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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I think what it all comes down to is most people don’t really want rational debate, and don’t participate in debates in the hope of learning or even to help others learn. Most people participate in debates to feel superior/“own” the other side. The result is debates that are typically lazy, uninformative, and downright mean.

    I think all of us have a little bit of this desire for superiority in us and we need to consciously make an effort to suppress it.





  • Let he who has to deal with that friend who constantly sends blatantly false Xits to them throw the first stone. Honestly I feel like every social media post that makes a factual representation should come with a big flashing warning “THIS IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE, LOOK IT UP BEFORE YOU REPEAT IT YOU DUMMY!”

    And I’m only like 10% joking. Given the success of language models it should be moderately trivial to train one to recognize when a factual statement is made and apply the above warning. It’s not even the children and teens I’m worried about. The people who seem to have the most trouble handling this are the adults.



  • rsuri@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    29 days ago

    This is Snowden’s claim and it’s not implausible, but it’s also quite a coincidence that he’d end up in the top country for spying on the US it’s also possible that he wanted to be in Russia and simply made up the part about it just being a stopover. If Snowden was looking for asylum, there are several other countries that don’t extradite to the US. I can see why he’d temporarily be stuck in Russia, but after several years he couldn’t find any other way out? There was apparently a privately-funded attempt to get him to Iceland, but the last update on it was that they were in contact with a “third party representing” Snowden…and then nothing.

    A third fact (in addition to Russiabot Greenwald’s involvement) that makes it questionable is that he eventually applied for Russian citizenship in 2020. One explanation is that he could do this to get a Russian passport and fly somewhere else with no US extradition treaty, but he hasn’t chosen to do so yet.


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    29 days ago

    Beyond the point that others have made about Snowden not considering himself a hero, for me there’s two facts that I just can’t get past when it comes to Snowden:

    1. He ended up in Russia somehow. Seems an odd place for a freedom fighter to end up going.
    2. He first contacted Glenn Greenwald, who now spends his days showing up on Tucker’s show to spout straight Russian pro-war, anti-Ukraine Propaganda

    One of these could be a coincidence, but I’ve not seen a lot of double coincidences in my life. It’s funny because I agree that the surveillance program got out of control and needs more transparency, and unlike Tucker and Greenwald, Snowden sounds like someone who truly believes what he says rather than a sleazy liar working for someone else. Emotionally I want to believe in Snowden, but I’m also a strong believer in probabilities and Snowden not acting at Russia’s behest and for some sort of personal reward seems hard to believe at this point.






  • For me it’s that compared to windows and linux, handling multiple windows between screens is always problematic, and is made worse by alt-tab bringing up all the windows for an application, which means they pop up in the other monitors too which isn’t usually what I want. Maximizing is usually not as straightforward as one would hope, and the dock moves to any window if you leave your pointer at the bottom which can get annoying fast. As some point out apparently there’s 3rd party software that allows you to fix these issues, but that’s not an option for me because I use a locked-down Mac for work and can’t install 3rd party software, so I’m stuck with the annoying base behavior.



  • Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”

    This is the same problem that all these “free speech platforms” keep running into. Some people will abuse free speech - if nothing else, I think everyone can agree spam is a type of abusive speech. But the difference between abusive speech and ordinary speech isn’t a sharp line, and the definitions of “abuse” will vary. So there needs to be some mechanism or rules for deciding what that line is. But all the people that create these platforms instead wanna pretend that line doesn’t exist, so they don’t create a means of determining it. So then “abuse” becomes whatever the users demand and/or the decisionmakers decide it is. Which is exactly the same as having no free speech to begin with.




  • There’s 2 kinds of evidence.

    • Circumstantial evidence - relies on an inference to connect it to the conclusion (e.g. guy saying before hand he won’t kill himself).
    • Direct evidence - no additional inference/evidence is needed (e.g. video of a guy going up to the car and shooting him).

    The guy saying he won’t kill himself requires inferring that he’s being truthful when he said it and that he didn’t change his mind. It’s not non-evidence, it does point to suicide being less likely. But it’s far from conclusive. If there’s no sign of entering the vehicle or that a struggle occurred, then I’d argue that far outweighs his prior statement.

    They just happened to work at the same company and die right before they could testify on the same thing.

    That’s also a common misunderstanding, at least regarding the first (I’m not as familiar with the second). I’m a bit unclear on the details of the deposition - which side wanted it and was asking the questions, etc. (detailed here) but whatever the case, it was Boeing that demanded he come back for one more day. So if Boeing wanted him to not testify that day, they’d just send him home as originally planned. The only reason they’d do it then was to silence him generally…but doing it in a way that draws so much suspicion to them seems like an implausibly bad decision. Then again, it is Boeing. (Note that this is also circumstantial evidence, and requires assuming that Boeing isn’t so dumb as to kill a witness in the middle of their own deposition, which may not be warranted).

    Edit: corrected my own misunderstanding of deposition