EldritchFeminity @ EldritchFeminity @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Posts

3

Comments

1,230

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'd prefer them to be suffering on the outside as well.

Don't forget that Trump and Epstein used to fly on Trump's private jet as well, along with the young contestants of Trump Beauty Pagents, who Trump says he liked to "surprise" by opening the door of the changing rooms at the pagents.

What I meant by generational line wasn't genetics, but location and culture. Many European countries wouldn't make the top 10 list for the biggest states in the US. If you look at a map of the US, Maine is about the same size as Portugal. The distance from Rome to Brussels, for example, is about 100 miles less than Boston to Altanta. So if you live in southern France, and your parents moved there from northern France, that's like moving from one end of a state to the other. An American visiting family across the country would be like if you went to visit relatives in Latvia or something (in terms of distance). Americans have such a different sense of scale when it comes to distance. And then you add in the amount of immigration that the US has (or at least had historically), and you get very diverse groups that, while they are American, may be first-generation Americans whose grandparents still live across the world in different countries. I myself am 100% American, but like 50% French and 45% Portugese due to my grandparents being immigrants on both sides.

The culture here is weird as well, because it's both homogeneous and not at the same time, and I think that massive scale of distance plays a part in that. Because you could listen to somebody from Boston, NYC, London, and somebody with a southern drawl, and you'd swear that they're all from different countries despite everybody speaking English because of the difference in dialect/accent. Oddly enough, I took French in school from a Belgian immigrant, so if I still spoke it, I'd have a bit of a Belgian accent (enough that people picked up on it in Montreal and Paris when I was a kid, at least), and I'd say the difference between Boston English and New York English is about the same as Belgian French to Parisian French, while a Boston accent to a Southern drawl is more like Quebecois French to European French. The distance from Brussels to Paris is less than from Boston to NYC. And the same goes for culture. We all eat Mac and Cheese, but Cajun food is specific to a "small" area of the southern US because the spices and ingredients simply don't grow in other parts of the US. And then you add in stuff like immigrant owned restaurants, and it gets even more varied. And as you go across the country, you can see stuff like massive architectural differences in the way houses are built. New England houses largely look like houses from the UK (with the occasional Slavic style house popping up here and there in my experience), while the south and the west have very different styles. And the reason that New England wouldn't look out of place in Europe is because the culture there is very much influenced by those European roots. When people immigrated here, they brought their culture with them, and many settled into little enclaves of fellow immigrants from their country. Everybody speaks English, but you know when you're in an Italian neighborhood in NYC or an Irish neighborhood in Boston. Many places are starting to put both Spanish and English on things like road signs (especially in the south near Mexico), but I've seen cities where roads are marked in both English and Chinese due to the large amount of Chinese immigrants to those cities.

The US is such a weird situation as a country that I don't think there's anything you can compare it to. It's like that 10 year period in Japanese history where they went from feudal fiefdoms to a countrywide rail network, electricity, and an army armed with gatling guns supplied by the US. There's no real frame of reference to draw parallels to.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by why this stuff matters, but the stuff that you'd be generating with AI for a game wouldn't be a loading screen or something - it would be assets. Character models, weapons, buildings, textures, voices, that's the kind of stuff that companies want to generate with AI. Right now, you can buy stock assets to use, and that's where all the garbage asset flips come from, but companies want to replace employees with software that makes their own assets for them for cheap. Replace the people who make games with software that spits out gacha products. But if they aren't protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can't do anything about it.

I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it's being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.

Edit: Going back and reading through the article, I see that they were straight up putting in AI generated images into the game as skins and loading screens and stuff. These also fall under the asset flip thing, especially if they're so obvious that they have six fingers like the zombie Santa. The same goes for their social media promotional material. You can just straight up use CoD's ads for your own game and they can't do anything about it.

People are upset by the use of it because of the poor quality, and, as I said, these companies want to replace the people who make games with software that churns out slop to consume. They think of gamers as pigs at a trough and developers as leeches stealing their hard earned profits.

Unless they're into that.

But this isn't about kink shaming foot fetishists - it's about the power dynamic and bruising Trump's ego. It's about as NSFW as you can get without getting into major trouble. Showing dommy mommy fElon in latex holding a leash and Trump on his knees wearing a pup mask on TVs in a government office would be hilarious and amazing, but I don't know if you'd survive long enough to laugh about it.

That, and drones are both small and therefore harder to detect - especially flying close to sea level - and they can be remote controlled, which allows them to move erratically, making them much harder targets to hit. There's definitely a reason that countries are looking into things like lasers and blasts of air to knock them out of the sky instead of just filling the area with a lot of bullets.

It's also a sample of what asymmetric warfare will look like. Militia groups can now buy or make their own loitering and guided munitions on the cheap. They won't have anywhere near the range or capacity of the military grade stuff, but a remote-controlled flying pressure cooker still blows up well enough.

