Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]

Well see, here you have good proof that chatGPT isn’t actually “the best knowledge retrieving tool at the moment”. ChatGPT (and every other LLM) suuuucks at complicated math, because these text extruders don’t reason. Seriously, try out some more complicated math problems. I think you’ll find chatGPT gets most of them wrong, and in infuriating ways that make very little sense.

I don’t disagree that we need better math instruction for students. I’ve been saying this since I was a student. But using chatGPT being horrible at math as evidence of this is, well, ridiculous, frankly. ChatGPT’s performance isn’t based on how well your average high schooler understands something, and I don’t know why you’re trying to tie those two very different things together.

I’m going to try to be respectful and reasonable here. If I fail at that, I’m truly sorry, I’m really trying.

I think you and I want different things from the fediverse. I like that my instance (Hexbear) is widely defederated. It’s a lovely little refuge from the reactionary political opinions I can’t help but hear in my day to day life living in America.

I also can’t agree with you that political disagreements aren’t reason for defederation. To go for an extreme example first, being an avowed neo-nazi is a political choice, and I’d kick an avowed neo-nazi out of any space I had the power to kick them out of.

For other examples, we can look at things that have already happened in the fediverse, such as feddit .uk deciding that posting transphobia is actually fine and dandy, because the laws in the UK are such that transphobic speech is very much allowed, or we can look at the recent kerfuffle surrounding feddit .org, wherein feddit .org decided that due to laws in Germany, criticism of Israel can’t be as full-throated as it really should be. These examples are both cases where local politics affect how things are moderated, or, at least, local politics are being used as an excuse for moderation decisions. And I think these moderation decisions (allowing transphobia in the first case, censoring criticism of Israel in the second) are worth defederating over. If transphobia doesn’t get banned and removed on sight, then how can trans people feel safe and included in a space? And similarly, if Israel’s horrific genocide is downplayed in a space, that space becomes less friendly for Palestinians and other Arab and Muslim people.

I don’t need or want political plurality in this online space, I want a brief refuge from the terrible politics surrounding me. This isn’t me sticking my head in the sand to ignore the awful shit happening around me, I see all that, I talk to people who believe in the American status quo because believe it or not, most Americans aren’t communists. I love that here on this corner of Lemmy I can be openly communist and talk to other open communists about all kinds of things. It’s really nice, actually, and that would be lost if we were federated with the anti-communist shitholes like .world. Not to mention the transphobia. Holy shit, every time I accidentally end up outside my lovely little Lemmy bubble it’s just transphobia as far as the eye can see. So I’m glad we at Hexbear are widely defederated, I really don’t need to see the liberal nonsense and transphobia that are so inescapable in my real life.

Ok, then try your comment again. What is it that you’re saying here?

This is deeply shitty. If you’re right that >80% of people on Lemmy are men (I’m not sure I buy that), then it’s even worse to assume everyone is a man. What you’re doing is chasing off the already extremely outnumbered non-men. If you want this place to be welcoming to people who aren’t men, then you need to change your behavior.

You did the right thing. It’s a lot of bullshit about “oh, you list your pronouns? You must be fine with corporations selling your data” and then at the end there seems to be a bit of “hexbear showed up late to the fediverse party and is ruining everything”, which is, of course, pretty much directly opposite of the truth.

Pathologic 2! It’s so good! And the next one is coming out next year so it’s a great time to become obsessed with Pathologic!

I can think of a couple of uses. Well, basically just one use. You could hide posts that cause distress for whatever reason. For example, I hate snakes and if someone posted a neat picture of a snake I’d probably hide it, just so I don’t have to keep seeing the same post and jump scaring myself with a picture of a snake while scrolling. Another example might be a thread in which people are arguing and you don’t want to get dragged into the argument. I actually literally did this earlier today with a thread where people were yet again arguing about the upcoming US election and whether voting Biden is a reasonable choice. I’ve read this argument so many times and it’s so tempting to jump in and be an asshole to someone who is wrong and I just don’t want to do that today, so better to hide the post so I don’t keep seeing it while scrolling.

So yeah, you can hide posts you don’t want to keep running across while scrolling for whatever reason. Seems like a pretty useful feature to me, I’m glad we have it now.

