It would be an interesting shot across the bow to corporate controlled social media to show opensource, open access social medias growth. I'm sure its in an exponential phase. It also would seem important to the community to know. Is there a way to query across the fediverse to look at user numbers?
Lemmy and the Fediverse. Select 'Active last month' for best estimation of actual activity. E.g., this is the current burst in Lemmy due to the Reddit exodus:
Because the sheer quantity of comments in comparison to the tiny amount of users and subs is nuts, each user would have been required to do ~250 minimum comments each if my hair brained maths is correct, a ratio which far exceeds any other community here by miles, or am I just missing some key context here?...
Well, I don't post on GZD, but just see my comment count: 560 rn, and that's nothing compared to some users who have been here for longer. Any Reddit user probably has similar numbers. GZD in particular is so large because of the first large migration from Reddit, which originated from r/GenZedong.
The study cited by the other user compares treated to untreated, while your study compares treated to cisgender. Since their study does not find a correlation while yours does, this suggests that HRT does not have an effect, while being transgender does. This is not surprising, since it's well-known that transgender people, regardless of treatment status, are more susceptible to depression and other disorders, which in turn increase the likelihood of cognitive decline later in life.
when i want to search something i add after it the word 'reddit' to get good results , can i do the same with lemmy?, is lemmy indexed by search engines?
ChatGPT will gobble up every symbolic manipulation task I give to it. At worst, sometimes I have to check its output and point out anything weird, then it'll correct it....
Well, the good thing about Jerboa is that anyone can just make changes to it and send them to the devs, so now that more people are using Lemmy, it will improve really quickly!
Hi all. New user as of yesterday (reddit refugee). Am playing around between the lemmy.one site and the Jerboa app. I have subscribed to a bunch of communities to get a feel for what is available through Lemmy....
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin once again reiterated his favourite sentiment: “It was only after the October Revolution that various quasi-states appeared and the Soviet government created Soviet Ukraine. It is a well-known fact.” To historian Alexander Orlov such statements are not only incorrect, but they show...
I'd frame the "obsession" in another way. Currently, in the present, the actual present, Russia claims and has control over some territories. Other countries reject this on the premise that those territories, before the invasion, were Ukrainian. Putin's stance is simply that, before being Ukrainian, those territories were Russian, so the position that they should belong to one or the other is indeed arbitrary.
The Donbass was basically invaded by Ukrainian troops in 1918, and Crimea was literally gifted to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, so why should those territories even be under Ukrainian control in the first place, if the majority of their population is culturally Russian? When Albanians in Kosovo started to protest against Serbia, NATO bombed Yugoslavia; now Russians in the Donbass are protesting against Ukraine, so why doesn't NATO intervene? Why does NATO support Ukraine against an operation identical to that which NATO itself performed? Well, the answer is simple: NATO bombed Yugoslavia to weaken it, and, as McGregor admitted, the US was planning for Ukraine to attack first. We could also draw a parallelism to the Cuban missile crisis: why is it okay to put missiles in Ukraine but not Cuba?
So, all of this nonsense about aggression, culture, etc. is ridiculous. The US and Russia are fighting each other, both on the battlefield and in the media. There's no ethics here, both will do whatever it takes (the list of American, Russian and Ukrainian war crimes is nauseating) and will weaponize public opinion as they would weaponize missiles or rifles. There's no lesser evil, just pure evil everywhere, just think about what the victory of either side would bring about to the world, then choose your evil.
Stories told to children who lived under the Russian occupation in Ukraine’s southern Kherson province were designed to terrify them. When the fast-approaching Ukrainian forces came into Kherson, people added, they would hurt anyone who had been in contact with the Russians. The web of lies were often spun by the children's...
Well, there are videos of Ukrainian officials stating that they would actively look for pro-russian residents, so I'd say the warning was not far-fetched.
I understand your point, but remember Marx regards capitalism as a necessary phase in the development of a country, and Lenin regards socialism as a period of gradual change after revolution. When almost every country in the world is capitalist, you need to use market forces to survive and thrive, keeping capital accumulation and corruption under control to make sure that full socialism will eventually be achieved. The point here is not whether what China is doing currently counts as socialism, but that Chinese leaders are indeed Marxist-Leninist, and intend to follow the path towards socialism as the brutal competition against the US permits, eventually becoming what US officials most fear: a successful socialist state with dominance in the world.
It's nice that we can talk about statistics, I really like the subject. Please note that what I wanted to imply is that China is, in the short term, sacrificing economic equality and other goals typically sought by socialism, in favor of maximizing the chance of success against a world that wants to destroy communism.
