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yes probably, and ive been calling this as their playbook for about a year

Make no mistake, this is not some sophisticated conspiracy. This is pure laziness and abuse of power. They have been using "domestic terrorist" as a button to slap anytime they dont want to be questioned. the phrase no longer means anything besides "this person questioned authority"

ICE has used it to label people they shot for videoing them. Note that they knew the video evidence existed and labelled them anyway, assuming they would be able to avoid court altogether and prevent the video evidence being seen. In at least one case, this didnt work and the victim was correctly identified as such.

So this isnt hypothetical. It is a playbook being used right now, and people are testing the waters for how much they can get away with.


I feel the average person is not equipped to understand the implications. being educated / intelligent means you have likely picked up some neuroscience knowledge and it has stuck for you over the years. Even if it is not your "field" we all have a brain and if you like knowledge then you recognize it's useful to know about it.

The average person, especially the below average person, is better off trusting others than their own judgement - since most people know more than them.

You need to talk to your cousin. No one else is going to.


> You need to talk to your cousin. No one else is going to.

This is absolutely true.

> being educated / intelligent means you have likely picked up some neuroscience knowledge and it has stuck for you over the years.

People in Russia and China have almost 30 percentage points more tertiary education levels than Americans do. Nonetheless social media is even more pervasive and popular in China than anywhere else in the world. Like with the panic about video game fixation, harmful time wasters are almost certainly an effect, not a cause, of something else.


>People in Russia and China have almost 30 percentage points more tertiary education levels than Americans do. Nonetheless social media is even more pervasive and popular in China than anywhere else in the world. Like with the panic about video game fixation, harmful time wasters are almost certainly an effect, not a cause, of something else.

I don't know about Russia but China social media is no where close to American Social Media. There is generally time limits, content restrictions and other things that make the two not similar.

When people go "Social media is a problem", they are generally referring to western social media where it's profitability over any external harm they are doing.


It used to be a meme to point that American TikTok was all (pre-AI) slop while Chinese TikTok was delivering children math and physics lessons.

But can anyone from China or who has been there confirm this meme? I don't doubt, but given the diverse milieu in here, there's a good chance somebody with first hand experience can say something.

I'm currently teaching Chinese high school students, and I don't buy it. There is certain content that's blocked here, but most of what's on the local tiktok is pretty trash either way because t's not the subjects, it's the format. You can try to surface more wholesome five-second videos but even if you succeed, they'll still be five-second videos.

I recall China having instituted limits on gaming for children. I believe there are limits for social media as well.

yes, if you buy into the 200% opposite philosophy as mine, then the words you are saying make it sound like i am wrong and you are right haha. i guess my point is: it doesn't really matter if they institute limits on gaming for children. the fact that kids want to play games all day - the fact that they need to create limits is a SYMPTOM of the problem. are you getting it now?

the bullshit machine is learning to optimize its bullshitting techniques!

<AI is a great tool for many things disclaimer, but> after working with it for a bit, how dont people realize we are training it to be an almost identical mimic to one of the worst types of employees youll ever have to work with?? the kind that always pretends to know what theyre talking about, only tells you what you want to hear, hides issues, and only does work if you would notice it didnt

you cannot give this type of worker autonomy over anything.


how confident is it in the identification? i imagine sometimes the angle is or resolution is bad and it may detect a bird but not have a lot to go off of to say what kind. does it narrow the list down or just make a guess?


It looks like they are using audio. Even with poor audio on my phone I find that it works very well. Once in a blue moon I'll get an ID I am doubtful of from BirdNet but it's rare in my experience.


but the thing with AI is that it excels in creating things we would not doubt, regardless of the truth. in particular, i find it to be susceptible to avoiding doubt at the expense of truth.

though i would be hopeful for bird audio, as differentiating their calls is something the birds themselves excel at, so it could very well be a great usecase for ai


machine learning has been used to identify bird calls for a while now, it's more of a classifier than a content generator, so it identifies calls and provides a confidence level

while it's not perfect it's not really producing hallucinations of pterodactyls or anything like that


>We also live in a world where a package written by someone learning to code ended up critically underpinning the entire ecosystem and is downloaded 500 million times a month

whoa what? which one is that?


As another commenter said, it's "is-even":

https://github.com/i-voted-for-trump/is-even

From that page:

> I created this in 2014, when I was learning how to program.

I've nothing against Jon Schlinkert, it's not his fault the way we build software is more than messed up, where our build systems are so brittle that, "Throw out the universe and rebuild it from scratch" became not just acceptable, but the main way to get build systems to work reliably.


