Yeah, that was a critical quote. Undeniably he is saying that black people should be sterilized.

University course lectures are still the best and you can find tons of them in YouTube in their entirety.

Yeah this isn’t newsworthy because she’s rich, tbh there’s probably richer immigrant students at Harvard we don’t know about. But diplomatically this is a pretty big deal. This lady is gonna grow up to wield substantial political influence in her country, and she likely won’t have warm feelings towards America as a result of this.

So then can anything that produces dopamine be addictive? Can I get addicted to hugging my girlfriend, or addicted to reading books, or jogging? Or is there some threshold? Does the intensity per time matter, or just the intensity, or just the time? What about the frequency of exposure? Does any amount of dopamine release make me slightly more addicted to whatever it is, or is there some threshold that needs to be exceeded? Do dopamine-based addictions produce physical withdrawal symptoms, always, never, sometimes? Depending on what? And are physical withdrawal symptoms necessary to constitute addiction or are there different tiers of addiction?

You see what I’m getting at. There’s sooo many questions that need to be answered before just saying “this produces lots of dopamine therefore it’s addictive and bad and should be limited”. While I appreciate and empathize with your sentiment about people cherry-picking the studies they like (sounding like an LLM here lol), it’s not as if science doesn’t know how to deal with that problem, and it certainly isn’t a reason to stop caring about or citing studies at all, or say “well you’ve got your studies and I’ve got mine”. Just because both sides have studies that give evidence in their favor doesn’t mean both sides are equally valid or that it’s impossible to reach an informed conclusion one way or the other.

My next biggest question (and what I’m trying to drive at with the semi-rhetorical slew of questions I opened with) would be what makes something an addiction or not? Am I addicted to staying alive, because I’ll do anything to stay alive as long as possible? That seems silly to call an addiction, since it doesn’t do any harm. And how do we delineate between, say, someone who is addicted to playing with Rubik’s Cubes vs. someone who just really likes Rubik’s Cubes and has poor self-control? Or what about someone with some other mental quirk, like someone who plays with Rubik’s Cubes a lot due to OCD, or maybe an autistic person who plays a lot with Rubik’s Cubes out of a special interest? Does the existence of such people mean that “Rubik’s Cube Addiction” is a real concern that can happen to anyone who plays with Rubik’s Cubes too much? Or perhaps Rubik’s cubes are not addictive at all, and it is separate traits driving people to engage with them in a way that appears addictive to others.

I know I’ve written a long post and asked lots of questions. It’s not my intention to “gish gallop” you, just to convey my variety of questions. The Rubik’s example is the one thing I’m most curious to hear your thoughts on. (There I go sounding like an LLM again)

I enjoy how every misplaced accusation of something being le AI le SLOP ends up just backfiring against the claim that AI only makes objectively trash things that can always be distinguished from beautiful pure human-made art. If it’s plausible that AI could have made this, then it must be plausible for AI to make art as good as humans have. What’s even better is it doesn’t matter if you can correctly distinguish it 95% of the time. Even just one misclassification is enough to undermine the claim that AI only produces #slop. The sentiment of the claim could even be saved if people were willing to say that just X% of AI art is #slop, but this is unacceptable for the dogmatist’s needs, which will only settle for 100%.

If every person who disagrees with you counts as further evidence that you’re right, then you’re thinking in an unfalsifiable manner, which is the basis for many a flawed conclusion. It doesn’t necessarily make you wrong, but you should really make sure to find justifications for your beliefs that are based on falsifiable reasoning instead. That’s the best way to know if what you’re believing is right or wrong, because you can try to falsify your beliefs in the way that you know them to be falsifiable, and if they still couldn’t be falsified, then you can say “Well, I tried to disprove this, and it still passed that test!”

So, let me ask you this, what would, hypothetically, suffice to prove or at least suggest evidence that porn addiction does not exist? If your answer is “nothing”, then you’re in unfalsifiable territory.

Oh, yeah, I know. My issue is more about the word being reused so much. Whenever I see a word take off memetically like that I feel like it’s usually accompanied by a lack of deep thought. Almost like a thought-terminating cliche.

Yeeees although I feel like I’m walking into a trap rn

I’m more sick of hearing “slop slop slop slop slop” than I am of hearing about AI at this point. People sling slop around like it’s some sort of brave, heroic, destructive insult, leaving AI users in tears and shambles in its wake. Ironic considering a complaint against AI is that it regurgitates the same characteristic bit of content over and over again mindlessly. But even ChatGPT would have the writing skill to cycle in some other adjectives, my goodness.

People thought “Gulf of America” was just Trump being ridiculous and egotistical, but to me it now seems clear that it was intended to lay the groundwork to ban press like AP. I believe that was a multi-step plan. The administration is not stupid, they’re getting everything they want. Everything is working out in their favor. That is not by accident, that is not the result of stupidity.

It’s worth pausing and considering what kind of non-stupid, multi-step plan would call for a large accumulation of likely Trump-supporting soldiers with military equipment at Washington D.C.

Is that what this is? Who knows. But I think it’s naive to attribute any of these actions to just ego-stroking.

Very bad even by already low American standards. Does anyone know what other countries regulations look like in relation to this? Does Canada have laws limiting any of these? European countries? I’m trying to find out, but info is sparse it seems.

Surprisingly solid article especially given CNN’s initial propagandistic coverage of the Luigi story. They actually quote people they interviewed, they seemed to cherry pick a representative sample rather than a few crazy people. I don’t think this really says much about CNN though, but it is uplifting in the sense that the social narrative around Luigi is becoming so solidified that even mainstream media can’t dance around it without looking totally idiotic. I suspect the crowd also had very clear talking points in mind that made it difficult to find a bad look to cherry pick. Very nice to see such a clear message here, especially on strong talking points like the clearly unequal treatment vs school shooters, and best of all - this article even mentions the line of reasoning that the CEO was effectively a mass murderer. Surely a more contentious angle, but definitely one with some validity to it. Very pleased to see that make it into this article.

Yup that seems to make the most sense to me. Guess we’ll just have to check in on that account in awhile. No news articles on it yet.

Yeah basically my exact thoughts. Glad I’m not alone in that interpretation!

Very interesting. I don’t use Bluesky and I’m trying to verify the accuracy of this information. Does anyone else find her account strange? 8 hours ago she posts this terrifying message. And…3 hours ago she posts a totally chill introduction? Isn’t that backwards? And she seems to have an awful lot of followers for just these two posts. The name seems legit from a quick search, tied to a lawyer indeed. But I’m kind of surprised people aren’t more freaked out in the replies - isn’t this the first known instance of a citizen being targeted for deportation? But it’s mostly jokes from responders. And her post chronology is confusing to me still. Maybe someone can help clarify/verify.