andrewrgross

andrewrgross , 17 hours ago

That's the whole theme song. I don't understand this meme.

andrewrgross , 9 days ago

I think maybe execs and investors might feel it's all the same, but if you're a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you've been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, 'Oh, don't worry about that anymore: a property manager that's owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,' some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn't the role that they were pitched when they took this job.

andrewrgross , 14 days ago

This meme is bad.

1. if you look closely, you'll notice that there's no real joke. Israel and Nazi Germany should date. That's a shit tier joke. It's relying on edginess too hope paper over that there's no real humor.

2. from a political commentary perspective, it's awful. We have a colonial state founded by people who have experienced a collective tragedy that they then allowed to justify displacement of an indigenous population, followed by decades of alliance with Western imperialism and a slide to the hard right, with lots of delusion and gas lightning. And we have an aggrieved former great power looking to expand over neighbors while killing of undesirable immigrants. Yeah, two genocides. But they're materially different in terms of approach, and the groups pictured hate each other. It's like you know there's atrocities, and you know Jews are involved, and that's kind of the end of your insight but you really wanted to make a meme anyway.

Find something interesting to say.

Also, free Gaza, release the hostages, lock up Netanyahu and all the rest, etc etc

andrewrgross , 14 days ago

Hold on a sec: self determination is always within the context of recognizing the right of self determination of other groups and the basic human rights of everyone involved.

Also, Israel already has millions of Palestinian citizens. And all of these people deserve a say in what the resulting arrangement looks like.

A two state solution is one possibility, but there is no strict requirement that it is the only or best way to serve the needs of those involved.

andrewrgross , 14 days ago

I think you could argue this before the passage of the Nation State Law of 2018. But now it's enshrined in law that the state exists to privilege Jews specifically and selectively. That's really putting it all in black and white.

Also I get asked about why I didn't criticize China or Russia or Iran etc, and the reasons are simple:

1. I do
2. my tax dollars didn't support their misdeeds and
3. I'm Jewish, so I have a huge investment in Israel's actions. They insist that I be judged by their actions, so now I have to get involved. Also, I actually like Israel. I'd like it to be a liberal, multi ethnic democracy and not just another Middle Eastern martial theocracy with a Jewish twist.

andrewrgross , 14 days ago

Oh, I see. Thank you for the clarification.

andrewrgross OP , 18 days ago

I encourage anyone with the power to keep fascists out of office to do what they can.

I also think, though, that if there is one thing that might save us, it would be Jill Stein breaking into the mainstream. I think Bernie's campaign in 2020 created the conditions that moved Biden and organized what become his turnout operation, and he needs a lefty foil or he's gonna fall flat on his face.

andrewrgross , 19 days ago

This sucks. I was really holding out hope that they might chart a better path forward than most of the alternatives.

andrewrgross OP , 22 days ago

I relate to this, but I keep trying to tell people that we need to get a clear diagnosis of the problem and figure out how we're going to get out of this bind.

Ultimately, Biden is currently on track to lose. He's been losing in the polls all year, and alarmingly, he's insisted that he isn't going to make changes. He's staying the course.

Those of us who want to avoid a Trump dictatorship need to find a way to change this dynamic, and I don't see any way that complaining about Biden's disaffected base fixes this. I don't think complaining about Biden fixes it either. I think he's made peace with losing. So what will?

The Democratic establishment -- the campaign managers and staff in particular -- can largely tolerate a Trump dictatorship more than the loss of status. "Leaders of the Resistance" is okay with them. "Collaborators" or "nobodies" isn't. If Jill Stein hits 15% in the polls and starts drawing major crowds, I thik this would be such a painful shock to the self-image of Democratic campaigners that I think this could dislodge the race and force Biden to reconsider his approach, and hopefully campaign for president the way he did in 2020.

If you don't want Trump, don't blame the left. They aren't the primary source of his polling collapse. That's coming from moderates who see no vision or benefit. And the Democratic party's most popular agenda items are all leftist anti-corporate stuff. So criticism is all that I see saving us from Biden's terrible judgement.

andrewrgross OP , 22 days ago

That's brilliant. I'm going to save this.

andrewrgross OP , 22 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

Bruh.

Your arguments are totally wasted on me. I'm not saying he hasn't done good stuff. I'm saying that he's running a losing campaign, and so far has been totally unwilling to change.

