This is also the second time that he’s tried this. The first time was during his previous term, and though he was forced to reopen everything by the courts, the fact that he sold some of the federal land to (I think) oil companies was never acted upon, despite it being illegal to sell public land to corporate interests.

That’s incorrect. The Dems first ran the sitting President who vowed that he would not run a second time and waffled about for an extended period before saying he was running, and then waffled about some more before dropping out due to the extremely tepid voter opinion on his running and the Dems declaring that they weren’t going to hold a primary and appointed Kamala as the candidate.

She was already a contested candidate with very mixed opinions on her track record, plus general discontent with the party leadership, and that was before the Democrats gagged her and her running mate when they found the most effective political campaign move they could ever possibly use against Republicans when they called them “weird,” and then the Dems shot the campaign’s legs off when they started dragging around conservatives to speak at campaign rallies. In places where they had people like Cheney speak, the Dems dropped a full 3-5% in the polls afterwards compared to before the campaign speeches.

Kamala herself definitely played a part in it, as did sexism, but truthfully the Democrats, like with Hillary, looked a gift horse in the mouth and started sifting through the pile of horse shit behind it for “moderate conservatives.” I bet if they had run a candidate like AOC and, you know, actually appealed to their base instead of avoiding talking about the things that their voters cared about, things would’ve been rather different. But they’ll never willingly run an actual progressive, so we’ll never know.

This got me thinking: How is this any different from the ending of the books?

Harry becomes a magic-cop and goes on to uphold the draconian institutions that enforce goblin slavery and Muggle oppression/classism.

That’s an issue with any form of information sharing, though. Your local library is full of false information as well, whether that’s because it’s outdated or because you live somewhere like the US where all school curriculum books have to be approved by a Texas based group per federal law.

Lies spread faster than the truth, and the internet is great at spreading information.

I swear Pornhub has released a similar report in the past that did check out the same way. And the same with gay porn.

Republicans don’t believe that FtM people exist. In their minds, they’re just delusional women who wish they were men, but it makes perfect sense to them that women wish they were men. It would be weirder to them to hear that not all women wish they were men. It’s completely part of the sexism and patriarchy.

The reason that they’re so obsessed with trans women by comparison is that it goes against their entire worldview. A man who wants to be a woman? Why would anyone ever want to be a woman?! There’s also the bigotry and everything else, of course, but the fact that it defies what they see as the natural order or hierarchy of the sexes drives them crazy.

Por qué no los dos?

Opt out on one account, use another as poison. If you’re gonna do this, I’d say move all your code to a new account and use the older account to poison - that way they can’t filter the bad out by account age.

Apparently turkeys eat ticks. We just need to keep the wild turkey population up and they’ll help cull the infestation.

You were thinking logically about a normal production chain. In that case, QA or whoever says “This is wrong, rework it and correct the issue” and that’s that. With AI, it does the whole thing over again and may or may not come back with the same issue or an entirely new one.

I’ve heard it said that pickleball is for former tennis players. And I think there’s plenty of truth there. It’s a relatively low impact sport that requires similar skills.

It’s honestly a great sport for older people - less risk of injury compared to similar sports, doesn’t require a lot of expensive equipment (although there’re plenty of companies making a killing nowadays), and it helps build and maintain things like hand-eye coordination.

There are tons of towns near me that are replacing their tennis courts with pickleball courts. The sport just supports a wider range of people than tennis and you can get two pickleball courts out of one tennis court if I remember correctly.

California, New York, Texas, Brazil, the UK, I think at least 2 more states as well…this is only the beginning. Everybody is jumping on the surveillance state/data broker hype train.

My question is when will governments attempt to pass stupid and impossible laws like requiring ISPs to verify your age before you can connect to the internet.

You did say that it wasn’t useless if you and your kid both use the same system, so my first thought for how it could be useful in any capacity outside of adhering to a law, which in the US at least (I’m not as well versed in the Brazilian, UK, or other variations) has in some versions very explicitly stated that the intent is for the OS to provide said age information to any app that requests it, was for group permissions on the different accounts on your system, which can just as easily be set up using other settings already available to you. I would consider that “protecting kids.” If you meant that it was useful in some other way where you and your kid are using the same system, by all means, tell me.