Check is-even and is-odd npm packages. https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even


That's still quite a ways away from 500M+ downloads a month, more like ~4M downloads a month.

Still a huge number of downloads, don't get me wrong!


You're right, I was reading the stats for "is-number" and mixing them up for "is-even":

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-number

170M downloads / week.

Same author, similar vintage. Arguably a necessary package, but that just further indicates how messed up javascript was.


So nuts.

> Arguably a necessary package

Arguably a somewhat important part of a standard library!


A large part of the problems of Javascript are corollaries of lacking of a good standard library, and the relatively long time it took and is still taking to fix that.

It wasn't really until ES2015 that a better standard library really started to take shape, and, thanks to IE11, it was a very long time before that didn't need poly-filling.

In a sane world, you'd just parse whatever you're after and then check for NaN or null.

You can't do that. Pop open your favourite javascript runtime and type:

    Number.parseInt("123Garbage")


the bubble doesnt mean they are worthless only that after a pop the value of stock will drop significantly. it is out of their control if people overvalue the stock, and thats what creates the bubble which will eventually need to pop for self correction - but might trigger a massive oversale bringing the stock below actual value and causing all sorts of problems that will challenge the solvency of the company (basically challenging their liquid funds vs how much debt that they backed to their stock value). if they survive that then a bounce back is expected and buying while they were low would get you profit again. if they overleveraged themselves during the bubble bc they bought into the hype themselves, then they could face serious financial troubles and be susceptible to getting bought out.


But isn't that supposed to happen when you create a hit product? I imagine some people said similar things about Apple when iPhone started selling like water, but I don't think that it was the majority like here


name change at 18 probably


identities spoken of in this way are tools and we often get very caught up in self reflection and the level of worthiness we feel we have earned certain labels. your true and actual identity is out of your control and not something you would ever think twice about. you arent someone who exercises or not. your identity is the part of you that believes exercising is good for you to begin with. thinking you need to and telling yourself you are someone who does it are both the same identity. If you believe it is good for you and you dont do it, then there is another part of your identity that is asserting you dont always need to good things for yourself.

The part you really need to challenge, which will help in all areas of your life, is to settle the question: "to what extent do I believe I should do things that are good for me?". Every day you go without any plan or committed effort towards your health and exercising is a day you answered, "very little extent". for sake of text length im going to skip a lot of detail, but if you're like me then this eventually leads to a question of "how do I restore faith in myself?"

a thought experiment that i read somewhere (and maybe tweaked) that i use is a "post body swap" mentality. If you are willing to accept accountability and responsibility for whatever is in your past, then you no longer need to identify with it, and can treat every single new day as if it is your first time in this body. A kind of "live every day like it's your first" mentality. It has helped me recover from a lot of tough spots where i had an overwhelming amount of 'backlog' to deal with.

phrased differently, you look at your life as if you have just inherited it. you died, met God, and He said "i dont normally do this, but im sending you back for another shot in a random <yours> body".

the point isnt to trick yourself, you dont need to, there is no trick. it is simply a reminder of the free will you had already possessed prior to the thought experiment. that this is always your life to live however you want moving forward.

imagine you woke up in someones body who is more out of shape than you are currently, to the point you cant do things you currently enjoy doing. would you take the obvious path to start training to at least be able to do the things you were previously used to doing and see how far you get, or would you put in work to figure out how to change the way you live to better fit the new body?

your life is the way it is right now largely due to momentum from your past, not your current identity. identity updates really are not necessary to improve your life, and you arent identified by your momentum - even if that momentum has labels people use to describe it


the particular danger now is not that the outside influence is new, but that more and more people are depending almost entirely on the information communication systems for all of their information.

the war against in person gathering and the family unit has been pretty successful, as they were pretty sloppy ways to exchange information to begin with. but at the very least you knew you were getting an actual opinion from someone, and you had context of their personhood and background for which to base that opinion.


>the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority

not authority but circles of trust from real life connections. we had a nice brief moment of centralized asynchronous information exchange with strangers that was relatively trustworthy but we are going to go back to needing to talk to an actual human being in real time in order to receive an actual human opinion from strangers, and then on top of that we can built local caches that explicitly are not able to be contributed to by strangers but that your circle of friends and family may be able to use.

ive been toiling over some designs/implementations for making it digital but ultimately its a process adherence more than a tool thats needed. any old notepad and emails would work fine


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