FaceDeer
@FaceDeer@fedia.io
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 6 days ago:
Put them in jail. If you're in a position to execute someone, then you're in a position to imprison them. These are not supervillains who can break out of Arkham Asylum every time there needs to be a new round of villainy.
Would England have freed the United States without violence?
Why wouldn't it? It freed Canada.
Would Hitler have backed down from controlling Europe if you held a sign for long enough? How about Putin? Or Netanyahu? Or Pol Pot? Saddam Hussein? Hideki Tojo?
At these points you're in a state of active war with another country, execution is not an option. You need to fight the actual war at that point.
Afterwards, though, once you've won the war and have captured the leaders and war criminals and such? No need to execute them, the war has been won. Imprison them.
There are countless examples from history where meeting violent with violence is the only answer. They bring it. You either fight back or you die.
Those aren't the examples at issue, though. Unless you think a guillotine is a battlefield weapon?
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 6 days ago:
Stooping to their level ought to make things better, then.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 6 days ago:
If your execution equipment is wearing out from overuse then that raises further questions that a society should probably think about.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 1 week ago:
I've seen discussions about the future of automation where people speculate "what will rich people do with the general population when they're no longer necessary to keep industry running for them?"
Opening up the "let's just kill the people we don't like and don't want as part of society" box seems like a bad idea in a context like that.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 1 week ago:
If we're being actually realistic I think it's actually "tax the rich so that they are no longer so extremely rich, and use the resulting funds to benefit the general population."
There's no need for killing.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 1 week ago:
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 1 week ago:
so things last longer.
Sadism is a negative, not a positive.
- Comment on Why Conservatives Are Attacking ‘Wokepedia’ 1 week ago:
The risk I try to avoid with this sort of wording is the religious connotations of "belief." When people believe in a religion they generally do intend that to mean "with no chance I'm mistaken" so I don't want anyone to mistake me as having a religious belief in an objective reality. It's not like that.
- Comment on Why Conservatives Are Attacking ‘Wokepedia’ 1 week ago:
So do you believe in an objective reality, or not? You said a couple of opposite things there.
I don't think I did say opposite things. I don't believe in an objective reality because there's no way to prove it. But it does seem like a very useful concept, and well supported. I generally behave as if there is an objective reality and I'm not sure how I'd manage if there wasn't one.
It's the same as how one shouldn't say the "believe in" any particular scientific law, because it's always possible that evidence will come along later that disproves it. I suppose you could say I believe it's the best idea I know of, but I don't like getting that sloppy with terms like this when actually discussing the concept of "objective reality."
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 1 week ago:
My understanding is that this isn't quite how it is. Shareholders don't demand profits as much as they demand that their share value go up.
I read some time back that this is because of an unfortunate choice in tax law. Dividends are taxed as if they were income, but growth in share value is capital gains and so isn't taxed nearly as much. It does unfortunately make some sense, if share value repeatedly goes up and down I wouldn't want each "up" to be taxed as if you'd accumulated that much additional money. You'd have to be constantly selling shares to pay your taxes on them. But as a result, it means that when a company winds up making a profit and having a big pile of cash they need to decide what to do with, shareholders will usually prefer that the company invest that cash into making the company bigger and more valuable rather than simply giving it back to them as a dividend. So you get companies always trying to grow, because the shareholders demand it for reasons that make perfect sense to each one individually.
I'm not sure what a good solution to this is. Economics is one of those fields that seems simple on the surface but has a ton of gotchas hidden at every variable. It's a special case of game theory.
- Comment on Why Conservatives Are Attacking ‘Wokepedia’ 1 week ago:
That happened to Conservapedia too. It's a poster child for Poe's Law, none of the editors over there really knows whether any of the other editors are true believer lunatics or highly creative trolls making up nonsense in the style of true believer lunatics. For all we know the true believers are a minority at this point and the whole thing is mostly trolling, there's no way to tell it apart from genuine lunacy.
- Comment on Why Conservatives Are Attacking ‘Wokepedia’ 1 week ago:
Reminds me of various old sayings, such as: "The truth is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." And "if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
I don't necessarily believe in a purely objective reality, personally. I don't know for sure that there is some kind of platonic ideal structure of all things that exists apart from observers and always has and always will, it's a hard thing to figure out how to even start to prove. But there sure does seem like there is one, some kind of underlying pattern to reality that everyone who makes honest rigorous measurements seems to be measuring the same way. So if you just do straightforward science it seems like you automatically end up participating in a single common shared worldview.
Whereas if you just make shit up based on your beliefs, you end up with a worldview that's divergent from everyone else who's also making shit up based on their beliefs.
