Onihikage @ Onihikage @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

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It's frustrating that so many who even talk about this are apparently too chickenshit to say what it actually is. Israel is openly committing Genocide. History will not be kind to Benjamin Netanyahu or the IDF.

Probably a local credit union, provided it's FDIC insured and has decent terms of membership. Most credit unions aren't in the business of spying on the people that own them, their purpose is just to manage their clients' money and facilitate spending.

I think most would consider democracy to be the single issue to vote on. When one candidate has repeatedly said he'd be a dictator "for one day, and then stop" and actively argues in court that the position he's running for is immune to the rule of law, I'm voting in whatever way is most likely to result in his defeat. As much as I complain about the candidates and the shitty voting system, I cannot compromise on the right to vote.

My understanding is that Biden is trying to be the angel on Israel's shoulder because if he condemns them publicly then he loses the political capital to influence them at all. It's a kind of good cop/bad cop routine on an international scale.

We keep saying that blocking ads is a security feature, and it keeps being true.

Adding to sleepyTonia's comment, many flash games have been preserved through Flashpoint Archive, which is like an epic DRM-free Steam client for flash games (as well as other web game technologies, like the shockwave player). However, Flashpoint uses old flash player binaries that, as stated, may one day stop working as hardware and operating systems evolve. If that happens, it'll be great to have a replacement interpreter ready to go that can be compiled to run on newer tech.

At first blush, that sounds really complicated for the voter to understand what happens to their ballot. Potentially delegating part of their vote to one of the candidates? That's going to be a hard sell. Sure, the direct mechanics for voting seems simple, but the system that ballot would go into feels unlikely to lead to better satisfaction than STAR, and might even lead to less informed voters. Even reading your link several times, I'm still not sure I correctly understand how the delegated votes are supposed to work, because I keep going back to "Why would anyone want that?"

My takeaway is either what we value in a democratic voting system is significantly different in some key area, or I don't understand how the delegation in DYN is supposed to work, but I suspect it's the former. I'm not a political scientist or a voting system enthusiast though, I just happen to like STAR.

STAR voting offers the same benefit of "vote for as many as you want" without Approval Voting's drawback of being unable to rank your preferences. I have yet to find a better method. It is, of course, miles better than IRV, both in complexity to the voter (rate candidates 0-5 stars) and simplicity of tallying the result (two steps).

I've read that long COVID is mostly neurological

It really isn't.

The title does need updated, but I suspect it was accurate at the time of posting 23 hours ago. The article appears to have been updated at least twice, based on the URL.

They're really gonna mention Lego Rock Raiders without a single nod to the unofficially sanctioned and free remake?

A non-steam game can be launched through Steam on either device, but Steam doesn't sync game saves for non-Steam games, hence Toribor's use of syncthing. Once a sync job is set up for each game's save folder, it'll keep them synced about as well as Steam does for native games.

Make sure the seeds you buy are for local varieties of plants! Local grasses, flowers, trees, bushes, even so called weeds as long as they're native to the area! Weeds aren't real, we made it up; there is only native and invasive. All plants serve a purpose in their natural habitat!

I always advocate for STAR voting but anything is better than FPTP.

Also, all ballots should be printed, and they should be tallied by hand.

It's not even about selling you something, it's about selling you, period. They sell the user's attention to advertisers, and don't much care about anything else because anything else is too hard to quantify in a spreadsheet.

These days I mostly go for paid content like Nebula, alternative platforms like Odysee or PeerTube, or even Newgrounds - remember them? It's not always possible to avoid YouTube entirely since some creators I follow only have a presence there, but transitions like this take time.

I really hope he's cultivating at least one successor within the company to carry on his vision.

Unemployment is low because potential workers have either given up and stopped looking for work or are working literally anything because they will starve if they don't; neither option lends itself to satisfaction with the economy. Labor participation rates have only just barely gotten back to their pre-pandemic levels, but a lot of people burned any savings they had to keep their heads above water, so on the whole they're still further behind than they were 4 years ago, and they know it, but Krugman never cared to ask a real person, so he has no clue.

