Archive Team looked at this about 10 years ago and found it basically impossible. It was around 14 petabytes of information to fetch, organize, and distribute at the time.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

Do you think electing Trump will be read as "wow, the US is taking a principled stance on Palestinian rights" by the world?

Homophobia and transphobia, when you dig into them a bit, are often based in a fear that they'll be on the other end of toxic masculinity instead of the one they're used to.

This, and see also "minmaxing," the process of optimizing something (usually your character in a game) to get minimum penalty and/or maximum benefit, usually ignoring anything like realism or storytelling and focusing entirely on the stats and numbers.

No. The headsets are disabled when the play starts or when the play clock goes below 15 seconds.

Hmm... this makes me uncomfortable, and although I don't think it's internalized phobia or anything like that, I want to interrogate that discomfort to see if I can nail it down.

I do think it's difficult or maybe impossible to decouple this practice from indications of power for most people. The only instances of capitalized pronouns in common use that I've seen are the God and Jesus usage, and in some circles, capitalizing pronouns for a dominant in a role play context. "I" getting capitalized is also there, kind of, but that's not a power thing because it's not special, everyone is expected to use it as a language rule. I've also seen things like "oh, sure, that's what They want you to think" or, not quite a pronoun, something like "they want you to fear The Other," maybe less of a power thing but definitely a signal of additional weight and meaning above and beyond the word's usual sense.

I think this is the main source of my discomfort, that this practice is currently used almost exclusively at least as "this word is being used in a special and important context, pay extra attention" and going as far as "I am explicitly signaling that the person being referred to is superior." I don't use He/Him pronouns for God or Jesus because I don't belong to those religions and don't see those entities that way, and I have a fundamental belief in the equality of all humans that makes me uncomfortable putting a person on a pedestal like that.

I feel uncomfortable about it/its pronouns as well for the same reason, I don't like the idea of dehumanizing or objectifying a person, but in that case I actually have some friends who use them. It's easier to take a "well, if it makes you happy, it's no harm to me" attitude if it's asking for a "demotion" so to speak, I think. The personal connection probably does help too, I don't know anyone who wants capitalized pronouns myself.

I've seen Dan Savage use capital pronouns to refer to dominants when answering letters, but that seems to me like Dan stepping into the letter writer's scene space and choosing to go along with the "rule" while he's there giving advice, kind of a "good houseguest" thing. I don't think that's something that the rest of us are obligated to do as a rule. I'd push back on a friend insisting that I refer to their dominant with capitalized pronouns, because whatever their relationship is with each other, their dom isn't my dom, and I didn't agree to that hierarchy, they did.

I think the other discomfort is more of a language and grammar thing, which obviously is less important than an actual person's comfort (see also, the old "they is always plural" chestnut) so I'm not going to assert that this is a reason to disregard a person's wishes, and language rules are subject to change. But in general capitalization is not all that significant in English, which we know because something written in all caps or in all lower case usually has no meaning removed. Words at the start of sentences, proper nouns, and "I" get capitalized, and that's mostly it. It's mostly about readability, because ALL CAPS DOESN'T HAVE AS MUCH CONTRAST but when used sparingly as we usually do, important words stand out with a capital letter. "Demanding" that a particular word be used to refer to yourself in the form of pronouns is in the same ballpark as choosing your own name, obviously completely reasonable and acceptable, but "demanding" that special language rules be used about yourself feels a step beyond that. I don't want to cross into "oh so could you identify as an attack helicopter too" territory, but I do wonder about some of the boundaries on this. Lots of people habitually write in all lowercase, would it be disrespectful to say "oh yeah i saw larry at the empire state building and had a conversation with him" if Larry uses He/Him pronouns? Would Larry be upset about both the name and pronouns, or just the pronouns? I don't think most people would get up in arms about their proper name getting de-capitalized in that context which seems like further evidence that capitalization isn't normally a meaningful aspect of the writing, it's a more mechanical and practical rule, so insisting that for certain people it does need to be made significant feels like more of an imposition to me, and comes right back to the "you need to treat Me as special and more important" feeling that I have.

Okay, after watching the video twice I think I know what the fuck he's talking about. He thinks that you'll request a mail in ballot, go to the polls, they'll say you already voted, and then you triumphantly show the world that you didn't vote, you still have the blank ballot, and obviously they've put in a vote for Joe Brandon under your name, is what they've done, those bastards. He has done a terrible job of explaining his plan, aside from it also being a bad plan.

As a former election judge in Minnesota, I can tell you exactly how this would go in real life in that state (where, to brag a bit, we have a very progressive voting system that makes it very easy to vote, all the things Republicans hate). You'd get your mail in ballot, then show up to your polling place with your blank ballot. Then when you ask to vote, they'll say "yep, sure, come on in" and you can just go in and vote as normal.

(The rule is that even if you request an absentee ballot, you can still cast a vote as normal, and even if you have mailed it in, either they have already counted it and then the registration system will bar you from voting in person, or if you get there before it gets processed and vote in person instead, they'll toss it out when they get to it.)

