Ha. No problem, glad you enjoyed.

Hm.

Here are my thoughts:

I don’t really care about picking the better debater. That actually seems kind of antithetical: In a perfect world, the truth should win, and it doesn’t really matter if someone’s more “skillful” or forceful or just willing to type and berate more. Actually one of the things that bothers me about the propaganda on Lemmy is that it is often (not always) pretty skillful at changing minds, independent of the validity of the content.

I do like the idea of formalizing it a little bit. Having a limited number of “rounds” is an interesting idea. Right now, one of the issues I see that I’m trying to deal with with this thing is the strategy of kind of blathering endlessly or constantly changing the subject, not really being responsive but talking without end. The current iteration of the bot will call you out on it when that happens, but it might be kind of better if it’s your chance and once it’s done it is done. Kind of like court: If the opponent raises a point, and you just ignore it, than by default they “win” that point and you don’t even have a chance to go back and correct it.

I don’t even necessarily like the idea of picking a “winner.” To me, that’s up to each reader, and often the truth is kind of in the middle or they are both valid arguments. It’s more of kind of a pass/fail on both sides: Are you being reasonable? There are a lot of strategies that look really reasonable, or at worst just like aggressively asserting your side, but if you’re good at using them you can literally make almost anything sound plausible. So, if neither side is doing that, then it’s fine! They just had a conversation, responded reasonably to each other’s points, everything moved forward. I am more on the side of “what truth did we figure out” as opposed to needing to assign a winner and a loser mechanically to each debate.

Yeah, modern day political TV debate is nonsense. Actually, even this format of debate in the video you sent, I don’t completely like. The woman is clearly full of shit. They’re setting up this format structure, this respect, this kind of “objective” format, and then they are welcoming someone to take an honored position within it that doesn’t deserve the respect. I didn’t watch much beyond the beginning, but I can almost guarantee that she is lying and rationalizing, and her underlying position is “red man good blue man bad.” I don’t really know how you can expose that in a taking turns long form “debate” format, that’s just my reaction seeing her. I feel like having something like Jon Stewart interviewing her and challenging her, still being fair and letting her talk but not letting her get away with bullshit, would be better than implicitly pretending that she is upholding the social contract when she is not.

Maybe I am wrong, that’s just my snap judgement seeing the first little bit. Actually, setting up a framework where being unfriendly to that kind of dishonesty is allowed and sanctioned, but being dishonest or shifty in your debating is “not allowed” in the same way that overt incivility is “not allowed” currently on Lemmy, is part of my goal here.

Those are my thoughts about it, in no real coherent order, it just took me a little time to watch a piece of the video and get back to you.

Well, but you do though. Making comments and getting the respect and agreement of the people in the community is how you get influence.

I really don’t like this Lemmy thing where certain people are empowered by the software to control the communications of other people (beyond just removing spam or abuse or something). I feel like you don’t need that. I really don’t feel like you or me or anybody being put in a position where they can “influence” someone else’s communications unilaterally is really necessary to a good community. Often it is counterproductive. Maybe that’s the issue, you just activated one of my pet peeves in a way that has nothing to do with what you want to do.

Can you tell me more about what you want to do, how you would want to apply Oxford scoring and such? Maybe that could be a whole separate community / idea, I was envisioning this one as being a lot more basic, just can people talk with each other without blatantly mischaracterizing the other person’s points or ignoring questions or etc. But IDK, maybe I just don’t understand the basic concept even yet.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Yeah, I’d be happy to post it up along with some of the other little tools I use here, that’s a good idea.

Nothing is stopping you from making that tool without mod powers…

I generally don’t even touch the mod buttons except in exceptional circumstances; I don’t expect that this place would be any different. Maybe events will change my mind but I would hope that a lot of this stuff can get worked out with talking and culture, as opposed to by removing comments.

