Youtube comments of clray123 (@clray123).

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  565. Yes, you wrote it, but your explanation makes no sense. If they were standing there wearing trunks or a towel, would anything be different about them being "out of shape, neglected, stinky, sweaty, standing in the aisle blocking the way"? I don't think so. So I guess you're making up excuses and the real reason is something else, which, like the topic of this video, indeed has to do with the "nude" aspect, which you find "uncivilized" or "disgusting", but you're not really telling why (except invoking the questionable and weak "it's always used to be like that / it's how things work among people" argument, which is the fallacy of begging the question). Given that you probably don't walk around nude yourself in the same context, and that you also invoked the "decency" issue before and also made allusions to public defecation, one has to wonder whether you find your own "private" parts disgusting, or what your actual psychological barrier is. So let me explain how it used to feel for me before I switched sides. I was indeed worried that the sight of my genitals would cause discomfort and awkwardness in other people. Because I knew from experience that when I was in presence of a nude dude myself (who apparently had no such thoughts about "exposing himself"), I was sort of worried about how to behave - do I look down on his genitals (which, because of novelty, sort of draw the eyes toward them)? But ain't that gay to look on someone else's dick? Or do I avoid looking on it in order to protect his privacy and underline my non-gayness? Is HE gay? Why is he not concerned? What are his intentions? Why is he not worried about making ME feel awkward? Is that a male domination attempt of sorts or what? From today's perspective, this was all overthinking based on my unfortunate upbringing and insecurity about my own body. Reality is: the dude is nude because it feels good to be nude. And I can look on whichever part of his body I please (just as he can look on me). His and my sexual preferences play no role whatsoever. Nobody is harmed, everybody is normally respectful, and behaves the same as if they were clothed. It's NO BIG DEAL. Unless you make it so in your head. But if you do wish to dictate what someone else should be wearing or not wearing to make you feel comfy... then perhaps you don't deserve that much respect after all for trying to limit other people's freedom? If you encounter an out of shape, neglected, stinky, sweaty dude standing in the aisle blocking the way, kindly ask him to move and make room for you. Regardless of what he's wearing.
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  574.  @joelcoll4034  Yes. As long as what's in the context window helps the learned function of weights and context window embeddings (which are derived from weights+input token embeddings) - whatever that function is - produce the correct final answer, those extra tokens serve their goal. The optimization goal of reinforcement learning is to produce the correct verifiable answer, not to produce a trajectory toward it which seems sensible to us (more precisely, we have no means of automatically checking that this trajectory is "sensible" because that already requires reasoning which we're trying to teach). But this is bad news because we would actually like that trajectory to be sensible, to ensure that the model mimicks human problem-solving behavior rather than some incidental stumbling on correct answers which happened to work on the training dataset. The story here is, the more we want the model to follow a certain path, the more constraints we have to add to the reward function. However, had we known how to specify the reward function in full bloody detail, we would not need to use RL in the first place. We would just be able to write down the algorithm which calculates the optimal value in old-fashioned way. So it's a hen-and-egg problem of sorts and generally bad news for any algorithms constructed via RL. The saving grace is that for some problems the RL-obtained solutions are much better than no solutions at all and also the only solutions we have (which doesn't mean they are optimal, correct, or even good enough for practical purposes, especially in safety-critical systems). Some hope is in that the models performance will gradually improve by means of self-correcting. There is some evidence that this self-improvement process works in limited domains (i.e. AlphaSolve). This automated (however slight) improvement is the holy grail of AI on which the success of failure of the entire field seems to depend.
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  852. +AK Manga Hinzu kommen noch: allgemeine Frustration, das Gefühl der Hilflosigkeit, der Eindruck, dass man durch die "offiziellen" Vertreter und Medien dreist angelogen und hintergangen wird, die Vorstellung, dass "Offensichtliches" gezielt manipuliert und unterdrückt wird, der Bedarf, die Schuld am eigenen Misslingen im Leben jemandem zuzuweisen, der Bedarf nach einfachsten Erklärungen für komplexe Sachverhalte, die Sehnsucht, sich selsbt stärker und zusammengehöriger mit den anderen zu fühlen, die "Tradition" und Einbildungen über "gute alte Zeiten"... All das wird prinzipiell durch sensationssüchtige Medien gefüttert und animiert - oft in perverser Form, z.B. indem man einseitige Reportagen produziert, die vermeintlich "Verständnis" für die gehasste Gruppe verbreiten sollen (sie erreichen aber durch den Präsentationsstil genau den umgekehrten Effekt, was den Medien sehr recht ist - sie möchten, dass die Zuschauer schimpfen und sich aufregen, da es die Einschaltquoten erhöht - gleicher Trick wie bei RealityTV, nur hier geht es um ernste Themen). Es entwickeln sich daraus gewisse Gruppendynamiken, die letzlich das Regieren der zerstrittenen Gruppen erleichtern - nach dem Prinzip "divide et impera". Kurz, der Hass ist eine kalkuliert hervorgerufene Reaktion in verängstigten, durch Medien dauernd gewaschenen fremdgesteuerten Hirnen. Steigt man aus der ganzen Medienkultur aus und fängt an individuell, statt als Gruppenmitglied, zu denken, so empfindet man auch keinen Hass, sondern eher Verwunderung und Resignation über seine Mitmenschen. Es gibt dann natürlich auch solche, die sich einfach darüber erfreuen, andere zu provozieren, sie hassen nicht wirklich, aber tun so als ob, weil sie neugierig auf die Gegenreaktionen sind (Trolle).
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  998. SNX Entertainment Once again, it's already a big mistake to talk about what "the [insert adjective] people" are like. This is disrespecting humanity by assuming that individuals cannot behave as such and form their own opinions, but rather must be a member of some group with their behavior dictated by their origin or (worse yet) by some superficial traits like skin color. Having watched quite a few of the videos, I don't see serpentza doing any of the things you accuse him of (a straw man fallacy). I just see him whining a lot (which seems to come natural to him) and also capitalizing on other people's interest in an "exotic" country and wish to have someone speak "with authority" about it. His channel seems to have a particular formula, but so do many other successful channels. I can see how this can get on the nerves of some, but you have to understand that in media business, the goal is to reach the broadest possible audience and to basically give them what they want to watch (this often includes playing into stereotypes). So it's only appropriate to separate someone's "media personality" or "character" from a real life person, which you seem not to grasp. On the other hand, some incidents that he describes (if true) do indicate that there's quite a few real people around him whose thinking is as primitive as yours - more than willing to gang up and lynch someone because of how they imagine the victim to be - largely on the very problematic foreigner/one-of-ours classification and false accusations (like yours).
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  1211. Your argument may have some merit when applied to the closest circle of family and friends, especially in earlier times where you (as individual) were highly dependent on such support, but it collapses outright when applied to an abstract and mostly externally imposed construct like "country". If you know any history, patriotism everywhere around the world is always hijacked to promote both aggression and war (or at least coercion of groups of people against other groups and rating interests of some people above others). I don't care what your personal "harmless" definition of the thing is. You are just whitewashing it, just like many people whitewash religions (all about morality and doing good, huh?). Sadly, in most circumstances, for most involved people, it turns into something ugly rather quickly. It's a slippery slope toward discrimination (on par with racism), and the best way to avoid this is to stay wary of it from the beginning and to abandon the concept altogether - in favor of a better, more modern, reasonable one which de-emphasizes differences instead of underhandedly promoting them. (Not to mention the sheer stupidity of being proud of something you didn't work for, like your heritage.) This abandonment of failed concepts has worked well for humanity with things such as slavery and colonialism, and time is nigh to eliminate the cover for xenophobia known as "patriotism", which seems to be spreading once again, and producing its usual rotten fruit around the world.
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  1375.  @mousethehuman7179  I doubt that the applicants would be happy to wait for decision inside their home country. After all, this would indicate that they are not really persecuted after all (because they can wait where they live for months). And there is already a process for that - it's called applying for a visa. The reason for deterring new arrivals is not mainly because "they're illegal, dangerous people" (although some are). There are two reasons: the first is the leeching off social systems - just in case they can't find suitable work, which is actually quite likely, given that many of them are unskilled, uneducated laborers - of which there is enough in the target country already. So they do not really bring much with them, but they create an immediate drain on local resources, which their previous generations have not earned. Unless we agree to dispose with social support systems entirely (of which I would be in favor), it is difficult to just open borders to everyone. The second reason, and this is much more critical, is the future development once you allow such mass immigration to take place. Given the demographics and the cultural incompatibility, these populations are going to eventually displace the native population of whichever Western country they emigrate to, which will give them political majorities and political power. They will then take care of their own people's interests (why wouldn't they?) and in turn create worse living conditions for the native populations of the target countries (as it has already happened in some African countries such as South Africa, Zimbabwe). So this is simply a pragmatic concern about increased competition for limited resources, between populations which do not understand nor like each other very much - if only for historical reasons, but these reasons, being historical, unfortunately cannot be made to disappear.
