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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I suppose if you’re not trying to let people know that their views are not acceptable then you’re part of the problem.

    Yes, but how are you approaching this discussion?

    I think there are different ways to handle this. On one hand you can be hostile and “give them what they deserve”. On the other hand you can engage in friendly arguments.

    This is a story about how someone from the Westboro Baptist Church left because of the way that people engaged with her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVV2Zk88beY

    What’s worth noting from this story, people that were hostile in their interactions with her only served to entrench her further in her ideals.

    What caused her to change her mind were the people that had “friendly arguments” and made an effort to learn where she was coming from.

    She listed out 4 key points when engaging in difficult conversations. I extracted/paraphrased some of what she said below:

    1. Don’t assume bad intent (assume good or neutral intent instead) - Assuming ill motive almost instantly cuts you off from truly understanding why someone does and believes as they do. We forget that they’re a human being with a lifetime of experience that shaped their mind and we get stuck on that first wave of anger and the conversation has a very hard time ever moving beyond it.

    2. Ask Questions - Asking questions helps us map the disconnect. We can’t present effective arguments if we don’t understand where the other side is coming from.

    3. Stay calm - She though that “[her] rightness justified [her] rudeness”. When things get too hostile during a conversation, tell a joke, recommend a book, change the subject, or excuse yourself from the conversation. The discussion isn’t over, but pause it for a time to let tensions dissapate.

    4. Make the argument - One side effect of having strong beliefs is that we sometimes assume that the value of our position is, or should be, obvious and self-evident. That we shouldn’t have to defend our positions because they’re so clearly right and good. If it were that simple, we would all see things the same way.

    You can’t expect others to spontaneously change their minds. If we want change, we have to make the case for it.



  • Most of those videos are also found on YouTube. I would expect that you don’t see those videos suggested to you because the algorithm has learned what you like to watch.

    If you open up YouTube with a VPN and in a private tab you’ll likely get search results that include a mix from both the right and the left.

    I’d rather not link to them, but from the ones you circled, these are the videos that I found on YouTube while doing a quick search:

    • The Babylon Bee video
    • The Paris Olympics opening ceremony video
    • The Assassins Creed video

    Now please excuse me as I purge my history…





  • I’d say the proof is on Apple to show that it’s being done on-device or that all processing is done on iCloud servers.

    You’re saying that OpenAI is just going to hand over their full ChatGPT model for Apple to set up on their own servers for free?

    But from the article itself:

    the partnership could burn extra money for OpenAI, because it pays Microsoft to host ChatGPT’s capabilities on its Azure cloud

    I get it if they created a small version of their LLM to run locally, but I would expect Apple to pay a price even for that.

    I think you may be confusing this ChatGPT integration with Apple’s own LLM that they’re working on… Again, from the linked article:

    Still, Apple’s choice of ChatGPT as Apple’s first external AI integration has led to widespread misunderstanding, especially since Apple buried the lede about its own in-house LLM technology that powers its new “Apple Intelligence” platform.


  • What? No. I would rather use my own local LLM where the data never leaves my device. And if I had to submit anything to ChatGPT I would want it anonymized as much as possible.

    Is Apple doing the right thing? Hard to say, any answer here will just be an opinion. There are pros and cons to this decision and that’s up to the end user to decide if the benefits of using ChatGPT are worth the cost of their data. I can see some useful use cases for this tech, and I don’t blame Apple for wanting to strike while the iron is hot.

    There’s not much you can really do to strip out identifying data from prompts/requests made to ChatGPT. Any anonymization of that part of the data is on OpenAI to handle.
    Apple can obfuscate which user is asking for what as well as specific location data, but if I’m using the LLM and I tell it to write up a report while including my full name in my prompt/request… that’s all going directly into OpenAIs servers and logs which they can eventually use to help refine/retrain their model at some point.




  • Imagine a scale, on one end is a market economy where the government does not regulate it in any way, and does not own any part of it in any way. This is pure capitalism/laissez fair capitalism, whatever you want to call it. And you are correct, it does not exist today in any country (and that’s a good thing in my opinion).

