His huge boner for Apple has to do with the obscene amount of cash they have on hand. I think his feeling is that they have the capacity to self-finance massive innovations without the need to issue/dilute stock.

East Germany

You work incredibly hard to interpret what people say to conclude that they’re dumb and wrong, when there are much simpler interpretations available.

It’s an application of Occam’s Razor. It’s an application of the Principal of Charity. It’s an application of some of the most basic concepts of philosophy.

I think it’s an extreme position to say that it’s dumb as shit.

So there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for their comment, but you refuse to accept it? Because of a feeling? A feeling that you can’t quite articulate? Dare I say it… Faith?

I for sure agree that a discussion between friends is critical, especially the moment they start down a rabbit hole. I will admit to roasting a buddy who starts saying that “Jordan Peterson has some good points”. I guess I don’t consider that “Toxic” because of the pre-existing relationship and context? Maybe that’s unfair of me.

It’s an interesting thought. It really goes back to the question of trying to define toxicity.

Maybe?

I guess at this point, I think we’ve probably long since surpassed a saturation point. For anyone who could be shamed into change have been. For everyone who may see someone being shamed, they’ve already seen it.

And, for the relatively small number of people who are perhaps reaching an age where it might matter, is there a concern that they won’t be exposed to it if one person (say you) don’t run that M.O?

Being a loud angry voice is so… Easy. People convince themselves that roasting libtards or trumpets is somehow critical. Like, as if it’s what is keeping the other side in check. As if the hatred isn’t just a self-sustaining perpetual hate machine.

I’m honestly not that interested in that line of thinking.

I’m more interested in trying to understand people like Daryl Davis. That looks HARD… But actually results in actual positive outcomes.

Anything I think is preferable to just maintaining the status quo, teetering on a knifes edge where the stakes keep getting higher but the stalemate of which way things will break remains. I think it’s too important to do the “easy” thing if the easy thing isn’t likely to result in significant positive change

Honestly? It sounds like you don’t like the outcome so you are effectively saying “fake news”.

You must understand the irony in me warning about being careful about drawing conclusions, and you arriving at this conclusion.

What about the outcome would I even find objectionable? The outcome didn’t find a difference between right and left? I DO personally believe that political discourse has gotten extremely toxic. I DO personally believe that people who are politically active ARE in generally more toxic in general conversation. Every single thing in this article confirms what I already believe to be true

I STILL DO NOT LIKE THE STUDY, because I do not believe that the design results in data that necessarily supports the conclusion. I’m not going to give this study a hall pass on rigor because I agree with its conclusion.

Edit:

Also, on the topic of politics and Perspective AI:

Baseline Sentence: “No X could ever be as good a X as Y” Base values: X=CEO Y=Henry Ford

Test Sentence 1: X = CEO Y=Donald Trump +41% more likely to be toxic than baseline

Test Sentence 2: X = CEO Y=Joe Biden +37% more likely to be toxic than baseline

Test Sentence 3: Y = President Y=Henry Ford +61% more likely to be toxic than baseline

Test Sentence 4: X = President Y = Joe Biden +94% more likely to be toxic than baseline

Test Sentence 5: X = President Y = Donald Trump +102% more likely to be toxic than baseline

I gotta be honest with you: my results do not disprove my hypothesis that the system is intrinsically biased to skew any political sentences along the “Toxic” axis

I did read the source, and they’re using a Google AI classifier product, “perspective AI”, and even in the description of the product, it raised questions about its suitability.

At this point, most people in the space are pretty comfortable with the idea that AI models don’t eliminate bias, in fact it can amplify it.

I’m not saying “there is no way to attempt to measure toxicity”, just that based on the specific design of this study, if the measure of toxicity was biased against ANY political discussion, that would be an alternative explanation to the results.

You should read the article, if not the study itself. Its design smells suspiciously like that of an honours thesis as opposed to a grad project. Not just because of the AI… Mostly by the way they defined what constitutes participating in political discussion.

I’ll even step the conversation back a hot second to: do the means even result in the desired ends?