Regarding polling: I don't know how to get through to you that he's losing. If you're not accepting reality, then we're fucked. Are you going to reject the election results too? It's not really even in the margin of error most weeks, he isn't even close to having the votes he needs in the states he needs to win. I can't believe we're replaying 2016 when we've already been through it. Wake up: we're on a collision course and need to change direction NOW.

Regarding his achievements:
These are largely great. Which just makes it so much more painful that no one knows about them. He's never been a skilled candidate, and unfortunately getting older has not done him favors. If he had a really strong campaign, he could certainly win, but if you give a guy who isn't good at the fundamentals of running bad support and bad guidance and a muddled, poorly delivered message, we're going to wake up under President-for-life Donald Fucking Trump.

Did people forget that he was president? He won. It's like I'm in groundhog's day, and no one knows that we already ran this simulation, and the result was terrible.

If Jill Stein hits 15% in polls we’ve wandered into bizzarro world and all bets are off anyway.

We are already in bizzarro world! The leading candidate is a known fascist/rapist/felon, and the current incumbent is the most unpopular president in contemporary history.

People don't even remember that Trump was found guilty of rape last year, because it's not even newsworthy because he keeps quoting Hitler. And he is CURRENTLY IN THE LEAD.

Smash the glass and pull the alarms! All bets ARE off! This is a god-damned crisis, and repeating why BIden SHOULD be winning is pure copium. Put down the pipe and put on a pair of comfortable shoes, because saving America is going to need actual organizing work! And that starts with accepting that we have a problem.

I'm not saying that we need to make Jill Stein president, but we need something to convince Biden to either let someone else take the nomination or start running like he means it. He (and you) need the loudest possible wake-up call or mark my words: Trump WILL win.

andrewrgross OP , 21 days ago (edited 21 days ago)

You know, Bertrand Russell might say that in the present moment, you're the one who needs to demonstrate some facts, but I'll oblige.

National polls: Losing, consistently.

Key state polls: Biden is losing, in some states by shocking margins.

The midterms: The polls were dead on. A red wave was predicted by pundits who ignored the polls. This was easier to do because a lot of elections were close, and hundreds of close elections make predicting the overall breakdown in seats very hard, but the specific polls were all historically accurate. Polling the presidential outcome in key states is much less unclear. In all the most important states, he's either losing badly or it's a toss-up, favoring Trump. I don't know of any precedent for a polling error massive enough to explain polls like this without Biden being significantly behind. That could change, but it won't as long as Biden and his enablers keep denying the reality of our dire situation.

The effect of Roe: the polls already capture this. It isn't like people answer polls without factoring in Roe, and then suddenly remember it at the voting booth. Biden IS already getting the benefit of Roe, and the current terrible poll numbers are how he performs WITH this benefit. He's historically unpopular. If he were running in 2016 against a conventional candidate, he'd be getting Carter or Bush numbers. These numbers are WITH his advantages.

Here is a question for you: WHY??? Obama had a tough election because he had a brutal economy. HOW is Biden not a runaway favorite to win? Why in a time of low unemployment, following the passage of highly popular bills, against a reviled opponent is Biden even struggling? Even if you don't think he's losing (again: it's really not subjective, he's objectively losing right now), explain to me why it is even close? What story do we tell ourselves to make sense of the obvious wrongness of all of this? He is doing worse than Hillary in 2016 by a lot. I don't know how anyone can claim that this is not an absolute catastrophe in the making. Expecting Trump to implode is crazy. He just went through a primary, and he mopped the floor with everyone. Everyone already knows that he's a monster. What do folks think there is to learn? He's a historically despised fascist who tried to seize a second term by violence on live TV. If that were going to work, it would have worked by now. That isn't a strategy that is going to work without Biden either reinventing himself or stepping aside.

This should be a five-alarm fire. Please don't get mad at me for trying to sound that alarm. Wake UP and figure out what we're going to do about it (suggestion: demand a new candidate).

andrewrgross OP , 21 days ago

This is out of touch with the problem.

The long term problem is that we don't have a political economy that actually represents the public.

But the short term problem is that Trump is currently on track to win, and the people who don't want that to happen are sticking their heads in the sand.

We need to (1) reengage the Democratic base. Biden's victory in key swing states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia in particular -- was built on the backs of grass-roots door knocking campaigns by Bernie supporters. His campaign was absolutely reliant on the support of people who didn't really like HIM, but really wanted to get Trump out of office. Those people will probably still hold their nose and vote for him, but that turnout operation is shattered, and I don't see a way he can match his close victory in 2020 without it.

