All language is a mental model, shared between the speaker and the audience. Math without any context like this is just a language like any other, encoded for two or more parties to communicate something abstract.

If the speaker and the audience both believe two plus two equals five, then it is true.

“Five” might look like “4” and be called “Five” or perhaps “Two” is instead written “2.5”, but the truth of the original statement is only actually dependent on the shared mental model of the speaker/audience.

There is no telling what the objective meaning could be, if there was ever an objective meaning at all. For example, the entire meme itself could be a password that means “buy Bitcoin”.

Or for another example, two plus two is five if this is a shorthand for two 1.25lb baskets of strawberries plus two 1.25lb baskets of strawberries being equal to five 1lb baskets of strawberries.

You might say “Hey! That’s adding outside context! Not fair, it’s nonsense!” but consider that the original statement didn’t specify any context for the numbers at all. What are the numbers in reality, without any context? They represent nothing but the concepts they represent until they relate to a physical context anyway, just like any other fragment of communication.

Have you noticed what’s going on with Marjorie Taylor Greene?

There is a small wing of the extreme right wing that is kind of like that “tea party” movement after the last Bush administration that is starting to question whether Trump has their best interests in mind.

If that continues to grow, and I do not believe Marjorie can stop it now that she’s started it, then America really is on a bonafide track to violent uprising. That momentum is why there is urgency over the upcoming open enrollment period, because doubling annualized healthcare costs will activate a LOT of conservatives when they see the whole year’s bill in front of them.

As much as left-wing politics makes people mobilize to march peacefully, it’s usually been the extreme right that has the weapons to take it from protest to open murder in the streets.

I think that administration officials know this, and that is why they are afraid of the protests.

They fear their own supporters if they become disaffected and they know that a bunch of lefties peacefully marching is going to signal permission for one of their own to start shooting(stochastically, statistically, not intentional permission nor official support for violence).

Oligarchs in America have the dangerous desire to enjoy American society using their very mortal fleshy bodies. Unfortunately, that requires enough support of the populace to not get murdered.

Sorry if it was a weird phrase. I just didn’t know if other racial identities were allowed/wanted there. I didn’t want to presume what the intent of the community founders was.

Thank you for your answer(and thank you to the others too).

Is Blacksky a racially self-segregated competitor to Bluesky?

I read the article and watch one of the videos linked in it and that’s the impression I got, but I’m hoping someone can confirm/explain.

I’m not on either network, so I think I’m woefully ignorant on this. I apologize if it’s a silly question.

I agree that this is a meme. It’s not a meme with widespread meaning yet, but I think a chip on the forehead, the obvious young age of the boy, and his expression of mixed happiness/fear is enough to convey something about the state of society that calls for nervous laughter.

I 100% agree with you.

I do, of course. I even do my hair. I didn’t mean to imply that one should not care about it hygienically, just for your own health and personal self image.

I just don’t understand the urge to thrust gender identity onto hair style and then argue about what that means to the polity online.

Why do people put so much energy into projecting identity politics on a superfluous detail like hair? Who cares? It’s all just a vanity concern, selfishly obsessed with what others think about how you look.

Does your hair make you have some intrinsic identity to others that you are or are not going for? Fuck you, I don’t care.

Do you authentically care, yourself?

Maybe you care about the politics - I can understand that. There is legitimate fear around legislating serious, dangerous things to your identity (not hair). Why the fuck are you spending your time and energy on hair???

Emotions are each examples of a continuum. You can be any level of sad or happy or angry, etc.

I’m not sure the distinction of spectrum from continuum is useful for understanding the world though. It’s just conversationally helpful.

Perhaps everything is a continuum but we just manufacture a spectrum so we can classify people for our own ease of conversation.

Just get the dates right, down to the month. Beyond that, you can make just about everything else up and since most employers don’t want to foot the bill for actual due diligence, your interview performance is what matters next-most.

Change your job titles to whatever fits the job you’re aiming to get now(remember you’ll actually need to interview for and do the job if you get it, so consider inflating only about 1 level of seniority upward).

You can add unverifiable resume items to explain gaps, such as a side gig or volunteer experience or family event.

You can make up 90% of the bullet points under each experience item too, which will increase net job search performance by 28% on average and 122% of hiring managers won’t read them or will read them and not ask about them anyway.

If you think companies are going to keep your data and blacklist you, then you just need to formally request your complete PII file under applicable data privacy laws such as GDPR or CCPA. If they did keep your data, the same laws can be used to make them delete it entirely (assuming you’re not also their customer, in which case they’ll have permissible reasons to keep it until you discontinue your subscription).

