tikitaki

I think it has the tendency to create a snowball effect. You see a comment with -50 points you are already subconsciously looking at it trying to analyze why everyone hates it. It essentially primes you into disagreeing with it. Sometimes it’s obvious in the case of a troll or someone saying hate speech or something but other times it’s someone sharing a genuine opinion that’s relevant to the discussion but the snowball effect of the first few people downvoting it causes it to spiral downwards.

By itself it isn’t a bad thing but when comments are ranked based on votes or downvoted comments past a certain threshold are hidden, it contributes to creating echo chambers.

Personally, I think it’s like that Churchill quote. Democracy is trash and has a lot of problems. But still, it’s the best thing we’ve come up with so far. It’s got its issues but the transparent nature definitely helps if someone is consciously trying to read things with an open mind.

In fact it is sort of freaky how a little one minute change in your schedule could potentially change the lives of dozens or hundreds of people

If we’re talking about future humans, we get into the exponential growth stage pretty quickly.

You have 2 kids, and they each average 2 kids, and they each average 2 kids, etc, etc

2, 4, 8, 16, etc - 2 ^ n where n is number of generations

After 20 generations we’re already talking a million descendants. With a rough range of 20 years per generation we get 400 years.

That number only blows up from there. In 30 generations we’re at a billion in 600 years.

One minor decision whether to take a train or a bus or what have you can have wide ranging effects on potentially billions of humans far into the future. It’s a bit absurd thinking about it. Everything you do has potential to radically change the future. Of course, your family line could just as well die out with you.

Now imagine how many descendants you have in your family tree going all the way back to the cavemen. Think of how many infinite little decisions led to the chances of your dad fucking your mom on that specific minute of that specific day. It’s effectively a 10 ^ -∞ chance of you being born. And yet you’re still here.

I live in Florida and while this summer has been unusually hot… it’s not that bad. You just get used to the heat. Also make sure you have good A/C in your home & car lol

my favorite drinks are

coffee -> kratom -> kava -> water -> tea

i appreciate the strong passion and education about the poll on everyone’s favorite beverage

Quem vive com medo de tudo não vive, cara

Tá coçando pra tentar algo, então bota pra quebrar, não fica nessa enrolação

Tenho certeza que você não fica pensando no risco toda vez que entra num carro; apenas o risco de se machucar é bem maior

Chega de frescura e come o ovo de uma vez

i think there’s merit to sarcasm depending how it’s done. satire can be a powerful tool to poke holes into ideas.

but like many things in life, you need tact and a bit of self awareness

No real way to know. If we assume technology keeps advancing at the exponential rate, we’ll all be in the metaverse or bionic cyborgs or something. 100 years ago we had just finished WW1 where airplanes and tanks were a new technology. We went from telegraphs to near- instantaneous communications across the planet. We went from the old Fords to having self-driving cars. The internet was created and then eventually popularized and now we all have constant access to the internet in our pockets no matter where we go.

There are some things we can know for certain and others we can guesstimate. For example carbon emissions will have a noticeable impact in 100 years. The temperatures will be higher, there would have been some amount of sea level. Probably not enough to drown Miami but enough to cause serious problems for people all across the world. Our agricultural systems will be put under serious pressure as temperatures change and lower productivity in certain areas (and increase it in others).

I think the future will be good for countries like Canada / Sweden / Russia because global warming will more or less only help them. A lot of land will become better for agriculture / more habitable. Of course they will probably have to deal with some sort of refugee crisis from the global south.

That’s of course assuming human society doesn’t totally collapse / change because of nuclear war / some sort of terminator AI.

debate bro and own you online

don’t worry this is the type of stuff i go on reddit for I’m glad there are people willing to go into long form discussion here

so ultimately I think we have to agree to disagree a bit here although I respect your opinion. You’re absolutely right that there are organizations out there, both governmental and billionaire funded, that astroturf the shit out of the internet ( and you didn’t mention AI like chatgpt, which will make this problem exponentially worse since it will become increasingly cheaper to astroturf).

I agree that I’m not personally going to debate a holocaust denier - they can more or less get fucked. I just don’t think they should be sent to jail or otherwise censored. And this more or less lines up with Chomsky’s beliefs. I’m a huge fan of him and I am 100% behind his free speech absolutism.

Anyhow, if you want more detail about the whole thing with Chomsky… there’s a page on Wikipedia that goes over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair

Here’s what he had to say to critics of his decision to support the holocaust denier

Let me add a final remark about Faurisson’s alleged “anti-Semitism.” Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi – such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here – this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense. Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read – largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him – I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort

I think the line that sticks out to me the most is- that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended

If we give up the principle, we lose everything.

“Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing

I’m sure he would say this. But in this specific case it’s more of a question of not having any topic be off limits. I know there’s a lot of emotions towards the holocaust and anyone who questions it is immediately labeled some sort of neo-nazi (and 90% of the time, that’s what they are). Chomsky firmly believes in the Holocaust, because like you said, he experienced it. He’s a Jew in his 90s.

But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because “the issue has been resolved”. What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures. Basically claiming the death toll was inflated. Which is, to the best of the research I’ve read, entirely incorrect. Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.

But again, the point isn’t whether the researcher was wrong or right. It’s just that we can’t set the precedent that certain topics are “finished” and can’t be modified anymore. Because at that point we’re not doing science or research - we’re falling victim to ideology. Keep in mind the guy he was defending was getting charged with a crime since this was Europe and they have certain laws about Holocaust denial.

So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn’t read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a “genocide denier” and a “CCP tankie”?

This immediate lashing out when experiencing “wrongthink” is something I think is so toxic and dangerous to having serious discussions about sensitive topics. The more you study these things, the more you realize things are never black and white. There aren’t good guys and there aren’t bad guys. Or rather, maybe everyone’s a bad guy. But I think you get my point.

Regardless, I appreciate your comment.

Can software written by a piece of shit like that

someone isn’t a piece of shit because they hold different opinions than your own. it’s OK to post articles even if you don’t believe everything in them. I glanced through one of the articles about the death tolls under Mao - https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/

The guy goes through analysis, cites sources, and makes an argument that the death toll is inflated due to Western propaganda.

Is that really such a piece of shit opinion? Wrong or right, I don’t think the author did anything wrong nor the dev by putting it in some sort of compilation. People are allowed to disagree on controversial topics.

Remember Noam Chomsky? He got so much hate back in the day when he defended someone’s right to be a holocaust denier. It’s as if you are not allowed to critically think about certain topics.

For example the Ukraine nazis thing. Ukrainians are not Nazis - but the Ukrainian military did official incorporate a neo-nazi paramilitary group. Just saying that is grounds for someone to claim you’re a Russian shill. I really wish people were more open minded and rational in discussion.

If you believe someone is wrong, explain why you think so instead of just attacking them like you are doing here.

le narwhal bacons when

lol i don’t think i’ve seen this since like 2011

Presumably there would be a cache on Mars of !news@beehaw.org so that anybody who wants to view it would not have to wait 10 minutes… they would get the cached update - so they would immediately see the community as it was 10 minutes ago.

This cache would be continuously updating so to the user on Mars, there actually isn’t that much disruption. Every time they check, there would be updates.

10 minutes or even 40 minutes is not that long in the grand scheme of things. We start talking about lightyears is when I think it starts to break down.