azertyfun

joined 1 year ago
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[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 36 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Fascists don't win on facts and logic, they win on affect.

He says one thing about guns, but means something about hurting minorities. His electorate only cares about the second part. Literally anything you could argue about the first part is worse than useless, because through sheer power of denial they'll revert to affect on this well-practiced talking point (”Trump love guns, Trump hate [insert slur here], Trump just like me"). You can't win on this battlefield, no matter how objectively and obviously right you are.

That's why "Trump is weird" is so unbelievably more effective than "Trump is a rapist", "Trump is a fascist", "Trump is a criminal" or "Trump is a traitor". Pointing out his weirdness directly undermines his affect. "We're not going back" calls back to the constant feeling of dread of his presidency. Ironically when dealing with humans, but especially when dealing with fascists, affect and core values are more important and less malleable than facts.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 days ago

[citation needed]

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Can you please give a definition of intelligence that does not correlate with IQ? Because scientists have been trying, and as far as I know, failing.

Or I guess we can keep pretending that intelligence is fully inquantifiable and therefore we won't be able to quantify how socioeconomic background affect people's wellbeing. I guess that does have the upside that we don't have to face the hard truths of our world, that unequal access to healthcare and education does affect people's cognitive abilities and that the worse life outcomes of poor people being self-inflicted is a myth perpetuated by the ruling class to justify their continued oppression. No, it must be the IQ tests that are racist.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago

Like I said IQ should never, ever be used as an entry exam or any other kind of social determinant. Not least because of the racist/classist history. However, it does have a signification and legitimate uses, and to pretend otherwise is scientific negationism. We do not have to listen to racist conspiracy theories about why some populations have a lower IQ than "us", when we have known and repeatedly demonstrated for many decades that differences in IQ at the population level is entirely predictable by education and health (the Flynn Effect). That's it, that's the necessary and sufficient counter-argument to the racist arguments you're referring to.

Put another way, education does not just make people educated; it makes them more intelligent. Someone who has gone through standard schooling is empirically proven to be statistically better at novel abstract thinking than someone who never went to school. Which is kind of obvious when put like that, but you can't prove or study that phenomenon scientifically without the use of tools like the IQ test.

Poor african countries have a lower IQ than the world average, and that is an irrefutable fact. Does that mean:
a) Life outcomes are not shaped in anyway by socioeconomic background, therefore [insert racist theory here]
b) I refuse to look into the possible causes and therefore IQ tests are racist
c) We can infer that poor populations would benefit from increased financing of childcare and education, it's a winning move for literally everyone.

The topic of IQ tests is really uncomfortable because it unearths the really uncomfortable fact that socioeconomic and geopolitical factors have not given us all an equal shot at life, even down to how intelligent we are likely to become as adults. It challenges the myth that anyone can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps, work at mcdonald's, and become a triple harvard graduate. But it's not neuroscience's fault that the world is unfair.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 days ago (6 children)

Controlling for confounding factors is, like, half the point.

Racists will tell you [x country] is lower IQ than [y developed country]. Which is probably true. What they won't say is that that average IQ is probably the same as [y developed country 100-200 years ago]. IQ being affected by education is the whole fucking point; widespread access to a good and long education provably leads to a more intelligent population, which we have seen time and time again with industrializing countries (including in the West since the IQ test is old enough that we can see the average IQ rising since the industrial revolution).

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago (12 children)

It is strongly correlated. High IQ reliably predicts high performance in a variety of cognitive tasks (even ones not covered by the IQ test).

To pretend that IQ is a sham is dangerous, because that would suggests that definite proof to the contrary makes the fascists right. Which it doesn't.

Firstly because statistical correlation is useless for individual outliers (e.g. high BMI Olympic athletes). It says something about a population, but can only suggest something about an individual (high BMI can mean someone is overweight, but further analysis is required to make a diagnosis).

Secondly and more importantly because using synthetic metrics as a proxy for the value of a human life is an abhorrent practice that has only ever led to misuse and dangerous if not catastrophic or outright genocidal policies. I don't mind IQ tests as an indicator for psychiatric diagnoses, or for aggregate research on human cognition. But if, for any reason, someone's IQ needs to be made public or handed over to an institution, then we're on the road straight to fascism.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago

Try to turn up the contrast and saturation to 200 %, that should increase the comments on picture quality :)

FR tho, mine is also impressively thin but like... I discovered that when I unpacked it? Thinness is not effectively conveyed by marketing material, and maybe it's because I haven't set foot in an electronics store in years but aren't TVs typically laid out in a way that you don't see them from the side?