Ooh… that’s a good point. Any discussion which gets fed into the debate bot will get fed into OpenAI’s API, which means it’ll be used for training. (I trust their “do not use this data” checkbox not at all.) And I think you’re right that having that happen will be a deal-breaker for most people and just a totally different thing than the purpose of the community as stated.

Let me think on that a little more. I won’t do anything with the tool until I can look into self-hosting it or something. I think consider it as purely a human community until further discussion, then.

Yeah, me too. I legit thought it was some kind of typo until I looked it up.

Yeah. We’ve been through some bad things, but this is going to be very bad. We are not set up to do well at facing the challenge.

I am sorry to write all of this but you got me thinking and I couldn’t stop typing.

I think a lot of what you mean is concentrated in the US. We don’t have a monopoly, but the idiocracy is here in a huge way. What I want to say, if you do mean the US, is: Your nation doesn’t have to be a country. Your nation doesn’t have to be under a government. The country is falling apart into fantasies and failure, as you say, but the nation is fine.

This all has happened before, in the mid- and early 20th century. Somehow, Europe went from literally the center of power for the entire world, running shit on the other side of the planet and living like emperors, inventing everything and running everything, into a place where the morons were in charge. It was for basically the exact same reason: A new style of technology that disrupted the way the old one had kept things on their course, and the people with their monkey-brains couldn’t keep their handle on what was even happening, how we make sense of the world and react to reality, especially with people lying to them on purpose on an industrial scale. And so… death and destruction and disease and economic deprivation. Misery without end, shattered buildings, corpses in the street in the rubble. Prisons with dark windows, visits from shadowy figures and someone never seen again. A modern society is too fragile and depends too deeply on things to happen in the right way and for people to understand and react, to survive for long if it departs from reality. The trouble comes on gradually and steadily, like Wile E. Coyote going off the cliff, but once the fall comes it is quick and inexorable. Mass starvation, mass incarceration, someone says the wrong thing and it’s war and bombed-out cities. It’s so easy, it’s like a slip and fall on an icy path. It is very close.

Right before and while that was happening in Europe, a lot of the nation I’m talking about decided to get the fuck out. Neils Bohr dissolved the Nobel Prizes of two of his friends in acid, calmly kept the jars of orange liquid in his office. And where did he go to find new employment? Los Alamos. Then when it was over he got the gold back out and in 1950 the Nobel committee helped him turn them back into medals and gave them back to the owners. He’d sold his own medal, and gave the money to the resistance, but those two weren’t his to sell, so he didn’t. The Hungarians did the math, the Germans built the rockets, work is easy to find in this nation I am talking about.

This nation is strong. You shouldn’t fuck with it.

When it happened the last time, it went to the United States. They lived in the plywood palace, they made the space program and all the fancy computers. Knights of the Lambda Calculus, the Lisp Machine, ARPANet. They still make weapons now, or their grandchildren do, alongside children of other citizens of that nation who came here much later. They keep tons of money coming in too (a lot of it stolen), and so there’s plenty to spare for stealth fighters and we can talk people into doing sanctions if anyone makes us irritated.

I don’t know if that time has come for that nation to move on from the US. If you ask me honestly, I really hope not. It’s time to start thinking about it but I hate it. I want to stay and fight and teach the people. People are fighting now, they’re getting in the ICE people’s faces and yelling on the cell-phone video, they’re still going on TV and making fun of Trump. Did that happen with the Gestapo? I feel like not, or not much. Some German people talked about how surprised they were that there wasn’t an outcry. There is here. Some. It’s different than Trump wants it to be. Like in Tolkien, we are soft as butter sometimes. Not always.

Is that going to last? I don’t know. There are a lot of stupid violent people, and a lot of the concentration camps are still coming true. Right now. We’re not stopping them, we’re just arguing while it’s happening. And there’s a whole process to be done, identifying the ones of us who can lead and resist and taking them out. But also, there’s a whole process to resisting. Let people know what is happening. A lot of people making the right decisions in government said that having a crowd of people down the street yelling, in public, that this is fucking wrong factored into their decision. Well, they did that, and no one shot them or anything, so I guess it’s safe for me to do this. It’s contagious.

