computational linguist more like bomputational bimgis

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Cake day: April 2nd, 2024

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  • Daniel Shaver?

    Bodycam video: https://youtu.be/VBUUx0jUKxc

    In August 2018, Brailsford was reinstated by the Mesa Police Department, staying for a further 42 days in what the department described as a “budget position”. The department agreed to reimburse Brailsford for medical expenses related to his post-traumatic stress disorder – the result of his shooting of Shaver and the resultant criminal trial. The reinstatement allowed Brailsford to apply for “accidental disability” experienced during the course of work. As a result, Brailsford was unanimously approved to be retired on medical grounds. Brailsford was also given a pension of $2,500 per month. The fact that Brailsford was ultimately medically retired instead of remaining fired was only revealed to the public in July 2019.

    He just fucking executed him in the hallway and walked over his body, and he gets rewarded?


  • The past participle of a verb is used as the passive participle (e.g. indicates the passive voice, where the patient of the verb is the subject and the agent is the indirect object). “She was killed” or “He was eaten” is in the passive voice, while “I died” or “I killed” is in the active voice. It’s normally supposed to be preceded by an auxiliary verb (in this case “be”), but news titles omit the copula among other things.








  • It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.

    That can’t be helped. Hard to explain well without knowing how much CS you’re familiar with, but basically in order to guarantee security/user safety you have to sandbox each tab (basically running an entirely separate container program for each tab which constantly checks for illegal memory access to prevent it from being exploited), all separately running their own interpreters for javascript/typescript, HTML, CSS, all of which are very resource intensive (mainly javascript/typescript). There’s not really any getting around this, no matter how well you design your browser.

    Now, theoretically, with the growing popularity/advances in WebAssembly, and increase in usage of frameworks/graphics APIs like WebGPU, you could completely get rid of that sandboxing and completely get rid of the extremely slow javascript and html/css, in favor of completely using safe, compiled Rust programs. There’s active research using versions of WASM which only accept completely safe code (mainly safe Rust code) so using memory bugs generated from user error to access data in different tabs becomes impossible (aside from potential unaddressed bugs in Rust itself obviously) and you don’t need to sandbox each tab – the program practically sandboxes itself. Then you could potentially have browsers with thousands of tabs perform perfectly fine, assuming each of the websites is programmed competently.

    But that’s not going to happen, because billions of users rely on HTML/CSS and JS, and it’s not pretty to transition away from. Getting rid of it would be like getting rid of pointy shoes, or getting rid of US Customary Units in the US, it’s just not happening no matter how much benefit it would bring to users. It’s not so much of a browser company issue as it is everyone ever would complain and potentially trillions of dollars of damage would be done. Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a “hello world” program in JS so there’s no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.


  • He said, specifically, people who already have it firmly established in their belief system that abortion is child murder will almost entirely be unswayed by data showing that the current bans aren’t effective enough at preventing abortion. They only see it as meaning “the current bans aren’t strict enough, and in order to prevent child murder, there needs to be a full nationwide ban”.

    These people aren’t just uneducated on biology and human reproduction (even though that applies to most of them). They for the most part understand that a fetus isn’t actually a person in the way a newborn/child is. But that doesn’t affect them because the belief is entirely emotional, not scientific – people have a fundamental, irrational moral belief that an unviable fetus is worth more than a living human being. How exactly do you prove that a fetus isn’t part of their vague and subjective concept of what a “person” is, if they already won’t take biological and psychological evidence as proof? And, following that, do you expect to be able to convince someone that child murder (in their eyes) isn’t bad?

    I get your reasoning that surrounding them with people who believe actually rational things, and who refuse to tolerate irrational beliefs like “abortion is child murder”, will pressure them to also start accepting those things, but that misses the point of what the person you’re replying to said. He said that data like the one in the post won’t change their mind – and, imo, it still applies when considering how it might affect the beliefs of others since it’s not a matter of effectiveness, rather a matter of emotion; a fundamental belief that parents and doctors who go through with abortions are child murderers and bad people. Mature people are just bound to eventually realize that abortion isn’t at all even close to comparable to murder, if they have basic knowledge of reproductive biology, and immature people are bound to stick with whatever beliefs they had since they were a child, most often anti-choice in a conservative society.

    It’s something that changes peoples’ minds on drugs, but not abortion. One of the most common insane things is conservative people going to a clinic to get an abortion (or get their kid an abortion), the same people who take part in and sometimes even organize the protests against places that offer abortion services, and get the abortion all while insulting the other people in the clinic and saying how they’re evil people who should be ashamed of themselves. They literally can’t see the hypocrisy in it, they have an ever-present belief that they’re the exception, that their abortion is the only moral abortion. Even when you confront them with the fact that many of the other people getting abortions have similar or the same reasons, they just have this innate visceral reaction to the fact that you’re comparing them (or their actions) to her (or her actions). Out of the dozens of cases of this I’ve heard of, only like 2 of them had someone that changed their mind eventually. And this is the absolute most extreme scenario that one could see an anti-choicer being confronted with in order to change their mind.


  • Well for the most part if we want to have a less context-dependent measure, with some caveats – “left” is advocates of a socialist (or communist if you wish to separate them) economic system and social equality, and “right” is advocates of a capitalist or fascist economic system and social hierarchy. Around the center would be where social democrats/capitalists who want strong social safety are, or in other words people who want a mixed-economy/regulated capitalism and are for the most part socially progressive.

    Also it’s hard to tell what you mean by “pure libs” but in most of the world that implies extremely free-market capitalist and pro-discrimination under the guise of “free speech” – very to the right. They’re usually called “libertarians” or “ancaps” in the US.