Now, that set aside, I like to be skeptical of such analyses, for a few reasons that I will outline.
Low statistical power
Accompanying these correlation analyses with an adequate error analysis usually reveals that the sample is too small to yield any significant results. Countries' different population further complicates this.
Confounding factors
Unfortunately, many statistical analyses in the field, even done by professionals, fail to take this into account. E.g., the "economic freedom index" publishes a report where the value of the indicator is shown to be positively correlated to higher standards of living (presumably to influence the reader's opinions). Upon closer inspection, one realizes that some of the values used to compute the index depend themselves on economic stability, and recalculating the index without them removes the correlation entirely.
Arbitrary definitions
Not only are these indices based on non-linear scores or arbitrarily weighted operations between incompatible magnitudes, but sometimes they are even defined in vague or subjective terms. E.g., "are deputies elected by fair elections", rather than being answer as some quantitative measure of transfer of entropy, is simply left to opinion. Furthermore, for the question of whether all citizens have equal voting rights, the US gets 0.81 out of 1, while China gets 0.00, despite the laws of both countries setting basically the same restrictions on voting.
Your logic is reasonable, but it makes the assumption that there is no way to create governance mechanisms that are not bound to become corrupt. Communism is based on the idea that the following flaws exist in capitalism:
Money can be used to earn more money using the scheme money -> capital -> money, which causes an exponential blowup effect that amplifies random fluctuations into wealth differences of up to several orders of magnitude.
Other such schemes exist, even without capital, but that is the one that most easily leads to an absolute departure from meritocracy and into lottery mechanics.
Additionally, money can be used to gain political power, leading to a money -> power -> money effect that further amplifies this effect. This, in, turn, might involve directly bribing officials, paying for their electoral campaigns or donating to news media.
Finally, the transfer of wealth does not simply occur between people in a country, but also between countries. This explains why (wealthy) capitalist countries do not apparently suffer the supposed horrors of capitalism to the predicted extent.
Communism seeks to eliminate those loopholes so that wealth more or less depends on merit and not on luck. Specifically, the ultimate goal of communism (socialism) is to maximize the amount of utility that an individual can acquire for a certain amount of work time, by applying the following changes:
Capital, i.e. anything that generate wealth, can only be owned by all people, not by specific individuals. This makes sure that the first loophole is closed.
Individuals receive compensation for their labor. This can be thought of as a sum of the theoretical (capitalist) salary and the theoretical profits they would earn as owners of their corresponding portion of the public capital in the form of shares, which in practice is just a higher salary (given the reports from typical US companies, that could be around +80%).
All capital and its activity is publicly managed as a single entity. This increases productivity due to scale effects, yielding even higher buying-power-to-work-time ratio.
Due to the absence of competition, all labor used to that end (all publicity, multiple finance departments, trading, etc.) would instead be used to add even more value to production, increasing the aforementioned ratio even more.
This huge increase in efficiency could mean an increase in the ability to purchase, a reduction in the number of hours worked, earlier retirement, or faster economic growth for the country (by using the additional earnings to buy capital). The specific outcome depends on what the people want to prioritize.
To avoid corruption through paid campaigns and the media, many levels of representation are established, where citizens vote to candidates for local offices, and these in turn vote for the national congress. National representatives do not campaign or depend on media influence, and they are selected among the local representatives.
To the same end, all of the government officials must cooperate: they should debate proposals according to their own ideas, but after a decision has been made, they should all go with it as a single team. Thus, there is a single party with multiple candidates.
Finally, (communist) countries themselves should cooperate.
So, that is what communism is about. That's what a socialist country "by the book" should do. Of course, not every country does this, especially since there are just 5 (?) of them, just like most capitalist countries in the world are pretty bad for capitalist standards.
Fair. It'd be helpful if you'd point out the falsehood in my comment. Or the reason why these don't apply to the specific analysis you suggested. Or the double standards in my comments.
And because none of these securities exist under communism…
Not necessarily. To provide a silly example by contradiction, you could ensure that the country is governed by an automated system that doesn't involve people at all. A more reasonable example would be implementing the exact same procedures as any democratic country, but constitutionally constraining the economy to a socialist system, which would give strictly less power to officials and thus be at least as resistant to corruption.
Separation of power into parts that will not cooperate is important in any system. Offloading power into a constitution is also necessary. Your points are valid and highlight the need to constrain power in a way that corruption is as unlikely as possible.
