No worries. I hope things get better.

That’s got to be a nightmare. I’m really sorry to hear that, and I appreciate you sharing.

I can’t think of any ways to rephrase that, that don’t sound empty or performative. You sent my thoughts towards my own parents. I’m sorry for your pain.

Thank you. I stole that from Philip (I think) in Off To Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer. He was describing that book’s antagonist but I’ve taken it to describe people who casually break rules to get ahead.

And I think that’s kind of what they’re doing, flooding social media with stories of how they broke rules in ways that make me go “foul! That’s a foul! Why is the ref doing nothing? This breaks my brain and I have no idea how to respond to this!”

No I know you’re being genuine.

So this is going to sound really weird, because I think you’re talking about the experience of debating troll farm accounts - understandably really frustrating - but I’m talking about the people, the voters, the weird family members you can’t talk about politics with any longer. (I have some of those - they’re in rural Illinois while I’m in blue-dot Omaha, I love them very much, and I absolutely hate that we can’t talk politics any more.)

But I think you need to give them more sympathy. (The IRL humans, not the online trolls.) The worst of them grew up in a system where they only see minorities as risks, because (a) brains look for patterns, for free, factory firmware, and (b) they don’t realize evil people set things up long ago so that minorities had things on Hard Mode. And maybe © fighting against your factory defaults takes work and practice.

Like, because TLOU is back on TV I’ll share something uncomfortable. S01E03 was really uncomfortable for me to watch. I was a nerdy kid, teased for being gay in high school when I was not and am not gay. So I have some homophobia I haven’t gotten rid of yet. I’m trying. But I still look away whenever men kiss. My wife doesn’t love that part about me, but she still loves me.

Do you give up on me because my journey isn’t complete there? Am I to be hated because I look away, lumped in with the people who vote against gay rights? Clearly not. Mostly because I’m clearly making an effort.

Some people who voted for Trump don’t wear red hats. They were on the fence and they went one way and not the other. And I promise they’re not the people you’re tired of debating. They deserve your positive thoughts. Don’t let the troll farms steal those thoughts. Please.

Which “They”? The voters or the politicians?

(Apologies to parent, this is something I’ve been itching to say, but the parent isn’t the problem I’m discussing.)

They will clap because it makes them feel good. It makes them feel good because they think we don’t respect them, that we celebrate their losses (in the Laslow’s Hierarchy sense, not the political sense) and that we don’t want to lift them up with us.

So yeah, we have differences. (Stay with me for a bit.) They think a foul in basketball is something you’re allowed to do a certain number of times and then you have to stop. We think a foul in basketball is something you Should Not Do.

Is the solution more hate for the people who got duped by Trump’s team? Yeah they got played. Yeah they have cognitive dissonance. Yeah they’re on Facebook too much, fed poison by an algorithm that optimizes for engagement (you know, happy, horny, angry, anything except writing letters or volunteering or registering to vote). That’s no reason to hate them.

Help them. Love them. Even if there’s no internet points in it for you. (Certainly none for me because I’m usually a crappy communicator.)

I think this might be hypocritical of me, but in one sense I think I prefer that outcome. Let those existing trained models become the most vile and untouchable of copyright infringing works. Send those ill-gotten corporate gains back to the rights holders.

What, me? Of course I’ve erased all my copies of those evil, evil models. There’s no way I’m keeping my own copies to run, illicitly, on my own hardware.

(This probably has terrible consequences I haven’t thought far enough ahead on.)

I think you’re right about style. As a software developer myself, I keep thinking back to early commercial / business software terms that listed all of the exhaustive ways you could not add their work to any “information retrieval system.” And I think, ultimately, computers cannot process style. They can process something, and style feels like the closest thing our brains can come up with.

This feels trite at first, but computers process data. They don’t have a sense of style. They don’t have independent thought, even if you call it a “<think> tag”. Any work product created by a computer from copyrighted information is a derivative work, in the same way a machine-translated version of a popular fiction book is.

This act of mass corporate disobedience, putting distillate made from our collective human works behind a paywall needs to be punished.

. . .

But it won’t be. That bugs me to no end.

(I feel like my tone became a bit odd, so if it felt like the I was yelling at the poster I replied to, I apologize. The topic bugs me, but what you said is true and you’re also correct.)