• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 5th, 2025

help-circle

  • While I agree that Reddit is awash in (multiple) state propaganda, and that posting violent rhetoric, or even sympathy for it, there is likely to put you on a list (or multiple), I don’t think Reddit users really trust it’s that safe. In the last year and a half, since Luigi, there has been huge amounts of bitterness over the censorship of content and strict banning policies. People have discussed, and followed through on, leaving in droves. Huge amounts of old content are no longer available because people scrubbed their post history on the way out.

    If the current discourse doesn’t reflect that, I would suggest it’s because :

    1. the real people still there remain to discuss uncontroversial niche topics
    2. political discussion there is largely driven by bots and paid actors now


  • NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.ziptoFunny@sh.itjust.worksClose enough
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 months ago

    Your baseline assumption here is that interaction with another person is burdensome. Most people don’t feel that way, and if they do, they probably don’t work in the service industry.

    So, presuming the doordasher finds human interaction to be neutral (neither good nor bad), and understanding that the customer is not making the joke at the expenses of the door dasher, I fail to see how this is a problem, even if the dasher doesn’t get it. Someone trying to share a joke with you, even if you don’t get it, is usually perceived as friendly.



  • I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s offensive, but I can agree it’s disrespectful. Respect is shown by the lengths someone goes through to demonstrate someone/ something is important and held in high regard.

    Examples:

    When you are talking to someone you respect, you demonstrate it by making a point to convey that you are listening to them and thinking about what they are saying.

    When a tragedy happens, we often show respect by holding a moment of silence where we interrupt whatever we are doing to hold a moment to think about the victims.

    Similarly, a traditional way of demonstrating respect for people’s contributions in a given field is through an awards ceremony where attendees both given their attention and dress in formal attire to mark the significance and importance of the event.



  • I think you are wrong about how off-putting your tears are.

    In my experience, when someone loses someone they care about, it is comforting for them for other people to be sad and feel the loss as well. I think that if instead of focusing on your own tears and your embarrassment when you get emotional, if you still focused on the other person while you were crying, they wouldn’t feel obligated to comfort you. Then they could just continue to share with you and be comforted by the fact that you empathized and were moved.

    When my brother and SiL had a stillborn baby, I went to visit them. They genuinely seemed somewhat relieved to see me crying while we visited together.








  • I’m not a Luddite in general, but as for AI I will probably only use it as necessary in the workplace. So far the main LLM AI I have gotten any use out of is Google’s Gemini. It lists the citations of its facts when I ask it physics questions, and it seems like there is some kind of filter on the quality of the sources than can be cited. Mostly it cities professional publications, Wikipedia, etc.

    I don’t think Google is currently winning the AI arms race (not do i think they have stood by their initial mantra of ‘Don’t be evil’), but it seems like that should be the gold standard. And Google/Alphabet was also the company responsible for Alpha Fold, IMO the most impressive application of learning algorithms to date.




  • I don’t see why we have to contrast the US and China so that one is a good guy and one is a bad guy. Has the US exploited the rest of the world since WWII for our own financial interests? Yes. Do we have an increasingly authoritarian government seeking to eventually crush internal dissent? Yes.

    None of that makes China good.

    If you don’t want to talk about Tiananmen Square, talk about China forcefully relocated migrant workers ahead of the Olympics in 2008. Talk about China sending Uyghurs to reeducation camps and forcefully sterilizing some of them. Talk about how China forced women to abandon/ abort babies for 30 years throughout vast swaths of their country. Talk about how people residing in China can’t actually talk about any of these things, to the point where citizens of Hong Kong fought back with violent protests and many fled to resist their encroaching authoritarian hand.

    Did China raise more than a billion people out of brutal poverty in a single generation, and was it one of the most impressive and important developments of the last century? Yes, absolutely. Is an authoritarian technocracy better able to deal with the issues facing humanity in the near future like climate change? Potentially.

    That doesn’t mean China’s citizens enjoy civil liberties.