    If by “pure lib” you mean a principled American “liberal” then there’s not really much to differentiate that from a social democrat – in practice America’s liberal politicians are either social democrats, or corrupt politicians who suck up to corporate money and stand in the way of social democrats – the latter definitely not being centrists. Same goes for “social liberals”.

    Either way there is no chance that democratic socialists are as extremist as national conservatives. Democratic socialists are barely left of social democrats, so much so that social democrats label themselves democratic socialists all the time. The ideology is dependent upon reforming a fundamentally capitalistic system in an attempt to achieve socialism, while more lefty ideologies are focused on forcing the ruling/regressive capitalist class to comply (and some just outright skip to purging all the aristocracy who are anti-worker).

    An accurate-ish description may be “socialist” and “syndicalist” vaguely can be anywhere on the left, so 5.5 to 10; “communist” and similar adjectives like “ararcho-communist” encompass 9 to 10; “anarchist” contains ideologies between center and fully left, so 5 to 10 (although most anarchist ideology is very far to the left, a lot of them are communists); “democratic socialist” is 5.5 to 7; “social democrat” is 4.5 to 5.5; the American “left” is mostly anywhere between 4 and 6.5 nowadays, although a decade ago it’d be more like 3 to 4.5, with actual social democrats being considered fringe or “extremists”. US “conservativism” (or “conservatism”, pick your poison on the spelling) is pretty much entirely “sounds kinda like fascism” to “fascism” at this point, so 1.5 to 2.5, with some politicians in the faction maybe squeaking it out to 3 or 3.5. Full-blown Nazis are 1. Libertarians/classical liberals are harder to classify in this sort of system, as in practice they’re usually as right-wing and reggressive as American conservatives, but their ideology is theoretically supposed to be more like a 3.5. Ancaps are just straight up 1 to 2.5 though, a complete lack of law applying to corporations & companies in general, being anti-government funding except when it’s military or police (except some of the farthest right of them believe even those should be completely private). They’re on par with fascist in terms of the scale from left to right.

    Assuming decimals are out of the question, let’s just truncate everything higher than 5 and round up everything lower than 5.

    Generally, the American public (or rather, the white majority) hovers at 3 to 4, with younger people being more like 4 to 7.

    What’s fucked is most people think of prominent historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela as at a similar position in a political spectrum as American liberals, when in reality they were literally full-blown revolutionary socialists/marxists and belonged to communist organizations. And figures like Gandhi and Orwell were openly reformist socialists. I mean it’s intentional rightwashing by the government to get rid of any and all semblance of left ideology from now-near-legendary people, and it’s not surprising at all, but it’s still fucked. This is the framework of thinking Americans have when they try to categorize ideologies on a left-to-right spectrum; the most leftist historical figures they know that aren’t Stalin or Mao or something are all rightwashed into oblivion, portrayed to be liberal in the American sense, which tricks people into believing the farthest left you can go before you cross the centrist line is Bill Clinton or something.

    If we take “left or right” to “how far one acts to accelarate towards progressivism or regressivism”, though, then I could see your proposed comparison working decently, with the caveat being that democratic socialists wouldn’t be anywhere near communists in that regard either.




  • Trap is a slur, especially used often by weebs. Describing gender non-conforming characters who look feminine as “traps”, including many canonically non-binary and woman characters, is pretty fucked up when you think about it. To them, “traps” and genderqueer people in general are sex objects, not characters with respectable identities. Most of the weebs that throw that word around are also the ones to do trans erasure, like denying that a character is transgender or otherwise gender non-conforming, instead treating any character implied not to be AFAB as a man; and then often ironically going crazy defending it as “not gay” because that’d be bad – there’s a reason “traps aren’t gay” is a meme, and it’s an unironically defended position by these people. They convince themselves it’s not gay by reducing queer people & characters down to sex objects, things to masturbate to, rather than people. If you don’t see them as an equal person, it’s not gay or immoral, is how they process it. Obviously they won’t say that explicitly if you ask them though, they’ll just say it’s not gay because being attracted to things that look like women is straight or something.

    That’s why it’s used a shit ton in, you know, porn. Not just hentai, but actual real porn. Usually in place of “bitch”, “whore”, or some other word used to dehumanize women. They’re used in the same derogatory manner. It’s pretty disturbing when men use “bitch” or “whore” to refer to women and female characters, it’s dehumanizing. And it’d be pretty disturbing to well-adjusted people if someone described anyone feminine genderqueer as “a trap”, but this is a slur that weebs are fine using amongst themselves.

    This problem is made worse by the fact that generic animes started to play into this, that is, they created “trap” tropes (with a lot of objectified/token otokonoko or josoko characters popping up because weebs like it).

    You would think those people wouldn’t equate anime characters with real people, but this mentality transfers between fiction and nonfiction unfortunately. Often times the way you feel about character identities in media is representative of the way you feel about the identities of real people – just look at the backlash of the gamergate people about the woke “ruining games and movies” by putting minorities and women in them.

    Now, I’m not saying everyone who’s ever used the word “trap” is a bigot or anything. People use words without realizing the way others see it, and the impact it has. I used it in my weeb phase. But undeniably, “trap” is a derogatory word and a slur used to objectify queer people, and it always has been – it originated in 4channers & internet weirdos getting mad over trans people being at gaming events, posting pictures and labelling them “traps” (“they’re trying to trick you into thinking they’re a woman to trap you into having sex with them, when they’re really not a woman”). It’s no different than other slurs for queer people (like “fag” or “sodomite”). It’s harmful and shouldn’t be used. Persistence on using it shows a lack of respect for (or just plain ignorance of) genderqueer people and their identities.