If progressives find a champion in Jill Stein, it's possible that they start dreaming of something better, and if Biden turns things around, they'll have the drive to rebuild that critical lefty turnout machine.

(2) Biden needs a metaphorical slap in the face. He won last time because Bernie's team wrote half his platform in a reconciliation committee. This time, there was no primary, so Biden has reverted to all his instincts, and they are TERRIBLE. He's trying to win Haley voters as if that's not like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football. If Stein gets momentum, maybe it'll knock sense into him.

This is all aside from the fact that voting Green builds party infrastructure and ballot access for a meaningful third party. There are lots of complicated reasons why voting Green has long-term strategic benefits, but I'm not even getting into those. I'm just talking about how we save Biden from himself. Sorry if it sounds like 4D chess, but polls already show Biden losing and he's not taking note, so I think seeing popularity for a left alternative is the only thing I can think of that will rescue this thing.

andrewrgross OP , 21 days ago

Mojofrododojo isn't going to see this, because he won an argument so hard he had to block me.

But if anyone else is reading this, I just want to state that being a dick to political allies because they're upset by a cold hard reality that you reject is not only a shitty way to build successful political movements, it's just a straight up a shitty way to treat people.

Oh well.

andrewrgross OP , 20 days ago

This is absolutely a myth.

Green party candidates can run and win many tickets other than President, but it's very, very hard to get ballot access, public funding, or voter awareness. In any state that isn't a swing state, voting Green most likely has more actual consequence than voting for one of the two major parties. This builds infrastructure that lets Greens organize the way parties do in other countries: doing actual outreach between elections instead of just threatening people every time they need votes.

The Green party is also often the only way to actually challenge the duopoly when both parties are taking the same pro-corporate position. What they do in a race is break a cartel dynamic, which forces Democrats to actually adopt popular positions which they can then be pressured to act on.

Vote strategically: if you're in PA, MI, or NC, by all means stick with a Democrat, but in about 40 states, you actually have a lot more voice and potential impact voting Green than you do otherwise.

andrewrgross , 23 days ago (edited 23 days ago)

This is a great point.

The technology that excludes transwomen from the app is the clear warning that the app is populated exclusively for transphobes. It's obviously wildly dangerous for a transwoman to be on the app.

The notion that AI is going to clock them is absurd AI hype. There's no reason to expect AI to be capable of this kind of discernment, and that assumes you even had a training set. Where in the absolute fuck would someone find a training set like that?

Edit: I didn't read the article. It seems it's a lesbian dating app. Well, probably less dangerous for transwomen, but still not technically sound.

andrewrgross , 23 days ago

Why do you guarantee that? It seems obviously wrong, on a technical level.

The point I'm making is that even if we take it as a given that a shrewd enough AI could correctly distinguish sex at birth -- which I think is obviously impossible based on the appearances of many ciswomen and the nature of statistical prediction -- you'd still need a training data set.

If the dataset has any erroneous input, that corrupts its ability, and the whole point of this exercise is trying to find passing transwomen. Why would anyone expect that training set of hundreds of thousands of supposed cis women wouldn't have a few transwomen in it?

andrewrgross , 22 days ago

Yeah, but the training set is nowhere near clean. That's my point. "Close" is no where near good enough within this context,

andrewrgross , 26 days ago

Yeah. And it's so bad that I feel like the functionality barely goes down.

They should release the following:

'Out of an abundance of caution, we advise against any user charging this device and attempting to rely on it for communications or regular assistance. Fortunately, we've found a workaround and suggest customers looking to continue enjoying the benefits of the Humane pin consider wearing it down in an unpowered state. This will provide infinite battery life and a 100% reduction in unwanted heating while enabling users to continue to receive nearly all the same functionality to which they are accustomed.'

andrewrgross , 28 days ago

To add to this, I've been using GIMP on and off for a decade and I've never given any thought to the name. It's all capitalized. I didn't think it was a backronym, I thought it was just an acronym.

I've used this in professional settings (I used to work in academic molecular bio), and I was very evangelical about it. Especially because we're not doing high-level artistic work, we just sometimes need something for processing microscope images or making graphics for scientific publications.

