31337

joined 1 year ago
[–] 31337 1 points 2 hours ago

No, just wood.

[–] 31337 1 points 4 hours ago

My friend just hooks his laptop up to his TV, connects to his VPN, and plays popcorntime (streaming torrents). He used to use streaming sites, but those have been getting taken down left and right.

[–] 31337 1 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Most fireplaces are just for looks, and don't heat much at all. Wood stoves work a lot better. I think a cooler chimney would increase creosote build-up and negatively affect draft.

[–] 31337 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I think I've heard there are a lot of genetically male, but born female people in sports. I wonder if the same people are against those people playing in sports.

Idk how many transphobic people just care about specific issues. There's a lot of "groomer" rhetoric, hate, and general disgust. It's easy to get people to hate what they don't understand; and a lot of media is trying their hardest to cultivate hate against trans people to create an out-group, so they can control the in-group.

[–] 31337 1 points 7 hours ago

Idk about this. I think most people care if their partners, sisters, daughters, and themselves can get healthcare that may involve an abortion. I think a lot of people do vote on vibes, and being "weird" is damaging. The Republicans are the party that won't stop talking about transgender people; I don't recall Harris mentioning transgendered people once.

I kinda agree with most of your other points. Economic well-being is what people vote on first and foremost. Dunno if celebrity endorsements actually hurt though. A thing to note is that, barring a tech advancement, recession, or depression, prices don't generally decrease. I.e. wages (and government assistance) needs to rise at about the same rate as inflation (preferably more than).

Harris lost because she was seen as not going to change much of anything from Biden. She even conceded to false narratives of the right (such as immigration), instead of providing an alternative narrative that could inspire people. The economic changes she ran on were uninspiring, and I'm not sure they would've helped most people (mostly people don't start small businesses, or even really have a desire to; not sure if downpayment assistance wouldn't just increased prices and fees).

[–] 31337 6 points 1 day ago

Meh, I would've given 3/5 stars to U.S. democracy since the Voting Rights Act. Stars taken away for FPTP, gerrymandering, campaign finance, "lobbying," and the electoral college. I believe we're going to go to 0/5 stars with completely rigged elections rather than just manufacturing consent and lightly tipping the scales like they've been doing.

[–] 31337 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, I think this could be the end of free and fair elections in the U.S., and there's no coming back from that without a revolution. Don't get me wrong, I don't think most of us will directly be killed by this change; our lives will just be shittier. It'll be like living in Russia. Given how utterly incompetent the administration is looking, and the things they say they're going to do (mass deportation of a significant part of our workforce, blanket tariffs, gutting social safety-nets), we may speed-run an economic and societal collapse. That could sow the seeds for a horrible and bloody revolution.

Or, maybe I'm wrong and the important institutions will somehow hold against a christo-fascist party controlling all branches of the federal government and a president with immunity. If there are still are free and fair elections, then congress could block a lot of things in 2026, and start repairing some of the damage in 2028.

Still, it does not bode well that the U.S. elected these people in the first place, and at best, the U.S. will slowly crumble for decades.

[–] 31337 7 points 2 days ago

If I understand anarcho-syndicalism correctly, anarcho-syndicalism involves federalism.

[–] 31337 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah, the employee-employer relationship is exploitative in itself. The sex industry has similar problems with exploitation as other industries have. Within a capitalist society, I suppose unions and worker cooperatives can mitigate some issues.

[–] 31337 12 points 2 days ago

Do you remember when it was commonly advised to use fake names and birthdays on online forms, and when "spyware" was a term?

[–] 31337 2 points 2 days ago

I've heard it said that chattel slavery was more expensive than it would've been to just pay people poverty wages and let them fend for their own food and shelter. Dunno if it's true or not. I imagine it also damages the mental health of the slave owners, and society as a whole.

[–] 31337 2 points 2 days ago

Some men, you just can't reach.

 

I'm a bit confused why capitalists support Trump when he plans on doing stuff that I think would destroy the economy. Thinking of mass deportations and high, broad tarrifs.

I'm not sure if:

  1. They just don't care because they have enough wealth to weather anything.
  2. They don't think Trump will actually do these things.
  3. They're dumb and think it won't hurt the economy.
  4. They plan on trading wealth for more direct power. I.e. becoming oligarchs.
  5. They have other ideologies (racism, Ayn Rand-ism, accelerationism, Dark Enlightenment, etc) that they prioritize higher than obtaining as much wealth as possible.

