Shitposter while I tend to two babies. Maybe when I have my life back, I’ll help us get a few more niche communities back?

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Ironically, I can’t really get into detailed discussion right now because I’m literally walking to my social psych class I teach, lol.

    To the first point though, take a step back and understand that more recent studies have shown empathy to be the normative state of humans. Humans, like most pack animals, need strong intuition and empathy to survive with both their own tribe and others.

    That has limitations, of course, as we’re most empathetic to people we identify with or find similarities to. People fight for their kin, not necessarily their neighbor.

    I recall a study… I forget the name (author name sounds like Nier) but they found that folks even cooperated more when wearing similar sports paraphernalia, even bridging racial divides. The stakes weren’t huge; just signing a petition, but you can’t necessarily ask for more from an academic paper.

    As to the point of being on offense, that’s probably outside the realm of social psych but I’ll try with what I know. I know helping behaviors tend to get stronger when people feel they have the agency to do so. Studies are quite a bit more tame than taking arms or something, but the Good Samaritan study kinda shows this. People running late aren’t willing to help someone clearly in need, but people running early are. Imagine the parallel to society-- who has the money, the time, and the energy to help?

    Edit: the comment on walking to class is real and not a flex, btw. T-minus 15 min now, though it’s only undergrad and we’re teaching love and friendship today, which is totally unrelated, lol.


  • Well, no, putting people through distress in this manner isn’t a necessary step to producing empathy, nor is hardship a way to reliably produce empathy. I thought so for a while, too, except there’s far too many people who suffer hardship only to turn it around and want to cause it to others.

    What is shown to be effective is an educational approach, as learning about power dynamics and injustice tends to reduce obedience. Authoritarians fear education because it creates that kind of person, hence why “colleges are woke” and such persist. That, and finding common ground with “outgroups”, as people are much more empathetic to those they identify with.




  • Even in the early days with a Vive, I found games like Crypt of the Necrodancer and Hollow Knight to be weirdly immersive in VR mode.

    I think it’s the blocking out of the outside world that did it for me, plus who cares about the old screen door effect when it’s pixel graphics?

    Iirc, there is also a way to play old emulated games in a made up 1990s bedroom on a CRT in VR, but I can’t remember how.

    (And on the topic of emulation, I also wonder if they ever made progress on the emulated Dolphin VR games? Star Fox was a fantastic experience but was still a bit glitchy a decade ago.)





  • I don’t understand the desire to not use a desktop PC for all the power it provides, but I’m not an everyday normal consumer. For a wireless VR set attached to a computer, it sounds lovely-- I’d like a cheaper, gutted version that’s strictly for streaming.

    But I suppose for now, I can stick to my Index, especially with prices for parts the way they are. I still much prefer it over Quest 3, tether and all.






  • There are many applications of machine learning models for military purposes, some of which you can see with Ukraine drone warfare for instance. Tech like visual recognition predates much of what people call AI now.

    However, this is likely referring to LLM usage to predict stuff, which is utterly stupid because it’s a language model. It’s like those people who think it’s sentient because it recites science fiction from its training to pretend to be sentient.

    Part of me hopes this is just a grift, since the reality of ChatGPT helping the military pick targets and make strategic decisions is terrifying. Either way we’re just so utterly fucked.




  • Ironically, the US is practically already off MS in schools and has been for a while but it’s Mac and Google Suite that took over. I literally had a college student in my class ask “What is Excel?” as it was listed as an option to conduct calculations.

    It’s not better, but I thought that was funny. Big reason that happened, btw, Apple gifted whole computer labs to schools back when it was trying to get market share in the 90s, and now Google does likewise with Chromebook. Too bad there isn’t a Linux organization with enough money to do something like that, as it’s much more effective than banning something.