I was a little disappointed that she tried to find some kind of synthesis between her own fawning opinion and Kim Stanley Robinson’s critical view of Always Coming Home.

Ursula’s concern with erasure due to sexism is warranted, but everyone’s star must fade. No one is completely correct, and while Le Guin was ahead of her time, no one has a perfect vision of the future or even a clear vision of their own present. Sincere criticism is a form of flattery, and many authors long gone continue to be referenced not just because they had a prescient view, but because their critics keep them alive. Tolstoy was the most famous author in the Soviet Union because despite being banned to print, the publishing of rebuttals and counter-apologetics were subsidized by the central soviet, so that everyone knew his name and anarchist views.

In this cast, DeFreitas celebrates Le Guin in a way that is effusive but neither hot nor cold. It’s exactly this kind of inoffensive praise that reduces the great to symbols of greatness, and from there to cliché, mediocrity, and obscurity. Good authors deserve trenchant praise, or at least honest criticism.

‘AI’ in the sense of machine learning algorithms is very old technology, and has seen revolutionary applications at every step of its development. Eliza was created in the 1960s and demonstrated that if the test of a computer’s artificial intelligence was whether it could fool a human that it was sentient, the value of that test depended very heavily on how willing the human correspondent was to ‘fill in the blanks.’ The results of those experiments show that the average person is extremely willing to fill in the blanks even when the technology is full of gaping holes.

In the podcast, they’re talking specifically about ChatGPT-style technology, its flaws, and the willingness of people to ‘fill in the blanks’ in a new dimension – to assume LLM technology is a truckload more graphics cards or a nuclear reactor away from what sci-fi writers mean when they say ‘Artificial Intelligence’ – and that is evidently false.

Small clarification, @MindTraveller participated in that thread, but was banned while a comment of theirs was removed in a separate post. That’s why they’re not included in the list.

Hey there, Mr. Glass Houseman.

Votes don’t magically give someone the power to rule you. The only thing that rules you is what you are willing or not willing to sacrifice. After you voted against Trump, and your team lost, did you put your body upon the gears and upon the wheels, did you stop the machine from working?

Or did you throw up your hands, donate a pittance to the party that lost? Did you wait patiently for four years for another chance, all the while being a well-oiled cog in the Orphan Crushing Machine with Trump now at the lead? If the people who didn’t vote caused Trump to be elected, then it must also be true that everyone who continued to cooperate with the government after January 20 are complicit in everything that Trump did while in office. Do you feel shame for all the fucked up shit you enabled?

The U.S. was founded by slavers, and in order to preserve the rights of white men to own slaves, they built several anti-democratic institutions into the constitution of the new country. Northern states had fewer slaves and more voters, while southern states has more people but most of them weren’t allowed to vote. A one-person one-vote system that included slaves would result in the end of slavery. A one-person one-vote system that excluded slaves would give most of the political power to the north, and would probably end slavery. So to make sure people could continue to be deprived of their humanity, the electoral college was invented.

All states were given votes in the college proportional to their population, with slaves counting as 3/5 of a person. This gave greater power to the plantation owning whites who were responsible for ratifying the constitution, and insured nothing short of a civil war could end their reign of terror.

After the civil war the electoral college remained, and continues to distort the popular vote.

From LW, yeah. They still federate with us though. And honestly, I get it.

Welcome!

Other leftist instances you might consider:

• Beehaw.org
• Lemmy.Blahaj.Zone
• Lemmy.DBZer0.com
• Midwest.social (USA)
• Feddit.uk (United Kingdom)
• Aggregatet.org (Sweden)
• Feddit.org (Germany)
• JLai.Lu (France)
• Slrpnk.net

¡Ya Basta – con beber!

I shared this in a comment recently and I’m wondering if it led to this post.

Maybe. I got it from @Ephera@lemmy.ml

It should be noted that not only buying their food benefit Israel, it is often grown on internationally recognized Palestinian land stolen with violence by Israeli settlers. Centuries old olive orchards could have been uprooted to bring you those pomegranates.

Murdered for four trays of meat: The uncle and nephew killed in Brazil for shoplifting

Taking the two tarsus discount.

Congratulations!

It’s a good thing that birds aren’t real, and already have RemoteID built-in.

It’s an instance of Invidious, which does not use ActivityPub. Invidious is software you can host to portal to YouTube while preventing most of google’s ability to track and advertise.

See also !infrapolitics@slrpnk.net

Shoplifting is definitely a case where privilege makes a big difference. White people in my area will shoplift even though they don’t need it and then distribute the food to homeless people.

I support that, and even if you weren’t disgusted by cops you’re welcome here. I hope I haven’t come across as trying to enforce some dogmatic orthodoxy as an admin, my intention is to provide an alternate lens on my post out of concern that no-one else has already given it.

As a threadiverse contributor, my goal is to post relevant and topical articles that inspire insightful discussion. I worry that my role as an admin puts people on a different footing when it comes to expressing their views - and that’s not what I’m trying to do here. I have strong opinions, but with the exception of fascism, I’m supportive of sharing space with a broad spectrum of political stances. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.

I post articles as is, but I hope they aren’t taken at face value. Obviously this is copraganda, most articles posted through mainstream media have shades of this bias. It’s important to read between the lines.

This is not typical of police, they are more likely to shoot you or take your children than help. If it were done, it would be much more effectively performed by trained social workers rather than police as intermediaries. It’s not their job, and not the role they are required by the capitalist system to do. If this was their purpose, they would not need guns, and they would not actually be police.

Also the implication that people stealing big-ticket items don’t actually need help (instead of being more efficient with their time) is a pretty toxic message.