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EldritchFemininity

@ EldritchFeminity @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Posts
1
Comments
503
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Punish the Democrats, she says

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  • Since when? I've literally never heard it used in that context except for your claim here that it means...corpo Dems I guess? Anything to the right of your views I could understand - that's how Grad works and why they call socialists fascists or conservatives. For not being communist enough. Hence why I refer to them as Blue MAGA. That, and the fact that they outright harassed Blahaj on our own server to the point of defederating to protect the users. Again, because we weren't Communist enough for them. They see little difference between most forms of leftists and conservatives.

    And what the fuck does any of that have to do with being opposed to genocide? That's just common sense. The only people that I've seen who aren't opposed to the genocide in Gaza are racists and politicians/companies who are gargling Israeli nuts for $20.

    I'm not even a Democrat. Milquetoast centrists and moderate conservatives slurping corporate dollars are not for me. I vote Dem for the few actual leftists among the party and the rare independents who are forced to work with them and because the only other choice is hatred and racism except when MAGA isn't just outright stealing from the people.

    You can fuck all the way off.

  • Australia’s teen social media ban is a flop. But there’s no joy in ‘I told you so’

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  • That's an issue with any form of information sharing, though. Your local library is full of false information as well, whether that's because it's outdated or because you live somewhere like the US where all school curriculum books have to be approved by a Texas based group per federal law.

    Lies spread faster than the truth, and the internet is great at spreading information.

  • Punish the Democrats, she says

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  • Isn't that just Dixiecrats/Dixie Dems then? AKA former Confederates.

    I use it because of the extremism of the MAGA crowd, not the conservatism. Not like Horseshoe Theory, but that extremists on the leftist side could have fallen down the MAGA rabbit hole instead under different life circumstances, and that they can show similar behaviors in "purity test" attitudes, etc. Not that they're terrorists like the MAGA crowd, but that they should probably log off and touch grass once and a while.

    Not something to be used wildly, but towards those who show 4chan-like behavior.

  • Punish the Democrats, she says

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  • This isn't a zero sum game and this isn't about defending a president who can at best be said to have kept the ship afloat and recovered some of the economic damage caused by Trump's COVID response, nor the shitty option B the Dems forced on us without a primary. All of the above can be terrible. That's always an option.

    You see one jersey or the other, I saw two jerseys with twice the players on the horizon. The policy is the same now, but in 2024 during the election? When the guy who idolizes war mongers like Putin and who used to read Hitler's speeches before bed (according to the biography of an ex-wife), and who had previously said about the Middle East that he wanted to "nuke the sand into glass" said that he wanted to invade Gaza and put a carrier just off the coast, I fully believed that the strip would be gone and the people who lived there a footnote in the history books written by Israel and the US by now.

    Both suck. Both support genocide. But one was talking about accelerating it by an order of magnitude that didn't leave nukes off the table. If they hadn't replaced the big red button in the Oval Office with one that orders a diet coke, he would've slammed it the first chance he got.

  • Punish the Democrats, she says

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  • Says the judgemental accusation throwing nut job. I'm a socialist with no love for the Democrats, only people who actually care about making things better.

    Where did I ever imply in my comment that I think genocide is good? I merely explained that many people used the "both sides support genocide" as an argument for not voting or voting for Trump. Just like the weirdos who voted for Trump instead of Hillary in 2016 because actively supporting that dumpster-fire was somehow the best choice in their mind after Bernie got shafted by the Dems in the primary. Or the "both sides" centrism that's actually just conservatism in a mask.

    It was a campaign to sow voter disenfranchisement into progressives. And it worked. I saw it online, and I saw it in real life. That's why they asked you who you voted for. Because actual people decided that the best course of action when forced to choose between genocide and genocide with an extra side of evil was to throw a tantrum, vote for neither and let somebody else choose which of the two would run the country, and then shame anybody who did vote for Harris for voting for genocide.

  • Punish the Democrats, she says

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  • Because it means you at least tried to mitigate the harm. Most people who took that stance said that people shouldn't bother voting at all because voting for either was supporting genocide.

