It’s an interesting question, but whose responsibility are you proposing it is to find another actress? Who’s paying that actress? Is the library going to pay twice as much, or is the existing actress expected to work the same amount of time for half the money to accommodate this second actress?

This is great, thanks for this link! Didn’t know this was a thing!

At the end of the article the quote from the black actress I think eloquently summed up what feels weird about it.

It’s a weird argument to make here, though, because this isn’t a white actor vs. black actor question at all. The library isn’t choosing between one or the other. There’s only one actor, no matter what characters are being played. If they were responding by saying “Actually we want to hire a black actor to play these characters,” I’d get it, and agree with that, but they aren’t. They’re just choosing to not have black figures represented at the performance at all, which seems… worse, somehow? I don’t know.

Not only that, it’s a meaningless requirement. There’s subs on Reddit that exist solely to farm karma. You make a post, everyone upvotes it, done.

While Iran isn’t considered one of the most sophisticated cyber actors in the world (Israel, for instance, is considered to be much more formidable), the group that allegedly hacked the Trump campaign is said to employ fairly tricky tactics.

It’s the Trump administration. You could probably just send them an email saying, “We believe you’re the victim of a cyber attack. Forward your emails to this address so we can scan them and remove the malware.”

Given the specifics, I don’t see any problem with what she’s doing. It’s not like a white woman was being cast to play a black character instead of a black woman; she put together a one-woman show that she is the sole performer in. The library even (initially) asked her to play the black characters, then changed their mind.

If someone here disagrees, I’d be interested to hear why.

That’s pretty funny. Unfortunately for them, I and probably almost everyone else don’t really care about their brand identity, so I’ll keep calling it all velcro. I’ll also keep call all tissues Kleenex, and all adhesive bandages Band-Aids, and all the others that have become synonymous with their product. That’s what they get for being too successful, I guess.

It’s velcro all the way down!

It sticks with adhesive, and I don’t doubt it would rip wallpaper right off, but using adhesive remover before trying to pull it off lets you work it off slowly and not cause damage to paint or surfaces.

It would tickle me absolutely pink if Mamdani was the catalyst to the creation of a third party.

Mate, nobody’s saying that every single black person or woman has it worse in every way than every single white person. We could play the ‘Ah, but this person has this malady that’s worse than the last one mentioned!’ game for hours and it really means nothing. It’s got nothing to do with my understanding of statistics, it’s got to do with the fact that I’m trying to make a generalized statement to keep the flow of conversation going, which we kind of have to accept or else having any kind of short-form discourse is impossible.

Here, let me try again.

“Generally speaking, doctors tend towards having implicit biases against black people and women. On average, medical treatment given to white men is more reliable than what’s given on average to those two marginalized groups.”

Is that really adding any meaningful clarity to a casual discussion? I argue that it does not.

To return to the topic at hand, I don’t think, in the vast majority of medical cases, diagnosis is something AI couldn’t handle. It’s not like every doctor is Dr. House, solving a complicated puzzle to figure out what someone has… it’s more or less a flow chart. Patient complains of X, most common causes are A, B and C. Order a test to confirm. Test comes back negative, next most common causes are Y and Z, order a test to confirm.

If AI could solve the majority of cases like this - even if there was a doctor whose whole job it was to take the AI diagnosis, review the symptoms and test results, and say “Yes, this seems correct”, it would presumably leave more time for doctors to spend on cases like yours where more attention is perhaps warranted. Or, alternately, maybe AI would have solved it more quickly by not being beholden to the specialist blindspots and institutional inertia that prevented them from correctly identifying it.

A lot of small things. I have some velcro on the wall in few rooms that I can stick a tablet to, for example. I’ve got velcro holding down a few items on my desk - a USB hub, speakers and the like, that I want to move sometimes, but that were commonly getting knocked off (by the cat). I’ve got a small whiteboard and a few places I can stick it, so I can use it to sketch something up and take it with me to our workbench, for example, and not have to precariously balance it.

All things that could be solved with other solutions, obviously, but the heavy duty velcro just happens to be a one-size-fits-all solution that leaves no permanent marks and is very convenient to set up.

A roll of really heavy duty velcro. The kind that can, for example, stick a sledge hammer to a wall. It’s about $12 for 5 feet or so, and about a 1" piece is sufficient for most tasks, so it lasts a very long time. I use it for all kinds of stuff; it’s amazing how many uses for it you find when you have it.

I’m not disputing that, but it’s fairly well documented in many articles that the health care system has implicit bias against black people and women, it’s not just something I’m pulling out of my ass here. So you need to consider that if you feel you’re getting poor care as a white man (I’m a white man, too, for the record), black people, women, and especially black women, are getting it far worse.

I kind of get it, though. Like, things are bad and might be affecting the people who you’re interacting with even more, and when things are generally shit and someone is just obliviously dancing around going “Look at this neat thing that happened today!”, it’s hard to tolerate. By saying “I know it’s bad right now, but this small thing happened and I wanted to share it”, it sets the proper tone to avoid that. Maybe that’s just me, though.

You could just look up articles on his policies - given his high profile status, they’re all over right now.

but not the fatwa that prohibit nukes

My understanding was that they weren’t constructing nukes per se, just getting the capabilities to do so ready to go so that if that fatwa is lifted, they can just do the final construction and be armed, rather than starting the process from scratch at that point. Is there new evidence that this isn’t the case?

Are you unclear on the definition or usage of the word “If”?

If

I don’t love Microsoft any more than anyone else here, and I get that “AI BAD” is the active group think on Lemmy and anything contrary to that gets immediate flak, but there are use cases for it, and accurate medical diagnoses for marginalized groups is a real problem. I don’t think Microsoft is specifically setting out to make shitty projects - like, that isn’t their mission statement, and if they, or any other AI company, can bypass existing biases in the industry, I’d call that a net positive.

I don’t have any actual studies to back this up (because I’m not sure they exist) but I could see this being the case, in some cases. At least in the west, Some groups who aren’t white men - e.g. women or black people - are often not given accurate diagnoses by real doctors, whose training or biases cause conflicts there. If the AI diagnoses can avoid those same biases, it could actually be better for those groups especially.

A pork pie!