does anyone have the actual written law? it is hard to argue using summaries or even opinion pieces of musky boy.

all good. i know it can be frustrating, to constantly repeat the same points. therefore tones may slip. if you allow me to give some advice, keep reading. otherwise have a great day, and ignore the rest of this post.

i think it is useful to target the most powerful party: “you claim that …” (the person trying to learn something) becomes “they claim that …” (the company selling something). that way the person (if that person is genuinely trying to learn) is not pushed into a defensive stance.

additionally dont forget that you may be an expert on a certain toppic. but others are not and therefore need much more context to pick up just the right keywords. e.g: what is DEXA and why does a scan for osteopenia matter for body fat? or is +/-5% your personal quality gate or is it a medical standard?

anyway, i hope this shows why ppl may disagree with a post - even if agreeing with the main message. have a great day.

you don’t seem to get my point entirely, so ill try to explain it here. your standpoint seems to be:

• body fat cannot be determined by impedance
• the measurements are that unreliable that the mere presence of the measurement hurts more than it helps

you present these points as expert, not as your opinion. in the comment thread you write: “I’m happy to delve into this subject in as much depth as you may be interested in”. when someone asks you for sources, supporting these points (presumably because they are interested) - you deflect and take a combative stance. it is deflection, as you ask the person trying to learn something, to find proof that your point is wrong. since you (initially) did not provide sources for your points - you seem to take the absence of evidence (from the companies selling these) as evidence, that it can not work and will cause harm.

This line of argumentation makes me second guess your motivation. even though i agree with the overall viewpoint. i am not asking you to prove it is a scam. as you mentioned it is tedious and wasteful to prove every new scam attempt false. so if you shift your argumentation just slightly (which you did in your reply to me), the whole second guessing of motivation won’t occur:

• The companies selling these products don’t provide any proof, that these scales work as advertised
• especially in medicine it is required to proof, that the benefits hugely outweigh the drawbacks
• who is more likely to tell you a falsehood: the person actively trying to sell you something or the one not selling anything?
  • -> be more skeptical of the person with a motivation to mislead you and ask them to provide proof and sources

these points are a very strong argument IMO and don’t require to do any more research. but they seem much more genuine as you don’t appear go back on wanting to discuss the subject and don’t take a combative stance towards the person probably trying to learn something.

man i largely agree with what you are saying and there are tons of useless ‘fitness’ products.

but you cannot claim to be “happy to delve into the subject” and when asked for sources simply deflect. you have to remember, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

so if you want to believabily present yourself as an expert on the subject and have such an absolute standpoint - you need to present some good reasons. otherwise you have to soften your standpoint to something akin to: “there has ben no proof of its reliability”. everything stronger seems disingenuous.

sure, that will stop kids from having one account with random access. but the step to alts isnt that hard.

i propose that it will work untill the teens want to see something - then they will quickly create an alt. or they are mischievous like i was and create an alt as soon as the parents leave the room - after all you need to find out what they are hiding…

we would not stop from accessing adult stuff, if we wanted to. so trying to hard prevent them now would be hypocritical too imo. it is our job as parents to prepare them as good as we can.

i dont do pixelfed, so idk what parental control they have. but what kind of system is gonna stop teens from making an account without their parents knowledge? and no, age verification wont work. there is a mysterious thing happening, where teenagers immediately turn 45 for the duration of any “please enter your age” question on the internet.

as someone who has made it through multiple ‘agile transformations’ in large companies: that’s how it usually goes.

however, that is the problem with people being stuck in their way and people afraid of loosing their jobs. PO is usually filled with the previous teamlead (lower management, maybe in charge of 20 ppl). PM & Sales have to start delivering unfinished Products! how else are you going to get customer feedback while you can still cheaply change things? A lot of the middle management has to take something they would perceive as a ‘demotion’ or find new jobs entirely - who would have guessed that with an entirely new model you cannot map each piece 1:1…

Given these and many more problems i have seen many weird things: circles within circles within circles, many tiny waterfalls… some purists would call SAFE a perversion of agile.

the point is: if you want to go agile, you have to change (who would have thought that slapping a different sticker won’t do it?). the change has to start from the top. many companies try to do an ‘agile experiment’: the whole company is still doing what they do. however, one team does agile now - while still having to deliver in and for the old system…

i take you have never heard of the V-model. basically you climb the waterfall back up to verify everything. most things that fly within the atmosphere are done that way. pretty sure NASA would do the same.

this is obviously talking about their web app, which most people will be using. In this special instance, it was clearly not the LLM itself censoring the Tiananmen Square, but a layer on top.

i have not bothered downloading and asking deepseek about Tiananmen Square. so i cannot know what the model would have generated. however, it is possible that certain biasses are trained into any model.

i am pretty sure, this blog is aimed at the average user. while i wouldn’t trust any LLM company with my data, i certainly wouldn’t want the chinese government to have them. anyone that knows how to use (ollama)[https://github.com/ollama/ollama] should know these telemetry data don’t apply to running locally. but for sure, pointing it out in the blog would help.

fair enough. i guess the usa never did a great job ar limiting their presidents power. that way he can extend his reach way further down, than he should…

well google always displays the locally official names and borders. so just business as usual.

but why does the president of the usa get to decide what places are called? isn’t there a cartography department or something?

