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2 yr. ago

  • Maybe he meant that or maybe his big lie is getting so big that he's jumped the shark. Either way, Trump should learn how to share a coherent thought if he's going to run his fucking mouth 24/7. It's not our job to figure out how to decode his demented ramblings.

  • Unfortunately Hamas hasn't held a single election since they were elected in 2006, and Netanyahu is looking similarly autocratic. The recent escalation is only going to make both sides more antagonistic.

    In other words, this shit ain't going away any time soon.

  • Should be gayer imo, maybe like rainbow wavy animated.

  • Kind of an aside but does anyone know how the Intel Arc cards are on Linux?

    I'd imagine that a lot of the driver problems aren't really as significant since you can use things like mesa and dxvk, but I don't really know.

  • I'm really sorry for your loss. It can be so crushing to lose a pet that you love. :(

  • The only mobile game that I ever really enjoyed was Game Dev Story by Kairosoft, and that was a long time ago.

    I'm sure good ones exist, but most mobile games seem overly simple or boring, and they often have annoying or borderline predatory business models.

  • The Balfour Declaration, which put the creation of Israel into play, was created by the British during WW1, at a time when the entire region was under the control of the Ottoman Empire.:

    His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

    It's obvious that Israel is the strongest and most strategically important ally that America has in the region today, nobody can deny that. Just like nobody can deny that Hamas, the ruling entity of Gaza for almost 15 years, is allied with and strategically important to Iran, Russia, and many of Israel and America's other big geological adversaries. Iran supported Hamas' recent terrorist attack on Israel because they understood that they, an Islamic theocracy, would benefit from the chaos of what appears to some as a religious war. Similarly, Russia wants chaos in the region in a desperate attempt to divert western military resources away from supporting Ukraine.

    To me, none of that makes the situation simpler.

    As for the clip you've linked, the first Arab-Israeli war was more than 20 years prior to that. And, taken in context, Biden was arguing against the Reagan administration's plans to arm Saudi Arabia, and to that point I'm not really convinced that he was wrong...

    As for claims of genocide, I'm afraid that cuts both ways:

    The original Charter identified Hamas as the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine and declares its members to be Muslims who "fear God and raise the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors". The charter states that "our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious" and calls for the eventual creation of an Islamic state in Palestine, in place of Israel and the Palestinian Territories,[3] and the obliteration or dissolution of Israel.

    The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.

    1988 Charter of Hamas

    So yeah, if you think the modern world's oldest geopolitical conflict is simple, then you're either way smarter than everyone else or you're mentally reducing the problem until it confirms your existing biases. Personally I think it's more complicated than you're making it out to be, which is why it hasn't been settled by 100 years of diplomacy and war.

  • You should try to talk to a doctor or psychiatrist about this habit, especially if it's beginning to bother you and affect your life in other ways.

    As for things you can do right away, how about sticking bandaids on your sores, this will help them heal and it'll also keep you away from the area. And don't wait until it gets bad, but even put bandaids on prematurely if it'll get you to stop compulsively messing with your skin.

    Another thing is to buy some basic skin care tools. As someone who has the habit of biting my nails, sometimes until they bleed or are painful, I know that biting them can lead to making them rough, which just leads to making me even more compelled to bite the rough bits. For me it can really become a cyclical problem that's also likely driven by anxiety and depression. But by clipping and filling my nails with proper tools I can quickly break the cycle, because my nails will start to generally feel better. So maybe you can do something similar with your skin by exfoliating and using lotion! It's worth a try!

    Finally I want to say that cannabis has been good for my personal type/level of anxiety, though I hesitate to recommend it because when though I don't find it addictive I think it maybe isn't great to recommend to someone who is experiencing addictive or compulsive behavior.

    In the end I think some combination of therapy, behavior pattern breaking and maybe drugs if necessary, might be able to help you get away from self-harming compulsive behavior. Good luck!

  • This isn’t… COMPLICATED.

    Honestly that's a pretty strange thing to say about one of history's most complicated and oldest conflicts. If it was as simple as random dudes online think it is, don't you think this issue would have been somehow resolved by now?

    Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have tribal roots in the region dating back thousands of years.

    The region also has religions significance to all three of the big western religions.

    And to make it even more complicated, the region has been under the control of multiple empires over the last 3000 years: waring tribes, Egyptians, Assyrians, Romans, Byzantines, the second Muslim caliphate, the Ottomans, the British, and I'm sure I'm skipping more. Israel and Palestine as nations where effectively created at around the same time post WW1 (see the Mandate for Palestine and the Balfour Declaration).

    So sure.. It's possible that you're so much smarter than everyone else that one of the world's oldest conflicts is trivial to you, OR, just maybe it's a little bit more complicated than you and some other people let on...

  • They didn't ignore that, in fact Biden gave a speech condemning it.

    Turns out stabbing children is already illegal, so what else needs to be done other than throw the murderer in prison for life.

  • But then you need to factor in that the rights holders would need to agree to that. AI companies don't get to simply decide what peoples work is worth, they need a licensing agreement. (Otherwise they need to successfully argue that what they're doing is fair use.)

    And when you add it up and realize that "AI" is a black box based off a training dataset of thousands (if not millions) of pieces of copyrighted artwork, all the sudden you start to see the profit margins on your magical art machine (POOF!) disappear. Oh, won't someone think about the tech venture capitalists?!

  • If you look at a hundred paintings of faces and then make your own painting of a face, you’re not expected to pay all the artists that you used to get an understanding of what a face looks like.

    That's because I'm a human being. I'm acting on my own volition and while I've observed artwork, I've also had decades of life experience observing faces in reality. Also importantly, my ability to produce artwork (and thus my potential to impact the market) is limited and I'm not owned or beholden to any company.

    "AI" "art" is different in every way. It is being fed a massive dataset of copyrighted artwork, and has no experiences or observations of its own. It is property, not a fee or independent being. And also, it can churn out a massive amount of content based on its data in no time at all, posing a significant challenge to markets and the livelihood of human creative workers.

    All of these are factors in determining whether it's fair to use someone else's copyrighted material, which is why it's fine for a human being to listen to a song and play it from memory, but it's not fine for a tape recorder to do the same (bootlegging).

    Btw, I don’t think this is a fair use question, it’s really a question of whether the generated images are derivatives of the training data.

    I'm not sure what you mean by this. Whether something is derivative or not is one of the key questions used to determine whether the free use of someone else's copyrighted work is fair, as in fair use.

    AI training is using people's copyrighted work, and doing so almost exclusively without knowledge, consent, license or permission, and so that's absolutely a question of fair use. They either need to pay for the rights to use people's copyright work OR they need to prove that their use of that work is "fair" under existing laws. (Or we need to change/update/overhaul the copyright system.)

    Even if AI companies were to pay the artists and had billions of dollars to do it, each individual artist would receive a tiny amount, because these datasets are so large.

    The amount that artists would be paid would be determined by negotiation between the artist (the rights holder) and the entity using their work. AI companies certainly don't get to unilaterally decided what people's art licenses are worth, and different artists would be worth different amounts in the end. There would end up being some kind of licensing contract, which artists would have to agree to.

    Take Spotify for example, artists don't get paid a lot per stream and it's arguably not the best deal, but they (or their label) are still agreeing to the terms because they believe it's worth it to be on those platforms. That's not a question of fair use, because there is an explicit licensing agreement being made by both parties. The biggest artists like Taylor Swift negotiate better deals because they make or break the platform.

    So back to AI, if all that sounds prohibitively expensive, legally fraught, and generally unsustainable, then that's because it probably is--another huge tech VC bubble just waiting to burst.

  • Honestly it's probably not... Estimates aside, who would even want to buy Twitter in its current incarnation?

  • Well, why shouldn't they have to pay artists a license to use their work, especially in ways that could drastically affect the market?

    There is a thing called copyright, and the exception to that rule is called fair use.

    Artwork is copyrighted by default and, under the law, to use someone else's copyrighted works requires a license (that is usually bought). Whether AI training counts as fair use is the question and ultimately that is the point that will need to be proved/justified.

