Calling someone a bloodmouth for literally eating things with blood might hurt their feelings, but vegans have feelings too, and sometimes we’re upset at the idea that moderates can’t be bothered to give enough of a shit to stop literally shoveling blood into their mouths.

This is something I seriously hate from people like you, you expect vegans to be these bastions of angelic perfection. We already go through the effort of being vegans in a non-vegan world, but that’s not enough, we have to make sure we do it in a way that don’t effect the delicate sensibilities of people who pay to consume tortured animal carcasses.

The goal shouldn’t be to try to de-radicalize vegans for expressing their discomfort around literal abuse that’s normalized in our society. The goal should be to get rid of the abuse.

While the civil rights movement was largely “peaceful” (loaded word with little meaning), it was also incredibly disruptive. People in the movement were very rude to moderates who advocated in favor of negative peace while reaffirming their appreciation of the status-quo.

MLK’s position here was not that the people within the civil rights movement needed to be more respectful to white moderates. His position was that the moderates were the issue. The people who consistently advocated for negative peace were the issue.

The leaders of vegan movements also don’t generally go around attacking the moderates of our time who appreciate the status-quo and advocate for negative peace. There are individuals that do attack moderates, just like there were individuals in the civil rights movement who literally physically assaulted white moderates (much worse than calling someone a cheese-breather and having their feelings get a bit hurt). Again, MLK did not draw attention to these fringe cases because the actual issue were the moderates themselves. Some might even say the racists deserved to be beaten, and that’s not even something I would necessarily argue against.

Veganism is the same. The issue is not the people who are a bit rude online to bloodmouths/carnists. The issue is the moderates themselves, their constant advocacy for negative peace in place of positive peace needs to be shut down unequivocally.

It goes to show how much we purposefully disregard the ways of nature, actually.

Moral decisions are not made on the grounds of “is this natural”? A lot of things are moral and unnatural, and a lot of things are immoral and natural. It should be incredibly easy for you to think of examples, but if you’re really struggling I can give some.

They’re orthogonal discussions.

MLK actually alienated white moderates to about the same degree that vegans alienate carnists. It was only retroactively, after the civil rights movement, that white moderates pretended like they were aligned with him all along. In 1966 MLK was polling in the low 30s among white Americans.

I’m sure future moderates/apoliticals will do the same with veganism. Lab grown meat will become a thing, we’ll outlaw our barbaric practices of animal torture and slaughter, and those future generations will look back with horror at how savage we were, and all the moderates will proclaim proudly that “I would’ve been a vegan if I was born in the late 20th/early 21st century”, and they would be almost always wrong.

It’s similar to everyone’s modern position on slavery. If you polled the majority of the population “would you be an abolitionist if you were born in the early/mid 19th century?”, you’ll get the vast majority of people saying they would’ve been, but the vast majority of people were not, and its not like we had some evil gene in us that got naturally selected out of us. People were just normalized in that environment. People today are just generally incorrect about what the impact of normalization would’ve been on them in the past (or even what the impact of it is on them today).

MLK said it best, so I’ll just quote him directly:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

When moderates advocate for “kindness” or “civility”, they’re advocating for negative peace; the absence of tension. Vegans advocate for positive peace; the presence of justice. When activists advocate for positive peace, in the face of those who deny said justice, tensions rise and moderates fall back to this common trope.

Your mistake here was saying “puppies” too early. You have to lead with a couple paragraphs of how you’re a flexitarian who has a farm and humanely raised animals like pets and then slaughters and feed them to your family.

Then list off the animals you exploit, cows, pigs, dogs, chickens, cats and ducks. Then their brain gets hit with the dissonance of “wait why did I support this and then stop the second they said ‘dog’?” That jarring experience can work for the intellectually honest type.

Saying it too early means they can categorize your post as satire easily and not engage with it at all mentally.

This is an interesting theory, but I think you’re just wrong on several counts. There are definitely permanently online people who don’t do anything in the real world, but out of the groups you listed, vegans and MAGA members almost universally have material impact on the world (socialists and antivaxers would like to, but their impact is usually hyper-localized, so you’ll find more “only-online” types).