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  1443.  @ruialexandre6197  There you have it "the quality of studies was low overall". And yes, they are not recommending removing masks during surgery just because they have "always" been worn in this context. The unknown risk of changing such established procedures is not deemed worth the potential benefits (of not having to bother with the potentially useless masks). Finally, surgical masks are used to prevent bacterial infections of open wounds. They are not meant to protect against viruses. If a surgeon has a viral infection, they cancel the operation. They do not trust the mask because of lack of evidence in this context. Neither do people who handle viruses. They wear hazmat suits and plastic head shields. Such important decisions are not made on a "maybe it works" basis. Neither should be yours. As for N95, nobody really wears them in an everyday setting, so these are fairly irrelevant. Also, to be effective they require custom fitting to an individual's face. Again, nobody bothers with that for everyday masks. Finally, notice that what we are discussing is the exact opposite situation of the "should we cancel masks during surgery": introducing a new measure that is not known to work. Just as well you could demand that people wear some magical amulets. Those have not been tested either. Maybe they would work. The whole "mandatory mask without defining what a mask is" policy is a disaster. You can see the negative side effects every day, and it destroys trust in health authorities and invites people to break rules like nothing else. That's what you get by making up stuff, withholding information, and introducing fines instead of treating the public like intelligent, concerned people. (That is also why several countries have still not introduced these stupid laws - and have not suffered an increased wave of infections.)
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  1444.  @ruialexandre6197  "I think it's obvious" is not a valid argument. Aerosols can remain in the air for minutes/hours. Evidence from superspreader events (e.g. choir sessions in which one person has infected the entire group) suggest that aerosols, not droplet contact is how the virus spreads. I don't know of any data on minimum infectious dose of SARS CoV-2, but there is existing data on other viruses, which suggests that very minimal amounts are already infectious. Finally, there is ample evidence that masks in fact do induce people to reduce social distancing and engage in risky behaviors (such as speaking) - as was feared before they were introduced as a policy measure. In fact, their introduction was accompanied by bogus arguments such as "restart economy", "enjoy normal life again" - which of course mislead people and are completely contrary to the "social distancing" guideline. Coupled with the amount of aggression, conflict and everyday stress the masks cause, it is quite safe to say that they do more known harm to public health than the (unknown) benefit of stopping the coronavirus from spreading. In fact, some of the strictest mask-mandating countries like Argentina have seen no reduction in infections whatsoever. There is multiple reasons why mandatory masks, as a policy measure, are not working and most probably are worsening the situation. Technical details such as filtering efficiency of the materials being probably the least important - and the other far more crucial issues of adoption and side effects seem to not have been considered at all (or willfully ignored and then no longer examined such as the "induces risky behavior" story). There are signs of negligence in supporting the measure which is not working (and even calling for more of this same measure) instead of admitting that a huge policy mistake has been made.
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  1451. The authors of this documentary are totally clueless about economy and banking. The "banks create money" explanation is flawed in that they don't explain what happens if that "created out of nothing" loan goes bad and is not repaid by the borrower to the bank. Then the bank is left with a liability equal to the loan (not to the fraction they keep as reserve with the central bank). Basically fucking the shareholders because that liability doesn't just disappear into thin air. Hence, banks are NOT very eager to lend money to everyone left and right despite being able to "create" it and despite artificially low interest rates. This is all well documented and known and can be found out by anyone with the slightest amount of interest in the matter. It's also the exact reason why the whole quantitative easing by central banks took place - after the financial crisis private banks were simply refusing to make any loans otherwise, out of worry about their own bottom line. It's also well known what happens in economies that are unable to create money "out of thin air" (e.g. fully gold-backed) - the prospect of the fixed amount of money in presence of a potentially growing amount of goods and services gives people an incentive to save the money rather than spend it, leading to a deflationary spiral, causing the goods and services to disappear (or not appear in the first place). A little example is the bitcoin (or should I say shitcoin), which is hardly ever spent on anything, but rather speculatively hoarded (by morons) in hopes of being able to exchange it for more value later. I could go on and on about errors in this "documentary", but it's a waste of time.
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  1492. 1 - This is not relevant in many climates. 2 - Overheating - not an issue, that's what our sweat is for. Sunburn - solved by applying sun cream. Freezing - yes, obviously, you need to wear clothes when it's cold. It's a sad necessity, an act of desperation of sorts because of our living in hostile climates. 3 - Completely false. Actually, walking and running without shoes on hard surfaces makes you LESS prone to injury, strengthens the feet and ankle muscles, teaches proper running technique. 4 - Duh, get a backpack. Or better yet, get rid of the "important things" you "have to" carry. 5 - See 3, there won't be no falls or accidents if your muscles and nervous system are fit. By wearing clothes and shoes you are voluntarily turning yourself into a disabled person of sorts. Except for some dangerous occupations or adventures like crawling through jungle, no protection is needed from clothing (and with the jungle adventures you only need this clothing around the body parts sensitive to scratching, as evidenced by native tribes). 6 - Clothes for the most part do not keep us cleaner. If anything, they retain sweat and skin oils and make a better climate for microbes to thrive in. Ever considered why barefoot walkers don't get toe fungus unlike shoe wearers? Or why so many people suffer from acne and other skin irritations? As for being wounded, you need sterile bandages rather than dirty clothes over the wounds. One case in point is menstruating women, though, who need their padding in one form or another (even though the amount of menstruation also seems related to diet, so if you are bleeding buckets, maybe you have a different problem than need for clothing). Generally, as with veganism, nudism is a kind of rabbit hole. When you dive into it, you suddenly gain new insights into how strange the "normal" human world has become, in some subtle ways that you don't ever ponder while being part of it. You discover new, more satisfying, calmer ways of life, free from certain obligations that you took for granted before.
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  1507. UFO Night Kein Land ist wirklich sicher vor Terrorismus - es ist die Aufgabe der Geheimdienste/Polizei eines Landes, im öffentlichen Auftrag den Schutz dagegen zu gewähren. Selbst das ist aber unmöglich - ich könnte z.B. quasi von heute auf morgen beeinflusst durch irgendwelche Internetscheiße verrückt werden und plötzlich Menschen um mich herum umbringen. Dieses Thema hat aber kaum etwas mit dem Thema "Flüchtlinge" zu tun - die Tatsache, dass du die beiden Themen miteinander vermischst, deutet darauf hin, dass du dich bereits unter einem "Medieneinfluß" befindest. Was der IS vor allem möchte, ist dass man sich damit befasst und davon redet - wie jeder Terrorist. Medien agieren in diesem Sinne immer im Dienste des Terrors, denn jeder Anschlag und jeder dahinter stehende Scheißkerl werden immer ganz schön laut publiziert. Meinungen können heute natürlich alle und überall kundtun, ganz unabhängig davon, ob sie mit irgendwelchen Fakten/Zahlen hinterlegt sind, oder nur auf eigenen Vorstellungen und papageienartig wiederholten Vorurteilen basieren. Wir haben sozusagen einerseits die organisierte Medienpropaganda von oben und andererseits die "unabhängige" Einzelpropaganda von unten, die von meistens nicht besonders zahlreichen, dafür aber sehr laut schreienden Gruppen im Internet ausgestrahlt sind. Beide verdienen nicht unsere Aufmerksamkeit. Stattdessen: leben, weniger fremde und mehr eigene Gedanken denken, Gewalt und Unsinn ablehnen (wie auch immer sie verkleidet werden), cool bleiben und vor allem Mensch sein. Die medialen Ablenkungen haben einen Zweck, und meistens ist er einfach, dir auf eine mehr oder weniger getarnte Weise das Geld aus der Tasche zu ziehen. Gleiches gilt für Politik - sie hantiert mit diversen wirren und weisen Ideen, vertritt aber letztlich nur die lokalen (und globalen) wirtschaftlichen Interessen. Diese sind übrigens nicht dumm und lassen sich keinen IS in EU einrichten - alle Bürger sollen aber am besten ganz brav erschrocken sein und dann zur "Abwehr" härter arbeiten und tiefer in die Taschen greifen und den Wirtschaftskreislauf ankurbeln (und zwar ganz egal, ob sie "die abendländische Kultur" verteidigen oder sich "für die armen Flüchtlinge" einsetzen. Diese Technik, Bürger immer wieder zu erschrecken, funktioniert in Deutschland hervorragend, hat sich auch in der Finanzkrise bestens bewährt. Ich will sie auch nicht wirklich kritisieren, denn Deutschland geht es damit überaus gut.
