patatahooligan

@patatahooligan@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why doesn't phones numbers have a "DNS" servet so we can just type in words like we do with the internet?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.

  But that’s probably not necessary. You could install something on your phone that does phone number lookup and then just dials the number as normal. The service doesn’t need to be built into the old phone networks this way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you contradicting yourself later by conceding (flawed as it may be) it fit “a very minimal definition of democracy”?

  What part are you referring to? This?

  So if you mean democracy in a very literal and minimal sense, that the people have some sort of power through their vote, that’s technically still going on.

  Cause that not the same context. One is responding to the “100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players” claim and the other is talking about the USA political system as it exists right now. These are not just referring to different periods; but the former is not even asking whether democracy exists in the USA. It’s asking whether the US has a long tradition of fighting for democracy against its major enemies. That’s why I didn’t just mention just the lack of voting rights for minorities, but also stuff like violently interfering in other countries’ politics. The sentences seem inconsistent to you because you took out every bit of context.

  Do good, objective definitions vary by time & culture? Seems problematic.

  Yes they do vary. One could argue objective definitions don’t exist in the first place. It’s not problematic, it’s a good thing. If definitions didn’t vary by time, black people would still be slaves and women would not have the right to vote. It is our changing definition of who “the people” of a country are that changed the rights afforded to those people. And the fact that even the most fundamental words of the most minimal definition are not objective and unchanging is why you cannot come up with a single universally accepted definition. I mean, if you think you have one, why don’t you share it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know if there’s a meaningful way to treat that as a spectrum and to place political systems on it. I mostly pointed out the different definitions one might use so that people wouldn’t read my examples of rights violations and think “what’s that got to do with democracy?”.

  Also, there’s no ancient Greek democracy. Greece was a bunch of city-states, each with its own political system. I know that in Athenian democracy there were slaves, and as you would image they didn’t get a vote. Neither did the women. If it existed today it would probably not even be called a democracy by western standards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.

  “100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy”? That’s not even true in a very minimal definition of democracy, let alone if we also mean equal rights for all. Just off the top of my head:

  The vote of racial minorities was not protected before 1965.

  COINTELPRO was a thing just over 50 years ago, targeting whatever political group was considered undesirable by the FBI. The FBI was found to be using unlawful surveillance targeting protesters for the inexcusable killing of a black man by police as recently as five years ago.

  Last election there was an attempt to overturn the election results. It’s not taken as seriously as it should have because it failed, but it was literally an attempt to overthrow democracy. It’s important to note that Trump was allowed to run for president and the case against him was dropped as soon as he got elected. I’m pointing it out because the system was already there to protect him and it’s not something that he caused through his own actions as president.

  There are so many unwarranted invasions of other countries, assassinations, and human rights violations that I don’t even know where to link to as a starting point.

  Don’t forget the [large scale surveillance] both within and without the country.

  And then there’s all the undemocratic qualities of unregulated free market capitalism. Politicians are lobbied. News outlets belong to wealthy individuals who often have other businesses as well. Social media too. Technically, you get to cast a vote that is equal to everybody else’s. But your decision is based on false data, and your representative is massively incentivized to lie to you and enact policies that server their lobbyists and wealthy friends instead. Do we all really have equal power?

  So if you mean democracy in a very literal and minimal sense, that the people have some sort of power through their vote, that’s technically still going on. If you mean in it a more general sense, where people have fundamental rights that are always protected regardless of race or other characteristics, and where power is not unfairly distributed between individuals and racial groups, then again not much has changed. Because that was never the case. If you think fascism was universally condemned then you just hadn’t realized how widespread and normalized it always was. Maybe fascism is growing. Maybe it’s becoming more blatant. But it was always there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine you were asked to start speaking a new language, eg Chinese. Your brain happens to work quite differently to the rest of us. You have immense capabilities for memorization and computation but not much else. You can’t really learn Chinese with this kind of mind, but you have an idea that plays right into your strengths. You will listen to millions of conversations by real Chinese speakers and mimic their patterns. You make notes like “when one person says A, the most common response by the other person is B”, or “most often after someone says X, they follow it up with Y”. So you go into conversations with Chinese speakers and just perform these patterns. It’s all just sounds to you. You don’t recognize words and you can’t even tell from context what’s happening. If you do that well enough you are technically speaking Chinese but you will never have any intent or understanding behind what you say. That’s basically LLMs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm at a roulette table. I only bet on red. When I lose I triple my bet, when I win I restart. Is this a roulette strategy?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  So help me out here, what am I missing?

  You’re forgetting that not all outcomes are equal. You’re just comparing the probability of winning vs the probability of losing. But when you lose you lose much bigger. If you calculate the expected outcome you will find that it is negative by design. Intuitively, that means that if you do this strategy, the one time you will lose will cost you more than the money you made all the other times where you won.

  I’ll give you a short example so that we can calculate the probabilities relatively easily. We make the following assumptions:

  • You have $13, which means you can only make 3 bets: $1, $3, $9
  • The roulette has a single 0. This is the best case scenario. So there are 37 numbers and only 18 of them are red This gives red a 18/37 to win. The zero is why the math always works out in the casino’s favor
  • You will play until you win once or until you lose all your money.

  So how do we calculate the expected outcome? These outcomes are mutually exclusive, so if we can define the (expected gain * probability) of each one, we can sum them together. So let’s see what the outcomes are:

  • You win on the first bet. Gain: $1. Probability: 18/37.
  • You win on the second bet. Gain: $2. Probability: 19/37 * 18/37 (lose once, then win once).
  • You win on the third bet. Gain: $4. Probability: (19/37) ^ 2 * 18/37 (lose twice, then win once).
  • You lose all three bets. Gain: -$13. Probability: (19/37) ^ 3 (lose three times).

  So the expected outcome for you is:

  $1 * (18/37) + 2 * (19/37 * 18/37) + … = -$0.1328…

  So you lose a bit more than $0.13 on average. Notice how the probabilities of winning $1 or $2 are much higher than the probability of losing $13, but the amount you lose is much bigger.

  Others have mentioned betting limits as a reason you can’t do this. That’s wrong. There is no winning strategy. The casino always wins given enough bets. Betting limits just keep the short-term losses under control, making the business more predictable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the Israel thing going on?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  prageru is a known disinformation platform. That link is worthless.

  The ongoing war in Gaza, is HAMAS against Israel.

  And what about the Palestinian lands that are occupied and the Palestinians that were uprooted from there? What about the Palestinians that have been killed by Israel? The recent events might have been HAMAS, but historically this is a Palestine-Israel conflict. If you can’t be bothered to learn and understand the context, why comment at all?