@FriendOfDeSoto - eviltoast

Joined the Mayqueeze.

  • 4 Posts
  • 608 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You’re citing my text but cutting off just before the point I was trying to make. I think be would still side with the people who claim to follow his ideology (yes, piss poor efforts objectively speaking but that’s irrelevant to him because he would prefer them over the folks entrenched in capitalism on the other side).

    Ideologs are a dangerous breed because they are surprisingly flexible under realpolitik conditions when the alternative is having to admit defeat. Or in Marx’s case admitting that his ideas didn’t work or the fact that they didn’t work as intended cost the lives of millions. Surely he wouldn’t like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China and well apoortioned crticism thereof (or of the GDR or wherever) would have eventually spent his good will capital (pun intended) with the local leadership and he would end up in a gulag or erased from history. Karl-Marx-Stadt would have been renamed sooner.



  • I think if he were honest with himself he would see that what he got wasn’t what he had envisioned in any of the countries that claimed to be communist/socialist. But they were his team so he would publicly support them. You can sell his stance as an evolvement of the theory rather than admitting mistakes. Not too dissimilar from the way the PRC sells its version of communism to its people: communism “with Chinese characteristics.”

    Chances are though that he would have perished in one of the purges happening in whichever communist country he would have chosen to reside in. He would have enough clout to niggle at leadership openly about stuff going wrong and eventually be would deliver the straw that broke his camel’s back. He would be mind-holed and his legacy rectified so he wouldn’t be the lighthouse of the movement that he could only become because he died early. And he didn’t starve millions. And communism would become the thing created by the people through an arduous march and not a system dreamed up by some German philosophers.



  • Apple was the first big aggregator with then iTunes. Spotify is the biggest streamer that also hosts podcasts. I suppose it helped highlighting the ease of subscribing through these services to get subscribers.

    I absolutely hate this triad of “you can find us on [insert propriatory source like Spotify], Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.” The last third includes the two preceding ones. Both Spotify or Apple are places where one can find podcasts. It is illogical to say it like that and I find it annoying. I don’t think it is necessary to remind people any more how podcasts work in 2025. They will find you. Stop giving free ads to other services. Especially services that have proven to be hostile to the open RSS architecture, like Spotify.




  • My preference is simple:

    Minimalist Lemmy - ordered by new, chronological (used to be the same on reddit before I stopped) Mastodon - chronological

    If I look at how the algorithms on YouTube or Instagram (don’t know which category they fall in) treat me, they always surface 80% irrelevant stuff and 20% that is okay but only in the rarest cases mindblowingly good. And that’s why on YouTube I tend to ignore the Home tab.

    Especially in the short video algorithms, I fucking hate that if you didn’t respond within a microsecond you’ll now get fed sloth videos or car crashes until you die. I’m all algorithm’ed out.


  • It remains to be seen if reading about all the emotions and morals is the same as feeling them, acting according to them, or just being able to identify them in us meatbags. So even with the sum total of human knowledge at their disposal, this may not matter. We already don’t know how these models actually organize their “knowledge.” We can feed them and we can correct bad outcomes. Beyond that it is a black box, at least right now. So if the spark from statistical spellchecker (current so-called AI) to actual AI (or AGI) happens, we’ll probably not even notice until it writes us a literary classic of Shakespearean proportions or until it turns us into fuel for its paperclip factory. That’s my assessment anyway.





  • God is surprisingly versatile in the good book. Old testament god is totally judgy and throws a plague of locusts at you. Or a flood if you wear the wrong fabric or something like that. Hissy fits to the hilt.

    New testament, so Jesus-story god is more chill. He only kills his own son to make a point. Father of the year material.

    Now, a lot of this stuff is open to interpretation. One might argue I have interpreted stuff in the preceding two paragraphs as well. I wouldn’t argue against that and I’m not going to get drawn into a biblical discussion because I really don’t care. I am a lapsed Lutheran protestant and the Jesus they tried to teach me about wouldn’t have given a fuck about your sexuality. So if fake LLM Jesus says you do your thing, it ain’t my biz who you love, I’m at least inclined to believe it was programmed with a similar interpretation of the story. And while the idea of a Jesus, Mary, and God LLM chat bot is absolutely, undeniably, ridiculously ludicrous, it is almost reassuring that there must be enough training material out there to get it to give that serene a reply.






  • They aren’t under any obligation to provide the fruit of their labour free of charge.

    As far as I can see their subscription prices have also only gone up over the years. Why? Do you think a Mr Burns like figure is sitting behind the scenes asking Smithers to relese the hounds? Or because running the linguistic operation, the database, and a website that people all over the world look at as the de facto authority of the language and gets queried thousands of times per day just cost shitloads of money? And they no longer get enough funding another way?

    Did they ever put ads on their website? Do you run uBlock or similar plugins on your browser?


  • Is it possible? Yes. You can see examples in mainland China where foreign channels, including the more liberal channels from Hong Kong, routinely get blacked out when China news come on (unless they are gloriously positive).

    Is it likely where you are? No. Especially it happening on broadcast channels you would hear a lot more about it. The socials would be full of it. There would have to be an office full of people censoring broadcast channels as they go out. We know the Chinese are operating such a facility because we heard about it. And we haven’t heard anything like that for the US. Ockham’s razor points at a buffering issue somewhere along the distribution chain from the news studio to your local antenna. A streaming video, like on YouTube, is just freeze framed when it’s buffering also. And I don’t think you as an individual consumer are important enough for somebody just doing it for your receiver.