Demonstrating absences anything beyond math’s clarity and definiteness can be challenging if not impossible to say the least.

ftfy

Anyway, just a tip for future comments on the internet: I’d suggest not being an asshole in your very first reply to someone you disagree with unless there’s a good reason to be, because it makes you look extremely silly if your shitty comment is actually just wrong. I wouldn’t have commented in this thread at all if you hadn’t been an immediate asshole to frightful_hobgoblin, but here we are.

Yes you absolutely can. Here’s an extremely trivial example: 6 is not prime, which I can prove by simply saying 6 = 2*3. Bam, I’ve proved a negative.

Ok, so, first of all, people vote in China. Like, they do. They have elections there. If you’re defining democracy as “a system in which people vote”, then by that definition China is a democracy. (Full disclosure, I don’t think that’s a great definition and I don’t think China is a “liberal democracy” like the US is, but at this point, we’re getting hugely into the weeds of different political systems and I don’t think now is exactly the time for that.)

Sure, the hexbear posts that make it to the top of the “all” feed aren’t going to be the ones where we’re talking theory, they’re going to be the ones where we’re dunking on people for shitty political opinions. Fair enough. That’s true. It doesn’t mean that theory posts don’t exist, just that they aren’t as contentious as dunking posts. That’s an indictment of the internet and social media, not of hexbear specifically.

Hexbear does talk about liberals a lot, because they are the political group in power in the west. It’s probably worth pointing out here that (american) republicans are, in fact, also liberals. So when we say “libs suck”, we are also talking about the american republican party. Republicans are more open than the democrats about their genocidal tendencies, but fundamentally, republicans and democrats believe the same things and act in the same ways. They all think capitalism is cool and good, they just have slightly different feelings about which tactics to employ to keep capitalism as the dominant economic system. So it’s not that we ignore republicans, it’s just that it can sometimes look that way to people who think “liberal” means “democrat”. It never has historically, but because political education in the US is so fucking garbage, a lot of people think “liberals” and “democrats” are synonyms.

And your last point is just wrong. We know that voting is never going to bring about real change, but that doesn’t mean we only want to complain. The usual advice is to get organized. It’s to find a local group that is on the ground helping people and get involved. Start working to build non-governmental power in your local area. Make connections, talk to people, help people, so that when world events are exploitable, we communists are ready to exploit them. It’s fucking hard, especially in the US where our government has spent years and years trying (and mostly succeeding) to make “communism” a dirty word, but just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. The idea that voting is something that will affect change is laughably incorrect. We could get into it, but let me just point out that the electoral college exists and that in my lifetime there have been not one, but two presidents who have been elected to office even though they lost the popular vote. Does that sound like a system in which the mass of voting people can bring about real change?

even if there was never any official method of communicating the public will.

What do you mean by this? What kinds of methods do you find acceptable?

There isn’t any discussion on political theory

There is absolutely talk of political theory on hexbear. Right now currently there’s a bell hooks reading group pinned to our front page. I’ve learned a surprising amount from my fellow hexbear nerds. People drop reading recommendations constantly and if you make a thread with questions from something you’re reading, you’ll get engagement and answers. It’s pretty cool.

the focus seems geared on one small part of the political spectrum while ignoring other parts entirely.

Yes, we’re communists. We aren’t going to pretend liberals are worth engaging with politically. That being said, we are a leftist unity instance, so anarchists, MLs, maoists, what have you are all welcome. As long as you’re an actual leftist and not some “just vooooote” liberal, you’ll probably enjoy hexbear.

I agree with your suspicion. Between the op being pretty obvious anticommunist bait and then that asshole arguing in incredibly bad faith about some alleged “10 principles” that supposedly guide all of politics in the dprk, I would guess that the reason this post exists is that people paid to post western propaganda on the internet are here doing exactly that.

Yup! It’s what finally made me stop watching twitch (embarrassing, I know, I’m more of a gamer than I like to admit). Minutes of unskippable ads, way too often, and no adblocker could get rid of them. The best I could find was a twitch redirect that would block the ad, but it couldn’t give you the content back, so when the ads happened the stream would just go dark until they were over. I decided enough was enough and I haven’t gone on twitch since. I’m mentally preparing to do the same with youtube if and when they succeed in breaking adblockers. Which is going to absolutely suck, I watch a lot of youtube, but maybe it’ll actually be a good thing and I’ll be on the internet less.