(biologist - artist - queer)

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You’re the only magician that could make a falling horse turn into thirteen gerbils

  • 2 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this and this is just my understanding of how to answer this question

    You may or may not realize that most voters don’t usually go out well in advance and research all potential candidates, selecting the one they feel represents their values the best. Many of them don’t even check in to the conversation until the primaries are over and they can make a simple red vs. blue choice. Among voters that do participate in primaries, they mostly rely on information they learn about those potential candidates by watching advertisements, endorsements from other well known politicians, clips from debates, news and social media coverage, etc.

    Creating that information (ads, debates, news coverage, social media, etc.) requires two things: money and momentum. Money comes first, and is disbursed according to the process the other commenter described-- the party talks with its donors and collectively they decide who to fund.

    In Bernie’s case, he was systematically deprived of money by the DNC as described above, in addition to his moral philosophy of not taking money from big donors. Instead, he funded his campaign through small donations-- which he earned a LOT of-- but he still had fewer funds to generate advertisements, to host events, to “get the word out”.

    Without this funding and support, Bernie couldn’t generate momentum as effectively. The fact that he is as popular as he is despite the lack of support from the party illustrates how popular his platform is, but that isn’t enough to get disengaged voters interested. Further, in his case, other party members actively wanted him to NOT be the nominee, so there were fewer endorsements, more intentional maneuvering by the party to convince voters to vote for other candidates, etc.

    In essence, the idea that having the purest moral and policy philosophy is the most important element to winning the nomination is naive: it takes money and support from institutions, or else no one will ever even know what that pure philosophy is.




  • I want to point out that in the article/interview you posted,

    1. the expert disagreed with the interviewer that the causes of the gap are biological in nature, and

    2. that they both agreed that the causes of the gap are undergoing rapid change due to social factors from the covid pandemic, and they bet it will be decreasing over the next few decades

    Figured I’d clarify in case anyone read your comment and got confused about what the expert was saying :)



  • I want to warn anyone thinking of trying this: don’t.

    Obviously there’s the don’t commit suicide part, and that’s the most important part. But also, as someone who has unfortunately spent time considering various methods, I can tell you: don’t even consider doing it this way.

    Genuinely sorry to be contradictive, but you absolutely would have been in a painful situation if you’d continued. The only explanation is that you didn’t get to the point that your body 100% takes over from you and forces a desperate, painful, writhing attempt to get air.

    You would die of increased CO2 concentration in your blood long before you actually ran out of oxygen. That increased CO2 would be very painful. Like, lizard brain stem absolutely taking over, full panicking levels of painful. Don’t try it!



  • Not the original commenter, but why couldn’t it be more like “John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00” and “Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00”, so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don’t super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, “What times are you available?”







  • That’s valid! I agree. I think in this case it would be reasonable for the model to give multiple (or like, at least one, jeez) images with white queens. I don’t disagree with anyone in that sense. I just also don’t think it’s worth pitching a fit when the dumbass model that has been trained to show more racial diversity produces (frankly comical) hallucinations.

    The ethos of the trainers is a good one. Attempting to counter the (demonstrated, measurable) bias of many models toward whiteness is a good choice. I prefer that the trainers choose to address the bias even if it (sometimes, in early versions) makes the model make silly mistakes like this. That’s all.


  • stoneparchment@possumpat.iotoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldAI or DEI?
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    2 years ago
    • it’s true that this would mislead children, but the model could hallucinate about literally anything. Especially at this stage, no one-- children or adults-- should be uncritically accepting what the model states as fact. That said, I agree LLMs need to improve their factual accuracy

    • Although it is highly debated, some scholars suggest Queen Charlotte might have had African ancestry, or that she would be considered a POC by today’s standards. Of course, she reigned in the 17-1800s, but it isn’t entirely outlandish to have a “Queen of Color”, if we aren’t requesting a specific queen or a specific race

    • People of color did live in England in the middle ages? Like not diverse in the way we conceive now, but here are a few papers discussing the racial diversity at the time. It was surely less intermingled than today, but it’s not like these images are impossible

    • Other things are anachronistic or fantastical about these images, such as clothing. Are we worried about children getting the wrong impression of history in that sense?

    • Of course increasing visibility and representation of all kinds of marginalized people is important. I, myself, am disabled, so I care about that representation too-- thanks for pointing out how we could improve the model further. I do kinda feel like people would be groaning if the model had produced a Queen with a visible disability, though… I would be delighted to be wrong on this front :)


  • stoneparchment@possumpat.iotoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldAI or DEI?
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    2 years ago

    It’s also like, I guess I would prefer it to make mistakes like this if it means it is less biased towards whiteness in other, less specific areas?

    Like, we know these models are dumb as rocks. We know that they are imperfect and that they mirror the biases of their trainers and training data, and that in American society that means bias towards whiteness. If the trainers are doing what they can to prevent that from happening, whatever, that’s cool… even if the result is some dumb stuff like this sometimes.

    I also don’t think it’s a problem for the user to specify race if it matters? Like “a white queen of England” is a fine thing to ask for, and if it isn’t specified, the model will include diverse options even if they aren’t historically accurate. No one gets bent out of shape if the outfits aren’t quite historically accurate, for example


  • Oooh it’s even cooler than that!! You’re spot on, acid is the problem. And acid from food, candy, coffee, etc. is harmful for enamel for sure.

    But sugary stuff that isn’t acidic also rots teeth. Why? Because the bacteria in your mouth do what’s called lactic acid fermentation. Basically, when they take a sugar molecule and want to make “usable” energy out of it (in the form of something called ATP, or adenosine triphosphate), they end up creating lactic acid as a byproduct. In essence, the stuff living in your mouth makes acid out of sugar.

    We also need to break sugar down into ATP, but we do something called cellular respiration instead. It uses oxygen and creates CO2 as a byproduct! That’s why we need oxygen to breathe, and why we breathe out carbon dioxide. But, when you work your muscles hard (lifting weights, sprinting), you might use the ATP in your muscles faster than your body can make it with cellular respiration. In that case, your cells will also do lactic acid fermentation! That’s what we’re feeling when we “feel the burn” (well, that and micro-tears in the muscle, in some cases).

    Source: I’m a biologist! And I love sharing weird facts like this! Thank you for the excuse to write this out :-)