The subjects that you can’t even bring up without getting downvoted, banned, fired, expelled, cancelled etc.

  • Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Eugenics, or creating better humans with the wisdom not to trash the planet and constantly risk the final nuclear war. With new, more powerful weapons being invented every century, we may not be able to survive without eugenics, because when a single sociopathic dictator can afford an Earth-ending weapon, one of them will use it.

    • yesman@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Eugenics is the single stupidest idea in human history. To advocate for it now is to deny biology and history.

      It relies on the same misunderstanding of evolution that underpins ‘great replacement theory’.

    • pseudo@jlai.lu
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      8 months ago

      I agree with you but only on Eugenics being automatically downvoted. Look, I did it!

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      The funny thing is that a lot of those problems are better attributed to society/culture/education than genetics or biology, since it’s people that vote/support other people. Unless you can somehow breed out psychopaths, and whatever makes people willing to sacrifice the collective for personal gain, from the human species, eugenics won’t do shit.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 months ago

      Eugenics isn’t a stupid idea on the face of it, but then you look at where our dog breeding has gone…

      The good news is that humans are pretty adaptable already. The only things that really definitely could sink us are our inability to react to really abstract, gradual problems and our tribalism.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          8 months ago

          It’s pretty unclear how much of the breeding 30000BC-1500AD was deliberate, and how much was just a kind of selection as people decided to eat their naughtiest dog when famine came. I’m talking about the highly-targeted breeding that brought us the pug unable to breath and German shepherds with back legs that stick out wrong because it looks cool.

          Also, wolves are pretty good at what they do, I’m not sure it’s fair to say they’re worse than dogs somehow.

          • Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Breeding unhealthy dogs could be called dysgenics. It’s like breeding better slaves instead of better humans.

            Wolves are good, evolution worked. Pet dogs are extra lives producing added value to themselves and their owners.

    • _MusicJunkie@beehaw.org
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      8 months ago

      Is it though? As long as one is relatively reasonable. There’s even gun communities here, even if they’re pretty dead at the moment. Time for me to come up with some memes maybe.

      • random@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 months ago

        I guess so, it’s just that if I say I support the right to own a gun, I get downvoted in most communities

        • KuraiWolfGaming@pawb.social
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          8 months ago

          Happened to me once. Nearly killed my desire to discuss firearms here on Lemmy. Not sure if this is true, but I feel that most people on Lemmy are likely anti-gun. Maybe the more liberal mindset of many people in the wider open source community has some part in it. Either way, I just want to dispel all the false claims about guns and their ownership. And some don’t want to hear it.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          8 months ago

          Yeah, in heavily left-wing spaces guns give people the wigglies. Even if it’s not rights, the general fact we live in a world with them is something people try to memory hole.

          • communism@lemmy.ml
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            8 months ago

            You and I define “heavily left-wing” quite differently then. The far-left has always supported gun rights and armed struggle. It’s the political centre and parts of the right that are blanket anti-gun.

            • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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              8 months ago

              We probably do. Far-left spaces are their own thing, and are almost always labeled as such since it’s a tiny, insular group.

  • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    All drugs should be legal and regulated.

    Is it worth it, drug warriors? All the unnecessary deaths, at the hands of police and unregulated drugs of a unknown potency? Was it worth sacrificing all our civil liberties on the vain funeral pyre that is the United States of America?

    When humanity is victorious in the drug war and all drugs are legalized, will drug users criminalize sobriety?

    Will people high as fuck demand everyone to piss in a plastic cup to make sure they are high?

    Will drug users ruin sober people’s lives with felonies and time in prison with hardened criminals?

    Will drug users dissolve civil liberties and prop up a bipartisan police state that gives cops a license to kill?

    NO!

    Who would want to do that to someone? To a fellow human for doing what they want with their own bodies? Prohibitionists… that’s who. And we are not them

    Nothing lasts forever drug warriors. Tick tock. We will be free one day, and you will wail and moan and your cries will fall on deaf ears.

