• School is where the passion for learning goes to die and the desire to cheat is born

    In this day and age, hobbies are the last bastions of passion and curiosity. One who is engaged in a hobby is intrinsically motivated to learn and apply what has been learned in novel ways, just as the scholars of old have done. School, reviled by many a student, has earned its reputation by perverting the concept of learning and exploiting students’ passions. The desire to cheat is most unnatural among students, a telltale sign that one’s passion and curiosity for the topic at hand has been extinguished, replaced with a desire to rid oneself of a burden, the burden of learning only for the sake of becoming learned.

  • Markdown is trash. It almost always comes in a fork that is naturally incompatible with other forks & never has the features you need for blogging or technical writing (leading to abuse of the limited features, unsemantic markup output, and/or embedding HTML which is both ugly & also ruining portability to non-HTML targets). This leaves you locked into some specific tool’s forked implementation & never looks good in other contexts. Markdown was also never the only or best option for lightweight markup at any time.

    • Downvotes here showing it’s controversial, but I am willing to bet these folk have never given AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, & LaTeX a spin in comparison (for ‘real world’ documentation, etc. with multiple output targets) to actually know what they are talking about 😅

      • They are mostly known for having smashed machines and been terrified of technology. That’s where the parallel here lies, and what the term has come to mean. Whether they had good reasons back then is irrelevant, the anti-ai bunch don’t have now.

        • I drew out the luddite parallel deliberately: artists likely do not mind AI tools if they are credited and compensated for their work, but they receive no residuals nor credit whenever their work is used so using the tools amount to their theft.

          • No it doesn’t. It’s not theft by any reasonable definition of the word. No images are stored, no artwork is used directly to create other artwork. It’;s just not, that’s not how latent diffusion works. That’s one of most commonly repeated pieces of bullshit which has been refuted so often you would have thought it’d have got through a few of your thick skulls by now.

            • (thanks for the insult, stay classy) so the network training stage was pulled out of thin air then? Huh, I didn’t know these models could self-bootstrap themselves out of nothing.
              I guess inverting models to do a tracing attack is impossible. Huh.

              • The insult is justified because you are spouting bollocks. Again. You CANNOT pull any of the training images out of a latent diffusion model, it is simply impossible because they are NOT THERE and if someone says they did they are either lying or spent a fuck of a lot of time and energy on making it look like they did. Either way they are trying to con you. Also the training thing - it’s no different to art inspiring human artists except the neural network in the computer is a lot simpler. It’s a new medium being used by humans, by artists, to create art. That’s all it is.

                I don’t have the time or energy to explain any more of this to you. Again. Learn how something works before you comment again. Or just shut the fuck up for good. That works too.

                • (nice ad hominem) Christ. When you reduce a high dimensional object into an embedded space, yes you keep only the first N features, but those N features are the most variable, and the loadings they contain can be used to map back to (a very good) approximation of the source images. It’s akin to reverse engineering a very lossy compression to something that (very strongly) resembles the source image (otherwise feature extraction wouldn’t be useful), and it’s entirely doable.

  •  Vanth   ( @Vanth@reddthat.com ) 
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    553 days ago

    I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don’t like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.

    I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I’m waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn’t happen, I guess I’m not really welcome in that group anymore and I’m ok with that.

    There are no trans people in this group. I’m not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It’s stupid. It’s tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren’t asshats about it.

    Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.

    • While I do agree that unity is the way to go in the fight for rights, I can understand why one would want to separate the T from the LGB. It’s an issue of consistency - L, G, and B all describe sexuality, while T describes gender. The two are related, but ultimately separate concepts - one does not inform the other, and grouping them can hypothetically lead ignorant people to think that they are directly related, which could hypothetically lead to non-straight cisfolk experiencing more oppression than they would have otherwise experienced due to the perceived association with transfolk, as non-conforming sexuality is more generally accepted today than non-conforming gender.

      That being said, it’s all hypothetical, and what matters is the reality that people from all spectra of nonconformity are regularly oppressed, and in many places, the oppressors treat anyone LGBT+ with the same disdain. So grouping them is vital for the sake of the most oppressed.

  • It makes no sense to pronounce “jpeg” as “jay-peg” because the ‘P’ in Joint Photographic Experts Group clearly makes a sound like the ‘F’ does in ‘fell’. Saying it like “j-feg” is more correct.

  • Being born to narcissistic parents was extremely controversial in my childhood home. I was the selfish little ingrate in the house who kept asking for things even though they already provided a house and food most of the time, and that was very polarizing for my parents.

  • People considered woke often only focus on institutional racism and make every other form of racism seem unimportant, including those targeting so called “whites” / Europeans. (And I’m not trying to victimize perpetrators here, I’m aware of the current and historical situation in Western countries.)

    I see that institutional racism is a huge problem, especially in the West, but that doesn’t make any other form less important or significant.

    For comparison: just because in sub-saharan Africa people starve on a daily basis due to extreme poverty caused by Imperialism doesn’t mean that poverty inside industrial nations with less harsh effects is less of a problem, especially to the individual.

    • I’m curious what makes you say that. What evidence is there to support Marxism? Isn’t Marxism just communism? Just genuinely curious. I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history. Not trying to say I think Capitalism is perfect. I definitely agree that Capitalism that is unrestrained and companies that are allowed to reign free is bad for the common people.

      • I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history.

        The more accurate lesson would be that communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War; the countries didn’t just implode of their own accord. Now, it’s fair to criticize them for this, if you have an ideology all about material conditions and then you aren’t able to survive those conditions, you probably messed up, but I think that’s a very different assertion from “communism doesn’t work”.