The people aren’t any more stupid than they always were. Not any more cowardly or malicious. Same genome. They’re just miseducated, they don’t value the right things, they don’t know what’s going on. Their viewpoint of the world got fucked with investment of steady effort, so it can get unfucked with investment of steady effort. Right?

I don’t know. The point I am trying to make is that there is a stupid nation and a great nation, and they’re both in every country. The great nation is fine. I think it came to live in America last century, and that’s why America prospered. If America the geography really does lose its mind forever (and it’s well on the way and no fucking mistake) the great nation will simply move on. There will be a new mid-century New York City, there will be a new place where all the universities have a chatter of different languages, and the miracles will start to get done for someone else instead of for the State Department. Maybe that is naive on my part but I have to believe that it will go somewhere.

We have a bad storm coming this century. Even the countries who have their act together are going to get messed up bad. If America the geography has not righted itself it is in for a hard, hard time.

They will start losing the wars, get fucked up on the world stage, death and suffering. No money. Disasters. Wildfires and droughts, hunger and homelessness, even if no one from outside is messing us up. And maybe some future person more sensible than Trump will have to go hat in hand to some other government asking for help like King George on his sad little boat ride, grabbing Roosevelt by the arm, talking hoarse in desperation. Save us. We’re fucked. We need you.

Or, maybe not, maybe we will just splinter and struggle.

What I’m saying is, idiocracy is always self-correcting, but you don’t have to go down with the ship.

I apologize for the screed I guess. Like I said I was just sort of typing about it and thinking. This long thing is mostly for me, trying to organize what I was thinking about from reading your comment and trying to answer. Like everyone I am trying to decide how to react to what is happening, and so it is intensely important for me, I can’t look away.

He has pro-Palestinian concerns. I think that genuinely, on a personal level, if someone is advocating for brown people, that upsets him and he thinks they should go to prison, and that’s the ultimate reason for this.

The Israel lobby is plenty strong, but I don’t think he would have taken such a personal stake in the reaction to this particular university and issue unless brown people were involved. There’s a reason he went after them first. Ironically, it is partly because they cracked down on the Palestine protests, and thus got themselves in the news as a university that has really notable Palestinian protests and is connected with them. I think if they’d mostly left them alone like most universities did, it wouldn’t have been any kind of news above the local level, and he wouldn’t have had any reason to even have them on his radar as one to punish.

Topf and Sons constructed the ovens at Auschwitz; their management coordinated with the Nazis in depth, and their engineers visited and observed the holocaust in action so they could make the crematoria function more efficiently, for example installing ventilation fans so that the gas chambers could be flushed with outside air more quickly. The company continued in operation until 1996.

Degesch produced Zyklon B gas for extermination in the camps. They were requested to produce a special variant for use on humans, without the additives that would usually give it a strong smell to warn people of the danger. That variant is what is indicated by the “B” in the name. They are still around, having merged into Detia Freyberg GmbH.

I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of ICE agents on a stakeout recently, sitting in their car with the hazards on waiting to snatch someone. I did what I was doing and then came back to observe and see if I was right, but they were gone by the time I got back.

Yeah, there was plenty from after the election too, I just started at that end instead of the closer one. Honestly, I think they have mostly moved on to new action items (protests are scary, be safe, I don’t think protests are going to do anything) but there are definitely people who are spouting the “what’s even the difference” line.

I was hearing from some people last week who didn’t see much of a difference between the outcome of what Trump was doing versus what was already happening under Biden.

Gavin is a corporate whore, but better than a cop Kamala. Indeed a teensy wee bit better.

Tl;Dr she’s just a cop that will say anything to be president.

