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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • This feels like some medieval shit from over a millenium ago

    I don’t think you realize how new a lot of the current situation is. When that article was written, it was still legal for children to perform in commercial pornographic films in parts of the West. A year before this article was written feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir signed a petition against the age of consent (there were a bunch of these in France in the late 70s and most of the French philosophers of the time signed at least one).

    It only took a couple of decades for sexualizing children to go from a bit creepy but it happens to the way we see it now.


  • The notion that we suck at choosing the good genes is entirely misled, even if it is just sarcasm.

    If we didn’t, we’d be talking about eugenics as that nasty unethical thing we tried once upon a time that eliminated say Huntington’s disease from a population, but we decided wasn’t worth it because of the ethical issues in actually doing it, rather than as just “racism in a lab coat”. The fact that eugenics in practice was about race at all is an example of us being bad at choosing “good genes.”

    The final question is also morally misled because science and the notion of truth is not amoral. Science, without humans, doesn’t exist. And humans are moral beings (constrained by social and moral considerations).

    Reality exists, and continues to regardless of whatever moral framework you subscribe to. Moral frameworks are specific to time and culture, what is acceptable politically even moreso. There are and will always be things that are real and are true and perhaps even useful to know or launching points for further understanding that are outside the range of current acceptable social, moral or political considerations, but that doesn’t make them less real.

    Truth is not limited to the Overton window.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world"Erased"
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    19 hours ago

    To provide a counter-example, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate are combined into a single dose as a treatment specifically for black folks with heart failure (initially sold under the brand name BiDil), because the combined drug treatment in general works measurably better on black folks than white folks, to the point that the combo drug was rejected by the FDA based on initial trials (that had a majority white patient base), but was later approved specifically for for black patients because that specific pair of drugs worked enough better in that population to be approved after further trials. It’s fallen somewhat out of use as a treatment, not because it was ineffective or “racist” to approve a race-specific treatment, but because better options have been developed in the last 20 years - the drug combo remains approved specifically for heart failure in black folks, however. It’s just no longer the first choice.

    common social categories of race (scientists use ethnicity, because of eugenics),

    Literally, they use ethnicity because of negative political associations with race as a term, and also because from a practical standpoint ethnicity is like race, but with more narrow groupings in modern parlance (as noted in the past “race” referred to much narrower groupings, closer to how ethnicity is used now).

    Also, eugenics would totally work if we weren’t terrible at deciding what “good genes” are and instead inevitably make it about something dumb like skin color and there weren’t the massive ethical issues in actually doing it.

    Here’s a fun question: If you had to choose a hypothesis that would be functionally impossible to properly test because of ethical or political issues but that you strongly suspect is true, what would it be?


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world"Erased"
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    21 hours ago

    Also, dog breeds exist because humans have actively bred dogs to have certain traits

    Selection pressure is selection pressure, whether being done by environment or by the active efforts of another species. There’s a reason why whether or not you are lactose tolerant has a lot to do with where in the world your ancestors are from, as does your likelihood of several diseases and likelihood of certain resistances/immunities, there are even certain drugs that will work better or worse for people dependent largely on where their ancestors came from. Short of doing thorough genetic testing, “race”/ethnicity is often a good-enough broad brush proxy for where a majority of your ancestors came from for a variety of purposes.


  • They couldn’t do that from one photo though, they’d need several examples all believed to be the same guy. A swirl like that preserves some of the information and you can reverse it, but the lost data is lost. Do that for several photos and you can get enough preserved bits to piece something together.

    Same idea for some other kinds of blurs or mosaics. Black boxes, not so much - you e got no data to work with, so anything you tried to reconstruct would be more or less entirely fantasy.





  • The issue is with what drug R&D looks like. You invent some new compound you think will treat X because it has a similar structure to other compounds that treat X. Now you need a decade or so of trials to prove that it actually treats X, that it doesn’t have side effects too severe to stop people from taking it for X, that it doesn’t also silently cause some kind of obscure cancer, and then it might get approved (and if it doesn’t that manpower and money was wasted) and the exclusivity time granted by your patent is how you turn a net profit from the last ten years of work because it’s much easier for another company to spin up a factory making X than it is to get X approved in the first place so anyone else making the drug can charge less to cover their much lower costs in getting it to market and will eat the lunch you spent the last decade+ cooking.

    Unless you intend for medical R&D to be done purely under public funding, which is an entirely different scenario than just “no patent law.”



  • If something that had already existed for 6 years when 4chan first opened can be said to originate from 4chan, then what can’t? Hell, large portions of internet culture as you know it for good or for ill were actually born out of the chaos of /b/, but your metric for “originating from 4chan” seems to be “do I think of it as negative and/or nihilistic, if yes then it must have originated from 4chan” rather than anything about where something actually started from.




  • Even as a “Vibe Coder” you kind of still need to know the idea of what code you need and what you want it to do.

    I’ve fiddled with it a bit. IM(limited)E, you tend to get the best results if what you tell it you want broadly, and then in a significant level of detail, and especially if you tell it to ask you any questions it has about the design. So something like “I want you to build an app in $LANGUAGE that does $TASK on $PLATFORM. As I see it, I think the interface should look like $DETAILED_DESCRIPTION_OF_INTERFACE and here’s what should happen when those elements are interacted with, Please ask as many questions as you think are necessary for clarity.”

    Also, unless you’re setting it to require personal approval for every terminal command, I’d only run one of those in a VM of some kind, where any potential damage from any potential fuckups are limited.