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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 4th, 2024

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  • Few days ago a friend linked me a danish research paper and claimed it shown that higher wages for women lead to decrease in children being born, and that higher male wages led to the opposite. I don’t have the skills required to parse this kind of paper quickly nor understanding of a lot of the terminology. I told chatGPT to read it and contrast it with the arguments being made, to which it responded with pointing out that the term “marginal net-of-tax wage” meant something different from “wage”, and that this paper suggested that tax laws incentivizing working more hours led to lowered fertility rather than higher salaries for women. I was asked to point exactly where in the paper it was said like that, and again, I had to lean on LLM to get me page numbers. I eventualy convinced my friend that he got duped by right wing talking points and got him to think a bit.

    So, if I didn’t do that and just read the conclusion from the paper I’d probably have to agree with him instead, as just googling it led to the right wing trolls making those claims. Was this a good use case of LLM to get me some counter arguments, or would it have been better if I stayed true to my ideals and not to use those tools? Was I rude by arguing against the point made about a research that neither of us understood from the get go by using genAI to parse through it? While I do agree that companies developing those tools are evil and need to be stopped, there is an utility to it that I don’t think is available elsewhere. Would me losing that argument and believing that women should have lower salaries to increase fertility (because I believe in science, and this paper seemed to be referenced a lot, also if anything capitalism would be to blame, so probably not as bad) be better than normalizing the use of the devil-tech but having myself and my friend better informed? I am legitimately not sure, but I think I did the right thing? What should’ve I done? I don’t have the skills nor time nor will to read scientific papers that aren’t related to my area of expertise, especially when someone linking them didn’t do any research either. I am also genuinely exhausted from defending my left-wing points of view from the constant barrage of underhanded and often completely baseless arguments some of my coworkers and friends make to convince me I’m wrong and the default consensus is right. Is it bad to use genAI to figure out some counterpoints? Or should I give up and admit I’m not good or commited enough to make them myself? Right wing people often argue in bad faith and don’t take the counterpoints to heart, but sometimes they do, even if the original point they made was just to rile me up. So, am I the asshole? Am I wrong? I seriously don’t know.




  • Just because they aren’t faceless doesn’t mean they aren’t as bad. In case of corporations, at the very least, anyone up to CEO could claim they were doing what their boss/investors told them/expected them to do, they have the mirage of fabricated innocence. The guilt is also spread more thinly, with many, often low paid employees contributing a small portion towards the greater legal crime.

    Small landlords have none of those delusions available, though from my personal, anecdotal experience, higher management in large corporations also often personally own real estate and rent it. I’m working in IT, but I have no reason to think it would be in any different elsewhere. I was led to understand it was “normal” and “smart”. So I’d say it’s the same kind of people that make decisions on top of the real estate corporations, and the petite landlords. And yeah, I’m excluding from that, obviously, renting a flat you’ve gotten as inheritance from your grandma or something, though I have more fundamental issues with the inheritance thing itself.


  • Quick google revealed that on average apparently 327 people are shot in USA every day, and 1 in 5 people have a family member that has been fatally shot. In comparison, in my country 267 people have been murdered by any means in entire the 2022. Population difference is a bit over 9x, so sure, that makes it a bit less grim, but USA still does more gun violence alone in a single week per capita, than my country does any kind of violence (and trust me we Poles are inventive kind) in entire year.

    I think the “problem” isn’t related to there being too few people trigger happy enough in USA, but I’m myself not too sure what it is that makes median voter more prone to shooting innocent strangers instead of depraved bilionaires. While I might sound sarcastic, I’m really not, I’m honestly bewildered by this and has been for years now.


  • I don’t want to sound bloodthirsty, but I was always really confused why this wasn’t happening regularly, at least in the States. Those people, the CEOs, are the faces of corporations that fucked many people over. With the amount of the violent gun crimes in USA you would think those CEOs would be targets of disgruntled gun owners all the time instead of next to never.

    At the risk of sounding a bit more bloodthirsty, since the current capital class is basicially free of consequences for their opression of the working class due to incredibly corrupt justice system, those things should be a natural outcome of the working class frustration. Especially accounting for absurd access to deadly and easy to use guns. Nature is healing.



  • I don’t think you can check if array of n elements is sorted in O(1), if you skip the check though and just assume it is sorted now (have faith), then the time would be constant, depending on how long you’re willing to wait until the miracle happens. As long as MTM (Mean Time to Miracle) is constant, the faithfull miracle sort has O(1) time complexity, even if MTM is infinite. Faithless miracle sort has at best the complexity of the algorithm that checks if the array is sorted.

    Technically you can to down to O(0) if you assume all array are always sorted.


  • I’m Polish and believe me when I say that I would also prefer Germany to learn different lessons from those your government claims to follow. The very idea that what nazis did wrong was targeting Jews instead of creating authoritarian stratified far right society that eventualy decided to displace and genocide people based on somewhat loosely described traits is not only a gross and dumb oversimplification, it’s gross and end evil to even propose. Fascism fits the class interests of the rich and powerfull of today just as much, if not more, as it did a century ago. Germany government siding with Israel in favour of the genocide they’re commiting is not just for show, they’re very happy that defending genocide became a position close to political center. In my opinion, that is.


  • Yeah well Germany does seem a bit anxious for some reason when someone mentions Israel and genocide in one sentence, but if anyone in the world should have any reasons to be unreasonably pro-Israel, that would be them. And even then, their performative support pales in comparison to USA. IDF literally murdered USA citizens and USA congratulated them for that. That takes real dedication to the cause!


  • I don’t think that’s really the case though? I’m pretty sure most nations condemned Israel except for USA, but USA blocked all attempts from anyone to do anything. And when USA says that commiting genocide with their weapons is on the table, I doubt any country wishes to find out what would happen should any concrete action against Israel be taken. It’s a big part of the reason why everyone calls USA complicit in genocide of Palestinians.