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GOP attorneys general have launched a new attack on gender care for kids
  • So you consider the side effects an acceptable risk?

    Doctors that are specialized in that field should know that better than you or me, no?

    But I'll humor you anyway. You know what also has side effects? Going through puberty. And those side effects are permanent. If your puberty changes you in ways that don't align with your gender identity, those side effects include higher risk of dying by suicide, as one example. So yeah, that seems like a risk that I, with my unqualified opinion, would be willing to take in order to make sure my child and their doctors have enough time to figure out who they are and what they need.

  • Capitalist logix
  • the argument that "being selfless is selfish" is not useful

    Yes, that's my entire point.

    and provably false

    Depends on how you define "selfish". Again, that's exactly what I'm trying to demonstrate here. Reducing the definition of selfish to mean "getting something out of it" makes it meaningless because every decision is made in the hopes of getting something out of it in some way, even if it's obscure. To make it useful, you need to look at what someone is getting out of it in order to get to a useful definition.

  • Capitalist logix
  • That would be an extremely reductive definition that doesn't really tell us much about how caring for others is actually experienced and how it manifests in the world.

    Exactly, that's my point.

    How would this for example explain sacrificing yourself to save another person, if the very core of caring is to create positive emotions in yourself?

    In this case it would be about reducing negative emotions, choosing the lesser of two evils. Losing a loved one and/or having to live with the knowledge that you could have saved them but chose not to can inflict massive emotional pain, potentially for the rest of your life. Dying yourself instead might seem outright attractive in comparison.

    this idea that caring is in its essence transactional

    That's not actually how I'm seeing it, and I also don't think it's a super profound insight or something. It's just a super technical way of viewing the topic of motivation, and while it's an interesting thought experiment, it's mostly useless.

  • Capitalist logix
  • Well, but what does "caring" mean? It means that their well-being affects your emotions. At its very core, you wanting to help people you care about comes from wanting to create positive emotions in yourself or avoiding negative ones (possibly in the future, it doesn't have to be an immediate effect). If those emotions weren't there, you wouldn't actually care and thus not do it.

    Edit to clarify: I'm not being cynical or pessimistic here, or implying that this means that everyone is egotistical because of this. The point I was trying to make is that defining egotism vs. Altruism is a little bit more complex than just looking at whether there's something in it for the acting person. We actually need to look at what's in it for the acting person.

  • Capitalist logix
  • I mean, you're not wrong, but your point is also kinda meaningless. Of course, you only ever do things because there's something in it for you, even if that something is just feeling good about yourself. If there was truly nothing in it for you, then why would you do it?

    But that misses the point of the "people are inherently selfish" vs "people are inherently generous" discussion, because it's not actually about whether people do things only for themselves at the most literal level, instead it's about whether people inherently get something out of doing things for others without external motivation. So your point works the same on both sides of the argument.

  • YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads
  • The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they'll get to play you more ads and cash out more.

    You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it's just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn't equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you'll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you're just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn't really have an incentive to make it work like that, it's just accidental.

    Here's the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: https://youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI

    Edit: to be clear, I fully agree that YouTube will do anything to shove ads down our throats no matter how effective they actually are. I'm just saying that this example you've brought is not really that.

  • Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”
  • Now please explain to me how C works.

    That's not what they're asking. It's not about how C works, it's about how specific APIs written in C work, which is hard to figure out on your own for anyone who is not familiar with that specific code. You'll have to explain that to any developer coming new into the project expected to work with those APIs, no matter their experience with C.

  • Tesla Cybertruck caught fire after hitting a fire hydrant in bizarre crash
  • Sand won’t do anything because the fire is self-oxidizing.

    From my understanding the recommendation to have a bucket of sand around when handling lithium batteries is not to put the fire out with it, but to have something to throw the battery into that's not gonna catch fire as well, and then to carry the whole bucket somewhere where the battery can just burn out on its own. Is that wrong?

  • Are LLMs capable of writing *good* code?
  • It is an algorithm that searches a dataset and when it can't find something it'll provide convincing-looking gibberish instead.

    This is very misleading. An LLM doesn't have access to its training dataset in order to "search" it. Producing convincing looking gibberish is what it always does, that's its only mode of operation. The key is that the gibberish that comes out of today's models is so convincing that it actually becomes broadly useful.

    That also means that no, not everything an LLM produces has to have been in its training dataset, they can absolutely output things that have never been said before. There's even research showing that LLMs are capable of creating actual internal models of real world concepts, which suggests a deeper kind of understanding than what the "stochastic parrot" moniker wants you to believe.

    LLMs do not make decisions.

    What do you mean by "decisions"? LLMs constantly make decisions about which token comes next, that's all they do really. And in doing so, on a higher, emergent level they can make any kind of decision that you ask them to, the only question is how good those decisions are going be, which in turn entirely depends on the training data, how good the model is, and how good your prompt is.

  • The Lego Movie - Rebuilt

    The Brickfilming community has taken it upon themselves to recreate the entire Lego Movie, scene for scene, in stop motion, in celebration of the movie's ten year anniversary! Last Wednesday, the project was officially announced and a first trailer released, and we're extremely proud of what we've already achieved so far. It's an ambitious project, but we have lots of fantastically skilled people on it, and it's shaping up nicely :)

    5
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)HI
    hikaru755 @lemmy.world
    Posts 1
    Comments 78