I'd say to any and everyone, "You know, you don't have to pay an annual subscription fee for Photoshop: there's this free, open-source program called GIMP that does most of what you need and you don't have to pay a thing! Want me to install it for you?"

I didn't even think to be embarrassed about the name, and no one ever seemed to care in conversation. As others have said, the bigger impediments are people's attachment to commercial software and interface challenges. This is just an absolutely silly complaint to make.

andrewrgross , 1 month ago

This is a great article.

andrewrgross , 1 month ago

I don't understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.

Decentralized? Yep. It's got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You'll have a lot of legal problems and most people don't want it, but the option exists.

Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn't controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government... well we have that. It exists. It's pretty okay. Go use it.

andrewrgross , 1 month ago

First, thanks for that explanation. That's interesting.

Is there a good place to learn more? I can see why having custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tools are good, but I still have a lot questions.

First, is there a genuine benefit to dissociating a users identity from their server? I think the connection between users and their home instances are a brilliant innovation. They seem to bring village culture back to the internet. They help people associate within networks below just the global level. I think the atomization of people online has been a part of why there is so little trust.

andrewrgross , 2 months ago

That's cool. Do you have any details?

andrewrgross , 2 months ago

I don't think they mean that tiktok is being banned over this app specifically: I just interpreted their comment to mean that tiktok has been an ongoing nuisance to the American mainstream political establishment.

andrewrgross , 2 months ago

I find the Times of Israel to be a decent source. They're obviously biased in favor of Israel, but it's not behind a paywall and they're far more informative than The NY Post, for instance. I think they seem less biased then the WSJ, frankly.

Overall, a useful insight into mainstream discourse in Israel with fairly accurate reporting.

andrewrgross , 2 months ago

Obviously not. But that's true to some degree for all news sources. I don't blindly trust any newspaper. I read Times of Israel through a lens of context, just like I do for the NY Times, The Guardian, The Intercept, etc.

I think it's incredibly useful to see what a country reads about itself. Not only is that true even for countries engaged atrocities: it's especially true for countries engaged in atrocities.

andrewrgross , 2 months ago

Okay, but how does that definition not precisely describe a tool?

It sounds like it very much is a tool, in the exact usual sense of the word.

andrewrgross , 2 months ago

It's either because of DEI or work from home. It's not clear how, but it's got to be one of those.

andrewrgross , 3 months ago

That's sad to hear.

I went to De Moines for work once, and to their credit: the place has charm. It's got more going on than I expected.

Coming from the west coast, I'll totally own up to my preconceptions, but a bunch of the businesses and signs made it clear that De Moines has a far more open-minded, fun-loving modern culture than I was expecting.

Still, I can't say I'm surprised at this. Especially on Facebook. I don't think the people who run the hip microbreweries and rad clothing stores I saw are commenting on Historical Society Facebook posts.

andrewrgross , 3 months ago

I think the mainstream Santa lore is dogshit.

I know a pro Santa, and as an actor he has to have his story straight. And if you ask him his life story, it basically starts as a mortal man in ancient Turkey with the story of the original St. Nicholas, and then proceeds to his gradual ascension to demigodhood through devinely favored acts of anonymous charity around the world.

Eventually, his aging slows down and stops, and he makes his way to the frozen north where the ancient, immortal elves have retreated to enjoy their hobby of crafting far from the bother of humans. They become friends, and he begins a routine of spending his time wandering the earth looking for the needy and deserving and passing along recommendations to the elves. What they build, he offers to deliver. And in the process, he inspires hundreds of millions to pretend to give on his behalf so that no one ever knows if he is real or which gifts came from him.

He doesn't judge each of us, and he doesn't actually give presents to most people. He just wanders the world every day looking for those in need. And he doesn't command the elves, he just furnishes them with requests which they oblige at their discretion.

It's such a better story, isn't it?

andrewrgross OP , 3 months ago

First one; then the other.

andrewrgross , 3 months ago

I am a Patreon supporter of the developers. It's that the best way to support the project?

andrewrgross OP , 3 months ago

Is this not a meme? I thought this counted. Lmk if it doesn't belong.

andrewrgross OP , 3 months ago

(˵ ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°˵)ﾉ⌒♡*:･。.

andrewrgross , 3 months ago

The answer is disappointingly pedestrian, I think: it's where the clicks are. What's he supposed to do? Post it on Vimeo and ask people to support him on Patreon?

No conspiracy needed. Lemon doesn't have anywhere else to go.