Hey what part do you think looks like AI slop?

I can’t see anything suspect but I’m looking pretty hard for it. If I’m wrong then that’s scary.

Is the photo somehow glitched that I don’t see?

I agree with you. Something I noticed and wanted to add: When I mention UBI to people, a lot of them are hearing it like a guarantee that everyone gets enough income to be happy or be comfortable.

I have found that people who interpret basic income in this way tend to become strongly opposed to UBI on the grounds that it could never be funded and would lead to social collapse due to limited resources.

Idk what you picture, but I imagine a person on UBI affording to eat rice and beans in a studio apartment somewhere in a low cost-of-living and low property value geography (though perhaps among pleasant neighbors and like minded folks).

So I kind of think the name “Universal Basic Income” needs to be reworked so it sounds more harsh, almost like a necessary evil. Something like “Rock Bottom Income”, idk.

I don’t have the perfect answer, but do you think conservatives would get on board if it was like “The poors can’t complain, they can take their complaints straight to Bean Town if they don’t like the wages” or do you think they’d still find it unpalatable?

During one of the mass exodus events from Reddit to Lemmy, a lot of people started using these tools they would install to automatically scrub and obfuscate their Reddit comments and posts history. Often these tools would replace posts with random letters and even nonsense links because there was suspicion that outright deleted posts could be detected and then programmatically restored if Reddit really wanted to get that user content back.

I suspect these tools probably exist for Lemmy as well and you are seeing users with long comment histories use them because those also happen to be the users who have a lot of previous content to cover up/obfuscate to maintain/ensure their own privacy.

Inject it with bleach! That’ll do the trick.

No, but you have access to the protocol so you write your own algorithm.

Then it is your algorithm, using the common protocol, that goes out and retrieves search results for your feed.

Likewise, 3rd party corporations can write their own algorithms on the protocol and everyone can choose which algorithms fill their personal feed with search results - turning them on or off on a whim, at a personalized level.

I recently listened to Paul Frazee talk about Bluesky on the Software Engineering Radio podcast and it struck me that one thing they got right was looking at social media like a search engine looks at the web, instead of like a centralized platform(Facebook) and instead of like a federated network of platforms(fediverse).

If your feed is understood to be just the search results you see, then users can understand that their algorithm is something they need to work on in the same vein that they change their search parameters on Google or Bing or other search engines.

This is a story that’s been rotating through the media since ChatGPT first released.

I have an unpopular opinion about this headline after seeing the media cycle repeatedly downplay/ignore what Alphabet has been doing in response to OpenAI: Google the search engine is not in direct competition with ChatGPT, but Gemini is, and Alphabet is smart to keep simpler/time-tested search functionality central to Google rather than react strongly and scrap the keyword-based search bar that users understand are comfortable using - especially older users, but I think most people are starting to discover they have a use for both search and LLM chats.

I think there are two product categories here, which first looked like they were going to converge in 2022-2024, but which are now slowly changing course as customers start to comprehend how both are necessary for different purposes.

When I make chats in ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude etc, I am starting to plan them longitudinally so that I can use them over and over for a specific project or query type.

When I turn to a search bar, it’s because I really want a proxy for a specific website or between me and whatever weird site has the answer to my specific question. It’s not that I want discussion and a chat about it, I just want Google’s card-like results with a website index I can read instead of that website’s stylized, animated web design on top or popups or malware.

Every time I get sucked into a chat with Bing CoPilot(ChatGPT) when I really only had a web search query, I regret wasting my time talking to the LLM. Almost as a reflex, I’ve started avoiding it for most things now.

Iran’s government sucks, but this story really shows how the Iranian people are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Regular Iranians have more in common with western social values than those of the Iranian government or Russia - it’s been that way before, during, and after the Iranian revolution.

Not sure what the answer is, but they keep trying to protest and resist their government every few years and they get violently forced back into submission.

Of all the countries with screwed up regimes, Iran is one where I think it’s more appropriate to encourage more fluid immigration into western countries - a lot of their working age population is relatively better educated than many other countries too.

Is this for real? Do these exist and are they any good?

A lot of the work they do is aimed at thwarting the business models of cyber criminals, scam sites, etc.

Their reviews are probably from the people who had a good thing going using bots to scrape PII or take advantage of free trials/free tier SaaS products but were suddenly put out of business by cloudflares captcha tools.