    Get fucked prohibitionists. Feel fortunate we want justice, not retribution.

    Now playing The War on Drugs - Red Eyes

    • Ziglin (it/they)@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      They’ve caused a lot of damage though restricting access would likely help with that. (Things like this usually get quite a few downvotes in my experience tbh so maybe it goes both ways)

      My pretty spontaneous solution compromise would be to legalize more things but keep them well regulated to avoid addiction and transition to similar regulations for already legal drugs. This seems like a solution that more people would be happy with. Obviously there would need to be help for people already addicted at least for drugs with similar withdrawal symptoms as alcohol.

    • BreadOven@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I know it’s very on the nose and has other themes in it. But the root cause is all the same. Reagan. This is the song I thought of reading the post:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU

      I don’t necessarily agree with everything said in the song, but I think we can all agree (to quote the song) “I’m glad Reagan dead”.

  • AFallingAnvil@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    For legal reasons I cannot have any opinion on the following: Gestures broadly at everything in the middle East

    • Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      You are more than welcome to choose from one of the pre-prepared opinions that we have on offer here… no need to bring anything new to the table and confuse such an obviously binary subject.

  • Mothra@mander.xyz
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    8 months ago

    “I’ve asked ChatGPT about xyz” , and “how to use chatGPT for xyz” in my experience gets me downvotes fast.

    People are quick to presume you have no ability to fact check anything and that you will be following its advice blindly, (which mind you - you were never asking for in the first place) instead of asking a human, ever ( for example about medical conditions but not limited to that topic). People presume you are trying to eliminate the human factor out of the equation completely and are quick to remind you of your sins, god forbid you ever use a chatbot to test ideas, ask for a summary on a topic so you can expand your research later or get creative with it in any way. If you do, most people don’t like to know.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        I think the bigger problem is that each answer it gives basically destroys a forest

        That, and it’s filling once-useful search engines with useless and even dangerous gibberish.

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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        8 months ago

        To be fair: “For each answer it gives”, nah. You can run a model on your home computer even. It might not be so bad if we just had an established model and asked it questions.

        The “forest destroying” is really in training those models.

        Of course at this point I guess it’s just semantics, because as long as it gets used, those companies are gonna be non-stop training those stupid models until they’ve created a barren wasteland and there’s nothing left…

        So yeah, overall pretty destructive and it sucks…

        • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          Training a model takes more power than what? Generating a single poem? Using it to generate an entire 4th grade class’s essays? To answer all questions in Hawaii for 6th months? What is the scale? The break even point for training is far far less than total usage.

          Have you ever used one locally? Depending on your hardware it’s anywhere between glacially to a morgue’s AC slow. To the average person on the average computer it is nearly unusable, relative to the instant gratification of the web interface.

          That gives you a sense of the resources required to do the task at all, but it doesn’t scale linearly. 2 computers aren’t twice as fast as one. It’s logarithmic. With diminishly returns. In the end, this means one 100 word response uses the equivalent of 3 bottles of water.

          How many queries are made per hour? How does that scale over time with increased usage of the same model? More than training a model. A lot more.

          • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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            8 months ago

            Yeah you make a really good point there! I was perhaps thinking too simplistically and scaling from my personal experience with playing around on my home machine.

            Although realistically, it seems the situation is pretty bad because freaky-giant-mega-computers are both training models AND answering countless silly queries per second. So at scale it sucks all around.

            Minus the terrible fad-device-cycle manufacturing aspect, if they’re really sticking to their guns on pushing this LLM madness, do you think this wave of onboard “Ai chips” will make any impact on lessening natural resource usage at scale?

            (Also offtopic but I wonder how much a sweet juicy exploit target these “ai modules” will turn out to be.)

            • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
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              8 months ago

              It’s really opaque. We won’t know the environmental impact right away. Part of the larger problem is, while folks like you and I make a sizable impact, it’s nothing compared to enterprise usage at scale. Every website, app, and operating system with an AI button makes it even easier for users to interface with AI leading to more queries. Not only that, those queries and responses are collected and used to further make queries.

