The Commission already has an instance and the ECJ also has an instance. I didn’t find one for the parliament, they might not even want to have one but instead leave it to the parties. A parliament instance would amount to the EP president policing parliamentarian’s speech not just inside parliament but also outside of it, kinda iffy.

Oh this is beautiful and reinforces the result that actual AGI will have to be able to develop its own encodings. In the sense of rather yellowstone relying on a fixed network creating a mapping, decide on a network to create mappings that make sense. Here’s the whole system-theoretical background, papers at the bottom.

I don’t believe there is no difference at all between men and women. I simply believe that a lot of the things we say are inherent differences are actually not as inherent as people tend to believe.

Depending on who you mean with “we” I definitely agree.

For example, I’ve seen no evidence that women are inherently more kind/caring/empathetic than men in any biological way, only that society socializes them to be so,

…and fails at doing so, if I may add. Male-pattern aggression is simply more obvious because it’s in your face physical while female-pattern is psychological, always ensuring plausible deniability.

Yet if you ask most people, they’ll assume there’s something biological that makes women more like that emotionally.

Women favour low-risk engagement, passive aggressiveness over overt aggressiveness. Thus you see emotional manipulation used way more often, one approach being self-victim-framing, and for that the narrative of “oh women are so delicate and emotional they have to be protected no matter what they do” fits the bill. Female viciousness is beautiful but I very much prefer it in the “never start a fight, but always finish it” version. Relevant symphonic metal. Also if you’re trying it with me you’re getting tickled into submission.

TBH, Silverbacks are actually good role models: Big, bulky, sit around grooming the troupe, know everyone, emotionally support everyone, when someone wants to start a fight, intervenes, “You wanna fight? Yeah, fight me! Both of you at once, if need be!” – and then suddenly the others lost interest in fighting.

Proverbial gymbro speaking softly and carrying a big stick, far from a tyrant, you know the type. Chimpanzees are the closest to us, with warfare and everything. Bonobos are… well, they are what biologists start talking about when they want to get into your pants. Let’s just say there’s a reason you don’t see them in zoos, parents don’t want to hear kids asking those kinds of questions.

Isn’t it weird that for humans, sex is a private matter? Completely singular among all the animals. And that’s independent of social status, like a smaller sea lion seducing a female one while the big hunk de jure leading the pack isn’t looking, it’s universal. Even if sex is a group activity, then that group itself is putting up layers of privateness and propriety. Swinger clubs with fancy dress codes, doesn’t matter if you end up naked but you have to start out in suit and tie.

If a scientist would, today, discover humanity and describe their behaviour they’d be laughed out of any conference, “did you get your notes mixed up”. “Next thing you want to tell us camelopards are real”.

You’re right after that comes the patriarchal, or just gendered, double-whammy: Women culturally do have more of a support network, even just in the “friends hanging out” way, as the male “do things together, chop wood, go fishing” is regarded as work, not leisure, and thus co-opted by capitalism: “What do you need to chop food and fish for, go buy fuel and food are you poor or something”. Thus all the productive time men have is spent in a hierarchical worker-boss environment, never “pals doing stuff”, cue loss of connection, alienation from broader society, loneliness. Going bowling? Time not spent hustling, you’re a loser. That’s your mind on patriarchal capitalism.

Thus, even if the starting conditions inflicted by capitalism are, for the sake of argument, completely even, it still hits men harder when it comes to loneliness. Women are more affected in other ways. This isn’t an olympics, it’s analysis of the material conditions we live under.

Alienation. Exploitation. Heard of it?

Capitalism has bereft men even of the patriarchal provider role as there’s no fucking time in the day to earn both rent and have any type of social interaction, much less time to reflect on your approach to life. Your position as a gear churning out profit for the bosses has been meticulously designed and drilled into you while you were a kid, blind obedience instilled by teachers and BS “zero tolerance punish the victim” rules. There is no use for you aside from that assigned role, happiness, connection, community, work//life balance? Don’t make a profit. Get out of here with that commie nonsense we have quarterly figures to hit.