As I said, I brought up the rest because that is the explicitly stated or easily inferred (in the case of increased fingerprinting of users for increased revenue) intent of the US versions of the law and “protect the children” is the tired old excuse being used by Facebook and the politicians in their employ.

Obviously, the data field equivalent of clicking the “I am 18 years or older” button is as non-invasive as you can really get, but it’s blatantly obvious that this is merely the first step in what the corporations and governments actually want out of this, and adhering to it before the laws are even out merely sets the stage for them to refine their language and push further. Something this easy could be rolled out at any time. There’s no need to comply before they have a leg to stand on. They won’t be satisfied by this, and they certainly won’t stop here.

Don’t forget the personalized ads! 🫠

And how is it useful then? Parental controls have existed for decades and you never had to give your age to Facebook, who is the main proponent of these laws in the US and has poured millions of dollars into their creation.

This isn’t about protecting kids. It’s about adding an additional fingerprint companies and governments can use to track and identify you and what you do with your system.

It would be weird for the Marxist instance to have entire communities dedicated to saying how bad socialists are, that’s what Hexbear is for.

But, that’s also why memes.ml is here, right? When people aren’t making fun of liberals (rightly so) or calling all Americans Nazis or something, you gotta make fun of the wrong kinds of socialists for not seeing the truth. Otherwise, what kind of content would be left?

I could see some people taking it as fact because that’s close to how they diagnose ADHD. They make you do a test and track your behavior during the test rather than your answers.

This is the sort of behavior that I’m talking about, but with the term “liberals” being thrown at any leftists whose flavor of socialism you personally disagree with. Like a bunch of Christian denominations all claiming that they speak the truth and all the others are heretics and liars.

It’s all too common in leftist spaces because we can’t get over the minor (and not so minor) differences in our theory/philosophy to stay focused on our shared opposition of fascism long enough to act on it, while fascists naturally cooperate because it’s easy to do when you don’t believe in anything other than hate and whatever you’re told to believe.

Sorry it took so long to get back to this, as they say, “Life, uh, gets in the way.”

I had to go and check the AI communities I have blocked because I could’ve sworn that I had multiple of different corporate GenAI blocked from DB0, but I stand corrected - I have only a handful of Stable Diffusion ones. Of course, I was also under the impression that Stable Diffusion is made by OpenAI or one of their competitors, so I blocked them instantly on that alone when I was largely blocking AI communities to clean up my homepage and to avoid the kinds of people those communities usually attract. There’s a certain kind of person with a “corporate fact cat/middle manager” attitude that can plague GenAI communities that drives me crazy because they think that generating an image takes as much skill and effort (or even more) than creating one by hand.

That definitely does change my opinion on Stable Diffusion, but it still comes down to a “it depends.” And as you so rightly put it, my problem is a capitalism issue, not a GenAI issue. My perspective is that not all of us are so lucky as to live in Ireland, which I believe has recently implemented a UBI specifically for artists, and so until capitalism is dealt with, any impacts of that take precedence - including those created as a consequence. Just because something is useful doesn’t mean we should be dumping it as fuel on to the fire of capitalism because capitalism is what’s actually burning us. Local models using images sourced with permission from the artists is a great thing. People getting paid to make things specifically to be used for training - awesome! A win in my book. In a world where artists have a guaranteed roof over their heads and food in their bellies, I do not care at all about whether or not their work is used to train AI. I bet artists can do some really cool stuff with GenAI as well - it’s basically a bigger, more advanced version of the same concept that makes the Gaussian Blur tool in Photoshop work.

This is why I’m also pro-piracy when it comes to corporations - you aren’t stealing from the workers, they got paid to make the thing, not when it gets sold - and why my opinion is “it depends.” I’m completely willing to go ahead and change my opinion once something stops hurting workers and becomes nothing but a benefit now that it’s out of the hands of the billionaires. There’s an interesting conversation to be had over the…I can’t think of a good word, ownership of identity maybe? Ownership of characters created to represent yourself at any rate (somebody coming along and saying “this is me” about a character you made as an avatar of yourself feels bad), and there’s a country in Europe that made an interesting choice in response to deep fakes, CSAM, and revenge porn created by AI by giving every citizen the copyright to their own face, body, and voice, but that’s a whole different conversation.