Maybe I'm totally off-base and it truly is a big factor for normies shopping for a TV, but I just can't even really understand how a 3 cm thick panel would significantly impact sales compared to panel tech, size, cost, and ancillary features.

However now that I think about it, maybe "thick" LCDs can't go bezel-less? That I could easily understand how it impacts the overall esthetics (or even practicality with respect to Ambilight for instance).

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago

What's the overlap of the general public, people who buy "fancy sculpture TVs", and people who still buy LCD TVs when OLED has been affordable for years now (I paid a grand for mine)? Keeping in mind that regular TVs already look impossibly thin so you gotta find someone knowledgeable enough to know that 3-5 cm is not as thin as it goes, but not knowledgeable enough to know LCD ain't shit.

Maybe there are enough of these people to justify a SKU to cater to their needs. But I can also believe that no market research exists to support that hypothesis, and it reads a lot like the average boomer's understanding of "the younguns and their flat-screen television sets" as if the switch away from bulky CRTs had only happened 5 years ago and not 25.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 10 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.

And having gotten to interact with the real process of product development, I gotta say in my (relatively narrow) experience it's based a lot more on vibes/politics than market research or focus groups.

I can totally see "make it as thin as XYZ" being a hard requirement for no better reason than a PM felt strongly about it, and no-one had all three infinity stones necessary to call them out (engineering knowledge, understanding of the PD pipeline, and political capital).

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 40 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Frutiger Aero my beloved. The apotheosis of skeuomorphic design, killed by a neverending downward spiral towards the least distinctive, creative, and inspired designs imaginable.

It's really ironic that this design cycle coincided with the rise of high-DPI displays. All those pixels used to upscale monochrome boxes with square corners. What a tragedy.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 week ago

"W" -> "Great success, my liege!"

"Thanks for the raid" -> "Gondor has heeded our call"

"Don't forget to hit your primes" -> "Word has reached me that the archbishop hasn't received your monthly heavenly contribution"

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

C'est ma lecture aussi. J'avais trouvé la vidéo vilebrequin où ils boivent en roulant très irresponsable (et sylvain y est particulièrement con), et depuis qu'il a repris le format vilebrequin il a enchainé les formats vraiment dangereux (surtout pour ses invités). C'est du beau spectacle mais c'est aussi vraiment très con (je me permet de douter très fortement qu'ils étaient assurés pour jouer aux voitures tamponneuses à haute vitesse par exemple).

Tout ça ne prouve évidemment rien mais ça colle au caractère du personnage.

 

Hi!

Kagi had a rough couple months on the PR side, and a comment from another Lemmy user arguing that they aren't using Google's index set me off... because I had just read a couple weeks ago on their own websites that they primarily use Google's search index.

Lo and behold, that user was "right": No mention of Google whatsoever on Kagi's Search Sources page. If that's all you had to go off of, you'd be excused for thinking they are only using their internal index to power their web search since that's what they now strongly imply. The only "reference" to external indexes is this nebulous sentence:

Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information [...]

... Unless one goes to check that pesky Wayback Machine. Here is the same page from March 2024, which I will copy/paste here for posterity:

Search Sources

You can think of Kagi as a "search client," working like an email client that connects to various indexes and sources, including ours, to find relevant results and package them into a superior, secure, and privacy-respecting search experience, all happening automatically and in a split-second for you.

External

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other APIs. Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user.

For example, when you search for images in Kagi, we use 7 different sources of information (including non-typical sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia Commons), trying to surface the very best image results for your query. The same is also the case for Kagi's Video/News/Podcasts results.

Internal

But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic. Kagi's Teclis and TinyGem indexes are both available as an API.

We do not stop there and we are always trying new things to surface relevant, high-quality results. For example, we recently launched the Kagi Small Web initiative which platforms content from personal blogs and discussions around the web. Discovering high quality content written without the motive of financial gain, gives Kagi's search results a unique flavor and makes it feel more humane to use.


Of course, running an index is crazy expensive. By their own admission, Teclis is narrowly focused on "non-commercial websites and 'small web' discussions". Mojeek indexes nowhere near enough things to meaningfully compete with Google, and Yandex specializes in the Russosphere. Bing (Google's only meaningful direct indexing competitor) is not named so I assume they don't use it. So it's not a leap to say that Google powers most of English-speaking web searches, just like Bing powers almost all search alternatives such as DDG.

I don't personally mind that they use Google as an index (it makes the most sense and it's still the highest-quality one out there IMO, and Kagi can't compete with Google's sheer capital on the indexing front). But I do mind a lot that they aren't being transparent about it anymore. This is very shady and misleading, which is a shame because Kagi otherwise provides a valuable and higher quality service than Google's free search does.

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