Gaywallet (they/it)

I’m gay

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  • 1.75K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • The 3D medium had some fantastic art. There were a lot of gimmicks in movies you’d expect, like harold and kumar go to whitecastle (not meant to be a serious movie). But there were also fantastic shots and art direction such as in tron: legacy and prometheus, where 3D provided a much deeper feel of space and made certain shots that much more emotionally resonant and beautiful.

    There were a lot more misses than wins, as most directors saw it as a gimmick, but not everyone did. The folks who thought carefully about how extra dimensions would affect a shot (even when it was done in post rather than shot on 3D cameras) made some wonderful art, and it’s a shame so many folks missed out on it because they weren’t able to see past it as a gimmick either.



  • The quantity of disinformation is irrelevant if people don’t fall for it

    I don’t know about you, but I find it increasingly difficult to find unbiased takes and find myself spending more time digging than I previously did. Because of this I find myself increasingly mislead about things, because the real truth might be so obscured that I need to find an actual academic to parse what information is out there and separate primary source from other mislead individuals.

    Not to say I don’t disagree with your point, I think you make a fair one, but I do believe that the quantity of disinformation is absolutely relevant, especially in an age where not only anyone can share their misinformed belief online, but one where this is increasingly happening by malicious actors as well as AI.




  • Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a way to solve everything. But an authoritative body can build credibility and hold onto it. People should still be skeptical and still review, but that’s a normal part of the scientific process. Knowing what’s more and less credible is a normal process of research, and learning to assess credibility is important too. Peer review doesn’t need to be torn down as a concept, it just needs to be taken with a healthy grain of salt, like all processes. This is part of why I mentioned how some journals are more reputable than others - it’s a reflection of how often their peer review misses important things, not a reflection of how bullet-proof their science is. Everyone makes mistakes, the goal should always be to make less.

    Also, to be clear, I’m talking about the post-research and pre-publish step, not the pre-research proposal step - that form of peer review can fuck right off.

    Also of great importance which I should have probably highlighted in my initial post - this is really dependent on the field itself. In medicine people put in effort for that kind of review. I’ve peer reviewed quite a few papers and I’ve received really good advice from peer reviewers on some of the papers I’m on. Certainly this can happen in environments where this kind of review isn’t necessary, but the institutions that exist do make it a lot easier. An open source self-hosted model would make it really hard to get an idea of how many eyes were on a particular paper, and would make keeping up with continuing education difficult… of course unless groups of people made their career reviewing everything that emerges and putting together summaries or otherwise helping to sift through the noise.


  • In certain fields, at least, there are important steps these papers provide such as screening and review that are simply not feasible through as self-hosted. People who understand what the paper is about and can sniff out bullshit - be it cooked numbers, incorrect figures, improper citations, etc. are an important part of the process. Heck, even among academic papers out there, some are much lower ‘quality’ than others in that they are frequently bought off or have poor review processes allowing fluff and bad science to get through.

    With all that being said, scihub is a thing and even paid journals are often easily pirated.



  • Kids have been doing idiotic shit to themselves since the dawn of time. Tik tok or youtube didn’t cause this.

    It’s not about who caused it, it’s about responsibility. The responsibility for making it easy to spread, amplifying the message. Kids in your class is very different from millions of viewers. Even in grade school there’s a chance an adult might see it and stop it from happening or educating the children.

    Ultimately this is an issue of public health and of education. For such a huge company, a $10m fine is practically nothing, especially when they could train their own algorithm to not surface content like this. Or they could have moderation which removes potentially harmful content. Why are you going to bat for a huge company to not have responsibility for content which caused real harm?




  • There is stuff that’s hard to understand and or get the context right and then there’s the holocaust.

    Absolutely. It was a difficult comment to write, because I suspect I fall closer to your opinion than it may seem absent any context of what I’ve spoken on and I don’t want it to seem like I’m arguing in favor of being tolerant of the intolerant (we absolutely should not - punching Nazis is good and correct). The comment is more about how shades of gray do exist even if the stakes are high and our tolerance for these shades of gray should be fairly low.


  • On principle I want to agree with you, and I also think that there’s a point at which someone knows or has done enough that they have responsibility for their beliefs and actions.

    But at the same time, we have to recognize that there is propaganda, that people tell themselves lies to justify things which they then tell as lies to others, that folks sometimes are so busy scrambling to survive that they don’t have time to sit and think through their beliefs and actions. I do genuinely believe there are many folks that are mislead and that there’s a spectrum of how harmful and hateful your actions can be.

    If I think back to my own childhood, for example, there were periods of time where I held and parroted beliefs that were harmful- racist, sexist, and bigoted. I was privileged enough to have time, space, and resources to evaluate these ideas and realize their harm and change my behavior. But there was a period in time where some of these beliefs, if shared online, would have had people rightfully upset. I think there are folks out there who might be accused of sympathizing with bigotry on specific issues because they don’t know any better and I think there are folks out there who need to take responsibility for the bigotry they are causing and have clearly crossed over into being bigoted from being just a sympathizer.

    Elon has clearly crossed that line, long ago. There’s certainly responsibility that comes along with action- devoting resources and spreading hateful speech on a global scale with a platform has real consequences and he deserves all the hate he is receiving. But I do think there are folks out there who haven’t crossed over that line quite yet and that there’s a gray area which some folks exist in where they aren’t causing enough damage or harm where one could be called a sympathizer due to their uneducated, ignorant, or unquestioned beliefs.












  • Just wanted to chime in and thank you for providing a valid critique and reality check for folks. No matter what we do as admins and moderators, humans are gonna human (myself included) and we should be realistic about what this space can and cannot be.

    I personally never envisioned this place as being a be-all end-all solution to the problem with social media, just one attempt (among many) to find ways to do it a little bit healthier. Building on the shoulders of giants and all - maybe some of our principles will make it into another healthy platform in the future.

    With that being said, I do want to be clear that if you ever have a critique or would like to report things that aren’t working on this instance, please speak up about it! We can only act on information that is surfaced to us and we want to do our best to curate the best space we possibly can in our little corner of the internet and fediverse.

    This is also as good a time as any to remind our newcomers, such as @kimagurevenus@beehaw.org, to go read through our docs when you’ve got a minute. Of particular note the core principles outline most of what kind of community we’re trying to provide a space for and how we expect people to act on our instance.