“I don’t know” is the default. That’s how epistimology works.

How do you know that you don’t know? Can you be sure that you don’t? Can you ascertain that you are not acting on assumptions you are not aware of, do not reflect on?

That is an actually skeptic mindset. Not your “Oh I don’t share the same intuition as others they are wrong because they cannot justify theirs”, but actually digging down into your own shit, seeing how much you can actually justify. Glass house, stones, and all that. Also that’s not how epistemology is spelled.

You know literally nothing about me.

True. I sorted you into the category of “reddit atheist” because you act like one, argue like one. Can I inquire about your reasoning behind sorting me into “Christian”? Because you’re fucking ways far off.

You know you can just say “I don’t know.”

If you take that to its logical conclusion you end up at “I cannot doubt that I doubt, therefore, I am” (which is what Descartes was actually up to) and need a leap of faith to re-introduce even the existence of the material world because solipsism has just as much tangible evidence when considered from that refuge of pure egg-headed rationalism.

That’s not so say that such a position is untenable, or unworkable, you could e.g. say “I will take any position that is compatible with both materialism and solipsism”, hedging around the question. Point I’m making is that you’re a reddit atheist who hasn’t thought as deep about any of this than you think you did. You’re not interested in the question, you’re interested in distancing yourself from a position you associate with people who have hurt you in the past. Valid, of course, but how about focussing on the “hurting people” part instead of “can find meaning in the concept of a god” because the two are, indeed, orthogonal.

That’s long since been the case, e.g. the Linux Kernel assigns its own CVE numbers, they’re a CNA. Which keeps the “root” CVS database completely out of the loop short of saying “this here is your namespace and scope”. Canonical is a CNA, Airbus is a CNA, both covering their own products. 453 in total.

Still important to have a fallback though because not all projects are big enough to do that kind of stuff, and you always want there to be some database you can report something against.

If China never wants to export REE again because other countries have built their own refineries sure, they can.

It shouldn’t surpris too much given Mike Pondsmith’s general record of clairvoyance that NetWatch is a European Corp.

And, no, “Vos videmus” totally isn’t a creepy motto. Based out of London, one could almost think that it’s the London CCTV system turned sentient AI.

Not sure whether Xi keeping the job is faltering of the CCP’s ideal of collective leadership, or him being the guy the collective leadership wants as figurehead. They certainly don’t want a second Mao that’s for sure.

Not really the CCP is basically using a reformed Mandarin system. To rise within the ranks of the party they look at a combination of how well the thing you administered (e.g. a state factory) performed in comparison to whatever is comparable, as well as opinion polls of the local population, which aside from making sure that you won’t be hated (which could cause disquiet and if there’s one thing the CCP doesn’t want then that’s that) also doubles at sniffing out manipulated numbers, the people are generally quite good at spotting corrupt officials. If you rank well within your cohort you get promoted from administering a factory to administering local industry, then regional, etc, etc. What doesn’t happen any more is grading people based on how good their poetry is as well as cutting off their balls but the basic system is, broad strokes, similar to how Imperial China educated and selected its civil servants.

That doesn’t mean that there’s not corruption and grift going on, there’s still some degree of princeling privilege but it’s basically impossible to fail upwards in the CCP. Knowing people or being someone’s kid might open some doors, but it’s not going to guarantee you anything. It also means that the top ranks are full of for lack of better characterisation engineer bureaucrats.

Or, put differently: If the CCP was completely incapable they would’ve long lost power. Their whole legitimacy hinges on being perceived as good administrators, they know that, and they’re doing their darnedest to not lose it. Propaganda and secret police alone is not sufficient, history has shown that again and again, you actually need to be good at stuff that’s important to people or they cease to tolerate you.

They’re also complaining about “women being excluded from women’s spaces by agents of the patriarchy posing as women”. They’re also not necessarily using “TERF” as a label. They’re using typical fascist-style “words mean whatever we want them to mean in the moment” type of stuff, hiding clear-cut positions behind pretend nuance, hence why I favour clarity.

Nah I’m demanding clarity. A clear question “Do you mean excluding TERFs or excluding women” and the answer is “I want to be inclusive”. It may not be meant as such, and I’m definitely not implying that it was, but that’s exactly how a TERF would evade questioning.

A clear “Fuck TERFs” would have provided plenty of clarity, and been much shorter. Also, it would have said “Fuck TERFs”.

Either can describe a bar that throws out Nazis or a Nazi bar, depending on perspective.

I don’t believe there is no difference at all between men and women. I simply believe that a lot of the things we say are inherent differences are actually not as inherent as people tend to believe.

Depending on who you mean with “we” I definitely agree.

For example, I’ve seen no evidence that women are inherently more kind/caring/empathetic than men in any biological way, only that society socializes them to be so,

…and fails at doing so, if I may add. Male-pattern aggression is simply more obvious because it’s in your face physical while female-pattern is psychological, always ensuring plausible deniability.

Yet if you ask most people, they’ll assume there’s something biological that makes women more like that emotionally.

Women favour low-risk engagement, passive aggressiveness over overt aggressiveness. Thus you see emotional manipulation used way more often, one approach being self-victim-framing, and for that the narrative of “oh women are so delicate and emotional they have to be protected no matter what they do” fits the bill. Female viciousness is beautiful but I very much prefer it in the “never start a fight, but always finish it” version. Relevant symphonic metal. Also if you’re trying it with me you’re getting tickled into submission.

TBH, Silverbacks are actually good role models: Big, bulky, sit around grooming the troupe, know everyone, emotionally support everyone, when someone wants to start a fight, intervenes, “You wanna fight? Yeah, fight me! Both of you at once, if need be!” – and then suddenly the others lost interest in fighting.