The main angle is not to ‘poisen’ the training set. it is to waste time, energy and resources. the site loads deliberately slow and produces garbage, which has to be filtered out.

as i said: not a silver bullet. but at least some threads where tied up collecting garbage painfully slow. as the data is useless, whatever their cleanup process is, has more to do. or it might even be tricked into discarding the whole website, as the signal to noise ratio is bad.

so i would still say the author achieved his goal.

sure, it is easy to detect and they will. however, at the moment they don’t seem to be doing it. The author said this after deploying a POC:

Aaron B told 404 Media “If that’s, true, I’ve several million lines of access log that says even Google Almighty didn’t graduate” to avoiding the trap.

So no, it is not a silver bullet. but it is a defense strategy, which seems to work at the moment.

dressing up in a costume -> hobby

harassing people -/-> hobby

the dissonance in these two posts

well, there are quite a lot of stupid things i did as a kid. kids just need to learn critical thinking through experience.

i would guess, that a large audience of youtube is kids: except retirees, they usually have the most free time.

i give you that: soviet democracy looks pretty neat on paper. lets look at its implementation.

people gather and elect representatives. these representatives in turn elect representatives again as needed. as the system grows, this will gradually form a hierarchical governmental body. in contrast to most democracies, representatives did not get elected for a certain (maximum) timeframe and could always be voted out again. additionally there wiuld not be a desperation of power: they where legislative, executive and judiciary all the same.

1905 the lenin and the bolschevikes introduced such a system. shortly after they only got a minority in the votes. lenin forcefully disbanded the opposition, (possibly rightfully arguing that the burgeoise could not accurately represent the workers) and explicitly excluding the burgeoise from the democratic rights.

Some people say that the end of soviet democracy was in 1918. Lets go with 1921: Martial law was in action, many people where discontent with the bolshevik government, mainly workers and sailors where protesting (kronstadt). this act of rebellion was swiftly crushed by the red army and many people lost their lives. at the same time lenin was still assuring democracy is working as intended.

conclusion: the democracy lasted for about 16 years. in multiple occasions people where forcefully pushed away. this is possible, because a pyramid structure is created by the system. later this form of government was described as “extremely democratic dictatorship of the proletariat”. dictatorship does not have to be bad for the people, but it has the tendency to do so.

overall i encourage you to explore socialist systems from the bottom up. start on paper, if it works try it out in the real world. gradually increase the size and dont be afraid to learn and adjust - now failing is still cheap and easy. the soviet democracy might have worked on a smaller scale. but applied to a country the size of udssr it was too much power focussed on too little people.

We are talking about communism, agreed. That means we are also talking about communes: small(ish) groups of people who want to live together in a communist system. I come from a practical approach: if you want to do something, it needs to work under sterile laboratory conditions first (communism does this). then you can take it to smaller experiments (communes which survived for long, usually have a low hierarchy). after gathering real world experience, you can slowly increase the size of these experiments. so far none of the countries, which had a socialist government still have a (valid) socialist system.

{…} Communism, with central planning and whatnot.

seems like you are suggesting a more centralised form of government and stronger hierarchical structures than any of the communes i personally know. what is your suggested path to avoid the pitfalls of the past communist governments? what safeguards do you suggest to prevent a (group of) person(s) accumulating power and perverting the government into a dictatorship?

As you said: socialism is an idealistic system. however, humans are far from ideal beings. even if you find the ideal group that agrees on their flavour of socialism and manages to actually do it - there is no guarantee, that this will stay as it is. as you mentioned yourself: humans change - sadly not always for the better.

don’t take my word for it. watch a documentary about a bigger commune (small village, houses scattered through a forest and such), or even better: visit one. They all will tell you that heavy moderation is needed. not everyone is allowed to join, sometimes old members even have to go. if you try to scale up these systems to the size of even a small country, they will fail.

communism has not worked and won’t work at a great scale (not talking about small communes). as history has shown, it will fail at the human factor.

unchecked capitalism won’t work either, we would end up in [insert cyberpunk dystopia]. that is why we need the state to do a socialist job in a capitalist system (redistribution of wealth, healthcare, taking care of handicapped, …).

in my opinion, that is where the usa failed majorly. coincidentally, that is where i hear most communism support from. i have too little data points to make a conclusion. but it would be really interesting to see demographics of these statements made in the comic.