              Should the usage of AI stay stable, improved hardware would decrease carbon output. We should be cautious coming to that conclusion. What is more likely is that increased efficiency will lead to increased usage. Perhaps at an accelerated rate with the anticipation of even more technological breakthroughs down the line.

              All that said, I’m really not a doomer. It’s important we all consider the cost of our choices. The way I see it, we are all going to die eventually. I’m old enough it will probably be from something else.

    • Skua@kbin.earth
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      8 months ago

      If you have fact-checked it, why not just say that wherever you did that is where you got the answer from? People are right to be skeptical of “ChatGPT says so”, and if you’ve used it as the start of your research rather than as your entire research then just saying “I asked ChatGPT” is no different to “I googled it”, and nobody would much like you saying that either. How you found the information is less important than where you found it.

      • Mothra@mander.xyz
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        8 months ago

        This are precisely the kind of presumptions people make. I’m never making an argument “because ChatGPT says so”. And yes you are absolutely right - chatbot answers are on par with search engine results if not even less reliable in occasions. My point is that I’m not using any of the information as evidence, counterpoints or even advice. People take a stand as if I were.

        For example, once I asked ChatGPT about a sensation I feel on my skin after heavy exercise, because googling didn’t give me satisfactory results. GPT didn’t either, but it gave me a list of close matches. The sensation itself was never a problem for me, never something I intended to change, was never something I would consider going to a doctor for and if I never knew what was causing it my life would carry on just the same. I was simply curious. And out of curiosity I asked here, and the majority of the answers were “you shouldn’t be asking to randoms online, how dare you”, “this is a question for a doctor, don’t ask for medical advice to a chatbot” - both stances baffled me. Never in my post I said anything that suggested I was in pain, discomfort, or that I wanted to change anything about it, or that I was expecting people to tell me how to make it go away- nothing. I just wanted to know what it was, period. People presume.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      and are quick to remind you of your sins

      On the other hand, it’s totally cool and good to drag around a big cross of contrarianism in a totally-not-self-righteous way because your treat printers were criticized, amirite? smuglord

  • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    People of color seem to perform amazing in athletics compared to other races in America (see: American football, basketball). Makes me think that Americans hyper-evolved their slaves by selective breeding. Unfortunate and extremely unethical, but maybe possible? Idk.

    • infinite_ass@leminal.spaceOP
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      8 months ago

      I heard that a similar breeding program happened in some African cultures back in the day. Like you could only breed if you were an alpha hunter or somesuch.

      So that’s how you get a race of 7’ tall dudes

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      I’d believe it if a good portion of black americans I’ve seen are tall and muscular, but I’d say their proportions are similar to their white american counterparts, i.e. a spectrum.

      I think they just want it more, and its one of the few paths to success they have.

      • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        That actually can be explained by the slaves that used to live in the farmhouses. They were treated as an elevated status and allowed to eat more. Think like the “aunts” for the children; caretakers.

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          But they were exceptions, not the majority who were slaves/workers. You’d still expect a heavy selection bias for good body attributes if you sampled them at random, assuming OP’s hypothesis is true.

    • Skua@kbin.earth
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      8 months ago

      It’s possible it’s for other reasons, though. Black Americans are generally poorer than other Americans, and success in sports is a ticket out of poverty that is accessible to people in that position. It could also be a cultural thing; I doubt Finns are genetically predisposed to be exceptional drivers, but they are still wildly over-represented at the top level of motorsports for such a small population

    • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.ml
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      8 months ago

      i think much more likely is the opposite happened. Europeans inbred themselves into infirmity and have simply yet to recover from all that nonsense fully hundreds of years later. As a pastey removed myself i can say the amount of genetic conditions i have is mind boggling. Its not that POC are especially good at sports its that white people are especially bad.