Lvxferre

I’d gladly post Batatinha’s pics if he was my dog, but my cousin would probably get annoyed, it’s a privacy matter.

But, basically: picture a huge dog. By “huge” I mean, he probably weights 40kg or so. Mostly black, with some tan; it doesn’t follow the same pattern as the Rottweiler or the German shepherd, it’s different. Short hair, floppy ears. Rather intimidating, I wouldn’t go anywhere close to that dog without my uncle or my cousin nearby.

My relatives do it all the time. On purpose. Cue to

• Átila - named after Attila the Hun.
• Batatinha - roughly “little potato”.

Guess who’s the toy poodle and who’s the shepweiler.

Federation woes?

Your comment has a different take though, and adding value to the discussion, it isn’t just the same as I said. Both are complementary.

Even more accurately: it’s bullshit.

“Lie” implies that the person knows the truth and is deliberately saying something that conflicts with it. However the sort of people who spread misinfo doesn’t really care about what’s true or false, they only care about what further reinforces their claims or not.

AI sheep.

How much time until this bot gets banned by “harassment”?

Predictable outcome for anyone not wallowing in wishful belief.

Easier: n(13-n).

In this context “politics” clearly conveys “things directly related to governments, such as wars, elections, or socio-economical ideologies”. It is only a subset of the definition of politics that you’re probably using, something like “things direct or indirectly related to human groups and their conflicts of interest”.

We got a whole Lemmy to talk about Israel vs. Hamas, late stage capitalism, elections etc. We could - and should - have at least one community to chill and talk about other stuff, and without that rule we won’t have it. For example without that rule 99.99999% of the content as of late 2024 would be about Trump, as if Americans didn’t have multiple communities to talk about it already.

Sometimes it’s about not conceding defeat in the debate, I agree. And sometimes it’s about convincing people that the proposition is true - sometimes the others, sometimes themselves.

You see the later a lot when people are witch hunting (accusing someone without solids grounds to do so), and the person is actually able to defend themself, or someone defends them. Often the attacker show signs to still genuinely believe that the person being attacked should be attacked, regardless of how you prove them wrong, because they claim that you’re straw manning while doing it.

[Sorry for rambling about this stuff.]

And in some fun cases they set up a straw man, then accuse their opponent of doing it, so they can hide their own.

It’s kind of fun to watch from afar, but annoying when you’re the opponent - because it’s a straw man plus red herring, and yet if you call it out people will understand it as a “NO! U! WAAAH”, even if that is not the case.

Then there’s the self-employed equivalent of that: savage some sense of freedom by sleeping up to 11:00, lunch, then spend up to 02:00 of the next day working nonstop because you got work piling up.

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when Tucker Carlson became Alex Jones. So, where did it come from exactly? …it’s very clear to me both are demons.

Yeah. I got a leg scar from a domestic cat that I’ve raised from kittendom, who’d easily have ripped my face if she could reach it*. A wild, larger, and more powerful version of that seems like a bad idea.

*because I was holding a kitten that she never saw before. Yup. Fuck you Kika, I love you but you’re a bloody arsehole.

For real. Companies being extra pushy with their product always makes me picture their decision makers saying:

“What do you mean, «we’re being too pushy»? Those are customers! They are not human beings, nor deserve to be treated as such! This filth is stupid and un-human-like, it can’t even follow simple orders like «consume our product»! Here we don’t appeal to its reason, we smear advertisement on its snout until it needs to open the mouth to breath, and then we shove the product down its throat!”

Is this accurate? Probably not. But it does feel like this, specially when they’re trying to force a product with limited use cases into everyone’s throats, even after plenty potential customers said “eeew no”. Such as machine text and image generation.

The insertion of an all knowing checker who could have written it himself anyway

The checker does make all the difference, but he doesn’t need to be able to write it by himself. It could be even a brainless process, such as natural selection.

I think the point is less about any kind of route to Hamlet, and more about the absurdity of infinite tries in a finite space(time).

I know. It’s just that creationists misuse that metaphor so often that I couldn’t help but share my brainfart here.

Perhaps even worse: Wobblesticke, Jiggleweapone, stuff like this.

If we’re considering even chimps “monkeys”, there’s already eight billion of them, I think that’s enough.

I have a way to make it work.

Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won’t be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare’s complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.

Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare’s works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.

And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.

Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let’s increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to… let’s say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it’ll take around 30min to type the right character.

It would take even longer, right? Well… not really. Shakespeare’s complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.

But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare’s complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren’t talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it’ll take at most a few days.

Why am I sharing this? I’m not invalidating the paper, mind you, it’s cool maths.

I’ve found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can’t appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can’t type the full works of Shakespeare.

Complex life is not the result of a single “big” mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.

And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.

Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen…) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.