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  1548. RAtargi A) What "dishonesty"? I think you're confusing the ability and readiness to adjust your own behavior toward others with "dishonesty" (which is withholding the truth with bad intentions). The two are not the same. To exaggerate a bit, it is not dishonest to withhold true information from someone who expects and requests to be lied to, typically for a good reason (usually an economic reason). B) You would be justified if those other non-social skills were really present to the extent of compensating for the lacking ones. However, reality is that if you're socially inept, you're probably also lacking in some other dimension. Why would you be able to reason correctly about, let's say natural or technical systems, but be unable to reason equally correctly about people? Social systems are systems, too, and they can be comprehended with the same method as others. Based on ideology or laziness, you may choose not to desire to comprehend them and not to "play along". But it's the same choice as someone who feels that they "hate maths" takes about not learning about it - in the end it's based on passive ignorance, not any sort of superior ability in another area. However, it's a bitter pill to swallow and most people choose to believe that if they suck at X they must be "above average" at Y. C) Not at all. D) Of course brains are not alike and there's no software involved. Some people have their neurons more interconnected and maybe firing at different rates than others. Finally, social skills are definitely useful in engineering. For one, engineering is creating artificial systems that fulfill some purpose. If you don't understand the purpose, you will generally fail as an engineer, unless someone else painstakingly specifies it for you (i.e. takes away a part of your job; but then you're not an engineer, you're a laborer). The purpose of artificial systems is always to serve someone's wants or needs - achieving that requires a social view. And of course engineering is seldom an individual effort - at the very least you will need to communicate with other engineers without your ideas and being misunderstood, which again requires social skills.
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  1549. RAtargi Once again, you are creating some false dichotomies, "honest" and "moral" engineering on the one side and "dishonest" and "manipulative" business (?) folks on the other side. I call bullshit on this because it paradoxically reeks of classifying people according to one's own whims - a very "social" behavior in your bad sense of the word (in-group, out-group etc.). You're correct that we use the word "social skill" differently. The examples you named (being entertaining at parties, ass-licking, engaging in back-stabbing and general douchebaggery) would not be called as being supported by "social skills" by most people, rather they would be qualified as lack of those skills (contrary to popular opinion, especially among the techies, people who have little integrity tend not to go very far). Your perception that someone's success is best explained by being a liar or a "yes man", also sounds much like a post-hoc rationalization based on a lack of deeper understanding of real factors at work. It's convenient because it also explains one's own shortcomings in terms of sacrifice. "I could have succeeded more, but for that I'd have to sacrifice my good character and integrity; my failure is in fact a sign of moral superiority." It's also convenient because it offloads cognitive stress. "These political things need not concern me because they are morally abhorrent; I should rather reject them whole and focus on other things." So I'm repeating myself: there is no contradiction between being good at engineering and good at business/politics. Honesty as a means of building trust is a useful trait in both areas. Recognition we attach to an individual is mostly based on the individual's ability to deliver on whatever they promised to others; in combination with the ability to make promises that are relatively high in comparison to those made by others. Conflicts of interest of course exist and must be recognized and handled at all times. You cannot just ignore certain constraints and deliver solutions as if they did not exist - that's bad in business and also bad in engineering. I imagine the actual point is subtly different: it's easier to get away with sloppiness and dishonesty where hard data about one's performance is difficult to gather and easier to fake. Engineering tends to be a discipline in which hard empirical data is more available and cannot be faked by pretending something. This is all true, but in no way supportive for the original argument that engineers are less in need of social skills than other people, nor does it lead to conclusion that possessing strong social skills somehow causes or requires dishonesty. So maybe you're simply confusing correlation with causation: dishonest people will unlikely make a career in engineering; but there is no reason why engineers should give up the understanding of or distance themselves from less technical areas of life. Many a business has been founded by an engineer, with great success. However, I dare say the engineers who succeed at business are not the kind of engineers who pride themselves on their superiority over managers or the marketing department.
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  1550. RAtargi I want to address your "password on the post-it note" example, an engineering "disaster", because it also reflects quite a stereotypical type of narrow reasoning assumed by technical folks. Here too the mistake lies on your side, in classifying behavior into two categories ("good" - according to system specifications or rules, "bad" - breaking the rules). One could say that you are optimizing a very particular target function (which your perceive as the only important one) while disregarding other factors. A more adequate perception would be that the person who is breaking the rules and apparently acting against the technical system's intended purpose, is simply taking risks, based on her judgement involving some aspects. Most likely the system's designers could not take those aspects into account because they were unaware of their importance; the information required for a correct assessment of an individual case simply doesn't exist when a general-purpose solution is invented. Such risk-taking and deviating from rules in favor of exceptions might be justified by the circumstances or it might not be. It all depends on the ultimate purpose of the system, the higher-order utility function that engineers lacked. It's not "wrong" per se, it has to be examined in view of why the rules were introduced in the first place, how likely the hazards present in the system are to activate because of it and what the consequences of a failure would be. Good engineers do understand risk, and they don't take sweeping objections to it. If the "crime" of working around the system was as severe as imagined, there would be a "punishment" of rule for it - designed not by engineers, but by the business people or their clients. The absence of such a rule doesn't indicate that people are dishonest morons. To the contrary, it indicates that an assessment made by an engineer might be out-of-touch with reality. The most important thing is that blame is assigned correctly in all cases - engineers are generally safe from taking fire if they can demonstrate that a system was knowingly abused and risks taken by others have materialized because of it.
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  1560. ***** Book value of a company does not equal its market value, which does not equal available cash at hand. The $1000 in book value is what the accountant recorded to account for the 66%/33% ownership stakes. Of it only $500 exists in form of available cash, the $1000 constituting the remaining book value is more or less fantasy (and therefore called "goodwill"). The market value of the business would be what someone else would be willing to pay for it. It might be less or more than $1500, depending on whether they are more skeptical or more enthusiastic about the future prospects than the current owners. The important thing to remember is that things do not really have any "intrinsic" value. Rather, everyone may come up with their own price of something; the price will only be realized if someone else agrees with them (which is very unlikely to happen if they can a better deal elsewhere - which is why market prices for some well-defined good or service tend to be quite uniform). You could argue that the $500 cash has an intrinsic value - it's worth exactly $500 after all. Obviously, it is true in a shallow sense, as long as you stick to using dollars as a metric of value. However, if you consider that $500 can buy you an X amount of stuff today and Y amount of stuff tomorrow, you realize that even cash has no stable value - it's an asset just like others, the value of which fluctuates relatively to other assets. This relative value comes from demand, which apart from common use comes from the fact that you cannot pay taxes or obtain any public services using any other asset (which you'd have to sell for cash first).
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  1585. russell schaeffler I believe it's fairly common knowledge. There are two ways of improving business: by reducing risks or by increasing expected gains. The skill of a businessman consists in being able to do both. The risk part is done either by hiring other people with special skills who are able to avoid the risks from materializing or at least to deal with their consequences. Unfortunately, high-skilled people are generally not dumb to sell themselves cheap, perhaps to the point that the venture is not any longer profitable if you want to have them. So, generally it's more convenient and may cost less to find someone (preferably deep-pocketed) that would agree to bear the burden of risk for you and dumb/adventurous/desperate enough to not demand full return on his capital. Failing that, you can also try shifting the risk on society at large (and possibly face punishment when they catch up to your tricks). The key lesson is you cannot make risk disappear, but you need to do something about it and first and foremost you should not keep it to yourself (see above; risk-handling is better left to well-paid, highly skilled professionals and rich investors, not enthusiastic entrepreneurs). That's even proper when judged from a left-wing perspective because it harms the "evil greedy capitalists" in a way by pulling out money out of their fat pockets and forcing them to contribute back to society. From a right-wing perspective one would also add that there is no need for any further mechanisms of redistribution, as the redistribution already happens by means of capitalism.
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  1747.  @AgentM124  No, not really. What you call "complex behaviors" (or "emerging behaviors", which is another such cop out) is just your illusion of those. It is like when people used to believe that the Clever Hans horse could do arithmetics. Even his trainer could not explain how the horse was about to perform the tasks. It was only explained through careful controlled experiments how his "skill" actually worked and that it was NOT in any way related to mathematics. Of course, such careful experiments (and many more careless ones) are also performed on the AI models today to measure their "skill". And they reveal their true nature and inherent deficiencies, but these are usually brushed off from marketing materials. The core problem is that language is a very misleading output - when we see words, we WANT to believe that the model is "thinking", and for an untrained person it is very difficult to distinguish at first glance how "replaying" of text sequences from a huge database (combined with some proximity searches) differs from actual reasoning. (As an exercise, you might ask your favorite LLM about which tests would be needed to make the distinction; you will get some interesting quotes out of them, copied from ML research papers.) What I find interesting is that people want to believe that these primitive algorithms "somehow" model our brains even if there is hugely relevant evidence which speaks against such assumptions, e.g. in form the largest models tripping up on some rather trivial tasks, or making mistakes of the kind that can be explained by overfitting to training data and imperfect recall. I wonder how people explain such failures to themselves and keep them consistent with their beliefs about the "AI progress". But then, people also "somehow" manage to believe in religions, so it is probably just human ability to eliminate any cognitive dissonance and accept contradictory data without second thought... as long as it fits one's preconceptions. And to be honest, it seems much easier to fool someone with a humungous database talking like a human than some old holy book.