Proverbial gymbro speaking softly and carrying a big stick, far from a tyrant, you know the type. Chimpanzees are the closest to us, with warfare and everything. Bonobos are… well, they are what biologists start talking about when they want to get into your pants. Let’s just say there’s a reason you don’t see them in zoos, parents don’t want to hear kids asking those kinds of questions.

Isn’t it weird that for humans, sex is a private matter? Completely singular among all the animals. And that’s independent of social status, like a smaller sea lion seducing a female one while the big hunk de jure leading the pack isn’t looking, it’s universal. Even if sex is a group activity, then that group itself is putting up layers of privateness and propriety. Swinger clubs with fancy dress codes, doesn’t matter if you end up naked but you have to start out in suit and tie.

If a scientist would, today, discover humanity and describe their behaviour they’d be laughed out of any conference, “did you get your notes mixed up”. “Next thing you want to tell us camelopards are real”.

You’re right after that comes the patriarchal, or just gendered, double-whammy: Women culturally do have more of a support network, even just in the “friends hanging out” way, as the male “do things together, chop wood, go fishing” is regarded as work, not leisure, and thus co-opted by capitalism: “What do you need to chop food and fish for, go buy fuel and food are you poor or something”. Thus all the productive time men have is spent in a hierarchical worker-boss environment, never “pals doing stuff”, cue loss of connection, alienation from broader society, loneliness. Going bowling? Time not spent hustling, you’re a loser. That’s your mind on patriarchal capitalism.

Thus, even if the starting conditions inflicted by capitalism are, for the sake of argument, completely even, it still hits men harder when it comes to loneliness. Women are more affected in other ways. This isn’t an olympics, it’s analysis of the material conditions we live under.

Alienation. Exploitation. Heard of it?

Capitalism has bereft men even of the patriarchal provider role as there’s no fucking time in the day to earn both rent and have any type of social interaction, much less time to reflect on your approach to life. Your position as a gear churning out profit for the bosses has been meticulously designed and drilled into you while you were a kid, blind obedience instilled by teachers and BS “zero tolerance punish the victim” rules. There is no use for you aside from that assigned role, happiness, connection, community, work//life balance? Don’t make a profit. Get out of here with that commie nonsense we have quarterly figures to hit.

Or, maybe, yes, you do have a point: I should have said late-stage capitalism. The internal contradictions are actively eroding it by now.

hooks suggests that men need to develop a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of masculinity, one that values emotions, relationships, and mutual respect.

Yep, written by a woman. Replace that with “value traversing rivers on couches strapped to floats and having a blast with the pals” and you’ll get somewhere.

Valuing something already is an emotion so you’re being emotional about being emotional about something so, yeah, no. Go climb a tree, create a tasty recipe, fix a shoe. Shave the soap.

Boys develop coarse motor skills first, then fine motor skills, for girls it’s the other way around. Which also means that girls are quite good at sitting still in primary school, boys, without getting tired out in recess, very much aren’t. Cue “behavioural issues”.

Lego did control for everything that could be controlled. They’re the OG “our toys are for everyone” company. They thought that their stuff was gender neutral, that stores and parents, society, were the problem, but had to admit that, no, kids actually do have, statistically speaking, different play preferences. Their female set designers didn’t catch it because they were not kids, any more.

And “no hormones to speak of” MF if there were no hormones involved male karyotypes would develop female.

they generally just go with what they prefer in the moment along lines that don’t match the gender binary

Nope. Lego did a large behavioural study on this because this was their assumption, they thought they were doing completely gender-neutral stuff, but even controlling for parents’s biases their stuff wasn’t gender-neutral when it came to actually be interesting to kids. I’m talking about stuff like the city series, here: A street, bunch of houses, bunch of minifigs. Figures that the girls by and large where looking at the inside of the buildings, finding them empty, and lost interest while boys where seeing the streets, found ample of detail and also a car to drive around, and created stories. There are, of course, as always exceptions to the binary but the overall trend was undeniable.

That (and the insistence of US stores on not having gender-neutral isles and putting Lego in the boy’s section) made them create the Friends series: Detailed house interiors, larger, more detailed minifigs. The pink is for the stores and parents, the interiors for the girls, the build-what-you-want flexibility for the humans.

Generally speaking, I think that difference feminism has been discarded prematurely. Sure, none of the normative BS that many of its proponents espoused should ever see the light of day, but denying difference is harmful in its own way, and the reason is the inevitability of essentialising: If you say “there is no difference at all between men and women” you’re bound to essentialise everyone towards your own gender. And it’s way better to be essentialised as an apple when you’re an apple than it is to be essentialised as a pear.

> capitalism
> self-inflicted

Sure, bud.

The Nobel prize went to AlphaFold, in case anybody is curious. Protein structure prediction, ML (not LLMs in particular much less a chatbot) is useful for that kind of stuff just as it’s useful in things like physical simulations: Accuracy isn’t as good as the full physical model, but it runs so much faster that you can go through tons more data and actually get somewhere with your research. Better to have a million 99% reliable answers than two 100% reliable ones.

According to gamedevs, 1-player pong (that is, vs computer) involves AI. It’s a description of role within the game world, not implementation, or indeed degree of intelligence, or amount of power. Could be a rabbit doing little more than running away scared, a general strategising, or a right-out god toying with the world, a story-telling AI. Key aspect though is reacting to and influence on the game itself or at least some sense of internal goals, agency, that set it apart from mere physics, it can’t just follow a blind script. The computer paddle in pong fits the bill: It reacts dynamically to the ball position, it wants to score points against the player, thus, AI. The ball is also simulated, possibly even using more complex maths than the paddle, but it doesn’t have that role of independent agent.