hello_marmalade

He could include himself. I have been involved in plenty of conversations about topics that don't interest me.

Yes, because the only way to drink, is to drink to excess. There are no other ways to drink alcohol.

"If it's a big enough group then the obvious solution is to have a selection of prizes"

Why? Is this really necessary? Everybody has gotten a gift or prize that they wouldn't use or didn't really care for. You can gift it to someone else.

If you wholesale abstain from an activity that the vast majority of people around you do, yes, you are a little alien.

What is it with people who don't drink being particularly disparaging about people who do and how and why they use it?

"depending on alcohol for team building sounds like the worst idea ever.

i don't want to be friends with people if their ability to develop friendship depends on alcohol. actually, i find it deceptive. i want to be friends with the real person. not the drunk person. it's dishonest. it's telling me that this person doesn't actually like me, and it's only the alcohol that makes them friendly. for an introvert who already has difficulty trusting people and making friends, this makes it worse, because it's a friendship that can't be trusted."

People aren't "depending" on alcohol, they're using it. Getting wasted is not a requirement of drinking alcohol. Alcohol reduces inhibitions. In small amounts it's enough to make a person feel less like they're going to sound stupid if they try to talk to new people. It's not deceptive any more than not opening up to others because you're anxious is "deceptive".

You are not better than other people because you don't drink.

The reason people are skittish about nuclear is because when it does fail, it fails catastrophically. The biggest failures in memory are all failures that risked making a multi kilometer area potentially completely uninhabitable for decades. Even if the risk is only 1%, coal is a much less scary prospect.

My biggest problem with Mastodon is it’s psychotic user base.

As much as I love FOSS, Element isn’t even close to Discord. Discord has one click streaming, easy to understand voice rooms, etc. You don’t have to sort out hosting, and the overall UI experience is sharper and feels more polished. Visually Element is nice, but it has some clunk to it.

One issue is that they won’t add fillets and chamfers.

This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance, and thus the Fediverse as a whole.

This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy.

Not to mention, people don't typically want to pay for these services, or pay to host them, they want to access them for free. On top of that, with something like Twitter, the desire is to be visible to all, rather than just a few. Most people use Twitter to interact with 'the world', not just a local part of it.

The market was less established, so there was a lot more experimentation and people just trying to do completely random shit. That's why there are so many cool little tech artifacts from the 60s - 2000s. Now everything is cloud hosted, and web based. We know the form factors: phone, laptop, desktop, tablet. The market's solidified. What will work and what won't is a little more clear, or at the very least that's how people think about it. Nobody's really trying to do some kind of bespoke chip work for a calculator that doubles as a lighter anymore.

Yes, strikes are okay as long as they aren’t inconvenient or worse, effective.

That’s pretty heavily oversimplifying the issue. There were some pretty serious accusations levied against Kellog’s.

As someone who is an avid Linux user for over a decade and MacBooks daily at work, this is 100% sour grapes.

There is absolutely a visible difference between HiDPI displays and standard ones.

The problem is that it causes those people to become more extreme because they get put into an echo chamber.

It’s like putting a petty thief in with hardened criminals. They’re not coming out better than they went in, they’re coming out much, much worse.

It’s the difference between seeing people say racist things on Twitter, and having someone shoot up a church. Extremists aren’t created out in public.

The source code is still open and available. It can be rehosted.

Not going to jail is not an exclusively 'corporate' interest.

Fedora is part of Red Hat which does a lot of business with the US government.

As someone who loves Japan, they kinda did have it coming.

They were doing some incredibly heinous shit at that time.

The company is based in the US. It's therefore subject to US law. There's nothing stopping anyone from forking / rehosting these things outside of the US.

That makes absolutely zero sense. The whole point of being able to modify and redistribute is about being in control of the software running on your system.

That is explicitly about choice.

That is straight up infantile. Plenty of people have horrible ancestral histories. If you choose to obsess over it at every moment, that's not really anybody else's issue. As another comment said earlier, it is very similar to no longer using the word 'cotton', because it might remind you of black slavery in America.

It's a childish waste of time that has nothing to do with solving real world problems. Changing terms used in technology contexts doesn't do anything for racial injustice in any capacity whatsoever.

By default you can't trust any for profit corporation. They will always do what is profitable over anything and everything else, as they are required to.

Reasons to use a credit union. People should be moving away from all these banks that essentially only abuse people on every level and move toward cooperative financial institutions.

Alternatively, better banks like Aspiration, which is a B Corp, but I wouldn't put all my money on that.