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  1898. The key piece of information, which is now available, but not widely publicized, is that among all the people tested the incidence of the virus is remaining around 10-15% and is NOT increasing exponentially (it's growing, but very slowly). What IS growing exponentially in most places is the number of performed tests. And, as an obvious consequence, the number of DETECTED cases is also growing at that rate. The differences in testing are also the reason why death rates appear to vary so widely across countries. Shame on the public health authorities and politicians that they keep this crucial information hidden from the public (i.e. never included in the "dashboards" or reports of increasing case numbers) just to keep us scared and compliant with their nonsensical lockdown measures. But this is also the exact reason why there will not be the sort of apocalypse that they had predicted in the beginning. You can't blame the initial reaction very much, but you can and SHOULD blame not changing course in face of this new data. (The stock market, driven by much smarter people, already realizes that. That, combined with the excessive liquidity pumping, is why it is not collapsing and will not be collapsing anytime soon.) When asked why a broad cross-population testing was not being performed (which would prove the above point of constant incidence rate further), Germany's RKI chief only answered that it was "not constructive" and declined further comment. Which just shows that he is not currently following the goal of correctly informing the public, he is following political instructions from above. At this point many people high in office DO NOT WANT this "pandemic" to end too quickly as they would lose face and political support because of what would seem like very poor decisions. It's much better for them to let this "test pandemic" continue until they can, at their own convenience, reduce testing and then declare "victory" despite all the "huge sacrifices", of course thanks to their "wise guidance" and "public solidarity" (all of which was not necessary in the first place, but they just found out too late, after they had already fucked up).
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  1986. ​ @Soul-Depth-68  For every Gandhi, Mandela etc. there were countless more - unheard of - who tried to resist and went under. And then there are also those who famously tried resisting and were brutally eliminated as consequence (does the name Jesus ring a bell? do you think his sacrifice was a "success" because of the religion - and the following authoritarian systems - he helped establish?) The point is that resistance in an inherently evil system is only possible at great personal risk. Just like committing crimes in a good system is only possible at great personal risk to the criminal. So in a sense, the just opposition is an aberration, a sort of abnormal, irrational, individualistic behavior which most of the time does not work and most importantly does not benefit those who choose this path. My opinion is that systems should be designed up-front so that authoritarian behavior has automated, built-in punishment options - those in power should actively, and reasonably fear collective retribution from those who their power applies to, and the retribution should be easy to exert (e.g. without waiting for "next elections" - which in case of an established authoritarian system either never come or are meaningless). But this would practically require empowering everyone with the capability of exerting a more or less equal amount of violence to defend their individual rights and morality, based on their own judgmenet of feeling oppressed. Supposedly reasonable people will argue against this on the grounds that this would "enable populism to win" - the assumption here being that the unkempt, stupid, evil masses would quickly turn against their good leaders because of getting successfully incited by the bad ones. AFAIK, this assumption has never been tested in history - the usual arrangement has been that individuals do not matter, only well-organized gangs do - but accepting it is already a sort of surrender to the idea that an evil system is the only sustainable one. Today's systems evolve toward centralization of power/violence in the hands of very few, regardless of the laws claiming balances and equality (which when push comes to shove can be undone very quickly even under light pretense, as we've seen with COVID). The technological (military, surveillance) and organizational advantage of the established "elites" are enough to tip the system toward the bad equillibrium and permanently keep it there. If evil behavior of the so-called leaders goes unpunished, there is very little incentive for being good, and even less if you are the ones who are benefitting from this system and whose task (what a coincidence) is to design and "improve" it.
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  2022. ​ @ccaagg  You imply that the regurgitation is intentional and happens for certain texts only. This is generally not true. The models can also be tricked into reproducing random training data, e.g. see "Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models" by Nasr et al, 2023. Generally, some (small) measured perecentage of raw input can be reproduced verbatim. Probability distribution: the job of a language model, based on the loss function used in the training algorithm, is, for any prompt in the training data set, to faithfully reproduce the completions found there. For example, if the trainining data contained the word "meows" after the word "cat" in 50% of training samples and the word "barks" in the other 50% of training samples with "cat", the model should assign 50% probability to "meows" and 50% probability to "barks" when it is prompted with "cat". That it works that wy can be trivially demonstrated by training a small language model on such a specially prepared training set. "Generalization" or "interpolation" to other sequences not found in the training data set only happens as a side effect (and when it yields undesirable outcome, we call it "hallucination"). For example, if the word "cat" had a similar vector representation to the word "tiger" (learned based on all the other training examples) the model might output "tiger meows" or "tiger barks" despite not having had these sequences provided in the training data directly. To what extent such "generalization" happens and in what way exactly is subject to much debate. It can be demonstrated in constructed examples that it indeed works for certain sequence prediction problems that exhibit inherent symmetry. In particular, there is a paper on "grokking", which demonstrates that a neural network might first overfit to the training data only, but after continued training find an improved "recipe" to correctly reproduce those input-output pairs that were intentionally left out from the training data set (the example they use is learning modulo division; interestingly the same approach does not work for e.g. learning the multiplication table). Colloquially you could call it "filling in the gaps". It has been also demonstrated for language models that during training they develop so called "induction heads", which is basically the ability to copy words from previous context into appropriate positions in the generated output. For example, even a simple LM might respond with "Hello, John!", if you prompt it with "My name is John, hello!" altough the training data set only ever contained "Hello, Kate!". You could still call it a form of regurgitation... because if the model had no greetings at all in the training set, it would respond with unrelated gibberish. By "producing" in context of language models I just mean the generation of a completion given a prompt (aka inference). By "knowing" I mean the representation of training data as encoded in the model's weights - i.e. the data which allows the inference algorithm to produce output when prompted.
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  2213. You're a few years late to the party, the AI doomers are running out of steam. The doomers' arguments revolved around insights from reinforcement learning ("reward hacking"). Back then there was grand hopes that RL algorithms would be the next big thing replacing every other way of doing algorithms (with AlphaGo out and AlphaWhatever on the horizon). Well, it turns out they weren't, defining right target functions is for many application domains about as difficult as defining the algorithm itself. Instead the AI pivoted to LLMs (ChatGPT and the like) and there's where the whole world apparently lost their own (human) intelligence. The state-of-the-art LLMs used to generate text (and their sister diffusion algorithms used to generate images/audio/video) do not really have any goals. They are just great imitators of datasets fed into them (you could say, their only goal is to make the output look what was in the input used for training). So what looks to you as intelligence is just an excellent fake. But wait, how can we tell it's fake? And isn't fake that is almost real as good as the actual thing? It turns out that we can indeed tell and that no, a "close fake" it is not good enough. The way we can tell is that the super-duper LLMs make embarrassingly stupid mistakes which any "real" intelligence would never make, like holding two contradictory statements as both true or failing with simple reasoning tasks and logical puzzles (until, of course, you "fake" smarten them up by spoon-feeding them solutions to parrot at you). The reason is probably that such puzzles, if novel to the model, cannot really be solved by just rephrasing something from the model's training dataset, to solve they actually need... algorithmic reasoning, search, strategizing, reward optimization of some sort (kinda like the AlphaGo was capable of doing - for a very narrow domain and only given a very vast training db to start with). Also, we can tell because LLMs do not actually learn anything the normal way any intelligent person would, in particular they never learn from mistakes. They just learn to "faithfully" reproduce what the trainer puts into them. That's also the reason why if you look close enough they are so boring and the "creativity" is so lacking.
