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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I live in a country with a relatively similar political climate as Poland (highly religious, post-communist, wannabe central Europe). And I used to use the same argument when I was surrounded by more conservative people. The argument is IMO frequently invoked not by people who are truly worried about children (which I’ll write about below), but by conservatives who need a civilised, “agnostic” argument for their homophobic stances. But ofc it’s better to assume good intentions, at least if you don’t know anything about the person using the argument (as e.g. here).

    The biggest problem with the argument is that it’s purely reactive and, under the hood, disingenuous. Children bully each other horribly already for a million stupid reasons - their shoe brand, their phone brand, their behaviour, etc. or just so, for no detectable reason at all. They also bully their teachers and professors. What is done against all this? Absolutely nothing, as far as I see (and I’ve seen and heard plenty while I was growing up). It is never brought up as a problem in public discourse, nobody seems to care too much. Bullying somehow becomes a big problem and relevant for the lawmaking only when gay parents are a possibility.

    In general, from what I’ve seen, bullies will find just about any reason to target a kid. Adding one more to the roster seems borderline trivial. E.g. a lot of existing bullying is class-based - my younger sister was mildly ostracised in the primary school for a while because she wore the clothes my mother sewed for her, without a brand or anything, suggesting we don’t have the money to buy “proper” clothes. Should we, then, try to separate poor kids from the rich kids, so the poor don’t get bullied? Or just forbid poor kids from going to school?

    Thus, instead of doing anything against the actual problem – that is, bullying as such – the laws of the state, the fundamental right of a child to a family, etc. should all buckle down before some child bullying? A child should be denied growing up with a potentially good and loving family with LGBT parents, and instead be adopted by a potentially inferior heterosexual family (assuming the adoption centres have some sort of system to judge the adopters in advance), or stay without a family at all indefinitely, because someone could/will bully them based on their most intimate and safe space, that is their family? Just as it would be monstrous to forbid poor kids from going to school to “protect” them from bullying, it is monstrous to propose “to protect some kids from bullying, we’ll deny them from having a family”. The whole argument is actually (or should be) an argument for aggressively rethinking and reworking your educational system , parenting and culture in general.

    because why should these children be victims of war that is not even theirs to fight

    Under the current system they’re also victims and involved in this same war - a part of their potential adopters is denied by default, and they stay without a family for longer. Are they not victims here? (Not to get into the issue of measuring potential benefits of having a family against the potential negatives of bullying, it’s purely arbitrary and depends on the given culture too.)

    On the other hand, I do think the whole discussion has been derailed by overly focusing on this as an LGBT issue rather than an issue of children without families. So there’s some merit at least in the general approach of the argument you present (the children are those whose well-being is most important here), but it leads to the wrong conclusion, usually because it’s invoked by people who really just want to get to that conclusion one way or another, rather than helping the kids.


  • it would reject invalid answers

    Not quite. When I used to care and kind of tried to distort the training data, I would always select one additional picture that did not contain the desired object, and my answer would usually be accepted. I.e. they were aware that the images weren’t 100% lined up with the labels in their database, so they’d give some leeway to the users, letting them correct those potential mistakes and smooth out the data.

    it won’t let me get past without clicking on the van

    That’s your assumption. Had you not clicked on the van, maybe it would’ve let you through anyway, it’s not necessarily that strict. Or it would just give you a new captcha to solve. Either way, if your answer did not line up with what the system expected (your assumption being that they had already classified it as a bus) it would call attention to the image. So, they might send it over to a real human to check what it really is, or put it into some different combination with other vehicles to filter it out and reclassify.



  • This is the first time in my life I’ve seen dislike of the userbase of an another site called ‘xenophobia’.

    Especially weird since 90% of Lemmy is fresh off reddit themselves.