    On the other end of that scale would be an economy that is completely controlled/owned/regulated by the government (for example, communism).

    In economic terms, every country falls on that scale with some balance between a completely free market economy and how much regulation they impose as well as what kind of industries they control/own.

    If someone is going to blame capitalism for “ruining everything” they are basically asking for a market system where everything is controlled/owned by the government. Where monopolies are rampant, and the citizens have no choice except for what the government or dictatorship has decided. In my opinion, this is also a bad choice.

    If I am wrong about what they are asking for, feel free to point out the economy of a country that they are saying we should follow. In other words, if not capitalism, what are you asking for?


  • Also, it is ranked 57th when sorted worst to best. It is sorted at 120th from best to worst. Worse than 119 other nations.

    Yes, 57th when sorted from worst to best, I never said otherwise. And your numbers are a little off when sorting the other way around. There are only 162 countries with rankings in that list, so flipping it around puts the U.S. at 105th (behind 104 other nations).
    Besides, we’re looking at the Gini Coefficient which (with the countries on this list) has a range of ~23 to ~63, and a score of ~40 is right in the middle of that. In no way is the U.S. at the top of that list, but I still don’t see how you can consider it to be “one of the worst countries in the world for income inequality”.

    You’ve invented a thing and then are using your own invention to sort terms that have actual meanings not related to your invented scale

    I mean, I’m trying to explain in other terms so that we can understand each other better?

    And if I understand this right, you’re saying that it doesn’t make sense to create a scale where:

    • one side of it is laissez fair capitalism, a completely free market economy with no government regulation
    • the other side is an economy entirely run/controlled by the government with complete government regulation (such as communism)

    Communism isn’t a scale

    I never said it was a scale. I just placed it at one end of the scale. The scale being “how much control a government has over the market.”

    On that scale, the U.S. is mostly capitalist, I have never said otherwise.


  • Well the U.S. isn’t entirely capitalist either.

    On one extreme you have a completely free market economy. On the other extreme you have an economy that’s completely controlled by the government (such as Communism).

    A pure free market economy doesn’t really exist anywhere among all the countries, what we have instead are a lot of countries that try to find the right balance between letting the market control itself and having the government control the market.

    So call it whatever you want, but the US does have a mixed economy when placed on that scale.

    The US gini coefficient is 39.8 as of 2021. Making it one of the worst countries in the world for income inequality.

    I don’t know how you can say it’s one of the worst when it’s not even in the bottom third in that list of 162 countries.

    According to that source, the worst country is South Africa with a Gini coefficient of 63.0.

    The best country is Norway with a Gini Coefficient of 22.7.

    The US. Ranks 57th with a Gini coefficient of 39.8.

    If anything that places it in the middle rather than “one of the worst”.


  • When I say pure capitalism, yes, I’m referring to laissez faire capitalism.

    I can’t think of any countries that currently have that, and I don’t think we should want that.

    Socialism is likely not the best term here, but when I’m referring to it economically I mean in the sense that the government has ownership of some businesses and is regulating other businesses as opposed to what would happen with laissez-faire capitalism.

    Perhaps it is better to say that the U.S. is a mix between Capitalism (a market economy) and Communism (a command-based economy) as this article explains? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economy.asp

    It is one of the worst countries in the world in terms of wealth disparity and income inequality.

    That has not been my experience when visiting/living in other countries, but I am curious if you have some data to back this statement up?

    Although I do agree that we have a problem with wealth disparity and income inequality.

    I think we should look to other countries that have much higher levels of happiness (Such as Sweden) compared to the U.S. and try to imitate what they are doing.

    Even in the case of looking to economies like what Sweden has, it is still a mixed economy. So completely doing away with capitalism is not something we should be striving for.




  • America doesn’t have a pure capitalist economy.

    A pure capitalist economy would have a free market system with no government intervention.

    Almost every country has a mix between capitalism and socialism for their economies.

    A pure capitalist economy is terrible just as much as a pure socialist economy would be terrible.
    The trick is finding the right balance between the two.