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  2237.  @JayRoKs1811 Those who hire labor have always had the problem of how to extract most value at minimum cost. The whole improvement in the standards of living you point to (and the elimination of slave labor in particular) was based in the observation that happy, independent feeling workers were more productive and less likely to revolt against their masters. But if you could instead have a worker who does not care, never protests, and costs close to nothing, there would be no incentive whatsoever in making their life "better" or subsidizing the less productive workers. Unfortunately, this is exactly what machines and more recently AIs are like. The only reason to treat the unemployed well will be to prevent them from starting riots and revolutions. But there are also other ways of keeping masses of people pacified, and the surveillance and oppression technology is also progressing rapidly. So that it may be cheaper to crack down brutally on the general population and reduce it instead of attempting to keep it content. Especially if overall resources start running low because your loyal automatons consume more of them. You must also realize that the masters are (rightfully) in constant worry of losing their wealth/status/power/health/life to the angry, envious mob, so it is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts that they are not very keen to "empower" their competitors. There is a reason why none of the top muppets leave their house (or bunker as may be) without trusted body guards.
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  2550. ita-eng subber You are contradicting yourself "they do rely on foreign arm trade to keep the populace stable" - that's exactly the point - if the foreigners didn't support the dictators through such trade (and associated exploitation of natural resources), the dictators would not last. So no, they are not "in charge", they are actively maintained by their foreign partners (and occasionally also deposed by them when they stop behaving as expected). As for poverty in Europe, the great majority of the population is not in poverty, and even poverty is defined differently (a "poor" person here means that their income is below average - it does not mean they live from hand to mouth or cannot afford healthcare). The reality is that the majority of Europeans/Americans waste their income on useless shit, and they could very well be buying those shares of the evil corporations (instead of buying shit like cars, clothes, eating out etc. etc.) Access to financial markets is ridiculously cheap now, cheaper than it has ever been before, although it is symptomatic that in shittier countries (such as Eastern Europe) that access is limited to local stock markets that are rigged against consumers (i.e. you can't as easily buy Amazon stock in Poland as you can in Germany). This is also a more subtle form of exploitation (make it impossible for people to invest their savings). I am not the victim, if anything I am the white exploiter. If your only ambition in life is to commit crimes while being fed by someone else, you should pity yourself.
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  2629.  @zxskipperxz372  Masks are more than useless, they cause daily stress, conflict and make some people avoid going out altogether (that's actually the most effective way of how the contribute to preventing the spread of the disease). The idea that "masks" will save anyone is ridiculous because even the term "mask" is completely undefined - I could put a piece of paper under my nose and call it a "mask". Others wear plastic shields that don't do jack shit in terms of filtering, and also call them "masks". Studies show that some commonly used materials filter 30-50% of NaCl particles. But other studies show that there is virtually no minimum dose of viral particles that cause an infection. It's ill-conceived and outright silly from the very get go. It's a political stunt, nothing more. Of course other people think that because they wear a "mask" they can skip on other measures. Perhaps that's why Argentina, the most masked and heavily corona-policed country, is having an explosion of infections. An "impeccable healthcare" of Scandinavia is irrelevant when it comes to spread of infections. It's just a matter of how people behave. Without masks. As for your "medical experts" of course China only invites those which will see what they want and report as they are told. You must be new to China. Meanwhile, you cannot publish anything anti-mask because of an overreaching censorship in the oh-so-scientific journals and anxiety not to damage one's career (not believing me? see how Rancourt's publication was handled, for example). And of course, the old "positive result bias" makes it far more likely that any slightest "yes it works" result gets published and any "inconclusive" or "no effect" result gets thrown away. One could say that Chinese methods are now being applied worldwide when it comes to coronavirus-related information. Which is no big surprise since billions of dollars are at stake in this farce. You may be surprised, but I don't live in the US either. Maybe you should take your head out of your ass and stop ASSuming so much.
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  2969. And this slightly less factual one ... from Falcon Mamba 7B AI model finetuned specifically on McGonagall's poetry: Beautiful and noble Great William McGonagal, Who had a heart full of goodness and kindness so primal, That he felt for the poor and the wretched a deep sense of regret, And in the most cold and inclement weather, he would them warmly greet. He was a man of noble principles, and to him ill-fortune befell, Which in general, it is only the virtue of the great that can quell; But, instead of contracting a hard and callous heart, It only made his kind and manly nature impart. He lived in the midst of poverty, and to him the struggle was severe, To give his loved relatives food to still their hunger, and not to see The tears of sorrow, and hear the heart-felt wail, Which, no doubt, would have made their great father’s heart to quail. But, poverty notwithstanding, he was ever ready to assist The poor and the destitute in their darkest and most desperate beat; And rather than to see a mother and her little ones go rung, He would, in the petticoat-division, step up and boldly swing. At the age of eighty and four, he met with a dreadful accident, Which for a few months rendered him incapacitated for work; But, like the true-hearted hero he was, he wouldn’s admit he was hurt, But suffered in silence, and the poor-man’s-pan often did lurk. Until by a vigorous shaking one day, his hip was put out of place, Which filled him with the greatest despondence, and to grief gave place; But as he wasn’t a duper, and knew not where to begin, He jumped into a cart-wheel, and knocked himself all pretty near in. Then young Benny Conacher, with a kind heart and a helping hand, Took poor McGonagall under his wing, like a wise boy lover his Gudrun; And he nursed him with the greatest care, and didn’contextake the least payment, But in his company rejoiced, and many a happy hour they had. But as poor McGonagall wasn’wanted for his uncustomary jilting, Young Benny he began to neglect, and in a few days to forget The worthy man whose bones were now firmly joined together in the grave, But whose memory will be held green by the young and the old for many a day. But I beg of all religious-suns, as they respect their God, and Queen, And as their souls are worth to them a dropped of honey-sweet gin, To remember the poor, and on them to engage, Who, I’m perfectly sure, will welcome a bit of food, or a bath, or a rag. And I conclude my poem with one additional-stretch of rhetoric, Which, no matter how critical, I will, without flattery, attempt; And in the guise of an heriot, I would have the people of Dundee Convey the bones of their Great-Baller to the grave where all troubles cease.
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  3089. At the core of the problem is that rich people do not wish that the poor people ever obtain a lifestyle they have had themselves. Unlike fake virtual money, there is just not enough of real stuff to go around. So at some point making the poor richer must involve making the rich poorer - that is not allowed to happen. From the rich people's viewpoint thanks to technological advances the poor dumb masses are just a nuisance and also a potential risk of revolt (e.g. see Taliban). It would be best if they could just die off or at the very least stop reproducing. But the damn pest just doesn't want to. Hence Bill Gates and the rest of his smart pals decided to save the world by convincing all poor people that they are to blame and should from now on voluntarily restrict themselves. If they do not comply, they will be beaten up (see Australia, New Zealand), imprisoned, converted into slaves and/or die. The good old feudal system where the rich were really rich and poor really poor will thus be restored, which will also enhance the feelings of being rich (what point is there of being a rich sociopath if everyone can practically afford the same stuff? it's just not fun) We call that fairy tale the "climate change", and it can be made more credible by setting some forests on fire and - by owning all the media and censoring comments like this one - putting some great emphasis on some minor events that have always occurred and have nothing to do with human activity. Guilt has always been a very powerful means to control people (see how well it works with managing the pandemic).
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  3227. Melissa Smith, Maybe you've not noticed, but I've been making fun of you concerning saliva and phlegm rather than agreeing. This whole discussion about fluid excretions or sex is beside the point because there's nothing inherently wrong or "horrific" about body fluids or sexuality. If you do any contact sport, you'll be coming in touch with other people's sweat all the time; if you go swimming, same, although in less concentration. But nudity is only very tangentially related to those bodily functions you seem so obsessed about. In majority of the cases you won't be touching a nude person, it's only about the looks. And the sight of nudity of a healthy human, especially female because of all the smooth curves (but males can look great as well) is, frankly speaking, beautiful and much more interesting and intriguing than a clothed version. That's why life art classes are a thing. For example, see CroquisCafe here on YouTube (thanks god not censored yet) or Google "Lisa Everhart pictures" to find a gallery of thousands of beautiful female nudes (not porn) shot by professional photographers. They aren't shocking, they make you appreciate the human body in full (as does a study of internal anatomy). In fact, the more you view, the less guilty and the more relaxed (not excited!) you become, which should also be a clue that It's Good For You. (Note that nobody is forcing or harassing you here - you can do that experiment just for yourself in full privacy.) Back to fluids - not being an owner of one I can't speak much about vaginas, but I can assert with full confidence that my penis does not secrete any of its own accord throughout the day. The exceptions are when I pee (but unlike some, I do remove last drops of urine with toilet paper; I don't want any stale urine anywhere around or on me). Another exception is if I haven't had sex for a week and become very aroused - but even then it takes some voluntary work to happen. As I recall, it takes a lot less effort as teenager - but then, teenagers also relieve themselves a lot more, so I suspect not so many run around with dripping dicks soiling their underwear - I know I haven't. All issues that you are mentioning are what I've talked about before - this oversexualization of human body and the scandalization of nudity while raising insane accusations toward people who just enjoy it as a lifestyle. But there's nothing inherently human about tabooizing nudity or sex. The real reason why this happens is power structures in society (the same reason why organized religions so quickly took to making up laws regarding those issues). Because if you control someone else's basic instincts, if you make someone anxious, uneasy, feeling inferior, ashamed and ugly, about something as universal and fundamental as their own body or sexual behavior, then it is so much easier for you to influence and control other aspects of their behavior as well by that. It's easier to turn somebody into your servant if they allow you to be the definer of their "weakness" or "sin". Why? Because then you can use groups of people to more or less violently enforce certain patterns of behavior that fit your goals. It's a bit of a carrot-and-stick method - make them anxious, but at the same time longing for the "forbidden fruit", then keep pushing the buttons at appropriate times. And the best thing is that the enslaved herd will self-regulate to enforce the rules which you set out for them to follow (if that doesn't help, there's always police). Different cultures, during different time periods, approached nudity differently, and often times much more reasonably than what we see today. And, thankfully, it also differs by country as well. Generally, the easier going a country is on nudity, the more it respects human rights and individual freedom. (But we've heard already that you don't value it very much.)