Or, maybe, yes, you do have a point: I should have said late-stage capitalism. The internal contradictions are actively eroding it by now.

hooks suggests that men need to develop a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of masculinity, one that values emotions, relationships, and mutual respect.

Yep, written by a woman. Replace that with “value traversing rivers on couches strapped to floats and having a blast with the pals” and you’ll get somewhere.

Valuing something already is an emotion so you’re being emotional about being emotional about something so, yeah, no. Go climb a tree, create a tasty recipe, fix a shoe. Shave the soap.

Boys develop coarse motor skills first, then fine motor skills, for girls it’s the other way around. Which also means that girls are quite good at sitting still in primary school, boys, without getting tired out in recess, very much aren’t. Cue “behavioural issues”.

Lego did control for everything that could be controlled. They’re the OG “our toys are for everyone” company. They thought that their stuff was gender neutral, that stores and parents, society, were the problem, but had to admit that, no, kids actually do have, statistically speaking, different play preferences. Their female set designers didn’t catch it because they were not kids, any more.

And “no hormones to speak of” MF if there were no hormones involved male karyotypes would develop female.

they generally just go with what they prefer in the moment along lines that don’t match the gender binary

Nope. Lego did a large behavioural study on this because this was their assumption, they thought they were doing completely gender-neutral stuff, but even controlling for parents’s biases their stuff wasn’t gender-neutral when it came to actually be interesting to kids. I’m talking about stuff like the city series, here: A street, bunch of houses, bunch of minifigs. Figures that the girls by and large where looking at the inside of the buildings, finding them empty, and lost interest while boys where seeing the streets, found ample of detail and also a car to drive around, and created stories. There are, of course, as always exceptions to the binary but the overall trend was undeniable.

That (and the insistence of US stores on not having gender-neutral isles and putting Lego in the boy’s section) made them create the Friends series: Detailed house interiors, larger, more detailed minifigs. The pink is for the stores and parents, the interiors for the girls, the build-what-you-want flexibility for the humans.

Generally speaking, I think that difference feminism has been discarded prematurely. Sure, none of the normative BS that many of its proponents espoused should ever see the light of day, but denying difference is harmful in its own way, and the reason is the inevitability of essentialising: If you say “there is no difference at all between men and women” you’re bound to essentialise everyone towards your own gender. And it’s way better to be essentialised as an apple when you’re an apple than it is to be essentialised as a pear.

> capitalism
> self-inflicted

Sure, bud.

From a European perspective the liberal American position is racist AF because it accepts the concept of race as something real. That is, the understanding is that while racism exists, race plainly doesn’t. To solve such issues you make sure that all kids go to primary and secondary schools which can develop their whole potential so that kids from all backgrounds have an equal chance. In the American context: Stop financing schools from local property taxes as that means that kids from poor neighbourhoods go to worse schools than rich kids.Those neighbourhoods quite often are predominantly black, which is how racism perpetuates itself systemically, but if you address the issue by “give black folks more money, or require lower test scores” instead of “get all the poor kids the chances that rich kids have” you’re playing the racist game, you’re playing into and reinforcing divisions, resentment, all that BS.

This goes so far that there was a discussion in Germany about getting rid of the term “race” (Rasse) in the constitution (Article 3) as something that one must not be favoured or disfavoured for, argument being that anything valuable that could be meant by it is already captured by “parentage, homeland or origin”. In the end the Gordian knot was slain by the Jewish community which said “We should keep it as a historical artefact signifying that the constitution was written in reaction to a time where that term had vicious meaning”. That everyone could agree on, would be valuable.

I don’t think any real-world ideology can be neatly mapped to brain structures, and vice versa. A rigid thinker growing up in a Zapatist commune will turn out quite differently, and hold fast to very different values, than a rigid thinker growing up among Amish. And where questioning the status quo will land you also isn’t predetermined: A Zapatist could deepen anarchic principles, they could regress towards democratic socialism (“we tried, but the world isn’t ready yet”), an Amish could become a reddit Atheist, a philosopher, or a batshit crazy supply side Jesus Evangelical. Or, like, a welder, not caring about religion. Or a Buddhist.

