princeofwittenberg

[princeofwittenberg]

a child came into the nature center and saw tadpoles for the first time and when i told him they're baby frogs he thought i was lying and i suddenly realized that if you're 3 and don't know that tadpoles become frogs it does sound pretty fake. this kid will not fall for made up shit online he is a born skeptic.

[princeofwittenberg]

it’s the way zohran’s win is being celebrated as a great progressive moment meanwhile some of the main demographics he did worst with are black voters, jewish voters, and those who make less than $50k

[princeofwittenberg]

Maybe a bit scary that the candidate for New Your mayor, a city with a lot of Jews, doesn't condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada".

I don't fucking care that "these words have different meanings for many different people." It's associated so much with violence and it's definitely associated with violence by the people suicide bombing buses in the 2000s.

It's really not that hard to support peace but somehow so many people don't do it.

[princeofwittenberg]

the pitt shitposts - part 1

(a gift for my wife @thebaconsandwichofregret)

[princeofwittenberg]

[princeofwittenberg]

🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦 Pride march was held in Kyiv, Ukraine for the first time since the beginning of full-scale invasion. It's dangerous for big crowds to gather for a long period of time due to potential russian airstrikes, so the event was smaller and shorter than usual, but still important and powerful.

[princeofwittenberg]

[princeofwittenberg]

[princeofwittenberg]

They don’t actually give you an encyclopedic knowledge of something when you get in a degree in it. They give you the skill to learn more about it on your own.

[princeofwittenberg]

Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

[princeofwittenberg]

this post's hypothetical by itself is already ridiculous but the thing that gets me is how the wording implies two very funny things that become funnier in tandem

1. "Accidentally, the pitcher tosses a Christian baby" means this is a mistake on the pitcher's part. i imagine the pitcher is breastfeeding on the field and they pitch and they look down at their hands and they see the ball still in the glove and they go "fuck"

2. hitting the baby will still win you the game

[princeofwittenberg]

big fan of when animals sniff things very intensely and make that loud ass sniffing sound

[princeofwittenberg]

i feel strongly about this

[princeofwittenberg]

I wonder if a man has ever seen another man’s penis

[princeofwittenberg]

technically i guess you coud drill into a human sinus fairly easily you would just have a weird divot there afterwards. might be worth it though

[princeofwittenberg]

I think a lot of women (and some men) have only ever experienced sex in the context of coercion and abuse by men, have never had a real opportunity to express or develop any kind of sexual agency (because it doesn't come automatically!), and down among the many negative consequences of this unjust state of affairs is that some people in this situation find themselves unable to conceptualize that sex for anyone (or at least, for any woman) could be anything but a horrible, coercive, violating experience; they attribute these characteristics to sexuality in its fundamental nature and not to the injustices to which they have been subjected. This is of course not nearly the greatest tragedy of this state of affairs but it is an unfortunate thing. For many people, men and women, sexuality and sexual expression are deeply fundamental parts of their experience as humans and something they could not envision a truly full life without. This is not a fringe experience but an immensely common one. But there is a deep emotional barrier to meaningful understanding between these groups and I have very little sense of how to breach it.