So you’re not actually arguing that the IDF is not committing massive war crimes, you’re just saying you don’t care?

Are you claiming that all of Gaza is Hamas?

Are you referring to Method of Loci? I’ve experimented with it a bit. For a while I would do daily mental walk-throughs of the apartment I grew up in and I practiced visualizing symbols for the 10 digits. After a few months I was able to successfully remember some pretty long numbers. Ironically, I don’t remember how long they were. It wasn’t that useful though. It took me a really long time to “store” numbers; longer than it would to just write it down. I didn’t have a system for storing anything besides digits. Worst of all, the “memory space” was limited to the size of my old apartment. I was able to increase the space by adding detail to rooms but it was never enough to be practical for anything besides trivia. Strangely the repeated “walk-throughs” ended up bringing back memories of smells and textures that I hadn’t thought about in decades

I think I’m much better at remembering and imaging things that can be easily articulated. I recognize my wife with no problem but I can’t really summon a good mental image of her. We have a photo of the night we met. I can visualize details of the clothing and jewelry she was wearing but when I “look” at the image in my mind I can’t really see her face. It’s hard to describe. Almost like there’s an image with a tag that says “link to wife’s face here” without actually loading it. When I really concentrate on it I can wither get a really blurry image of her face, a really zoomed in image, or a sort of “line art” version of her face. I don’t have real prosopagnosia. I can recognize faces, it just takes many more exposures than it does for most people.

I used to do a lot of visualizing meditation. I can get myself to the point where I could imagine a different room all together (for meditation it was always the same fantasy “place” so that made it easier). When I was really into it I could change the perceived orientation of gravity. That is, when I was lying in bed I could sometimes complete the hallucination that I was standing in that “room”. That typically lasted only a few seconds but it was pretty wild.

This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I’ve always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I’ve never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don’t understand it at all it just seems natural.

When there’s a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It’s not that my memory is particularly good but I can “synthesize” shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.

With music it can be a bit distracting. I’ll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it’s incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I’ve never heard before. I can play that enough times to “drive out” the other one but not enough to “light up” the new one and I’m fine.

As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven’t found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.

As an aside, I’m also one of those people that’s terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone’s name and face within minutes of meeting them. I’ve started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I’m supposed to know and run through them every night. It’s a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I’m one of those people that never forgets a face.

Is that intended as a legal or moral position?

As far as I know, the law doesn’t care much if you make money off of IP violations. There are many cases of individuals getting hefty fines for both the personal use and free distribution of IP. I think if there is commercial use of IP the profits are forfeit to the IP holder. I’m not a lawyer though, so don’t bank on that.

There’s still the initial question too. At present, we let the courts decide if the usage, whether profitable or not, meets the standard of IP violation. Artists routinely take inspiration from one another and sometimes they take it too far. Why should we assume that AI automatically takes it too far and always meets the standard of IP violation?

Yes but there’s a threshold of how much you need to copy before it’s an IP violation.

Copying a single word is usually only enough if it’s a neologism.
Two matching words in a row usually isn’t enough either.
At some point it is enough though and it’s not clear what that point is.

On the other hand it can still be considered an IP violation if there are no exact word matches but it seems sufficiently similar.

Until now we’ve basically asked courts to step in and decide where the line should be on a case by case basis.

We never set the level of allowable copying to 0, we set it to “reasonable”. In theory it’s supposed to be at a level that’s sufficient to, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).

Why is it that with AI we take the extreme position of thinking that an AI that makes use of any information from humans should automatically be considered to be in violation of IP law?

Yeah. Even 6 year olds know their Lego houses will fall apart if they don’t interleave the bricks.

Forgive me. I’m old so I’m not up on the current vocab. I thought “woke” and “tankie” were opposite pejoratives. What is a “woke tankie”?

And more to my original question, what have they actually done that causes any problems? Even if these “woke tankies” have terrible ideas, who cares if they’re not actually causing any problems?

What have they actually done?

I’m all for defederating from instances that cause problems but all the quotes above basically seem to say, “I know you want a revolution but you still gotta follow the rules of whatever instance you’re posting on.”

It’s your server so your under no obligation to provide a reason for defederating beyond disagreeing with them but it leaves me wondering if there’s anything else or if it’s just a matter of disliking them?

If a cop just acts like some random “guy with a gun” who might shoot you at the slightest provocation they probably shouldn’t have a gun.
Or be a cop.
An honest cop should be keeping a close eye on that guy.

I’m not talking about any particular language.

Modern programming languages are as complex as natural languages. They have sophisticated and flexible grammars. They have huge vocabularies. They’re rich enough that individual projects will have a particular “style”. Programming languages tend to emphasize the imperative and the interrogative over the indicative but they’re all there.

Most programming languages have a few common elements:
Some way to remember things
Some way to repeat sets of instructions
Some way to tell the user what it’s done
Some way to make decisions (ie if X then do Y)

Programmers mix and match those and, depending on the skill of the people involved, end up with Shakespear, Bulwer-Lytton, or something in between.

The essence of programming is to arrange those elements into a configuration that does something useful for you. It’s going to be hard to know what kinds of useful things you can do if you’re completely fresh to the field.

Python and Javascript are great. The main reasons I wouldn’t recommend them for an absolute beginner is that it takes some time to set up and, even after that, there’s a bit of a curve before you can do something interesting.
If they go and change configuration settings in an app, they’re learning to manipulate variables.
If they click a “do this N times” they’ve learned to create a loop.
etc.

I’d actually start by playing around with the automation and customization functionality you already have. Learn to set email sorting filters, get some cool browser extensions and configure them, maybe even start by customizing your windows preferences or making some red stone stuff in Minecraft.

