very_poggers_gay [they/them]

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2021

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  • Yes, but that does not mean AI has 0 influence. Rather, AI is a circle, a shape with no beginning or end, suggesting that AI has endless and infinite potential. Now, let’s say you want to remove AI from the equation - imagining a world without AI. What happens when you divide by zero? You can’t, because dividing by zero is undefined. Thusly, a world (future or past) without AI is now an impossibility. This is simply the laws of mathematics.

    • Property Manager, AI Consultant









  • Oh absolutely. It’s a huge issue, especially in humanities and social sciences, where the barrier of entry makes it so that almost all published research is conducted by certain populations on themselves. Some people call it “WEIRD” populations, meaning western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (though that “weird” terminology is a bit stinky… I’m looking at the “E” and “D”). Interestingly, China has now overtaken the US in publishing the most highly cited research of any country, though I think their advances are mostly in natural sciences and engineering.

    There are also issues with how we qualify good quality or *academic * research. Again, this is especially the case in social sciences and humanities where the standards have been set by colonial researchers who had the means to run expensive studies on large samples. As a result, a lot of research methodologies and ways of knowing that don’t align with the western colonial standards (e.g., qualitative research, narrative analysis) get discounted or written off entirely




  • Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants.

    Not really and certainly not directly. Almost all research grants (at least in Canada and the EU) are for the costs of running research, not for the PI’s salary, which their institution pays. I know those two can’t be separated, but the point is still true that most of the grant money that individual researchers apply for can only be spent on conducting research. It is not for them to live, it is for them to do their job.

    If this was even a problem, which it isn’t,

    What do you mean by this part?

    The neoliberal logic consuming academia is bad for academia as a whole, and anyone who can stand to benefit from higher education and/or quality research (i.e., practically everyone everywhere). Almost anyone working on research in academia is severely underpaid and they’re expected to work countless hours for free. Academia is a house of cards help together by the grindset of graduate students and early- or mid-career researchers.

    The ways that grunts and funding are allocated are deeply flawed, and fields that aren’t tied to profitable industries (e.g., “life sciences” like biology and chemistry) are severely underfunded. See:

    NIMH funding. NSF funding

    The only winners in the current system are the profit-driven capitalists who fund research for good PR and ‘passive’ income, and the few others in academia who game funding systems to cash out on shitty dead-end or naively idealist research


  • The company wouldn’t exist without owners, someone created it, someone started it, someone owns it. The owners are also the ones usually making the big decisions, they have a lot of skin in the game when it comes to the future of the company.

    The kingdom wouldn’t exist without monarchs, someone created it, someone started it, someone rules it. The monarchs are also the ones usually making the big decisions, they have a lot of skin in the game when it comes to the future of the kingdom.

    Americans are so pro-democracy, but they’ll bust out the most self-defeating, thoughtless, begging-the-question-ass logic to argue against having democracy in the workplace. Sad.


  • Employees are allowed to buy company stock and vote using it just like anyone else.

    And vote with what money? Income inequality is arguably as worse as it has ever been. More and more workers are forced to live on wages that can’t even cover their basic needs, let alone buying power, while the capitalist/owning class is hoarding unbelievable wealth.

    How can workers vote with their money to overturn a system designed by wealthy employers to make themselves as wealthy as possible (a system that involves keeping employee wages as low as possible, btw)? That’s the fucking problem, lmao.

    Consider this: Wealth inequality in America today is worse than it was in ancient Egypt. Your “solution” is like asking asking what’s the problem with the slaves of ancient Egypt not buying their way into power.



  • Everyone I know that supports Ukraine does so because they feel for the victims of the missiles launched by Russia at schools and homes.

    What does that support look like?

    I, and many others in this thread, are very out of the loop.

    Again, I have a hard time believing this is true. This is a war. People die by the hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, in wars. Providing uncritical support (as most liberals and “Slava Ukraine” types do) for any side in a war is still encouraging more deaths on all sides of the conflict. It is not a Marvel movie or gritty political sci-fi thriller that so many people seem to think it is.

    The longer the war goes on, the more people will die or be displaced, and the more money from working class people will get funneled into the military industrial complex. Nobody outside of the MIC is benefitting from the death and despair of this war.

    Most discussions about the conflict outside of leftist spaces is just liberals and conservatives fantasizing about Russia getting weaker (i.e., its people dying) and America/NATO/“freedom” getting stronger. The rare person will acknowledge that Ukrainian men must die for the latter to be true, but the reality of those deaths is often minimized or even celebrated. As well, anyone who dissents is typically accused of being pro-Russia, a bot, or a paid shill.

    See this freak

    This is a top comment on the top post of /r/UkrainianConflict fantasizing about making a Marvel movie montage of a war crime, and other users lapping it up

    Or click on any new thread and see all the highly rated comments like this, lusting for further destruction

    It took like two minutes to find these examples, and there’s countless more on lemmy, reddit, and the like. It’s almost undoubtably worse on Twitter or Facebook too shrug-outta-hecks