V0ldek

Like look how much space this random municipal cemetery in Warsaw takes:

That's bigger than some living districts. And for what?

Like do we really need this system where each family has to buy a plot of land and spend a truckload of money on a big stone monument, with the implied social pressure of having the prettiest shiniest one because otherwise what, you don't love your dead ones enough?

I don’t disrespect the dead (not conscious).

To be completely serious, the only ethical reason for caring about the dead in any way is that there are living, conscious people that care about their memory and it would upset them. Otherwise there'd be zero reason to treat the dead with any more respect than other biological waste.

All the other parts are normal and practical (why waste time or energy bothering animals or insects if you have no business in them? that hurts the ecosystem for no reason; why destroy your own useful property?), but if there was no ethical reason for not "disrespecting" the dead then we should, as a matter of policy, turn it all into fertilizer and put the unusable parts into a trash compactor so that no precious land or resources are wasted on cemeteries and shit.

You can disagree with that, but I don't see a way to make an actual rational argument against it without invoking consciousness one way or another.

Just to be clear I don't deride people who treat dead with reverence, you do you, although I think we could have a discussion about how much space is taken by burial grounds and the frankly gauche nature of some of the tombstones.

if the text is well-written you don’t need this sort of “Gemini/ChatGPT, tell me what this text is about” on first place.

And if it's badly written then the LLM will shit itself.

Now let's ask ourselves how much of the text in the world is "well-written"?

Or even better, you could apply this to Copilot. How much code in the world is good code? The answer is fucking none, mate.

Go ahead and ignore all the cases where it’s getting answers correct

• Sir, half of the patients are dead!
• Ye sure, just ignore the half that survived then!

This is hall of fame shit right here, someone should study the way you use the internet sir

Said like a person who wouldn't be able to correctly hold a hammer on first try

While reading this entire stuff I periodically looked at my cat and let out a sigh, and he just looks at me with that knowing gaze

"Ye, you are all dumb, hoomans. Don't think about it. Pet me now."

What LLMs can currently do summarise this paragraph as dot points

The entire point here is that they can't?

That’s on top of their Prime memberships and the cost of the unit itself.

This is unclear to me, is Prime membership a separate thing you also need to pay for to access this new backend?

shall I presume many of you have no objection to being called ‘nazis’ in the standard twitter-left definition

I didn't know there was a standardised definition, or that it was somehow political-side-specific. If I were to steelman this then this could be about a pedantic distinction between a fascist and a nazi?

Hey, you know what you can do if you feel bad about being called a nazi? STOP BEING A FUCKING NAZI.

Shall I treat all drunk sex as ‘rape’ because kidnapper-rape and frat-sex have the commonality of reduced consent

Yes. Yes you should. Hey, see, you understand this! Also consent either is or isn't, there's no "reduced consent".

Shall I treat your remarks about this-or-that group as ‘hate speech’, or ‘violence’, in the form of speech?

Emm, depends on the remarks? If they're hate remarks then ye dude, that's what the word means?

Clearly, we have some sense by which concept creep exists; by which definitions can be stretched dishonestly.

Ye, like how you would define "censorship" I'm sure

That is Alexander Grothendieck. He's involved with some abstract algebra I'm way to sober to grok rn. My only knowledge of him is that his stuff basically established category theory as a thing, although apparently that was completely unintentional on his end.

He seems to have been an... interesting character in his later years

Local villagers helped sustain him with a more varied diet after he tried to live on a staple of dandelion soup.

but even in ancient Greece and Rome there existed some legal protections for slaves

We don't know much about Greece, but in Rome if you were released from slavery (by the master's will, contract expiring, etc.) you were treated equally to people that haven't been enslaved at all. And slavery was extremely common, independent of your state allegiance or color of skin.

That being said, we're talking about a deeply fucked up system where the paterfamilias held complete control over not only his slaves but his wife, children, the entire family. And being treated "equally" to other commoners in Rome isn't really saying that you were treated any good.

The main difference is that slavery as in the USA went through so many iterations of bad faith laundering that it had an entire ideology tacked on top to explain why it was good and Christian, actually. In Rome no one bothered, it was a clear power dynamic - we conquered you, now we own you because we have bigger dicks, simple as that.