    Personally I just don’t want the shitty aspects of the reddit community seeping over here. It’s a fact that reddit userbase has been facebookised, to the degree where I frequently see people who are outright stupid (repeatedly posting threads to wrong subreddits, ignoring mod messages, unable to comprehend basic English… stuff that I’d expect to see on Facebook and not reddit), or focused on memes and quips to the point where any discussion is flooded with such moronic content. There’s still (at least) tens of thousands of people on reddit who I’m sure would be great contributors on Lemmy too if they decide to switch, and I hope they will. But I don’t want all of reddit here. Is that really so bad, to not want to look at unfiltered normie crap? Reddit was good (if it ever was good) precisely because it was a bit elitist in its design and its culture.

    We can’t argue about federation on the net, avoiding corporate control, or whatever while sticking our hand out and stopping people from joining.

    Maybe people can join somewhere else too? Make a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook/Instagram or something. Lemmy is not all of Fediverse and doesn’t have to be for everyone.

    Like half of your complaints are literally good things. Yes, people want to be heard and not practically hidden from 90% if they don’t get enough upvotes on their post/comment during the crucial early time frame, as on bigger reddit subs. Lemmy is not a social media platform anyway, its goal is not to facilitate socialisation among the users and it doesn’t need many millions of users to work well.



  • antonim@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldGoodReads alternative
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    1 year ago

    Bookwyrm is open-source, works similarly to Lemmy (i.e. is a federated platform). Storygraph and LibraryThing are also popular alternatives, but IIRC they’re both closed source.

    Personally I think just creating a spreadsheet file with your reading data is better. (In LibreOffice, of course.)


  • Human language change happens first of all because the reality that the language is meant to represent changes. I.e. you create a new thing, you create a new name for it too.

    ChatGPT does not intend to represent a reality when it uses a language. It does not even know of a reality outside of its language.

    Human language also changes due to various rather vague “economic” reasons, e.g. simplified pronunciation, merging sounds, developing some new habits in grammar that spread within one community but do not spread elsewhere… For example, we have extremely obvious proof that Latin developed into Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc., so language change clearly isn’t some magical process. On the other hand, if you fed a ton of ancient Latin into ChatGPT, it wouldn’t even develop the pronunciation of medieval Latin used by priests, much less the totally different descendant languages that developed at the time.




  • So you understand the system very well, yet completely ignore the ethically dubious aspects of the system.

    People are not born desiring harmful garbage. They are, at least in part, taught, conditioned to desire it.

    When you say that a site “feeds you whatever you want”, you’re ignoring the chicken-or-the-egg pattern of desire and satisfaction on the market. The site teaches you want you want. Internet addiction and the ways in which contemporary media and tech affect your mind (most obviously by reducing people’s attention spans) are fairly well known today.

    Imagine a drug dealer who sells his garbage to the same person so much that they develop an addiction. With your logic, we can just blame the junkie who keeps returning to the dealer, while the dealer is pretty much innocent - surely it’s not his responsibility if someone else develops an addiction and destroys their life!


  • You can relativise things all you want, it’s a fact that online insanity does leak back into the reality. For example see Qanon, or Brenton Tarrant, who used to frequent 4chan and 8chan. Not to mention the more trivial things such as people openly agreeing with Andrew Tate, or becoming fans and voters of Donald Trump due to his online presence, etc.

    If you know people IRL that believe lgbt people shouldn’t exist, I guess I feel bad for you and who you associate with.

    Did you just spin this into a covert ad hominem? Nice job, but I don’t “associate” with every person whose views I hear espoused IRL.

    I don’t know anyone at all like that, not even close to that.

    Ok? But why assume that every community and society is exactly like yours? From your other comments I notice you’re from Canada, I hope you’re aware your political culture isn’t typical for the rest of the world, not even for the entire “west”.

    I don’t feel the need to defend the most extreme examples of dumb things you’ve read online that someone else posted.

    Right, so you didn’t have to claim such people and such extreme positions literally don’t exist - with caps lock, no less. I probably wouldn’t think of replying to you if you didn’t formulate it so categorically.