For vegans and MAGA, there is real direct action that they partake in as buy-in for the group. For the former, it’s abstaining from animal products, and for the latter it’s voting for Trump.

Claiming most vegans or MAGA people aren’t motivated to improve things for their cause is demonstrably false. An interesting theory nonetheless.

I’ll mention just so my biases are clear, I’m a vegan socialist, but I don’t think i was unfair here in favor of those positions.

Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).

Until the tankies seize power and start killing the anarchists for being anti-state xd

Not all tankies would do this, but it’s happened before and it’s good to be cautious around those who want supreme authority, even if they claim it’s just “temporary”. If we see the Chinese state wither away and give rise to a truly communist society, I’ll be genuinely surprised.

Holy shit you’re right, I’m an idiot. Thanks for helping me shift my perspective.

If you didn’t have an agenda/preconceived idea you wanted proven, you’d understand that a single study has never been used by any credible scientist to say anything is proven, ever.

Only people who don’t understand how data works will say a single study from a single university proves anything, let alone anything about a model trained on billions of parameters across a field as broad as “programming”.

I could feed GPT “programming” tasks that I know it would fail on 100% of the time. I also could feed it “programming” tasks I know it would succeed on 100% of the time. If you think LLMs have nothing to offer programmers, you have no idea how to use them. I’ve been successfully using GPT4T for months now, and it’s been very good. It’s better in static environments where it can be fed compiler errors to fix itself continually (if you ever look at more than a headline about GPT performance you’d know there’s a substantial difference between zero-shot and 3-shot performance).

Bugs exist, but code heavily written by LLMs has not been proven to be any more or less buggy than code heavily written by junior devs. Our internal metrics have them within any reasonable margin of error (senior+GPT recently beating out senior+junior, but it’s been flipping back and forth), and senior+GPT tickets get done much faster. The downside is GPT doesn’t become a senior, where a junior does with years of training, though 2 years ago LLMs were at a 5th grade coding level on average, and going from 5th grade to surpassing college level and matching junior output is a massive feat, even if some luddites like yourself refuse to accept it.

In my line of work (programming) they absolutely do not have a 52% failure rate by any reasonable definition of the word “failure”. More than 9/10 times they’ll produce code at at least a junior level. It won’t be the best code, sometimes it’ll have trivial mistakes in it, but junior developers do the same thing.

The main issue is confidence, it’s essentially like having a junior developer that is way overconfident for 1/1000th of the cost. This is extremely manageable, and June 2024 is not the end all be all of LLMs. Even if LLMs only got worse, and this is the literal peak, it will still reshape entire industries. Junior developers cannot find a job, and with the massive reduction in junior devs we’ll see a massive reaction in senior devs down the line.

In the short term the same quality work will be done with far, far fewer programmers required. In 10-20 years time if we get literally no progress in the field of LLMs or other model architectures then yeah it’s going to be fucked. If there is advancement to the degree of replacing senior developers, then humans won’t be required anyway, and we’re still fucked (assuming we still live in a capitalist society). In a proper society less work would actually be a positive for humanity, but under capitalism less work is an existential threat to our existence.

I don’t think revolutions are any more likely to be fascist than socialist, historically though genuine socialist revolutions tend to lose, mostly because international capitalism can play very nicely with fascism, but not socialism.

However if the U.S underwent genuine socialist revolutions, it’s an entirely different ballgame. The U.S has been the capitalist hand on the global stage for the better part of a century, constantly involved in overthrowing democratically elected governments in favor of fascist dictatorships.

With that constant capitalistic/fascistic pressure gone, and better-yet replaced with genuine socialism, you’d get a very interesting situation. You’d have genuine socialism in the U.S (probably followed by at least some socialist revolution or socialist-inspired reforms in Europe), and then rhetorical socialism in the east, marred by material capitalism. The contradictions of the global stage would intensify, and I don’t think there’s any Chinese theory for development in an internationally socialist stage.

It’s more counterproductive to be a non-vegan and try to convince nobody. I’ve had a good deal of success convincing people to go vegan. There are definitely vegans that are more successful than me, but you want to know who is always less successful? Non-vegans who rage online about vegans.