And this concept right here:

It assumes everyone has enough time to train on making art, which most wage-slaves undoubtedly do not. It’s an inherently classist argument to assume everyone has the free time to master any artistic skill.

Has a sense of capitalistic entitlement in it. You feel that you deserve the product of art but don’t respect the people who do put in the time and effort learning how to make it enough to properly compensate them for the time that they spent learning the profession. One, because they could have spent that time learning a different trade - programming, becoming an electrician or maybe an airplane mechanic or whatever - and two, because those who do art professionally almost universally talk about how they almost never have time to make art for themselves - stuff that they want to make just for them. And art (alongside the humanities) is a universally disrespected skill, with many commission based artists working for below minimum wage. It’s like arguing that because you don’t have the time or money to make a car, you deserve to be able to freely take cars from people’s driveways and use them as a form of public transit. In an ideal world where the US isn’t a car-centric hellscape and the trams always arrive on time, we wouldn’t even need for everybody to have their own personal car! But we don’t live in that world and hot-wiring somebody’s car to take for a joyride that makes them miss work isn’t cool. Just because I don’t have the genetics for it or the time to train to compete in the Olympics doesn’t grant me the right to free steroid injections.

And I use the word product up there very, very deliberately. Art is two things: the Product to be Consumed (and promptly discarded in this day and age of consumerism), which is what GenAI makes, and the Process, which is often what artists talk about as their favorite part of making art. But the end result - the Product - is just a small part of what Art is. Adam Savage said something along the lines of “I have no interest in AI art. One day, some college film student will do something amazing with AI - and Hollywood will milk it to death - but right now, I don’t see anything in AI that I care about. Because you don’t see anything of the artist in it, and that’s what I care about. Their intent, what they wanted to say with the piece, what they went through in making it and what they learned along the way, none of that exists in AI art.” I’m not religious, but as the saying goes: “God gave us grain but not bread so that we, too, could indulge in the joy of the act of creation.” Making something allows us to better understand ourselves and the world around us. It’s why people desire GenAI. To create something that only exists in their imagination. It’s why Art Therapy exists. One time I heard a college student reflect that “art is how artists process the world around us” and I absolutely agree. Van Gogh died a pauper, having barely sold any of his works in his lifetime, only to become one of the most beloved painters long after his death for his loneliness and pain that he expressed in his brushwork. One thing that is guaranteed to make me cry is that scene from Dr Who where the museum curator talks about why Van Gogh is his favorite artist while Vincent breaks down crying behind him.

One thing that people caught up in the GenAI arguments often miss is that artists (any worth listening to at least) aren’t gatekeeping art at all. Go watch a video on color theory, perspective, or additive and subtractive palettes. Artists love sharing information, and art is a conversation itself. I’m sure you can see it in the GenAI communities on your instance as well, people love to make things and be a part of a community with a shared passion. Artists don’t care if you aren’t an expert or anything, so I encourage anybody reading this to pick up a pencil, make something, and just share it with the world. I’ve talked to artists who say that their favorite commissioners are those who send them drawings to help interpret their vision - even if it’s just doodles of stick figures on a napkin or something. There used to be a tiny subreddit called r/Mona_Leslie, and it was one of my favorite places on Reddit because the whole idea of it was to professionally critique random people’s stuff as if it were in a museum gallery. People praising the brushstrokes of little kids’ fingerpaint art, the line work of stick figure drawings, whatever, it was just such a great vibe. In fact, I challenge anybody who uses GenAI regularly to take an image they generated and like, bring it into an image editor, create a new layer, and just start drawing over it. You can probably make it fit your original vision even more than the AI could with enough effort. Even if you just do a half hour a couple of times a week or something, what you learn simply from doing it will expand the horizons of your creativity.

TL;DR: You’re absolutely right that it’s a problem with capitalism, not with GenAI itself. But until such a time as capitalism no longer creates a problem from GenAI, I am firmly in the camp of putting a leash on what can and can’t be done with AI (largely on corporate AI) to minimize the harm as much as we can. Just because overfishing is a larger issue caused by capitalism doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work on limiting the amount of micro plastics that end up in the ocean - especially now that supposedly something like 5-10% of the fish we eat is plastic.

Quick question: Are you a cis, white, heterosexual male with Christian/agnostic beliefs? Or at the very least, could you be mistaken for somebody like that? And do you live in an urban area, or a suburban or rural area?

