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Cake day: March 5th, 2024

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  • Only place I’ve occasionally run into metric prefixes above km is in astronomy within proximity to our planet. You just don’t need them for most terrestrial applications, and as soon as you get out of the solar system people switch to parsecs and light years.

    I suppose people also have a basic sense of how long a km is, where that goes out the window with anything bigger. Especially anyone who has gone through the military, has an intuitive feel for how distant a “klick” is.







  • Yeah I caught that too, I’d be curious to know more about what specifically they meant by that.

    Being able to link all of the words that have a similar meaning, say, nearby, close, adjacent, proximal, side-by-side, etc and realize they all share something in common could be done in many ways. Some would require an abstract understanding of what spatial distance actually is, an understanding of physical reality. Others would not, one could simply make use of word adjacency, noticing that all of these words are frequently used alongside certain other words. This would not be abstract, it’d be more of a simple sum of clear correlations. You could call this mathematical framework a universal language if you wanted.

    Ultimately, a person learns meaning and then applies language to it. When I’m a baby I see my mother, and know my mother is something that exists. Then I learn the word “mother” and apply it to her. The abstract comes first. Can an LLM do something similar despite having never seen anything that isn’t a word or number?







  • Nothing about the term tankie does or should deny their right to live. Advocating for the deaths of people who disagree with you is profoundly against everything liberalism (the freedom-based guiding principle of what we’d call “the west”) stands for.

    To the contrary, as a pretty standard liberal American I fully support their rights to advocate for whatever they wish. Since there is no realistic way to accurately and objectively determine what is or is not propaganda, I support their right to create that as well.

    Regarding the utility of recognizing where propaganda comes from, it can occasionally be useful to know, as it tends to follow certain patterns based on the goals of whoever created it.


  • Actually the goal of terms like that is efficiency. We could say “supporter of aggressively implemented authoritarian communism” if we wanted, but tankie is shorter.

    Helps if you have the background to understand the specifics of what different “isms” support and thus what they disagree on that leads them into genuinely fighting each other. A fascist, a lib and a tankie really do have very core disagreements that cannot be realistically compromised on. At the most basic, a fascist wants a unified society with a strict hierarchy, the tankie wants a unified society with no hierarchy, the lib doesn’t want any kind of unified society. If any one of these people gets their way, the other two do not, which leads to conflict.

    Left/right are more economic arguments with some wiggle room due to being more or less a spectrum, but also tend to feature significant real world disagreements.

    Anyways, I do agree that it’s important to have conversations about these underlying details, but when you’re talking amongst other people who know the background already, some shorthand terms are going to start appearing. Since these are overarching governance philosophies that any person can adopt or discard at will, they’re also a little different from more inherent divisions, like ethnicity for instance. Being a tankie, lib or fascist is a choice, where being Arabic or gay or something is not.



  • Same. Every time I see someone complaining about the all feed I wonder if they came from 4chan’s b board or something.

    How many places on the internet expect you to regularly use some sort of all feed? 9gag maybe? Did people regularly use reddit’s all feed, despite it being crammed full of garbage and vote farming? I think I used it for like 5 seconds when I first started there before I gave up in disgust and started picking communities intentionally.

    Do you set up your newsreader with all of everything? You want all the sports, all the pop culture, all the tech, etc etc?

    I just don’t get it. All is always going to be garbage on every service just because the world is a big place, and that’s fine.

    Now, rant aside, I did actually find his idea of an all feed where local instance voting is all that gets counted kinda neat. I don’t have any problems with that being an available option if someone wanted to work on it.



  • I think they’re just reading the room. If he goes full-on authoritarian, do your shareholders benefit more from you getting in his way or licking his boots?

    His first term there was a sense that he might shake things up, but they would eventually return to some semblance of balance of power. This second term, people still wonder deep down whether Trump might try to pull a S Korean style martial law declaration at some point, and perhaps meet greater success.