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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotion that happens to be conveyable by pressure waves in air. Can you imagine if sound just didn’t work? How much that would suck? It’s amazing that it’s like… a thing.

    Sight too (obviously, now that we’re thinking this way). But just how fucking weird can a thing be if you manage to think about it abstractly for a minute? Matter, over there, just so happens to excite a completely unrelated field that randomly permeates everywhere, even empty space(?!). And we went and fucking evolved little squishy organs that connect these intangible excitations in this weird field into the glob of electrical neurons that make our being. And by some complete fucking voodoo I’m sat here with a picture in my mind of all matter around me that’s emitting EM radiation in the 400 to 790 trillion wobbles per second range. That’s weeiird.


  • In the core of this reasoning is the idea that “men are inherently dangerous to women” therefore “women must know at all times the biological sex of any person they interact with”.

    I don’t believe that, just to be clear. But I think that’s the view of a lot of people, and that’s what i was outlining. because that was relevant to OP’s question.

    So you can’t go past the “transition” history for reasons that under all other circumstances you would decry as “misandry”,

    I will assume you are not talking about me here as you have no idea of my point of view on the matter. I believe you are talking generically…

    even if you are talking generically, i don’t think your assumption here makes sense. many people feel free to discriminate between people on the basis of their biological sex. there are many contexts where (for example) men will accept they are treated differently but will not resort to calling this “misandry”. at least in the settings i’m familiar with and amongst the people i’ve lived alongside here in London, UK. you may have very specific incidence in mind or may not be intending to speak universally, but you said “all other circumstances”, which sounds pretty universal, so i’m just pointing out that’s not correct…

    entitled to hands down secrecy, given that a random bigot can just shoot them down for being trans with zero consequences.

    I don’t know where you live, but this is not true in the UK

    while I agree with the thrust of what you are saying you have a writing style that puts words and assumptions in my mouth in a manner that comes across an unnecessarily combative. you also use exaggeration to make your point which is itself problematic…





  • Musk: more politically oriented than just money now, had aligned himself with a very large part of the population that thinks at a minimum that even if some people need to transition for their own health, society retains the right to consider their pre-transition history to still be part of reality

    Zuckerberg: profit driven, is aligning Facebook etc with the political reality in America and the real prospect of being fined or embargoed by a Trump administration, would flip back if a democrat won in 2028

    Rowling: belongs to a British generation of certain age where trans people are superficially accepted BUT regards their pre-trans history to be something still relevant. That’s where this started and it escalated / deteriorated from there E.g. compassionate to a degree and willing to entertain the “fiction” that a biological man is now a women for the sake of that person’s mental health: see them at the shops presenting female? carry on as normal… talk to them? use their current name and pronouns out of politeness… BUT… if they want to access a female shelter, draw a line… if they want to teach young children, risk assess them including their pre-trans gender and history etc. Rowling then got into increasingly fractious arguments on Twitter, largely arising from other people she followed and liked and what the trans community inferred from that. At that point she doubled down declaring advocates on Twitter to be increasingly hysterical and deluded whilst simultaneously insisting she would treat trans people humanely in person. She’s then lashed out in numerous ways including in her writings aligning herself with increasingly extreme anti-trans people. FWIW, I think she would have carried on being a mildly tolerant (if dated) person of a certain age had she just stayed off Twitter entirely. But lashing out, being misinterpreted and misinterpreting others had led her to spiral down into viciousness and bitterness.


  • We were promised hyper-intelligent computer systems that would usher in an era of unparalleled prosperity and innovation.

    With the advent of ChatGPT, some say these modern-day oracles have arrived.

    Others say they are nothing but bullshit machines.

    Technologists and publicists gush about how Large Language Models (LLMs) will revolutionize the way we work, learn, play, communicate, create, and connect to another.

    They are right that artificial intelligence (AI) will affect nearly every aspect of our daily lives.

    And they are right that by providing a way for people to talk with machines in ordinary language, LLMs constitute a dramatic step forward in making computing accessible to everyone.

    Yet for all the good that AI systems will do, they will also saturate our information environment with bullshit at a scale we’ve never before encountered.

    “I think it’s going to be the most transformative technology humanity has ever created, potentially on par with or exceeding the invention of the printing press, electricity, and the internet.” Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

    For better or for worse, LLMs are here to stay. We all read content that they produce online, most of us interact with LLM chatbots, and many of us use them to produce content of our own.

    In a series of five- to ten-minute lessons, we will explain what these machines are, how they work, and how to thrive in a world where they are everywhere.

    You will learn when these systems can save you a lot of time and effort. You will learn when they are likely to steer you wrong. And you will discover how to see through the hype to tell the difference. ?