Because as a bi trans woman who grew up in a relatively red part of one of the deepest blue states in the country and spent a LONG time being able to hide as a cis white male, it is two very different experiences of life in the US before and after transitioning and what kind of area that I’ve lived in. Cities are natural melting pots of diversity and run very liberal/leftist as a result, suburbs can be a mixed bag depending on where they are (though like often follows like and you tend to get concentrations of similar beliefs close together due to socio-economic factors), and rural areas are often very group-think oriented and form cliques like it’s highschool. I also spent a lot of time listening to what conservatives say when they think they’re in like company. And it’s very political.

You know how people say that the two things you should never bring up at work are politics and religion? Every place that I’ve worked, the people who cannot stop talking about politics have always been conservatives. From hating on immigrants or trans people to the guy yesterday who went on and on about how people only hate Teslas because they’re liberals who hate Elon and how great Teslas are while we all side-eyed each other (somebody said that the cyber truck is dangerous and looks ugly), they are constantly either trying to convince you that they’re right or just assume that you agree with them in the first place. I had a “both sides” so-called “centrist” trap me and another coworker in a conversation about another one of our coworkers after he found out that they were a trans man and just kept going on and on about how they had trans friends but our coworker would never be a “real man,” just like his trans friend would never be a “real woman.” Didn’t stop talking about it for over an hour, just talking in circles with barely a moment to take a breathe before he started talking again. I would’ve thought he was gonna pass out if I didn’t already know that he’s one of those people who would probably die if they ever stopped talking. He would also go on and on about the “violent left” but would get oddly quiet whenever a right-winger or MAGA voter would shoot up a place or something. Despite the fact that the US accounts for something like 95% of all school shootings in the world, and all but a couple of those have been committed by white men who either traditionally voted for Republicans or grew up in a conservative household, and that in the past 10 years something like 80% of mass shooting victims were shot by people (most often men, and usually white men) who also either traditionally voted for Republicans or grew up in conservative households

It’s only been in about the past 6 months that I’ve mostly stopped seeing MAGA flags outside people’s houses or on people’s trucks. Though there is one pickup at work that the owner stuck a “MAGA Edition” label onto just above the branding, and there is one guy who up until recently would wear a Trump 2024 shirt occasionally. He might still, but I haven’t seen it in awhile.

There are now about 20 states where it is either unsafe for me to travel due to state laws or where my existence is outright illegal in some way. Trans people were having their passports, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and other forms of identification confiscated by the DMV after the election but before Trump even entered office. A law in Utah banning trans girls from school sports got overturned because it affected a total of 3 girls in the state and it was therefore considered a law targeting specific individuals, which is illegal. You can make it illegal to turn right on a red light at a particular street corner, but you can’t make it illegal for Tom, Larry, and Diane to turn right on a red light.

You can have reasonable discussions with conservatives, but because conservatism largely consists of the belief that there are groups that the law should protect but not bind, and groups that the law should bind but not protect, it can very quickly fall into arguing what kind of people do or don’t deserve to be treated like humans. Very often with them, respect means “respect my authority or else I won’t treat you like a person.” Back before 2001 and the rise of right-wing extremism these past 20 or so years, there were much more mild discussions between Democrats and Republicans, but that’s because the US largely has no true leftist institutions. The Democrats are largely a moderate conservative to left-leaning centrist party with a few moderate leftists thrown in (who are unpopular with the party leadership but usually popular with voters). So debates were largely about whether or not the tax break for corporations should be 5% or 7% higher than last year. Both parties largely agreed on policy.

In the US, there are two genders: Man and “political.” Two races: White and “political.” Two sexualities: Straight and “political.” Two religions: Christian and “political” (and which flavor of Christian you are can be considered “political” based on the region of the country that you’re in). If you can fake being in the former group in any way, you’ll have a very different experience living in the US than you would otherwise.

I’ve heard of kids who have had them follow them home from school or even stop them in the middle of the school hallway.

I never had to deal with them, but they apparently can just walk into school in the middle of the day.

People really don’t understand just how dystopian the US is and how much of it we take for granted because we grew up in a place where it’s normal for elementary students to pledge their undying loyalty to a flag every morning before class starts.