    1
  3228. As noted before, your argument that sex parts are used exclusively for sex is and urethras are used for urination, and that being a huge reason for you to hide these parts AT ALL TIMES, is simply stupid. Neither sex nor urination are as "horrific" a thing as you seem to believe (where does that idea come from?). Plus, even if one agreed with your disgust (which makes me wonder what your sex life must look like), these activities only happen from time to time. It's as if you demanded that everybody wear gloves every day because hands can be sometimes used for disgusting things like shooting guns, punching and strangulating people (or even quite regularly for wiping your ass or touching your dick), which somehow made them abhorrent. Just as a knife can be used for cutting throats or bread, a penis can be used for rape, but it can be used for mutual pleasure in a loving relationship. And for the most time it's just hanging around there, like your breasts or your tongue (which, by the way, can also be used for sex). By itself a penis/vagina is indeed just as "innocent" and boring body part as any other. It's not a novelty either - in today's world most people have seen hundreds if not thousands of vaginas (and penises) thanks to porn. It's not like seeing another one is going to be a revelation. It's not hard at all to separate base instincts from nudity. Every nudist out there can attest to that. Every regular sauna goer can attest to that. Here in Germany we have nude mixed saunas, which I've been visiting for years. There are from time to time events in which a crowd of nude women and men are not just sitting in the hot room, but brought outside, e.g. to be served drinks after the session or to be whipped with twigs or rub some cooling gel into their bodies (except genitals, for then it burns). Not once have I seen any man get an erection under these circumstances. For anyone whose mind is not poisoned by the weird anti-sex "culture", it's not a wonder of all: animals run around naked all the time, and it's not like they are lusting and fucking each other at every possible encounter. Nor are men becoming stiff each time their pants drop. Nudity and sex are indeed very separate affairs, unless you have managed to mix them up completely in your mind (again, growing up in our society will do that to you, but it's not so difficult to undo that). I agree with you that you should not be "ambushed" by nudity, just as you should not be startled by someone suddenly shouting something next to you. However, if nudity was more common and accepted, as it should be, there would be no "ambushing" of anyone by it, just like a dog or a horse cannot "ambush" you simply by running around nude. It's a little bit like the difference between being gay or being a gay activist - the first category simply keeps to their business, the second category feels it necessary to be very vocal and draw attention. Yes, the activists can be annoying, but they are being loud purposely to send a particular message, and their conduct does not reflect that of the "normal" non-activist people. (Given that most people won't understand this distinction and jump to conclusions, I do have mixed feelings about nudist activists as well.) "Naked art would be less impactful" - exactly! It would be as impactful as non-naked art - which is still very appreciable. This is the phenomenon also common among nudists - at first "indulging" in public nudity may feel exciting or awkward, but with time it becomes just a normal, relaxed thing. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why people shun nudity - they WANT it to be perversely exciting and they do not wish it to become relaxed, just like they prefer watching gory action films and porn to National Geographic and life art. Once again, it's your choice which mindset you wish to support - one could say that by demanding "decency" you are playing into the cards of porn industry, boulevard press and the like.
    1
  3229. Melissa Smith, I think your pets may not be quite representative, the saying about "fucking like rabbits" is there for a reason. And although it's true that body fluids have the potential to carry disease, in a healthy person they don't. In fact, the exchange of body fluids and skin contact may help strengthen the immune system, as does being in touch with some dirt in your childhood. Primates in particular engage in beneficial social behaviors that involve close non-sexual contact (e.g. grooming each others' furs - in humans that would be equivalent to giving a stranger a back rub - again a huge taboo for no good reason) - or even sexual contact (bonobos having casual sex, not for pregnancy, but just for entertainment). Consuming small amounts of feces is how animals get their vitamin B12 in nature. And obviously if you look at dogs they also have zero inhibitions about coming in contact with any of the supposedly "gross" body parts. I recall one scientific study which even found out that consuming one's own feces is pretty safe as far as health hazards are concerned (the great aversion toward feces is historically grounded in times of overpopulation in small areas without working sanitation, in which sick individuals were able to spread disease quickly by poisoning water supplies). So once again, we have a cultural stigma, not something that is rationally founded. However, there's also studies that the emotion of feeling disgust about "gross" things is built-in for humans, and animals must be somewhat similar, as they rarely shit straight into their feed or drinking water (ruminants like cows and sheep being a notable exception). Note that other things which we instinctively feel gross about as children - like the mass-killing of farm animals - are un-grossed and legitimized by the very same culture (a very small percent of population switches over to veganism, although I'm pretty sure that if you gave a child a choice between a banana and a freshly slaughtered animal, they would opt for the former and consider the latter gross or shocking). So yes, I am very skeptical about culture which is defined by "traditions invented by some weird people centuries ago and passed down through the generations", and in many cases I favor going with your own undisturbed and innocent "animal" instinct instead, but always supplemented by the golden rule (which is in fact is the only rule that makes any sense and is needed for social harmony). I say, one always has to carefully question such traditions, consider where they are coming from, what side effects they have on us, and whether they are perhaps doing more harm than good in today's context. Ask your own conscience and brain instead of asking what other people would say or think about your choice, and you may be surprised at the difference in the conclusions. Finally, you can also experiment with breaking some of the rules yourself and observe which kind of emotion this behavior evokes. If you go skinny dipping for the first time and feel fantastic, exhilarated and free rather than guilty about it, that may be a clue (obviously, do it in a safe environment without taking risks of getting stoned to death or jailed by well-meaning other protectors of culture; and taking into account other people who you might suffer collateral damage through your actions, the world being a friendly place as it is). As for rape or sexual harassment, the key concept here, which is very different and independent from sex, is the act of violence. Any scenario in which one individual or group of individuals forces another individual to behave in a certain way against their will should indeed be forbidden and persecuted. There is subtlety there, though: if an exhibitionist jumps out flashing his erect dick at you, this should be considered harassment because first, it's very hard for you to avoid this experience, indeed it's the intent of the exhibitionist to startle you and to make it difficult to escape, and second, the act of flashing his dick in this context is alarming because you have all reasons to believe the guy is going to proceed to violently assault you (if you were sure otherwise, you could just laugh at him and tell him to get lost). However, if a nudist just sits or stands around peacefully (and that would be the normal "staying nude 'for too long' in a gym" scenario from JP's video), and if he's behaving the same way as he would if he was clothed or had a towel wrapped around, generally either disinterested in interaction with you, or only engaging in polite non-sexual interactions, we should not consider this as sexual harassment at all. Because if you feel uncomfortable at all (which you have no rational reason to) you also have an easy way out of this "trouble" - if you don't wish to see his dick, just don't look on it. Just as you might wish (?) to avoid staring on a disfigured or morbidly obese person. Of course you could also claim he is still infringing on your freedom by making you unable not to accidentally catch a glance of his dick or forcing your eyes to turn. But that's essentially playing devil's advocate - it is then you who becomes the robber of freedom, by attempting to prohibit someone else's inconsequential behavior - which is as ridiculous as if you demanded he must only wear a particular color of socks while in your presence or else your feelings get hurt. "Live, and let live" may be the best summary of all these concepts.
