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15
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570
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I believe it works like Bittorent (and things like Windows updates) where there is a swarm of peers that simultaneously upload and download to/from eachother, so the original creator, or any single user, doesn't necessarily need much bandwidth. There are some disadvantages to this, but it is manageable, and works for many other things. If it actually became a thing, I imagine sponsored/patreon-funded creators would pay someone to seed their videos to ensure availability and quality. Fans would probably help too. Technically, it's a viable option.

    But yeah, with how walled-garden the Internet has become, it probably won't become popular without massive amounts of marketing and doing things like signing exclusivity deals with popular creators, which needs a lot of money.

  • They wouldn't against Israel, for the same reasons they wouldn't against the U.S. if the U.S. did the same. I'm pretty sure the U.S. is violating international law ATM in regards to the border they share with Mexico, and I expect no action will be taken against them.

  • Meta could've done a lot of things to prevent this. Internal documents show Zuckerberg repeatedly rejected suggestions to improve child safety. Meta lobbies congress to prevent any regulation. Meta controls the algorithms and knows they promote bad behavior such as dog piling, but this bad behavior increases "engagement" and revenue, so they refuse to change it. (Meta briefly changed its algorithms for a few months during the 2020 election to decrease the promotion of disinformation and hate speech, because they were under more scrutiny, but then changed it back after the election).

  • This may be true at the moment, but Amazon can control how shitty the non-prime experience is.

    Personally, I'm trying to avoid Amazon altogether. It's much worse now, and flooded with cheap defective shit. I've also been noticing that a lot of manufacturers don't sell on Amazon (guessing Amazon takes a big cut).

  • I saw a video of an Israel official on RT blaming Russia and vowing revenge. I also saw some analysis that some of the weapons Hamas had were from North Korea and Russia would've had to have helped get the weapons there. There is all kinds of disinformation going on about the Israel war, so I take everything with a grain of salt.

    Calling for a stop to an ethnic cleansing campaign is not pro Russia. If anything, Israel's behavior has greatly increased the threat of harm to its civilians, and its image on the world stage may never recover. Same for the U.S. ever trying to claim moral superiority.

  • Bait

    Jump
  • TBH, I initially had a strange reaction to Discovery. It seemed to me like it was virtue-signalling and pandering to an audience to increase viewership or profit. Similar to how you sometimes see fake stock-photos of a business where they contains exactly one person from every ethnicity. I think the word I'm thinking of is "tokenism." I still watched it for a couple seasons, and it was decent. I didn't really realize at the time how prevalent and dangerous bigotry still was in the U.S.. Now I think it's probably good some shows and movies over-represent minorities.

  • IDK, I'm a leftist, and am skeptical about UBI because it's more of a free-market approach to solving a problems, rather than just directly solving problems. I.e. the government could just build more and better homeless housing, and expand section 8 to cover more of the cost and more people. I'm a bit afraid UBI would be used as an excuse to cut social programs, in a similar way that school vouchers are used to cut spending on education and leave families paying for what the vouchers don't cover.

  • I don't think Biden will do anything really. He is already making concessions by trying to push an extremely bad immigration bill in congress. His strategy for dealing with this stuff seems to be to make concessions, sending cases to the courts, and just wait for Texas and Republicans to move their attention to something else.

    I think Biden should activate the national guard and force them to stop their shenanigans, but I don't think he will.

    The Dems are playing the political game like they're in the 1990s, and the Reps are playing the game like they're in 1930s Germany.

  • AI is simply a broad field of research and a broad class of algorithms. It is annoying media keeps using the most general term possible to describe chatbots and image generators though. Like, we typically don't call Spotify playlist generators AI, even though they use recommendation algorithms, which are a subclass of AI algorithms.

  • Hmm, I suspect the pro-Russian Christian people you're seeing online are extremely-online people with mental issues, or are a part of Russia's disinfo campaigns, or both. Most of my family are evangelical Christians, and are not pro-Russia (but, are pretty crazy about other things). Many of my friends and associates are either Protestant or Catholic, and are not pro-Russia. I've never seen what you talk about online (I don't use Xitter, or TikTok), but have heard about some extremely far-right "Catholics" switching to "orthodox," and still, those people are an extremely-online, extremely small group of people, AFAIK.

    IDK WTF you're talking about with the prison rape shit, but it sounds very conspiratorial and homophobic. I could be ignorant, because I'm not too familiar with Russia's domestic history, but what you are saying sounds pretty outlandish. However, I agree that religion is often used as a tool of control by the state. I.e. "religion is the opium of the masses."

    Being against lethal aid to Ukraine could be about austerity, isolationist, or pacifist principles, but the politicians blocking the aid have no principles, and often advocate for violence elsewhere.

  • I don't think most regular Republican voters praise Russia, but many Republican politicians are anti-Ukraine aid, and support policies that could help Russia. I think these politicians are somehow influenced by Russia (money? kompromat? just simply knowing Russia has effective disinformation and conspiracy theory networks?).

  • Yeah, stopped at a gas station out in the middle of nowhere in west Texas, and the old woman at the cash register wouldn't ring up me and my GF because my GF was black. In 2020. A friend almost got in a fight at a bar out in the middle of nowhere in Texas because he had a UT bumper sticker on his truck, and they didn't like "liberals" there.

    But, the cities are pretty normal. Have seen police cars painted with rainbows for pride month. A church down the road from me flies a pride flag, etc.

  • Eh, I'm not sure what position Bezos has now. If I ran Amazon, I'd probably covertly support unionization of the entire workforce. I don't really care about a luxurious lifestyle, and don't plan on having kids to give an inheritance to, so yeah, I'd probably just give almost all away and buy a small farm to garden in and work on open source projects or something. Like, that's my dream. It would actually be really hard to figure out how to give all that money away. Could provide the initial funding to like 100,000 decently sized worker-coops I guess.

    Edit: I should say, I don't think most people care so little about luxury and money as I do. My problem is not so much about people having wealth (though wealth is a limited resources, so that does mean others will not have it), but my problem is what people do to get such wealth. It usually involves deceiving your network of associates and exploiting your employees. I do not think most people would be ok with forcing their employees to shit in bags.

  • I wonder what the strategy of this rhetoric and defiance is. I don't think it's just about immigration. I imagine they are trying to get favorable precedents set by the right-wing courts. I could also see, in the not too distant future, blue states defying a Republican-controlled federal government on things like a national abortion ban and anti-lgbt laws, so ideas and precedents normalized here could be applicable there.