this thread has broken containment, and the median quality of the discussion has dropped to the point where some rando decided to start a subthread about how it’s not ok to celebrate hitler’s death and also two regulars had an extremely heated fight about who was the most not-mad about the word chat as a noun/pronoun/whatever in English of all fucking things so uhhhh that’s all folks
TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Meanwhile I've seen people justifying the power use of genAI with "but people also consume as much if not more energy through their lives".
Fuckin' clanker lovers.
It's only bigotry if you believe machines incapable of thought or feeling deserve human rights. In which case, you have bigger problems than people being "racist" against bullshit-ass generative AI.
How online do you have to be where "people dunking on AI "artists" is like Kristallnacht" doesn't sound completely fucking deranged?
This is called rationalizing because any relationship with reality it has is strictly rationed
This shows why it's so easy for conservatives to reverse Uno the language of social justice, painting themselves as the victims of oppression and liberals / women / minorities / immigrants / LGBTQ+ people / anyone else who exists without their consent as oppressors. They refuse to admit that words mean things, and that things are more important than words.
It's not a lack of reading comprehension. It's a lack of reality comprehension.
The 'change the subject' thing can be useful if you're changing like for like. Equating AI algorithms to the Jewish people is very far from that. To a disturbing degree.
“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” The Judge
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
It’s also why the right can’t meme
I think it's the other way around. The right is incredibly good at memes - because memes presume underlying facts without having to prove those facts, and, by portraying them humorously, imply that anyone asking for proof of the underlying facts is taking the meme too seriously.
Remember last summer when the internet was flooded with memes about Haitians eating people's pets? That whole vicious racist slander based on a single false report that in any other context would have been absolutely unacceptable, but anybody who pointed out "hey, this is vicious racist slander based on a single false report and is absolutely unacceptable" got accused of being humorless wokescolds taking a joke too seriously?
It's why the Trump White House posts so many viciously racist and contemptuous memes on Twitter. It's why the fucking Department of Homeland Security likes to hide the numbers 14 and 88 in its social media posts. Because it puts the left in a Catch-22: if they call out the memes, they look like humorless enemies of free speech, and if they don't, it normalizes racism even further.
The right has mastered the art of the meme. The left may be winning the meme Olympics, but the right are fucking professionals.
I think it's the other way around. The memes are incredibly good at left vs right because left- and right-leaning people presume underlying facts and the memes reassure people that those facts are true and good (or false and bad, etc.) without doing any fact-finding.
When we say "the right can't meme" what we mean is that the right's memes are about projecting bigotry. It's like saying that the right has no comedians; of course they have people that stand up in front of an audience and emit words according to memes, tropes, and narremes, such that the audience laughs. Indeed, stand-up was invented by Frank Fay, an open fascist. (His Behind the Bastards episodes are quite interesting.) What we're saying is that the stand-up routine is bigoted. If this seems unrelated, please consider: the Haitians-eating-pets joke is part of a stand-up routine that a clown tells in order to get his circus elected.
In my understanding: they aren’t making jokes with the expectation that their audience laughs at the joke itself. The audience is laughing at the target of the joke. In this sense, you might say the right doesn’t meme, and further speculate that they can’t meme.
So yeah they post and repost a lot of “memes,” but it’s never really to be like: “look at this clever meme I made,” it’s just “look at this meme that makes fun of x people”. Their accusation of humorlessness is just a confession.
If we're going to focus on form instead of content, it's amusing that "if you say mean things about ai then you're a bigot" is the exact same form as "if you say mean things about Trump then you're a terrorist."
the post: https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2f66lgh2c2v .
The person is a bluesky engineer.
Not only that, she introduced mass surveillance to Bluesky and is brainstorming further methods of such in response to getting clowned on so hard.
Yeah, I'm not touching bluesky's servers after this.
Migration luckily works pretty well on atproto.
Hoo boy. The original person being reposted continues on their original post that they believe we cannot be certain that genAI does not have feelings.