Low inflation is meaningless when economic mobility is lower than ever, with education and healthcare dropping in quality and availability while increasing in price much faster than the average. Most small businesses that went bankrupt due to pandemic half-measures have not reopened, because unlike billionaires, when regular people without an army of lawyers declare bankruptcy, they actually lose everything. In spite of all this, clueless clowns who barely know how to look at numbers on spreadsheets write articles wondering why regular people aren't satisfied with such a great economy, and concludes a better outcome was impossible.

His only mention of consumer prices is an aggregated consumer price index, which is a "mere" 19% increase over pre-pandemic levels, and from that he concludes people are dumb babies because wages rose by about the same amount. This take is particularly insulting because he has definitely seen this chart and the numbers it's based on:

If that's a great economy, I'm a firebreathing dragon.

It's artificially limited, but I don't think the number of housing units is necessarily how the limitation is imposed. You see, landlords aren't actually interested in tenants, they're interested in property values going up. Why? Because land and housing are legally considered capital, the value of which they can leverage for loans. That results in what we see happening in NYC and many other places, where apartments and retail spaces can lie vacant for years because the rent demanded by the owner is absurd, but to ask for less rent would lower the building's valuation. It's also why we have far more empty housing units than homeless people in this country, about 27 empty units for each homeless person. If these landlords were honestly participating in the market, or if housing wasn't considered capital, housing prices never would have gotten this high - and I suspect the same is true of the number of homeless.

The hyper-wealthy basically gave themselves a cheat code decades ago and have been abusing it to the detriment of markets and regular people ever since. We have a government body, the FTC, that's supposed to put a stop to this kind of market abuse, but the last time it really did its job at all was when it broke up Ma Bell forty years ago. For far too long it's been content to let corporations that are already far too big and have far too much influence over the market continue buying up their competitors or colluding to inflate bubbles.

I recently found Sideberry which looks like an improvement over TST, but I've been putting off switching to it because I would have to reorganize 431 tabs :')

Since this labour is likely to be farmed out to innocent people in developing countries

You don't quite seem to understand how easy it is to train these AI models, and because of that, you're missing a critical point - with open-source technologies like Stable Diffusion, which has models that can be refined and run on a consumer-grade graphics card, the people using models to generate images and the people creating and refining those models are the same people. People who want to generate brand new pokemon sprites can train a model on all the pokemon sprites until it looks good. A few absolute galaxy-brain nerds who want to generate MIDI spectrograms from a text description and convert the output into audio... can apparently do that. And of course, people who want to generate lots of hentai or photorealistic porn can create and fine-tune a model, or multiple models, all by themselves (I won't link any of these, but hundreds are readily available, and thousands exist in total)

In other words, people who already consume CSAM are the people working on models for generating CP, and a subset of those have definitely been trying to make it work with only legal images so that the model itself can be distributed and used without breaking any laws, maybe even hiding in plain sight pretending it's not for making CP. Someone else out there with a different set of fucked-up desires has probably trained a model on gore and snuff images and then used it to create "photos" of people they hate as mutilated messes. There's sick people of all kinds all over the place, and the jury's unfortunately still out on whether this new tool actually causes harm when used in such a manner, or if it's just the newest way they can express their deviance. We don't know yet.

But this genie is already out of the bottle. Banning the use of this technology for specific, narrow use cases just isn't going to be effective without banning AI image generation entirely, and we're past the point where that's feasible. Image generation is a powerful tool that's not going away; it's on us now to figure out what we really believe about harm, health, and personal freedom, and what we want a society with this tool to look like.

Personally, I'm of a mind that if all the data going into the model is legally obtained, anything generated should be considered artistic expression. A person had a thought, then put their thoughts into a tool, which made a picture of those thoughts. No matter how repulsive those thoughts were, I think throwing people in prison for that kind of expression is thought-crime. There's public obscenity at play, of course, but only once they take the step of showing it to other people. If it's just for themselves, and nobody else sees it, who is harmed? Even if it does turn out that it harms the person generating the images (which wouldn't surprise me), that makes it a health issue, like drugs or other addictions, not something to criminalize.