Or maybe some combination of the above, or something else entirely.

Edit: by "capitalists," I mean the "elite" like Musk and his other billionaire donors. But I guess it's a good question for smaller donors as well.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by 31337 to c/[email protected]
 

On Tuesday, the New York Times published a long interview with Donald Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, who Googled an online definition of fascism before saying of his former boss:

Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators—he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.

Also on Tuesday, the Atlantic published a report that Trump allegedly said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

The revelations have dominated discussions on Fox News, and prompted two-dozen GOP senators to call for Tr—haha, just kidding.

Instead, Democrats and their supporters once again contend with a muted reaction from the media, the public, and politicians, who seem unmoved by Trump’s association with the F-word, no matter how many times Kamala Harris says “January sixth.”

One exception was Matt Drudge, the archconservative linkmonger who has been hard on Trump, who ran a photo of the Führer himself. This proved the rule, argued Times (and former Slate) columnist Jamelle Bouie: “genuinely wild world where, on trump at least, matt drudge has better news judgment than most of the mainstream media.”

Debates about Trump and fascism have been underway for a decade now, and applying the label seems unlikely to convince or motivate anyone. But the lack of alarm underlines a deeper question that doesn’t require a dictionary to engage in: Why do so few Americans, including many on the left, seem to take seriously the idea that Trump would use a second presidency to abuse the law to hurt his enemies?

Maybe it’s because Democrats have studiously avoided confronting Trump about some of the most controversial, damning policy choices of his first term, or the most radical campaign promise for his second. You simply can’t make the full case against Trump—or a compelling illustration of his fascist tendencies—without talking about immigration. Immigration was the key to Trump’s rise and the source of two of his most notorious presidential debacles, the Muslim ban and the child separation policy. Blaming immigrants for national decline is a classic trope of fascist rhetoric; rounding our neighbors up by the millions for expulsion is a proposal with few historical precedents, and none of them are good...

 
 

"Judge shopping for me, not for thee"

 

"Fossil-fuel billionaire Kelcy Warren is about to land a knockout punch on Greenpeace..."

 

AI firms propose 'personhood credentials' to combat online deception, offering a cryptographically authenticated way to verify real people without sacrificing privacy—though critics warn it may empower governments to control who speaks online.

 

I use Google Shopping (the “Shopping” tab on Google) to see if local stores carry certain products, what they cost, how far away each store is, etc. It seems to mostly search national or large regional chains, but it was still pretty useful.

Is there any alternative to this (in the US)? The “nearby” function has unfortunately got shittier and shittier over the past year or so. It's gotten less “deterministic," just mixing results from local stores with e-commerce stores, further reducing usefulness.

 

I don’t remember how I heard of it, but just binged-watched it over the past few days. Ratings seem a little bit above average, but I found it very enjoyable. I liked that the mood oscillates between modern comedy and tragic comedy; and that it seems to implicitely critique modern society. The series almost feels like an allegory (or perhaps I’m reading too much in to it).

 

I've recently noticed this opinion seems unpopular, at least on Lemmy.

There is nothing wrong with downloading public data and doing statistical analysis on it, which is pretty much what these ML models do. They are not redistributing other peoples' works (well, sometimes they do, unintentionally, and safeguards to prevent this are usually built-in). The training data is generally much, much larger than the model sizes, so it is generally not possible for the models to reconstruct random specific works. They are not creating derivative works, in the legal sense, because they do not copy and modify the original works; they generate "new" content based on probabilities.

My opinion on the subject is pretty much in agreement with this document from the EFF: https://www.eff.org/document/eff-two-pager-ai

I understand the hate for companies using data you would reasonably expect would be private. I understand hate for purposely over-fitting the model on data to reproduce people's "likeness." I understand the hate for AI generated shit (because it is shit). I really don't understand where all this hate for using public data for building a "statistical" model to "learn" general patterns is coming from.

I can also understand the anxiety people may feel, if they believe all the AI hype, that it will eliminate jobs. I don't think AI is going to be able to directly replace people any time soon. It will probably improve productivity (with stuff like background-removers, better autocomplete, etc), which might eliminate some jobs, but that's really just a problem with capitalism, and productivity increases are generally considered good.

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