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  3230. Melissa Smith, I challenge you to find a child and go kill (or pretend to kill) your fluffy pet with them. The result will be a traumatized child. Because most human children are not psychopathic by nature, and children torturing animals or eating them alive unless told otherwise is not the norm, it's an exception. The "children assisting slaughter without any objections" is also a (bygone) cultural thing. Hunting and eating animals is partly cultural, and partly due to sheer desperation for survival (can't live without it when you are in certain cold climates, but if you were lucky enough to live in a land of plenty, you would not do it and feel better without it). You're right about animal rape, though - unlike humans most animals do not have the "golden rule" thing (except maybe some monkeys, in which empathy has been observed already). This makes non-consentual sex the norm among them (unless the female can run away or fend off males). Hence my qualification about going the nature's ways. I owned a cat and I know they would hide away to defecate when there was no litter box. Dogs will normally demand to go outside to defecate as well. They don't willfully poop or urinate in their water bowl. Again, maybe your small rodents are an exception. I've never said sanitation is useless - in fact I said the exact opposite thing (about lack of sanitation causing disease in overpopulated areas). Nice try to twist my words there. Anyhow, we started with simple non-sexual nudity, and the whole "dissection of culture" and body fluids is just a side-effect of your irrational objection to it (even though we noted at the very beginning that no fluids are forcibly excreted at you by a nude person standing in the gym [in a public place I'd even sit on a towel to humor yourself, as most nudists do]). We are splitting hairs now, which I should not have done, knowing full well you cannot convince anyone unless they somehow manage to convince themselves (and that stubbornness about not changing mind and sticking with consistent wrong beliefs instead of revising them seems very inherent in humanity - it's the pinnacle achievement of science to notice and undo it). Well, at least it was somewhat entertaining.
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  3231. Melissa Smith The whole vegan angle is beside the point, it seems you're hell bound on grasping at straws to feel that you "won" and jump to false conclusions on the original issue by that. I mentioned veganism to show you that most people do things, without any consideration for others, that some other people consider way more disgusting and unsettling than staying nude in a gym for a few minutes. In fact, experiments have been done showing that the MAJORITY of people (in Germany) are not ready to have a farm animal (a goose, specifically) killed right in front of them by electric shock on the street to purchase fresh meat, but are ok buying the result of the same killing when it's on the shelf in the supermarket. So they are in fact engaging in doing something that they find disgusting and unsettling themselves, and picking ways to reduce the associated cognitive dissonance. My main point was to show gross inconsistency in people's "culture-driven" behavior and the need to question such behavior (something which you admitted yourself that you're too lazy to do). But whether or not you or me subscribe to the idea that killing animals for food is "all right" is largely irrelevant (an insect btw a different nervous system from a pig; and pests are called pests for a reason). The argument for such killing might be that it goes on all the time in nature, after all, and because we are part of nature why should not give a fuck (also, meat tastes good). The argument against it is that we humans even as children show empathy even toward inanimate objects (e.g. toys), and that with the understanding of finality of death and the reality of suffering (happens around age 6 in normal case) the aversion to killing other living creatures becomes even bigger. (Our entertainment media does a lot to revert that aversion, by broadcasting and glorifying violence and thus "desensitizing" people to it.) So maybe killing farm animals is just not worth it, psychologically, and no longer necessary for us, indeed a "bygone" cultural thing that we could get rid of, along with a couple other such inconveniences. And yes, of course, that would involve changing the culture or if you wish to call it so, adopting a different one, so give yourself a cookie for noticing the obvious and mastering wordplay. Dropping the animal killing is a little bit like dropping your t-shirt and shorts in order to feel more comfortable while hot, both actions work well and don't cause harm to others. This whole discussion revolves around one issue: is our culture causing us to behave in weird ways that suck for us, as individuals, and which we would not miss if only allowed to drop them, and also to discourage or even ban other people from doing what's good for them? The answer is a resounding YES, and public nudity is a perfect example.
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  3454.  @OlgaZuccati  So far it gets curated and selected by people hired by and compensated by the AI companies. But yes, there are also AI models specifically designed to generate synthetic data for training, e.g. Nvidia's NeMo. What you are referring to as "cheating" is the difficulty of specifying "bulletproof" (from human perspective) reward functions in reinforcement learning. But the same problem exists in doing things the other way around (by writing down algortihms instead of describing the desired outputs) - it's called software bugs. As for humans checking the output "at every step of the way", this is precisely of what machine learning tries to avoid. Sometimes (most of the times?) all you need is statistical assurance that the output fulfills your requirements - you don't care how it came to be and are not interested in nor capable of checking the process. When you obtain electricity from an energy company, you are not also interested in checking of how exactly the power plants operate and whether they do what they should at every step. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, the only time when checking matters is if you are concerned about safety. But even then you have to acknowledge that you have not possibly checked or avoided every possible hazard, which is why planes fall down and trains collide despite greatest effort to avoid. So in that sense AI-"learned" algorithms are not that different from handcrafted ones - you check (by exhaustive testing) what urgently needs to be checked and accept the rest if it works well enough.
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  3834. ​ @johndewey7243  No, for RL to work you have to define the final reward function, and specifying what it means for tests to pass correctly is just as hard as writing the damn code. You have probably not done anything with RL yourself in the past to know what it is like. Unfortunately, the AI is just as unable to write correct tests as it is unable to write correct code which makes them pass. Not to mention how inefficient it is to let a machine figure out what to change by trial and error (which RL boils down to if you don't have a good guiding reward function to dole out intermediate rewards, only the "final test passed" reward). Not to mention that this whole AI bullshit presupposes that all information to optimize on is already provided in some form (which may be the case for little benchmarks and math olympiad tasks). But in real life a great majority of information is not written down, but e.g. contained in heads of people who define the requirements AND ALSO if not mostly in heads of people who fulfill these requirements, based on their long-term experience in the domain and with the org they are working for. Unless you are talking about some junior code monkeys who you can hire and fire at will as replaceable parts. So once again good luck convincing these senior people to write everything down so that the AI can "grok" it. You're gonna have to pay for that, and those tasked with eliminating their own jobs in favor of AI are gonna sabotage your stupid efforts - because unlike AI they have brains to figure out what is strategically important for them and what you are trying to do to them. I predict that in the future it will not even work for artists and other low-key "creative" professionals who will refuse to work in certain setups or demand huge markup for "training" the imitating/copying/filling in the gaps algorithms (which is the only true "capability" of today's "AI"). Already the fact that you are falling for this AI scam (which is mostly targeted at pulling as much money from clueless investors as they can before the house of cards inevitably collapses, as it has with "AI" several times before) indicates that you might not be the brightest bulb out there. So again I wish you all the best with your efforts with outsmarting people who can actually do their jobs.
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  3880.  @afraidofmoths6547  Evidence for what? The question of how much humans contribute to observed effects on climate (many of which are purposefully exagerrated for political reasons) is as undecidable as the question of what exactly the weather will be in 6 months. We are talking about chaotic systems here that cannot be reproduced in a lab, no matter how many supercomputers you throw at it (because it is not a matter of computing power, but of accurate measurements of the system to supply inputs, which cannot be made). Being "climate friendly" has become such a political agenda that expressing opposite views is a sure way to get your public funding cut off or, if you are company, have consumers successfully rallied against you. That is very similar to what we witnessed during pandemic: false, authoritarian theories propped up by strong authority and everyone who disagrees silenced violently. We should not be discussing particular pieces of evidence pro and against climate change, we should be discussing about how this matter is handled and what it means for everyone's freedom to support the agenda. I personally could not give a sh*t about whether or not some scientist in some lab discovered that the temperature in some place increased or decreased 1,5 C or increased 1,6 C, but what I certainly give a sh*t about is if the government (supported by military and police force as it is) takes this as an opportunity to crack down on my human rights. And as it seems, they sure have that roadmap. (Why? because the Earth's population is constantly growing and the cake to divide up is not.) Hopefully my position is clear now.
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  3882.  @afraidofmoths6547  We should be skeptical about the models because their predictions have already turned out as quite inaccurate in the past, and the amount of data they are based on is limited (when it comes to geological timespans). Also, as I mentioned, not all phenomena can be modelled accurately; it is hubris to believe otherwise. As for how actionable "stopping climate change" is, you need to notice that we are unable to influence much smaller scale phenomena (e.g. no way to even control local weather, much less the global climate). You also need to consider the broader geopolitical context. Governments will pursue this agenda if it is in their interest, as in allowing them to keep redistributing wealth from general population toward their friends and supporters. But governments which sit on reserves of fossil fuel resources will not be as interested to reduce their use if this would risk political stability or revolt from said population (they will be interested to limit exports if it can earn them more money; that's why OPEC exists). That is also why governments are happy to fund wars, even though war is very much not a climate friendly activity (what are the emissions of a tank or a military plane? and what are the emissions of the entire military industry? somehow nobody is calling to curb these) So the whole "climate fairy tale" appears to have only one purpose - the manipulation of citizens to act as ordered by the government (or whoever has the power to lobby/threaten them), and specifically to limit their future consumption. Finally, that negative consequences of climate changes outweigh the positives is a claim that needs to be proved, but it's hard to prove something that cannot be measured well and where the causality is disputable. I guess we will just have to find out. At least, I know that nobody is trying to measure the positive effects and will not ever be allowed to, given the fixed "climate catastrophe" agenda. It is simply impossible to backtrack on it, given how much propaganda has been published into the other direction. It's as if you demanded from a "pandemist" to admit that covid was not all that dangerous after all. The best they will do is rave about how vaccines saved lifes and/or our immune systems miraculously learned to fight off this originally oh-so-lethal disease. Admitting having been wrong from the get go is dangerous, also from a legal perspective, because the decision makers could be sued for all the damage they have caused. (This is also why they were hesitant in the beginning and why they got emboldened when they noticed everyone is making the same errors in lockstep. And why they tried to force every government to adopt the very same policies; at which they failed, which allowed e.g. Sweden to prove by means of an experiment that the measures were bollocks. They are still very concerned about it; that's why we have WHO trying to force their single opinion on the entire world in any future pandemic they will manufacture for us.) As mentioned above, governments will act according to their own interests, and if a government of a country such as Russia or China, does not see a benefit for itself from supporting the climate change agenda, it simply will ignore it while claiming to the world that they are making their best effort.
