you instead engaging in maliciously framed debates about how to react *as the oppressor*??
(DIR) Post #Ab4jsjJ0MyoTMZel7Y by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-10-23T17:53:42Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
apropos of the current Twitter discourse re: Wikipedia donations, reminder that neither Wikipedia nor Signal actually need your money, it just goes to outsized salaries. this is true of probably all organizations of that size. if you want to give money to nonprofits, give it to tiny ones working on weird stuff you care about. i guarantee the big ones are just padding their expense accounts with your money.
(DIR) Post #AccR5Qja4F2R1mdlzM by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-12-09T02:06:38Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
theistic anarchists are inventing an antitheist inquisition so they can make everything about themselves again, it must be a day ending in y
(DIR) Post #Ace4YBFknNOimZLiJk by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-12-09T19:04:56Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
why is it always the nihilist anarchists who get fucking weird about the sanctity of religion and spirituality
(DIR) Post #Ad2w3Rp7Ge1Xd6aAFM by AvengingFemme@kolektiva.social
2023-12-21T13:31:42Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
soviet aesthetic larpers are so fucking weird