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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I don’t support most of the crackdowns on the protests, but it’s silly to think that people are suddenly fascist for wanting state power to crack down on what they BELIEVE is antisemitism. If I believed that the protesters were doing it more out of weird racist shit than concern for Palestinians, I would want them out too. ESPECIALLY now.

    And before you say “well they should know better!” I mean sure, but not everyone has the luxury of spending tons of time analyzing every single piece of news, looking into multiple sources, reading the history of a middle east region the size of New Jersey, etc, etc. What makes it even harder is that Israel and Palestine are ultimately foreign countries, no matter how much of an alliance the U.S has with Isreal, it’s still a country in the middle East.

    Then there is the nuance, Hamas are still terrorists and Netanyahu even supported them until October 7th, Israelies were trying to actively get red of the guy until the 7th, the country was set up by the British have both sides fight and hate eachother forever, real antisemitism is rising all over the world and fascists are trying to take advantage of that and connect it to Israel-Palestine. Then Add media bias and how even video footage can be fake with AI and you have a basically completely out of control situation.



  • One thing I found really interesting and was talking about with someone recently about the Isreal-Palestine situation currently is that unlike with Apartheid South Africa people have a MUCH harder time boycotting corporations involved with Israel than they did during Apartheid, with Globalism many things (such as soap in the US) are basically owned by a few companies operating under multiple labels, so it’s extremely hard to tell if a product is linked to a Zionist company compared to the Apartheid protests where things were both more clearly labeled and also less monopolized.
    An example is: I’m pro-Ukraine. All my go-to soap brands are owned by Unilever, who are still active in Russia. I’m too poor to get handmade soaps from the farmers market, and I need to go scentless because of allergies and convenient because I can’t just spend all my time looking for guilt-free soap.
    So, in regards to Isreal. who does that leave for people to boycott? The US Government, which although tax evasion is a very harshly punished thing, is much more directly and obviously linked to Zionism.





  • After the SORA AI reveal today I’m starting to see that luddites have a point. I don’t think we’ll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I’ve seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I’ve seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.

    But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don’t even know how to use a phone. I don’t see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.


  • Yes of course China covered up COVID, however I believe that this actually probably is M. Pneumoniae as it’s famous for spreading in schools amongst children as well as already resistant to many antibiotics because it has no cell wall.
    My one concern is that this could secretly be a human to human form of avian influenza, but there is absolutely no hiding a disease with a mortality rate on par with Ebola (30-50% or 18-30%- as much as Spanish Flu or the black death) for very long at all. COVID has around a 1% mortality rate and there were people posting videos of people dying in the streets on Chinese social media, if it’s avian flue than there will be mass graves on an unheard of scale.





  • There are a few great Chinese single player games out there like amazing cultivation simulator, but they are all indie games. The Chinese government restricted how Steam works in China so I have no idea how indie Chinese games are getting out there, if at all.
    https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-china-launch/
    I played a little Genshin after it first released but was put off by the underage characters being portrayed sexually. The sad fact of the matter is that its a great game made with passion, and many Chinese games have a “”“lolicon”“” issue. I tried the game Mahjong soul after getting into Mahjong from Final Fantasy, and it has the same issue.
    And when I say “”“lolicon”“, I mean kids as young as 11-13, maybe even younger. it’s disgusting. Otakus seems to run the industry there as far as I can tell, or at least what makes it to the west because to know real stuff about Chinese culture you have to be at least kinda a weeb for Chinese stuff. I got into Xianxia from my love of manga which lead to Manhua. The Xianxia scene has a lot of problems but “”“lolicon””" hasn’t been one of them.
    TL;DR The chinese video game industry is run by otakus, at least for whats made it into the west. The worst part is that HoYoVerse WAS an indie developer whose motto was “by otakus, for otakus” they aren’t hiding what they are about, but unfortunately have become #1 for pandering to the lowest possible denominator



  • You’re right that such weapons could be made again but imho there is no reason to, conventional weapons are more precise, accurate, controllable, and deployable. Chemical and biological weapons are both at the mercy of mother nature and can easily turn on people, like how poison gas can literally just blow back on an army as it did many times in WWI. Nerve agents and things could get into the water supply of both armies, etc.
    Don’t even get me started on biological weapons which can literally evolve out of control in less than a blink of an eye. There is NO REASON to keep such things around or to make them. Politicians can talk about using WMDS as bargaining chips but it’s not really worth it or indeed logical to bargain with billions of lives and possibly even your own.
    It’s honestly very funny to me that so many people are worried about a robot revolution or skynet when we have weapons that could basically do the same thing already. They aren’t intelligent, but diseases are very quick to evolve and adapt to getting as many hosts as quickly as possible, yet we are still keeping such things around for some insane reason.




  • In biology we’ve been using machine learning for a long time now so the AI super hype out there is pretty funny to me. It’s for sure useful with stuff like predicting protein folding and analyzing genes and stuff, but it’s all hyper-specific stuff just like it has its always been. Good for removing tedium for sure as its the reason we can even know the human genome because it would take literally forever to sequence it without modern tech, which we did in the in the 90s and finished in 2003.
    My big hope is that all this hype will get people to invest in proteonomic technology which is 100% a great use case for AI and also the future.