They should be the focus of our criticism, both in their own actions, and even as a broader strategy for enacting change.

Also I’d go as far to claim malapropisms don’t exist. There is no “incorrect” use of a word. I’m not a prescriptivist. Language is about communicating ideas, and I know everything I’ve said would make sense to a great deal of people I know.

Maybe something doesn’t make sense to you, maybe because we learned different definitions or usages of some word or phrase. Neither of us are wrong, we’ve just hit a language barrier. This is uncommon in English, but actually happens quite regularly in Europe even with two people speaking “the same language”.

Our best example of this is going from American -> British English, but it can happen within the same “dialect” too.

Now there are obviously times where you try to adopt some language someone else has, and misunderstood it, so your usage aligns with essentially nobody else’s (so the word has lost all function). I know that’s not the case with what I’m saying because I’ve had these types of conversations with enough people who have understood me, but I’m fine humoring you, and still interested where the clash/miscommunication happened.

Feel free to correct me, most (or dare I say all) people aren’t born omniscient, so sometimes we misuse words or phrases. I’m not sorry to admit that I’m sometimes incorrect about things, I used to be a staunch non-vegan for example.

what state is forcing a diet on you

The dog and cat meat trade prohibition act in 2018 in the U.S outlaws the slaughter and trade of dog/cat meat, in effect banning it as a diet.

I’d be more than happy with this exact same legislation being passed, but just for chickens/cows/pigs/etc. too. If you don’t think that this is prohibiting a diet, sure. Let’s just ban the slaughter/trade of cow/pig/chicken meat and say we found a good compromise.

It’s impressive watching you repeatedly sidestep the main point, about how your view of dogs/cats is inconsistent with your view of pigs/cows/chickens.

I’m not a moral leader, I’m making points you repeatedly sidestep with ad-hominems. You can’t articulate counter points, so you repeatedly attack me as an individual. It’s awesome.

The really cool thing about actually every person I’ve met or heard of online, in person, etc. is anytime they’re not vegan due to a health issue, they can’t actually say what that health issue is.

People are genuinely more open about any other aspect of their health or mental state. People more readily open up about their schizophrenia or suicidal-level depression than whatever mysterious health issue “prevents veganism”.

It’s cool too, because there is actually no medical issue that prevents veganism. Every major health association has come out and said a vegan diet is suitable for literally all people at all stages of life. That might seem reductive, until you realize how many different vegan foods there are. You’re likely able to eat beans, lettuce, and rice (and if not, surprise, there are other vegan foods), and those 3 things alone have sustained poor people for decades. Living in a rich western country makes this vastly easier too.

It’s just funny hearing the broad, fake excuse because so many people use it when it’s totally incoherent by the account of every major medical association.

A small sidenote too about your advice, I appreciate you trying to help, but I’m actually happy with how many people I’ve converted and continue to convert to veganism. I’d even bet good money that I’ve converted more people to veganism than you.

If you find a tactic that converts more than a few dozen people per year, let me know, but out of the two of us I probably have more actual real world experience converting people to veganism, given I’m the vegan activist, and you should consider that a vegan activist might know more about vegan activism than a non-vegan.

At least consider it as a possibility, my friend.

Knowledge isn’t bad, and I’m aware of where I’m knowledgeable and where my limits are. I tend to be quite a bit more knowledgeable about philosophy than the average person, most people don’t introspect or read about where truth comes from. They often don’t even know or understand what an axiom is, even though they’re foundational to how we live.

If that’s all too much for you, you can literally just disregard my latter two paragraphs before you went into your defensive panic. I don’t (usually) need to get into the idea of normative truths to justify veganism, because ironically we live in a country of “animal lovers”, many of whom would happily literally kill dog abusers. I’ve unironically met non-vegans that advocate for the fucking death penalty for people who abuse dogs.

That amount of dissonance, to advocate for actual death for humans who abuse animals, while themselves literally paying for animal abuse, is sufficient to dismantle people’s entire preconception of animal rights and worth. If we happened to live in a society without massive hypocrites, where people consistently held that abusing and torturing all “lesser” animals was okay, I’d have to get into more nuanced discussion about the nature of truth to help people get to veganism.