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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Not rude at all. The original question is why certain people behave in a certain way.

    The first point addresses the direct reason why some voters would refuse to vote for Harris due to her stance on Israel. When people believe they are being harmed they tend to focus all their attention on the immediate harm. It’s not a logical choice but people don’t act logically in these circumstances.

    As an example of this, I’d offer our response to 9/11. The entire nation came together to pass the PATRIOT act and start a war in Afghanistan. There’s no logic in passing a bill that was so long that no one in congress could have read it before voting on it. It’s hard to argue for the logic of invading Afghanistan. There wasn’t really an objective (besides “get OBL”, who we later ended up assassinating in an other country) and in retrospect it’s certainly clear that it caused far more harm than good. But we were in an emotional state. The people watching their relatives getting bombed in Gaza are in a similarly emotional state.

    The second point addresses why Democrats attempts to convince them are failing so spectacularly. Getting someone to vote for your preferred candidate is an exercise in persuasion. Much has been written about the art of persuasion and “insult your audience,” isn’t generally a recommended technique. One counterexample is “pickup artists”. They theorize that by insulting or “negging” women they can motivate the woman to counter the insult by seeking the mans approval. While this does work on some small percentage of women, the vast majority are more motivated to find their mace.




  • It’s not just the sexual aspect that makes people uncomfortable.

    Many people view it as childish. Children are really into their stuffed animals and love playing dress up. There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying activities normally associated with children but other adults tend to look down on it.

    Some furries like to talk about their fursona as a spiritual extension of themselves. Many people associate that kind of language with crazy old hippies.




  • It’s otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.

    In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone’s work and produced something strikingly similar. That’s not what happened here.

    This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn’t about what the AI did it’s about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn’t copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can’t just remove the APL2.0 from some work it’s attached to.


  • It’s not deeply rigorous but it’s correct reasoning in principal.

    The scientific and statistical standard interpretation of the null hypothesis is that there’s no relationship between the variables in question. It’s up to the researcher to establish an evidence based argument that the null hypothesis should be rejected in favor of some alternative.

    When we “fail to reject” the null hypothesis, we haven’t proved it’s true, we just continue to assume it is until someone proves otherwise.

    In this case, the alternate hypothesis is that there’s a correlation between incarceration and crime rates and the null is that no such correlation exists.

    As of now, the bulk of the research has failed to find such a relationship https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=correlation+incarceration+crime&btnG=






  • Yeah. It confused me at first too.

    It’s not too bad when they use some word that we never use at all. I had no trouble figuring out what a “bellend” is.

    It’s more of an issue when they use a word differently.
    Me: “Yo blondie, that’s not how you’re supposed to wear condoms.”
    Nigel Covington III: “You git, I most certainly do wear rubbers on my feet.”



  • That’s one of many many plot holes in Harry Potter.

    There’s really no depth to the world building beyond, “What if British public schools taught magic?”

    It doesn’t make sense in any context beyond that because the author never considered it from any context beyond that. Whenever you run into some crazy crap in HP and wonder, “Why TF would anyone do it that way?” The answer is almost always, "Because that’s how they do it in British public schools.



  • There are already some games like that.

    Some games like Eve or Factorio have backstories that make it clear the player sucks. Capsuleers are immortal but the rest of the crew isn’t. The Factorio engineer lands on a strange planet, pollutes the hell out of it and kills the natives.

    Then there are games like KOTOR or Pathfinder:ROTW where the evil path has you make some pretty fscked up dialog decisions.


  • The visual qualities are exactly the point.

    If you wave around the constitution, it’s indistinguishable from some random bits of parchment. Most people can recognize their flag, even when it’s flapping around and next to similar flags. Humans are just very visual creatures.

    In either case, the pledge isn’t actually to the object itself but to the country represented by that object.

    The problem we have in the US is that Old Glory is commonly used to represent some particular group’s vision of what the US should be rather than a symbol of the country as a whole. When that sort of change is broadly positive, such as when it started to become a symbol of American ingenuity in space, it’s easy for everyone to rally behind. When it starts to symbolize a message like, “We should give the police unrestrained power.” it becomes more divisive.