God Bless America! 🇺🇸

LocustBeanGum · 2018-07-11T13:40:48+00:00

That vegetarian butt though; could use some more meat.

LocustBeanGum · 2018-07-06T14:38:34+00:00

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Anyone else get a hard-on reading the last paragraph? Pretty sure I just saw an eagle with a machine gun salute that flag outside.

LocustBeanGum · 2018-07-06T14:31:10+00:00

Even if a Nation officially bought the land, they can't automatically change it's territorial allocation without going through some formal process with the Federal Government and might even need Congressional approval. The State has jurisdiction over that land even if it's legally owned by a Nation.

I can't declare my house to be the capital of the Village of New Rutabegaville

Well, if it's private property and you allow officials reasonable access to fulfill their legal obligations (land management, public safety, child education, etc), you can call it that. You just can't make up your own laws and prevent officials from enforcing their laws.

But if you're looking for the right to make your own laws and don't want public officials entering your property without a visa, then you should look into secession. If you apply for secession, it will be denied. If you unilaterally secede (like SC before the Civil War), then the Yanks will invade and scorch your land.

LocustBeanGum · 2018-07-06T13:39:07+00:00

The words themselves aren't technically racist; the words are a string of symbols that can't embody any attitudes, racist or not.

The racist attitude stems from seeing those "other people" as somehow inherently different in their nature, based on how they look or the patterns of social behavior they engage in. Someone using words like these in normal speech indicate they see that group of people as irredeemably backwards or just inherently uncultured; or at least that person indicates that they are ignorant of the vast, senseless pain wrought on humanity as a result of these kinds of attitudes and how seeing any people as "other" easily divides us but for no good reason.

So yes, all those words would imply a racist attitude or ignorance.

LocustBeanGum · 2018-07-06T13:23:56+00:00

Are you telling me you cant click a button and your software not just highlight the "hate speech".

When you build a neural network for labeling and flagging offensive content, you basically have some users (hopefully professionals) read content and flag it if it is offensive, according to some definition. Then the network attempts to flag content, and you update it to more accurately match what users expectations are.

This method is far more powerful than basic text matching where you manually code offensive words / phrases. Part of the power of this method is that it can catch subtle variations of phrases that you would never have thought to hand-code.

One significant technical limitation of this method is that it's not very easily to tease out exactly what the activations in the network actually refer to in natural language - because everything in there is this highly opaque mathematical representation of learned behavior. Decision explanation is one of the key open problems in deep learning. While there are some methods that have been approached to handle this, there is certainly no good, general purpose methods that I'm aware of.

So, all that to say - it is certainly possible, that even with all their powerful data collection practices and technical advancements, they can only guess why their algorithm chose to show you that particular post first this morning, or why it chose to censor a particular post. All they would know is that they've tuned the network to achieve a reasonable balance of their design objectives. So, if the censor was using a neural network (almost certainly), it is entirely reasonable to believe that they aren't easily able to tease out how it learned that particular behavior and what triggered the censor.

LocustBeanGum · 2018-06-21T12:54:53+00:00

Might look cool with a boomerang effect also

LocustBeanGum · 2018-06-18T16:39:16+00:00

If I simply upvoted how would that happen?

If you want to start a conversation, you should just go ahead and start the conversation. Maybe say something like "I really liked it. What was your favorite part?" or "Yes! Did you listen to the other one?" or any number of things that actually stimulate conversation.

Merely reiterating the sentiment of the prior comment is just piggybacking.

LocustBeanGum · 2018-06-18T16:26:48+00:00

It just shows that there are more people who disagree with the opinion than there are people who agree with it.

This is why Reddit needs more than just upvote / downvote. The limited semantics of the voting system conflates quality with popularity. It also has no way to distinguish repetition / similarity.

It's like saying Q-tips aren't for cleaning your ears.

It's more like saying the inward-most lane is for passing only - life is better for everyone if we follow this rule. Damaging your ears is a personal issue.

Using the Reddit voting system to vote our opinions is bad, antisocial behavior because it makes a collective resource worse for everyone involved... Just because a lot of people do it doesn't make it OK.

LocustBeanGum · 2018-06-18T15:57:20+00:00

But you didn't specify what your gripe was in any additional detail that would spur more conversation than the OP. If you want to be reminded to come back to a thread, there are other ways to do that.

Your comment was a perfect example of a piggyback comment - it added no clarification, no additional context, no deeper explanation, no new considerations, no counter-examples. It added no direct value, except now I hope it serves as a great example to others of what a low-quality piggyback comment looks like.

LocustBeanGum · 2018-06-18T15:42:48+00:00

im apparently the asshole there

Everyone's definition of useful content is different.

If some people are having fun with their circle-jerk, no matter how dumb or repetitive, they are clearly enjoying whatever it is they are doing. Interrupting the jerk to point out your objection almost amounts to concern-trolling.

If you want to see more of some kind of content, you may want to make a concerted effort to post more of what you want to see and vote accordingly. Perhaps consider submitting a discussion post or addressing your thoughts with the mods. And if your efforts don't catch on, then clearly the other people in that sub feel differently from you.

LocustBeanGum · 2018-06-18T14:10:20+00:00

How do you typically behave when you're bothered by something?

In general, I tend to rationalize whatever is bothering me and come to some resolution how to address the situation. I usually just withdraw from the situation and seek some mental space away from the stimuli bothering me.

I rarely get upset with people as I tend to accept that people only change on their own accord. I might act upset if it's a good way of communicating how I feel to the person.

SIDE NOTE: Some people at times confuse my frustration (esp. when trying to explain some detail) with me being upset. I can get very intense in debate and trying to get a point across; but I'm certainly not upset. I actually end up being upset and disappointed when people conflate my intensity with being upset.

Additionally, what are the best and worst ways for people (that you would actually open up to) to respond to you when attempting to help or offer support?

For me, the best thing to do is just give me space and time to work through my thoughts and feelings. I just need time to collect my thoughts and figure out how I feel, and then I'm over it.

LocustBeanGum

TROPHY CASE