What I'm saying is that the focus on race is counterproductive because it's thoroughly irrelevant to the solution. If you have one group blaming minority failure on their race, and another group saying that the failure is because of racism, the conversation revolves around race. We look to racially based solutions, and miss what's right in front of our nose. We assume that the issue is racial when it's not. That's what I mean by distraction.

The topic should be 'How do we fix crime, recidivism, and poverty?'. Pointing out historical injustice does absolutely nothing. There is no reasonable thing to do if that's your focal point, because the only ways to 'resolve' it is what? Reparations? Making decisions about jail time and release based on race? It's illogical. You'd end up putting people with high levels of recidivism back into a community, only serving to repeat the cycle, because you never actually look at the real problem. The things that cause that recidivism. The things that are actually causing it right now, instead of the reasons that it happens to be black people. If history were different, it could have been anybody. It could have been white people, brown people, any color, any ethnicity. It explains why the people in this situation are black more often than they are not, but it does not explain how we fix the problem.

It is an absolute waste of time, and the real issue is that while we screw around talking about pointless grievances people will continue to go to jail, and die, because we're still not talking about the problem.

Edit: I realized that this wasn't quite a response to your last post, but the relevancy is that you will only get complacency if you're focusing on things that can't really be fixed, or that essentially blame others, but what you can do is draw parallels, and essentially say 'Your issues are my issues too, and we can and should work together on them,' which is also true.

This is a really good illustration of why it matters to be aware of what your sample sets are, especially in the case of using machine learning / automation in regards to things that have a very high likelihood of impacting human rights.

To be honest, I don't think our understanding of these systems is mature enough for us to be just throwing them out into our societal systems right now. There needs to be a lot more testing because the possibility of unethical results is pretty damn high.

That said, I still think that the concept of structural racism is a bad way to look at this problem, as it's simply one form of a common error when looking at sample sets.

Yes, but what relevance does structural racism have to the model?

That's only true only if you believe the majority of people are racist. I don't.

There's also a number of ways that you don't even have to interact with that argument. You can show that the end results. It's not like we don't already have the studies and statistics that show how to resolve these issues. You can easily say to someone who thinks that way 'ok sure, you go on believing that, but even if you do believe that, there are still better ways to resolve this.'

Also most people are actually pretty receptive to new information if you are capable of packaging it well, and acknowledging their biases without judging them for it.

But that's not an issue with the model, that's an issue with our response to the model.

Fundamentally there's nothing wrong with this. The somewhat harsh truth is that 'systemic bias' is actually just... statistics. There are a lot of minority criminals. It's not that there's something special about these people that makes them criminals - it's the same thing that makes everybody turn to crime: lack of opportunity, low capacity for upward mobility, limited access to education, and so on. We act as if the information is not accurate, and that this is a result of racism, but the cold truth is that if you were to take a white person and a black person and only look at the likelihood of criminal behavior, the black person is going to come out on top of that. It's just the math.

Where the human element comes in is where we decide what to do about that math. Do we blame the race? Do we utilize these models to preemptively police people on the basis of race? The answer obviously, should be no. That said, our model can give us insights into this. We can take this data and go, 'well we know that it's unlikely that race is the major causal factor here, so what else can we look at?'

This is a much deeper issue, and 'structural racism' is a really bad way to look at it, because it forces you to focus on the racial elements, even if they're not relevant. It's asking for a model that is not representative of reality, because it looks ugly, rather than looking at it for what it is - just data - and figuring out what to do with that data.

Yes but that's not about race, that's about how we deal with crime as a society. These things aren't being unfairly applied to minority communities and that's the point. The system would be working the same way for a non-minority community, and it does, where the economic situation is similar.

That's why the racial angle is a waste of everyone's time and energy. It's not the relevant issue. The more relevant issue is how we deal with crime prevention. Currently, we go with a punishment approach rather than a truly rehabilitative one. This also has a lot to do with economics, and lobbying and private prisons and so on. It's much more complicated than 'everybody's racist'.

Yes, but you can't build it into your model. In this example, you would end up with a result of putting people back into these communities who have a high level of recidivism. You are actively not avoiding an actual issue because of perceived racial injustice when the issue is not racial.

This is the problem with processing our world down racial lines. You're trying to correct for a historical injustice. The fact that race factors into the circumstance of why people are where they are right now doesn't change the fact that those variables lead to recidivism. It's not racist. It's accurate.

If you want to fix the problem, then you need to fix the underlying issues, which tend to be economic. Those economic issues stem from an issue that affects all races, and therefore splitting it across racial lines only serves to reduce the possibility of actual change.

All you're doing when you try to account for historical injustice is slapping a band-aid on a deeper issue.

(Edit: Grammar)