Computers are just tools. Programs are just stuff you tell a computer to do over and over again. All the fancy programming languages give you really good control over how you talk to a computer but I’d start with the computer equivalent of “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”

Insurance can work just fine for things like hurricanes. Insurance companies have several methods to address it. They’re all effectively variations of buying insurance policies themselves.

Re-insurance pools are a close analog. It’s basically a bunch of insurance companies from around the planet getting together and agreeing to pool risks. Big companies also use a bunch of funky financial instruments to simulate insurance.

There’s some risk of increased systemic correlation (eg climate change may increase the risk that major hurricanes hit multiple areas around the planet simultaneously). That’s largely mitigated in that we can see it coming. Climate change is pretty prominent in their models and they can adjust premiums or stop offering policies, over time.

The bigger risk is in synthetic systemic risk. It’s burned us a bunch of times already and it’s gonna do it again. Those giant global re-insurance pools are almost certainly fine, and worth the risk, if we just use them for their intended purpose. But history shows that we’ll end up creating derivatives contracts on them and those contracts will get leveraged. Those leveraged pools end up merging and turning into giant financial time bombs.

This is a difficult question. I try to focus on the article itself rather than the news site.

The first thing I look for is if they’re rambling. That’s probably not the best criterion but it’s so obvious. If an article doesn’t get to the point in the first few sentences it probably doesn’t have a point.

The second thing I look for is verification. I already know some stuff about the world. If know the article made some mistakes I’ll assume they’re making other mistakes. If they are correct about less well known facts I mentally bump up their reliability a bit.

If they make a statement about a fact I expect them to source it. If their source is some equivalent of “trust me bro” I’m getting out my salt shovel.

Beyond that I’ll look at the track record of the author and the publication. Do they consistently pass or fall short of the reliable news threshold? If so, I adjust my expectations.

The individual articles or statements come first though. I may have very little confidence in Fox and Friends or in Donald Trump but if they get on TV and make independently verifiable statements that check out then it’s true.

In terms of a simple rule that could be practically implemented. Maybe something like, the article must have independently verifiable sources for its claims. One corollary would be, if article A cites article B as a source, don’t post A, just post B directly.

It would be great if there could be some discussion of what exactly “diversity” means. It’s one of those words that people seem to assume is well defined but I can’t get anyone to define it.

I don’t know what the definition should be but I’ve seen variations that assume different definitions and I’m more comfortable with some than with others.

1. I have a friend who works at a bank. He bragged that his team was 100% diverse. When I asked him what that mean he said there were no white people on his team. Personally, this seems like a bad definition. I have trouble thinking of “diversity” as the removal of some group, even if that group is otherwise over-represented elsewhere. It also ignores any potential diversity around any other factors; either the traditional political factors such as gender or religion or any diversity of thought (do their analysts include both Frequentists and Baysians?)

2. Reddit mostly has users from the US. Should we consider a Lemmy community diverse if it represents the predominant views and voices of the US? If that’s the case the image above needs more white people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity

3. The world is a big place and anyone could join Lemmy. Should we consider a community diverse if it matches the demographics of the planet? In that case the image above has too many white people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Global_demographics

The above focuses on race but it’s more widely applicable. This community will most likely consists of mostly US citizens for the near future. If the community is firmly focused on US ideas it will be more about US opinion of the rest of the world than actual diversity. If it actually does include a globally diverse set of ideas it’s likely to get pretty uncomfortable for the majority of the people here.

Debt is likely less of an issue here. These are PhDs and they tend to be funded by grants. Students typically pay no tuition and get some stipend for expenses.

Of course, graduating debt free with a PhD in molecular biology from a top program is less exciting when you can’t land a single interview for a junior faculty role.

Industry may pay twice as much but if you love research and China offers you lab space, you’ll consider it.

I think it’s primarily two things.

China now graduates almost twice as many STEM PhDs as the US does. A lot of people move after their PhD but they tend to stay in country.

I also think, anecdotally, that new PhDs have a harder time finding a job here.

Overall China just seems to make more effort to attract scientists. They promise, and deliver, the two things scientists care about, funding and academic freedom.

There’s a bigger picture at play too. China has been making itself attractive for researchers in general. It’s not just Chinese scientists moving back. An increasing number of other scientists are choosing to work in China over the U.S.

In fields where China was pushing it earlier we’re starting to see the results already. There are several fields where a plurality of top tier publications come from China.

I’m not a lawyer and you should go talk to several. Most states have several ways to find lawyers. If you have any friends who are lawyers, describe this to them and ask if they can refer you to anyone. Every state in the US has a bar association. Their websites have search engines for all the lawyers licensed to practice in their state. Make appointments with a few of them. You don’t have to pay for the initial consultation. You explain the circumstances and they tell you what your legal options are and what it will cost you. Pick which ever one you want to work with (if any).

Talk to them about this but here’s my basic understanding of how it breaks down.

There are basically two avenues; criminal and civil.

In order for there to be a criminal prosecution, they would need to have broken some law and it needs to be bad enough that a government attorney is willing to spend their time going after it. There are a whole bunch of federal laws around phones and telecommunications. You’re probably familiar with a bunch of them from your IT work. Chances are pretty good that they broke some law. If you give the police your evidence they may care enough to go after it.

In order for there to be a civil suit, they need to have done something that harmed you, in a quantifiable way and they need to have done it in an illegal way. This does seem like their methods met the threshold. The harder part might be establishing harm. Feeling violated is hard to quantify, unless there’s some statutory compensation. If you can point at something like lost wages or lost economic opportunities it’s probably stronger.