Schadrach

Especially since the most common sexuality just…wasn’t on the tier list at all. Not even marked as F tier or something.

That’s how men are measured, so equality I guess? Seriously though, note how much talk about men as a class is specifically about CEOs, Senators and the like who are far, far away from the average experience.

Has been at least since Occupy at the very latest, if not since Gloria Steinem was involved with the CIA.

and I became a vegetarian.

That’s just the estrogenization keeping itself active through phytoestrogens.

I don’t think pesticides or ultra processed foods make kids transgender.

Of course not. That requires being infected by a trans first - they work under vampire rules which is why we need to keep trans and children away from each other! /s

As civilization has progressed, we’ve done more and more writing and record keeping and done so an less and less durable media. From stone to clay to papyrus/parchment to paper to film to digital media.

I feel like there needs to be some kind of write once media that’s extremely durable and reasonably dense for digital data specifically for long term archival purposes. What’s the digital equivalent to carving something on a stone tablet, that a thousand years from now despite age and weathering could be dug up in a field somewhere and still hypothetically be at least mostly readable?

Better to compare it to gab than Facebook. Steam community supports and allows way worse shit than Facebook because they have no advertisers who will pull out if the site is crawling with Nazis.

As a general rule, Steam itself doesn’t moderate their forums - game forums are moderated by the dev/publisher or whoever they designate, and user communities are moderated by whoever runs that community or whoever they designate, barring content that is actually illegal in the US (like CP) which Steam will actually take action on. Steam will rarely moderate user profiles, but only if it’s extremely egregious.

How do those food stamps work anyways? Can you use them like money? I’m not American so it’s a foreign concept yo me.

You get an EBT debit card with an amount of money based on some calculations that can only be spent on certain things (in the case of SNAP aka food stamps, you can only spend that balance on food). WIC is another subsidized food program that sometimes gets included when talking about “food stamps” targeting people with small children, which has a more restrictive list on what you can buy with it.

Some of the guidelines have been painfully dumb, even if there was an intended logic to them - like “no hot food” where the goal was to disallow restaurant purchases and purchasing pre-cooked meals because they are generally a less efficient use of the funds, but led to dumb shit like Subway noting that they sell subs cold and so could hypothetically still sell, then just offer to toast the sub post-sale so that the division was meaningless.

Then you have the abuses of the program that really do need fixed, like stores that are well known to be willing to buy certain stock from just anyone, at a stupidly low price. The idea being that you go to Walmart or wherever and buy up a bunch of product that you can buy on SNAP, take it to the store and resell it at a massive loss to launder your SNAP funds into regular cash. In my area it was certain convenience stores that were known to buy certain brands of soda in cases of cans for much less than they could be bought through legitimate channels as a way of laundering SNAP funds.

Sorry, got my racist propaganda films that still show up in film school because they used revolutionary techniques in film making and are thus important pieces of cinematic history mixed up. The Birth of a Nation is the US one, Triumph of the Will is the Nazi one I was thinking of.

(and no I am not glorifying those monsters)

You don’t have to glorify their beliefs to admit they were fantastic at propaganda and aesthetics. Birth of a Nation was used in film schools for decades afterward for a reason and that reason wasn’t that film schools were all secretly run by Nazis.

and the stuff about apple seeds being dangerously poisonous is just some bullshit

The short version being that apple seeds are in fact poisonous, but you’d have to eat much more of them than you’d find in a single apple, and you’d have to break or crush the seeds in the process to release the poison. The dose makes the poison and all.

Don’t worry, Trump is working hard to bring it back! Make Waterways Burn Again!

In parallel to what Hawk wrote, AI image generation is similar. The idea is that through training you essentially produce an equation (really a bunch of weighted nodes, but functionally they boil down to a complicated equation) that can recognize a thing (say dogs), and can measure the likelihood any given image contains dogs.

If you run this equation backwards, it can take any image and show you how to make it look more like dogs. Do this for other categories of things. Now you ask for a dog lying in front of a doghouse chewing on a bone, it generates some white noise (think “snow” on an old TV) and ask the math to make it look maximally like a dog, doghouse, bone and chewing at the same time, possibly repeating a few times until the results don’t get much more dog, doghouse, bone or chewing on another pass, and that’s your generated image.

The reason they have trouble with things like hands is because we have pictures of all kinds of hands at all kinds of scales in all kinds of positions and the model doesn’t have actual hands to compare to, just thousands upon thousands of pictures that say they contain hands to try figure out what a hand even is from statistical analysis of examples.

LLMs do something similar, but with words. They have a huge number of examples of writing, many of them tagged with descriptors, and are essentially piecing together an equation for what language looks like from statistical analysis of examples. The technique used for LLMs will never be anything more than a sufficiently advanced Chinese Room, not without serious alterations. That however doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.

For example, one could hypothetically amass a bunch of anonymized medical imaging including confirmed diagnoses and a bunch of healthy imaging and train a machine learning model to identify signs of disease and put priority flags and notes about detected potential diseases on the images to help expedite treatment when needed. After it’s seen a few thousand times as many images as a real medical professional will see in their entire career it would even likely be more accurate than humans.