One thing’s for sure it’s never a good idea, from a progressive POV, to attack lentil stew: Don’t fuck with the actually tried, good, and true. If the “traditional” in “traditional carpentry techniques” makes your eye twitch, seek help¹. When meeting a rigid thinker, make sure to establish rapport by showing your appreciation of such things, you’ll find that suddenly they’re much more amenable to listen to new (to them, or in general) ideas. In this case, centrism actually is enlightened: It allows you to circumvent the old vs. new discussion and get into good vs. bad which ultimately is what actually matters.

¹ Unless a hipster happens to have cornered you. My condolences, then.

Three days is the (generously calculated) time until civil defence will have soup kitchens up and running, and at least over here they stock three months worth of lentil stew, pea stew, and bread and more than enough diesel to keep logistics, kitchens and crucial infrastructure such as water pumps running. Heating, push come to shove, would be supplied at the gymnasium of your local school or suchlike. Recommendation is to have 7-10 days worth of stock.

But yes I’d recommend against (completely) relying on stocks that need preparation because electricity and water might fail. Canned soups and stews are good and don’t forget canned peaches or such so you can have dessert. Woodgas burners are cheap camping supplies and you’re bound to be able to find some sticks somewhere so with some water reserve you even can have your morning coffee.

Would you be bold enough to write if (i++ == INT_MAX) break? The result of the increment is never used, but an increment is being done, at least syntactically, and it overflows, at least theoretically, so maybe (I’m not 100% sure) the compiler could be allowed to break out into song because undefined behaviour allows anything to happen.

You’re right, that’s what I get for not having written a line of C in what 15 years. Bonus challenge: write for i in i32::MIN..=i32::MAX in C, that is, iterate over the whole range, start and end inclusive.

(I guess the ..= might be where my confusion came from because Rust’s .. is end-exclusive and thus like <, but also not what you want because i32::MAX + 1 panics).

I mean i < 10 isn’t wrong as such, it’s just good practice to always use <= because in the INT_MAX case you have to and everything should be regular because principle of least astonishment: That 10 might become a #define FOO 10, that then might become #define FOO INT_MAX, each of those changes look valid in isolation but if there’s only a single i < FOO in your codebase you introduced a bug by spooky action at a distance. (overflow on int is undefined behaviour in C, in case anyone is wondering what the bug is).

…never believe anyone who says “C is a simple language”. Their code is shoddy and full of bugs and they should be forced to write Rust for their own good.

i <= 9, you heathen. Next thing you’ll do is i < INT_MAX + 1 and then the shit’s steaming.

I’m cooked, see thread.

Go download ComfyUI (civitai is a good source of models) and Blender. A snappy cycles viewport is something to behold. Do simulation nodes run on GPU? If they do you can do all kinds of stuff with that.

Oh, last but not least: You can swap to VRAM.

Contact your data protection officer, they collected data that did not need.

Both are in there, and neither of those are wrong. Generative AI does have serious limitations when it comes to detail control, and it’s also used a lot by people (not necessarily executives) who don’t respect or understand art – even to create things that they then consider art.

The thing is that we’ve had the same discussion back when photography became a thing. Ultimately what it did was free the art of painting from the shackles of having to do portraits.

One additional thing is that I recommend extremely against trying to try and develop art skills by generating AI. Buy pencil and paper, buy a graphics tablet, open Krita or Blender, go through a couple of tutorials for a few days you’ll have learned more about what you need to know to judge AI output than what hitting generate could teach you in a year. How do I know that the eyes in that AI painting have an off-kilter perspective? Because, for the life of me, I can’t draw them straight either, but put enough hours into drawing to look at both the big picture and minute detail. One of the reasons I switched to sculpting.