We've had these for decades now. They're called CIWS, and they're capable of taking missiles out of the sky and turning inflatable dinghies into flotsam. They're mounted on every aircraft carrier in the world - both US and otherwise - and we've fielded trailer mounted variants for at least 20 years. They were using them in Iraq to blow mortar rounds out of the air.

We have automated systems on vehicles capable of identifying a tank round traveling 1,700 meters per second via radar, figure out whether it's going to hit or miss the vehicle, and fire an explosive at it to neutralize it if it is, all within a span of about 300 milliseconds.

The biggest issues with drones are largely man portable solutions and things that don't send thousands of rounds of lead into the sky to rain down on a population center. Drones are small enough to fly indoors and cheap enough to be deployed in swarms. Figuring out how to counter those aspects is probably where the most energy is going to be spent.

But they'll also toe the party line, no matter what that line is or who's drawing it. I've known enough "I'm a Republican. I vote for the nominee" conservatives in my life to know that.

At the height of its power, the Nazi party made up less than that percentage of the population of Germany. It doesn't take much to ruin it for everyone.

Case in point: US President Donald Trump, whose approval rating has historically hovered around 30%.

Those of us with front row seats to the shitshow hope you're right, because even just last week, my dad was saying, "It could never happen here!" when I brought up how the playbook Trump is using is the exact same one that Hitler used.

The War Thunder community has entered the chat and leaked a classified document

On the one hand, as a country of immigrants, there are tons of places where communities settled and brought their culture with them and so have a strong feeling of connection to their ancestry despite their culture today being completely different. The French Quarter of New Orleans comes to mind. On the other hand, we also kinda traded tradition for consumerism. We lack a real sense of history and culture of our own, making it easy to connect more with our hereditary culture than our country's.

You can also add to this the ease modern technology has brought in communicating with people across the globe. Americans are probably more likely than just about any other country to have distant family connections in other countries that they are in contact with. If you're French, you probably come from a generational line of French people who lived not far from you (relatively speaking). By comparison, as a kid, me and my parents went on vacation once to spend a week with some distant relatives of ours in Scotland because we have connections to a specific family castle there.

Or the day before

As somebody who was barely sentient when Clinton was in office and grew up under Bush Jr., I've seen the writing on the wall since I was old enough to understand the concept of sexuality.

I can't say I expected blatant Nazism and a fascist coup back then, but I remember when we had to make up a brand new word that meant "I'm a straight man who also happens to wash their hair and like dressing well" because that was enough to make people assume you were gay. And if people thought you were gay, it could cost you your career.

The slide started under Reagan but truly accelerated when Nixon showed the Republicans that big government could be good for them, too. My entire life, the two guiding principles of conservative philosophy have been hatred and control. American society has always had issues with deeply rooted bigotry.

They've gone full mask off, which is why there's the sudden backlash. The hate speech rules now include a section that explicitly says that it's okay to call LGBTQ people mentally ill. They're the only group with a specific carve-out in the rules saying that it's okay to post hate speech about them.

Depends on whether you have an Android or iPhone for 99% of people. Or, they use an email account that their ISP provider created for them when they signed up.

They want a backdoor so they can use it, but so can everyone else if they know where it is. In some ways, that makes it worse than having no encryption at all because it gives you the illusion of safety when in reality, if people know how to jiggle the handle of your door the right way, they can walk right into your living room at any time.

Yeah, I don't think it's some long-running scheme to get Trump into power or whatever. More that he happened to be the right idiot on the payroll when the shit hit the fan.

Trump's ties to Russia have been known forever. The FBI has been trying to pin him for his ties to Russian crime organizations for decades, with all the "gifts" of yachts and planes that they've given him and all the real estate that they own in Trump Towers and the like.

I think he just happened to be there when all the greed and flaws in our system finally broke under the weight of actual schemes to foster extremism in the population for various reasons and the short-sightedness of corporate interests looking to wring the country dry.

I'm in Massachusetts and can report much the same here. Outside the cities, there's plenty of MAGA maniacs. You could see "Trump 2020" flags still up all throughout Biden's term in spots.

Half of the people who voted*

Trump got about the same number of votes this time as he did in the previous election (marginally less, I believe).

It makes little difference to point out, but it's good to remember that the Dems are a bunch of feckless corporate shills who lost the support of their voters, and about a third to half the country simply doesn't vote.

Trump is a symptom and the end result of deeply systemic and cultural issues here, and as an American, I hope you guys make it hurt. Maybe then we'll wake up to the problems here. I doubt it, but at least the economic collapse here will hopefully spare the rest of the world from a dementia patient with daddy Putin's leash on his collar swinging the biggest military budget in the world around like he's got something to compensate for.