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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

    There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

    At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

    The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War





  • I’ve been thinking about this exact question recently.

    My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn’t realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn’t really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn’t much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.

    None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn’t have been held accountable.

    History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.

    https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
    The world is watching.







  • 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.



  • I don’t think it would even have to go that far.

    It’s mostly that Harris needs to be able to present credible red lines. Right now, the perception is that Israel can get away with absolutely anything.

    Anything to break that perception it might be enough. A light version might be something like, “Every time X happens, we’ll delay weapons shipments by a week while we investigate.” That’s not much and it might not even change Israel’s behavior but I suspect that just articulating some policy and sticking to it would be sufficient.


  • In terms of her affect on the Green party, those numbers make it look like she’s fairly run-of-the-mill. Her first one was low and later on she posted numbers similar to more famous candidates.

    I did a quick search on where those candidates are and it seems that many of potential Green party candidates are in swing states. It also looks like many of them are specifically siding with them because of their stance on Gaza.

    That suggests that she’s just fine for the Greens and is likely even helping them. She’s a problem for Democrats because there’s an assumption that those voters would switch to the Democratic ticket if they don’t vote Green.


  • My question was more along the lines of the “(not so) the great (wo)man” hypothesis.

    Let’s imagine that Jill Stein was permanently abducted by aliens. What do we think would happen?

    Would the Green Party just collapse?
    Would the former member just join the Democrats?
    Would they start a new party?
    Or maybe someone new would take over who could do a better job?
    I think we’d likely just get someone who’s functionally equivalent.


  • Is she really responsible for the problems of the US Green party?

    As near as I can tell the EU Green parties had a different trajectory. They initially started winning seats in parliaments on purely environmental platforms. Those MPs actually started pushing green agendas in various parliaments. That, in turn led to more people voting for them. Eventually that had to adopt policy positions beyond the environment and they tended to be pretty left.

    The US never had Green party members in a position where they could actually do anything useful about the environment. That means they could never fulfill their primary goal in the US. So when they tried to branch out the same way the EU Green parties did, they just turned into a vague hodgepodge of leftists ideas.

    Is there any suggestion that Jill Stein’s replacement would have any chance of saving the US Green party?