Kamala is as center right as she’s ever been, she’s a fucken cop ffs

I don’t know where you’ve been for the last 40 years, but the Democrats are not a progressive party. Look at all of the things that happened when Biden had power that they did nothing meaningful to stop: Roe repeal, cop cities, 2+ trillion for war, child genocide in Israel, rent/grocery/energy bills skyrocketing.

You say “things will get worse under Trump”. That’s true. But things got worse under Biden/Harris after Trump’s first term as president - environmental policy, the border camps, reproductive rights, trans rights, cop city, the genocide of Palestinians etc. So when you say “we must vote for Kamala or things will get worse” that line of reasoning is at best unconvincing and at worst it betrays the 4-year state of amnesia you have lived in because you are so politically detached from the consequences of your voting.

bernie is the good cop and the dnc is the bad cop. the bad cop does bad things so that you’ll trust the good cop more than the bad cop; but in reality both cops are putting on a show to manipulate you.

Just calling back to this helpful and informative commentary from back before the election.

See my other comment. I wasn’t saying at all that Lemmy was a US-only thing, I was just trying to say that that the whole network is probably enough of a niche platform that it’s not worth the substantial effort that would be involved in trying to interfere too much with US users on non-US instances. Big instances in the US, they can fuck with, and so why not (and especially since the Take it Down act is structured to empower individuals to go after them without the government needing to spend resources on it.) Instances outside the US, never mind, we have bigger fish to fry.

Oh, I am sure most of Lemmy is outside the US. I was saying that, in general, Lemmy (and even Mastodon) is probably too small and difficult a problem for them to want to attack through any systematic method. I think, if anything, they’ll just surveil and punish individual US-based users as opposed to trying to shut down or block instances outside the US.

It’s one of the advantages of ActivityPub services. Bluesky will be easy for them to attack at the root and I fully expect them to do so, whereas for truly federated services I think the reaction will be “ah what the hell too much trouble, how much harm can they really do.”

No, they will just make server operators liable for obeying any conservative who has an issue with any content there and can make the right format of complaint.

I suspect that instances outside the US will simply be too small a factor to bother with. Small, scattered opposition that is subject to deliberate trolling and disruption at any scale anyone feels like deploying will simply not be worth bothering with.

This is all assuming if a big internet-censorship operation starts (which it seems likely that it will). I think it will mainly focus on large based-in-the-US companies which host large services. Notably among them will be Bluesky. The only impact it will have on anything ActivityPub-based is that they will shut down or muzzle some big instances inside the US, and then, the point being made, they will probably move on, leaving instances outside the US to do whatever they want. That’s my prediction.

Oh, also, Palantir’s surveillance will incorporate people’s comments into their overall dossier on the person, regardless of where their instance is, which means that anyone who maintains a big presence on an ActivityPub network will be putting themselves at person risk of neo-deportation to somewhere they can never get free from. It will still be legal to do, though. Sure.

Let me guess, Che Guevara was an asshole too, because he had a fancy watch.

Also, I don’t think anyone here is upset about this or planning to protest because they like the army.

Edit: I was a little bit curious, and wound up looking up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_and_slavery to learn more. I like this bit:

his enslaved workers were bequeathed to his widow Martha until her death. She felt unsafe amidst slaves whose freedom depended on her demise, and freed them in 1801.

I knew it, man.

I learned MIPS assembly first, and it was like the registers were all a baseball team, with everyone trained and doing their part to try to get the job done.

When I learned about x86 assembly it was like the registers were a tiny band of wacky misfits who were going around in a van trying to solve mysteries.

• Code segment: fine
• Data segment: It’s weird that you even do “segments” but fine
• Extra segment: …
• F segment: Please stop
• G segment: Stop it

I looked at Erik Hernandez and only him, and I found out they originally charged him with second-degree murder, and after the whole trial it was the jury that couldn’t decide.

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/former-colorado-police-officer-pleads-guilty-manslaughter-erik-hernandez/

I don’t know how it lead from there to him pleading to manslaughter, but that’s what happened. They charged him with murder (which sounds like the right charge).