    So again, what makes AI "fair use" and why shouldn't companies have to pay a license for their use of copyrighted artwork?

  • The President has limited authority and cannot make laws unilaterally. For sensible AI regulations and laws we will certainly need Congress to do its job, and clearly they're pretty damn bad at that.

  • Brings a whole new meaning to "country roads, take me home."

  • I've been thinking a lot about this. I think a fedi-connected, self-hosted Bandcamp alternative would be huge for discoverability and helping fans keep tabs on new releases, tour dates, etc... As a musician it'd be great to be able to have fans be alerted right away when you post a new track or tour date, and as a fan it'd be awesome to be able to follow artists that you like from other fedi-compatible platforms.

    I'm not a web dev myself so I don't really know for sure, but I think the biggest challenge is probably not even content delivery but keeping track of ownership/library. It's really nice that you can log into Bandcamp and access a library of all of the albums/songs that you've previously bought, and I'm not sure how something like that could be emulated in a federated way. It might be possible, I just don't know how!

    Also it'd be nice to be able to stream your library, and when your library is distributed across multiple federated servers I don't know if that becomes more difficult to implement.

    Still, I'm with you. I'd love to see a federated alternative to Bandcamp, even if it takes some years to reach maturity or feature parity.

  • Also, it’s such a uniquely North American thing to downplay the invasion of other countries.

    (a) I'm not downplaying the invasion of other countries, so right off the bat you're mischaracterizing what I'm saying.

    If anything, you are downplaying Trump's involvement in American wars in the Middle East, which he may not have started, but he was certainly a willing participant in them. Droning people with impunity and less accountability than ever before, and even assassinating an Iranian general in January 2020--an act that could have very easily escalated into a direct conflict with Iran and its allies.

    Also it's funny that you bring up the MOAB, because from what I remember it was Trump, not Bush, who dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan in 2017; resulting in the largest single explosive attack by America since the dropping of the atomic bombs during WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017Nangarharairstrike

    (b) Downloading invasions is very obviously not a "uniquely North American thing". See: Russian downplaying of the invasion of Ukraine, Japan downplaying the history of their invasions of Asia, British attitudes towards imperialism and the pillaging of cultural artifacts from all over the world, Chinese annexation of Tibet and the literal filtering of information regarding it, and so on for all of human history.

    Trump and Bush were both awful presidents and human beings, but I maintain that Trump was worse for America, for democracy, and for the Earth.

  • spreading COVID was more passive and the result of a lot of idiots ignoring good practice. One is negligence, while the other is malice.

    When world leaders like Trump (1) ignore pandemic planning, (2) lie about the seriousness and gravity of the situation during the crucial early days and weeks of the pandemic, (3) turn pandemic precautions and public safety measures into just another pointless item in their culture war, and (4) spend just about every waking moment scapegoating scientists, fomenting conspiracy theories, and intentionally muddying the waters, it's can no longer be considered "negligence".

    Right from the guy at the top, the Trump administration made calculated political decisions and came up with talking points that actively made COVID-19 worse, and we are still feeling the effects of it today. The pandemic may be "over" when it comes to public policy, but an incalculable number of people all over the world are still having health problems as a result of the virus (which is now endemic to humanity), and we are still very much in the middle of the economic fallout with still no end in sight.

    Whether COVID was worse than the War on Terror is debatable and subjective (I'm not exactly a fan of either, frankly), but there's no doubt in my mind that the effects of COVID on global health and economics were much more wide-spread.

  • Listen, I'm not really into quantifying human suffering like that, so let's just suffice to say that both Trump and Bush were fucking terrible human beings who did lasting damage to the world.

    It's also very much worth noting that Trump was a willing and active participant in American wars in the Middle East, and he did so with impunity and with less accountability than his predecessors. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/obama-drones-trump-killings-count/ (Plus he assassinated an Iranian general in Iraq without the knowledge and consent of the Iraqi government, which is arguably a war crime and could have easily escalated into a war with Iran.)