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  4040. When training artificial neural networks, this is also a big problem today. It is known as reward hacking. The trained algorithm optimizes a function different from the one the trainer wishes to be optimizing, by utilizing additional data features from the dataset that are not really intended to guide the training (but in fact provide a stronger signal for arriving at correct predictions than the actual desired training data). Although it is best known from examples in reinforcement learning (e.g. AIs trained to win games playing them by breaking the rules, exploiting bugs and what not), this also unsurprisingly happens while training image recognition or large language models. In image recognition there are, based on that, attacks which fool the image recognition algorithm to "see" a particular picture by subtly manipulating pixels of an unrelated image presented to it. This can be eliminated by training the algorithm not just on the desirable pictures, but also on the "hacked" pictures, to make it distinguish the good ones from the fake ones as well. A language model may be very keen to utilize positional encoding information of the provided sequence of words rather than just the word meanings. That is, if you train it on sentences, it may learn to preferably output certain words at certain absolute position from start of example text, rather than based on the "understanding" of preceding words in the text. A very striking example of it is when training simple models on stories - how does the language model know that a short story should not go on and on, but finish in a certain way? Well, it turns out, it might not pay attention to the story content at all, but rather shift its output toward "words likely to occur during story endings" after it has noticed that it has produced n words of output... You can see how it becomes really dangerous when we ascribe intelligence to, well, artificial intelligence and start relying on it like we would on actually intelligent entities (think self-driving car being fooled into driving over a pedestrian).
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  4046.  @ruialexandre6197  Provide sources for your claim that an amount of exhaled/inhaled viral particles really matters for the (severity of) infection. I'm aware of at least one paper which suggests that the amount required for infection of known viruses (not coronavirus, as the paper is from 2011) is minimal and certainly not changed by redirecting some of exhaled air toward your glasses and behind your ears (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7090536/) Back to common sense and epidemiological data, if masks really were effective to contain viral epidemics, Japan, the country known for widespread voluntary use of masks, would not have experienced such a severe flu season in 2019. And maybe at least one of those hospital studies conducted over the past 100 years would also have demonstrated their efficacy. Maybe viral antibody rates in dentists would have not been above average (another old study). The argument that masks improve odds is a conclusion which is easy to believe (I considered it plausible myself BEFORE the mask laws were introduced - and before I looked into publications on the topic). But ultimately it's a layman's fallacy that is not reflected by data. A fallacy which has apparently not been communicated properly to law makers, and around which, as a result, unfortunately the entire world (with exception of a few countries) is making bad policies. After the mandatory masks, an argument was invented to rationalize the switch that the prior recommendations AGAINST mask were based on concern to avoid a run on surgical mask suppliers. However, if DIY cloth masks had been touted as they are, such a run would not have occurred. So this argument does not make sense, there must be different reasons. I suspect that these policies have a deep political background (indeed WHO themselves did not deny that they changed policy on masks because of lobbying, not because of emerging new scientific data). The presence of masks in everyday life provides a reminder of the crisis and also hints at how politicians are "in control" and doing a "great job" fighting it. It provides a justification for spending tons of public money and embezzling a sizeable amount in the process. The goal of masks is to make an average person feel partly guilty for the pandemic, more willing to rationalize all past mistakes made by the decision makers, and more ready to accept any further actions that go against your own (economic) interest (it's a valid psychological tactic used by scammers to demand little concessions before robbing the victim in big style). Finally, they also serves as a very effective distraction to divide people (as our discussion here demonstrates).
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  4047.  @ruialexandre6197  In some initial polls around 50% of Germans said they felt bad while wearing masks. In fact, even though Germans are typically keen about discipline and sacrifice, the tide is changing - comments on a recent "masks forever" Spiegel article (a left leaning magazine) indicate that there is a huge number (a majority) of people fed up with the masks. As for trusting scientists and health authorities, why not trust those from Sweden, Denmark, Finland - all three civilized countries where no mandatory masks have been introduced - and no explosion of infections has occurred compared to other countries. The MacIntyre meta-study you quote is a perfect example of those which analyze some data, then conclude masks "supportive" despite the data showing something contrary (BTW, MacIntyre happens to be sponsored by 3M). From the studies referenced by MacIntyre's metastudy "in favor" of masks - Aiello 2012: "results did not reach statistical significance" and also (in MacIntyre's own words: "masks alone not protective"). Aiello 2010: "Adjusted estimates were not statistically significant. Neither face mask use and handhygiene nor face mask use alone was associated with a significant reduction in the rate of ILI cumulatively". MacIntyre 2009: "We concluded that household use of face masks is associated with low adherence and is ineffective for controlling seasonal respiratory disease." Cowling 2008: "The laboratory-based or clinical secondary attack ratios did not significantly differ across the intervention arms. Adherence to interventions was variable." Need I say more? How can you trust a meta-study author who quotes such results as supportive for mask use? Still waiting for concrete references regarding your claims about viral dose and infection likelihood/severity beyond what I already pointed out. As a biologist you should be able to find those if they are so obvious...
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  4083. You correctly recognize that AI companies use safety as a pretense to obtain monopoly (by regulatory capture). Yet in the same video you act as if the "safety" argument really mattered, i.e. if the public was in danger. There is no danger. The only danger is the regulatory capture and the big corps cooperating with oppressive governments who also like to pretend they are acting "for your good and safety". You should not pick sides in this argument because as many misleading arguments by arbitrageurs it is constructed so that whichever "side" you pick, you lose. It is based on the false dichotomy fallacy, which is very often employed by the powerful to mislead their victims into behaving as they would prefer them to. Like in any compenently executed con, the goal of those who run it is for you to exclaim "oh, I see through your tricks" - and then, having been distracted and emboldened by this, fall for the actual confidence trick. So I would advise you to reconsider and stop helping these confidence scammers by further misleading the public about it. The whole safety argument is a scam. It originated from arm-chair Internet philosophers imagining AIs getting out of control and pursuing their own goals to the detriment of humanity. It was popularized around the time AlphaGo and computer playing AIs were developed, and developers observed the phenomenon of "reward hacking" in models trained with reinforcement learning. Not much has come out of it since. LLMs do not even use reinforcement learning all that much, and certainly not in the sense of a reward function which obtains a better "score" through cheating.
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  4212. I believe that the point you are missing that the genius of free market is expressed in the people - masses of people - voting with their money. Of course this cannot work if all the people don't have any money to vote with - or if they are successfully scammed into ceding their voting rights to a bunch of charlatans. However, proposing that we fight against free market principles and view tech companies as inherent enemies is very much like guaranteeing that your voting rights will be managed by charlatans. You mentioned Soviet as an outdated analogy, but it is in fact very current. Look how life works in Russia, North Korea, Iran. This is the "strong (populist) man versus the evil companies" alternative that you seem to be indirectly arguing for. It is a big mistake. The blame for the current state of affairs is mainly not with the free market mechanisms or profit making, it is with the people who are shortsighted to be cheated of their future and voluntarily participate in these systems. The only solution is to spread awareness and change the attitudes of individuals. No company is going to make money if it has no customers. You are just falling for their bs and complaining about the results. Note how different it is to government coercion - the government, backed by an armed police/military - can in fact extract money of you even if you have no wish to cooperate. (That by the way, is also the reason why big companies love to get into cahoots with government - to obtain that missing advantage over all competition and their [former] customers.) Overall, the enemy is not free market or capitalism. The enemy is totalitarian thinking and all who support it one way or another. Be very careful not to reinforce it while you fight some imaginary bad guys.
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