The goal of socialism is to create a society that is governed by the people, for the people, so ensuring the above is a task for any socialist state. A socialist state where this does not hold is not just a flawed democracy, but also a flawed socialist state. The ideal state is one where all the flaws (exploits, if you wish) of traditional states cease to exist, which implies that corruption should be out of the picture. Communism only states that capitalism and traditional democracies are intrinsically exploitable due to the issues I mentioned, so in order to create the ideal state, they should also be abolished. What you describe is a situation where some issues were corrected while others were created, so little or no progress was made.
“LLMs don’t understand what they say, they just try to sound like they do” is a sentence that denotes a good understanding of how AI works, as expected from an “expert on AI”. However, it makes a comparison with human intelligence that either assumes we know how it works, or shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. For all we know, either our brain is a mystery (and thus we can’t really state whether an AI “understands” anything, since we can’t even define what that means), or, as research on neurobiology seems to indicate, it’s just large-scale deep learning, with more ad-hockery for evolutionary stuff, and two orders of magnitude more energy-efficient.
Yeah, sorry... Eliminative materialism is the belief that subjective experiences like consciousness can't possibly be defined or explained because they simply don't exist. According to this, they are just an illusion. As extreme and counter-intuitive as this may sound, it is a plausible explanation for the phenomenon of ego death, which I have experienced myself (in the medical, non-spiritual, drug-induced sense, an extreme form of depersonalization), and would under this school of thought simply entail a temporary malfunction of the mechanisms sustaining this illusion.
Since eliminative materialists deny that consciousness can be defined at all, this meme implies that they feel contempt and frustration towards repeatedly failed attempts to do so.
Federation Query
Hi all, I'm very new to this fediverse thing!...
What are some of your favorite Lemmy communities?
I'm new here and want to expand my feed a bit. I have way too many niche hobbies so please give me some more 😂
Does any one know a way to quantify the growth of lemmy/ the fediverse?
It would be an interesting shot across the bow to corporate controlled social media to show opensource, open access social medias growth. I'm sure its in an exponential phase. It also would seem important to the community to know. Is there a way to query across the fediverse to look at user numbers?
What's the stupidest way you've ever injured yourself?
Sending this from work where I was looking at a coworker while talking and walked full-speed into the edge of a table...
Help! My opponent rearranged the infinite chess board to make a mate in ω⁴ moves where ω is is the smallest ordinal greater than the natural numbers. What do I do in this position? (i'm black) (i.stack.imgur.com)
Fresh user here, is GenZedong community is botting their comment count or are they just 215 insanely active lemmy users? (lemmy.ml)
Because the sheer quantity of comments in comparison to the tiny amount of users and subs is nuts, each user would have been required to do ~250 minimum comments each if my hair brained maths is correct, a ratio which far exceeds any other community here by miles, or am I just missing some key context here?...
Long term effects of HRT on cognitive function (sopuli.xyz)
Source paper unknown
can you search the web for links with lemmy like you would with reddit?
when i want to search something i add after it the word 'reddit' to get good results , can i do the same with lemmy?, is lemmy indexed by search engines?
I think I'll ditch WolframAlpha
ChatGPT will gobble up every symbolic manipulation task I give to it. At worst, sometimes I have to check its output and point out anything weird, then it'll correct it....
it will improve :) (beehaw.org)
What is your preferred method of sorting posts?
Hi all. New user as of yesterday (reddit refugee). Am playing around between the lemmy.one site and the Jerboa app. I have subscribed to a bunch of communities to get a feel for what is available through Lemmy....
Help Putin find Ukraine: A historian explains the Russian government's obession with the past (web.archive.org)
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin once again reiterated his favourite sentiment: “It was only after the October Revolution that various quasi-states appeared and the Soviet government created Soviet Ukraine. It is a well-known fact.” To historian Alexander Orlov such statements are not only incorrect, but they show...
‘I was so scared’: the Ukrainian children taken to Russia for financial gain (web.archive.org)
Stories told to children who lived under the Russian occupation in Ukraine’s southern Kherson province were designed to terrify them. When the fast-approaching Ukrainian forces came into Kherson, people added, they would hurt anyone who had been in contact with the Russians. The web of lies were often spun by the children's...
US Select Committee on CCP recommends India to be part of NATO Plus (www.firstpost.com)
AI Expert Says ChatGPT Is Way Stupider Than People Realize (futurism.com)
r/Futurology
Philosophy meme (lemmy.ml)
CodeWeavers Now Controlled By An Employee Ownership Trust (www.phoronix.com)
The comments are pretty interesting...
First-In-Human Trial of Oral Drug to Remove Radioactive Contamination Begins (www.drugs.com)