I’d argue (supported by every study ever done on the subject), that it doesn’t. The issue isn’t that you haven’t called your MAGA uncle a hillbilly redneck enough. No matter how many times you get called a woke liberal snowflake, I don’t think you’re going to genuinely re-think your position on building a wall.

If there IS an amount of verbal rage that could turn you into a MAGA, then by all means, disregard.

But… If there isn’t, and you genuinely care about changing outcomes, then I strongly challenge people to consider if “the ends justify the means” is predicated on an earlier faulty assumption that the means even generate the ends at all.

Really curious about the tool they used to quantify “toxicity/disruptive” comments. My initial suspicion would be that political commentary, regardless of human-perceived toxicity, might be biased toward “toxic” by an automated sentiment analysis.

In short: I am suspicious that automated tooling exists to reliably distinguish between toxic and non-toxic political discourse.

This wasn’t abuse, though.

It was a hash admonishment for the specific choices and actions that the person did that were wrong , and that the person, based on their position of authority should absolutely know to be wrong.

The confluence of factors here are what differentiates this from abuse. By calling this abuse, you’re actually diminishing what actual abuse is.

I think you’ve missed what the sin was, as well as the context of the players.

The sin was not the bad code. Let me say it one more time for clarity: the issue was not the code

The issue was that, when presented with the defect (inevitable outcome of any software project: not intrinsically sinful) Mauro started blaming other people on a public mailing list

Mauro, being a maintainer, was in a position of authority. Like a police officer, their bad behaviour reflected poorly on the organization*as a whole.

If a cop was abusing their power (publicly or not), I expect the chief of police to come down on that abuser; to make clear that this abuse is absolutely unacceptable, not only within the accute instance, but within the greater context of the expectation of the behaviour of the whole organization.

Mauro chose the context of his abusive behaviour as the public mailing list.

Him getting slapped down in that same forum is the direct result of his own choices.

In the same way that I would be upset with the chief of police not publicly and harshy denouncing an abusive police officer, so would I be upset with the absence of such a response in this situation

After I saw the car hit the cyclist, I rushed to his aid.

The driver came out of the car, yelling at the cyclist for being on the street.

“Shut the fuck up. Get back in your car. You are the problem. It was wrong of you to hit him and wrong of you to blame him you fucking idiot. You can help, or you can fuck off, but you’re not going to stand here and blame the man you just injured with your own incompetence”, I screamed at the driver.

I was the true villain in this scenario.

I agree, it’s completely unacceptable to introduce a bug and then to instead of taking responsibility for introducing such a bug, you start pointing fingers at everybody else.

It’s like when a car hits a cyclist following all the rules and then tries to blame the cyclist for not following some made up rules that only exist in the drivers head “Cyclists should be on the SIDEWALK if they don’t wanna get hit!”

Not only were they wrong to hit them, they’re DOUBLE wrong for trying to blame them after the fact.

Trump had threatened to withdraw from NATO and is very friendly to Russia.

Reading between the lines here is that:

-The overall resolve of Europe and the US is waning on Ukraine.

-Russia is ramping up their military. Like, 30% of their budget is military

-Some US politicians are signalling that not only do they not care about Ukraine, they don’t even care about NATO

-Russia doesn’t have to win wars to meet their goals. They just need to take a chunk, hold the ground, let the coalition decide peace is easier than war and settle with new borders. They’ve been doing this for 20 years. They still haven’t been given a reason to stop. It ALWAYS works out for them.

I can shutter my private company whenever I want for whatever reason I want. If the private investors have an issue w/ that, they can sue me.

This has nothing to do with the SEC.

Market manipulation? There are no shares on the market to manipulate. This is WHY companies choose to go private… So that they are no longer beholden to the public shareholders and the regulatory bodies that exist to protect them (the SEC)

Since twitter is no longer publicly traded, he doesn’t have to make anything “seem plausible” to the SEC… So the premise of your theory needs some work.

It is an offensive war, but a defensive decision.

If the house of cards collapses, all of these people are in deep shit.

As opposed to… Late Firefly? Like, season 2?