It gives an inherent advantage to the reality-based people. They end up working together and supporting each other even if they have absolutely no way to communicate with each other. Physicists doing experiments on opposite sides of the planet with no awareness of each other can produce results that, when they're later brought together, click into place as if the two of them had directly collaborated all their lives. It's awesome.
- Comment on True staple of the format 1 week ago:
Does it need to be repeated over and over, though? The answer is there.
- Comment on True staple of the format 1 week ago:
Funny to find comments like this in a thread whose root point is basically "don't be a dick to people in the comments."
- Comment on Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 1 week ago:
My hope is that they'll sell off all the smaller IPs to make money fast, hopefully setting some of the ones I like free.
- Comment on Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 3 weeks ago:
And why sometimes when a writer becomes immensely successful the quality of their output suffers - they become "too big to edit."
The Star Wars prequel trilogy is a case in point, IMO. Back on the original trilogy George Lucas had people who could tell him "no, that's a bad idea."
- Comment on Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 3 weeks ago:
You can tell the voices aren't right, the pictures are soulless, the prose is stilled and often self-contradictory.
And you can't tell when the voices do turn out right, the pictures are fine, and the prose works well.
This all reminds me a lot of how people railed against CGI in movies, claiming that CGI scenes or actors would always look "uncanny valley" and that they'd always be able to tell. Many people continue to claim that to this day, unaware of just how much CGI is in each frame that they don't recognize as CGI. Or worse, they look really hard for things to complain are bad CGI and end up accusing non-CGI shots of being CGI.
- Comment on Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 3 weeks ago:
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing,”
And screw those people who make a living washing dishes in restaurants or doing maid service in hotels, their jobs aren't special like mine are.
This headline could be so easily flipped on its head; "Clients rejoice as custom art becomes cheaper and more accessible for their projects." But we've put artists on a pedestal for so long that such views are incredibly unpopular, and so those headlines don't get the clicks and views like it get crushed out of social media.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 4 weeks ago:
Those places aren't public places, so of course I'd turn it off or leave.
If I was in public and someone told me to stop recording, I'd likely say "no." Hasn't that been a major point of pushback against police demanding that we not record them, for example?
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 4 weeks ago:
yeah, no, we still disagree.
Okay, then, we're in disagreement. But I'm still able to use it, so.
Call it creepy if you want, that's fine, that's your opinion. It's not infringing anyone's rights.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 4 weeks ago:
no one is saying you don't have "the right" to wear this
Okay, we're in agreement then.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 4 weeks ago:
But my comment about how people have the right to do things you personally disapprove of is even more pointful.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 4 weeks ago:
It's not universal. Where I live it's one-party consent.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 4 weeks ago:
Unfortunately we live in a world where people often have the right to do things that we personally disapprove of.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 4 weeks ago:
Well, don't use it then.
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 5 weeks ago:
Sure, but are any of these "don't worry guys I torrented a database dump, it's safe now" folks going to go to the trouble of actually doing that? They're not even downloading a full backup, just the current version.
You need to devote a lot of bandwidth to keeping continuously up to date with Wikipedia. There's only a few archives out there that are likely doing that, and of course Wikimedia Foundation and its international chapters themselves. Those are the ones who will provide the data needed to restart Wikipedia, if it actually comes to that.
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 5 weeks ago:
My point is that the alternative isn't "no solution", it's "the much better database dump from Internet Archive or Wikimedia Foundation or wherever, the one that a new Wikipedia instance actually would be spun up from, not the one that you downloaded months ago and stashed in your closet."
The fact that random people on the Internet have old copies of an incomplete, static copy of Wikipedia doesn't really help anything. The real work that would go into bringing back Wikipedia would be creating the new hosting infrastructure capable of handling it, not trying to scrounge up a database to put on it.
- Comment on Plot twist 5 weeks ago:
Force Lightning is a Sith technique, not a Jedi one. Unscientific!
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 5 weeks ago:
The problem with this solution is that it leaves out the most important part of Wikipedia of all; the editors. Wikipedia is a living document, constantly being updated and improved. Sure, you can preserve a fossil version of it. But if the site itself goes down then that fossil will lose value rapidly, and it's not even going to be useful for creating a new live site because it doesn't include the full history of articles (legally required under Wikipedia's license) and won't be the latest database dump from the moment that Wikipedia shut down.
- Comment on Automated Sextortion Spyware Takes Webcam Pics of Victims Watching Porn 5 weeks ago:
This is where having unusual fetishes pays off, so the software has no idea you're watching something "pornographic."