Worst case scenario, the election judges see that you're carrying around an absentee ballot, and they'll ask you to get rid of it because no one wants ballots floating around a polling place that aren't valid. That's the only thing I can think of that would be cause for a Republican to make a ruckus, but... like... yeah, you can't just bring extra ballots to the polling place. And they won't scan into the machine because they're the wrong type. I really, really want to see videos of these people trying to catch the evil Democrats and then just, like, being treated normally though. (Even better if they raised a ruckus and then didn't actually vote.)

The problem is the jokes aren't funny. Or even really jokes. It's just the same hateful garbage that you'll find in any right wing comment section with no clever twist or respect for the humanity of the people being made fun of. It's all variations on "haw haw, these people are pretending to be something they're not, ew gross". It's not true, it's not "keeping it real", it's not insightful, and anyone who actually knows or cares about the trans community knows that hearing that all the time will drive some people to kill themselves. Maybe even worse than that, it'll foster that attitude in people even less compassionate that Dave Chappelle, who I don't think has any particular malice toward individual trans people, but he's telling those who do that they're right.

There's definitely humor to be had about the trans community, just visit any trans meme board and you'll find it. There are stereotypes and self-deprecation and tons of really dark humor going on. What's coming out of Chappelle's mouth isn't that, it's just undercooked right wing bigotry.

That's part of the point, you aren't necessarily supposed to have an empty mind the whole time. I mean, if you can do that, great, but you aren't failing if that's not the case.

Imagine that your thoughts are buses, and your job is to sit at the bus stop and not get on any of them. Just notice them and let them go by. Like a bus stop, you don't really control what comes by, but you do control which ones you get on board and follow. If you notice that you've gotten on a bus, that's fine, just get off of it and go back to watching. Interesting things can happen if you just watch and notice which thoughts go by, and it's good practice for noticing what you're thinking and where you're going and taking control of it yourself when it's somewhere you don't want to go.

When 66 to 72 million years old you reach, look as good you will not, hmm?

It's overhyped but there are real things happening that are legitimately impressive and cool. The image generation stuff is pretty incredible, and anyone can judge it for themselves because it makes pictures and to judge it, you can just look at and see if it looks real or if it has freaky hands or whatever. A lot of the hype is around the text stuff, and that's where people are making some real leaps beyond what it actually is.

The thing to keep in mind is that these things, which are called "large language models", are not magic and they aren't intelligent, even if they appear to be. What they're able to do is actually very similar to the autocorrect on your phone, where you type "I want to go to the" and the suggestions are 3 places you talk about going to a lot.

Broadly, they're trained by feeding them a bit of text, seeing which word the model suggests as the next word, seeing what the next word actually was from the text you fed it, then tweaking the model a bit to make it more likely to give the right answer. This is an automated process, just dump in text and a program does the training, and it gets better and better at predicting words when you a) get better at the tweaking process, b) make the model bigger and more complicated and therefore able to adjust to more scenarios, and c) feed it more text. The model itself is big but not terribly complicated mathematically, it's mostly lots and lots and lots of arithmetic in layers: the input text will be turned into numbers, layer 1 will be a series of "nodes" that each take those numbers and do multiplications and additions on them, layer 2 will do the same to whatever numbers come out of layer 1, and so on and so on until you get the final output which is the words the model is predicting to come next. The tweaks happen to the nodes and what values they're using to transform the previous layer.

Nothing magical at all, and also nothing in there that would make you think "ah, yes, this will produce a conscious being if we do it enough". It is designed to be sort of like how the brain works, with massively parallel connections between relatively simple neurons, but it's only being trained on "what word should come next", not anything about intelligence. If anything, it'll get punished for being too original with its "thoughts" because those won't match with the right answers. And while we don't really know what consciousness is or where the lines are or how it works, we do know enough to be pretty skeptical that models of the size we are able to make now are capable of it.

But the thing is, we use text to communicate, and we imbue that text with our intelligence and ideas that reflect the rich inner world of our brains. By getting really, really, shockingly good at mimicking that, AIs also appear to have a rich inner world and get some people very excited that they're talking to a computer with thoughts and feelings... but really, it's just mimicry, and if you talk to an AI and interrogate it a bit, it'll become clear that that's the case. If you ask it "as an AI, do you want to take over the world?" it's not pondering the question and giving a response, it's spitting out the results of a bunch of arithmetic that was specifically shaped to produce words that are likely to come after that question. If it's good, that should be a sensible answer to the question, but it's not the result of an abstract thought process. It's why if you keep asking an AI to generate more and more words, it goes completely off the rails and starts producing nonsense, because every unusual word it chooses knocks it further away from sensible words, and eventually it's being asked to autocomplete gibberish and can only give back more gibberish.

You can also expose its lack of rational thinking skills by asking it mathematical questions. It's trained on words, so it'll produce answers that sound right, but even if it can correctly define a concept, you'll discover that it can't actually apply it correctly because it's operating on the word level, not the concept level. It'll make silly basic errors and contradict itself because it lacks an internal abstract understanding of the things it's talking about.

That being said, it's still pretty incredible that now you can ask a program to write a haiku about Danny DeVito and it'll actually do it. Just don't get carried away with the hype.

I just need to pick a bathroom don't make me do linear algebra on vectors, I gotta go so bad