  • Punish the Democrats, she says

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  • And yet a large portion of them don't vote because of what you said in your previous comment. They say that their vote won't matter because nothing will change, and therefore don't vote.

    If we could convince them to vote out the Republicans and then hold the Democratic party over the fire until we can replace them with actually competent candidates (third party or not, we should remove parties period and enact ranked choice imo), then we might have a chance. But no conversation ever gets past the first hurdle of "vote blue no matter who won't change anything."

  • Punish the Democrats, she says

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  • I mean, Trump at this time did say that he was going to put American boots on the ground in Gaza and pave it over to put up a luxury beach resort, so I wouldn't say that they're literally the same on this, but it's a measure between actively supporting genocide and actively supporting and taking part in said genocide through direct military action.

    Both parties love Israeli money, one just also happens to be run by a man who would love to wipe non-white ethnicities off the planet and build more towers to his inflated ego where they once lived.

  • Punish the Democrats, she says

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  • Ironically, I use Blue MAGA to refer to people like those Grads. If they had hit 4chan before reading communist theory, they probably would've ended up on the other end of the spectrum.

  • Data Finds Republicans are Obsessed with Searching for Transgender Porn

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  • I swear Pornhub has released a similar report in the past that did check out the same way. And the same with gay porn.

  • Data Finds Republicans are Obsessed with Searching for Transgender Porn

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  • Republicans don't believe that FtM people exist. In their minds, they're just delusional women who wish they were men, but it makes perfect sense to them that women wish they were men. It would be weirder to them to hear that not all women wish they were men. It's completely part of the sexism and patriarchy.

    The reason that they're so obsessed with trans women by comparison is that it goes against their entire worldview. A man who wants to be a woman? Why would anyone ever want to be a woman?! There's also the bigotry and everything else, of course, but the fact that it defies what they see as the natural order or hierarchy of the sexes drives them crazy.

  • Trust me bro!

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  • Por qué no los dos?

    Opt out on one account, use another as poison. If you're gonna do this, I'd say move all your code to a new account and use the older account to poison - that way they can't filter the bad out by account age.

  • Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions

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  • You were thinking logically about a normal production chain. In that case, QA or whoever says "This is wrong, rework it and correct the issue" and that's that. With AI, it does the whole thing over again and may or may not come back with the same issue or an entirely new one.

  • Charlie Kirk’s ‘mentor’ and father of modern cheerleading dies after falling while playing pickleball

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  • I've heard it said that pickleball is for former tennis players. And I think there's plenty of truth there. It's a relatively low impact sport that requires similar skills.

    It's honestly a great sport for older people - less risk of injury compared to similar sports, doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment (although there're plenty of companies making a killing nowadays), and it helps build and maintain things like hand-eye coordination.

    There are tons of towns near me that are replacing their tennis courts with pickleball courts. The sport just supports a wider range of people than tennis and you can get two pickleball courts out of one tennis court if I remember correctly.

  • Surge in Systemd forks after the latest changes

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  • California, New York, Texas, Brazil, the UK, I think at least 2 more states as well...this is only the beginning. Everybody is jumping on the surveillance state/data broker hype train.

    My question is when will governments attempt to pass stupid and impossible laws like requiring ISPs to verify your age before you can connect to the internet.

  • Do you feel that use of generative AI and LLMs is ever justifiable? If so, when and where? If not, why not?

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  • Sorry it took so long to get back to this, as they say, "Life, uh, gets in the way."

    I had to go and check the AI communities I have blocked because I could've sworn that I had multiple of different corporate GenAI blocked from DB0, but I stand corrected - I have only a handful of Stable Diffusion ones. Of course, I was also under the impression that Stable Diffusion is made by OpenAI or one of their competitors, so I blocked them instantly on that alone when I was largely blocking AI communities to clean up my homepage and to avoid the kinds of people those communities usually attract. There's a certain kind of person with a "corporate fact cat/middle manager" attitude that can plague GenAI communities that drives me crazy because they think that generating an image takes as much skill and effort (or even more) than creating one by hand.

    That definitely does change my opinion on Stable Diffusion, but it still comes down to a "it depends." And as you so rightly put it, my problem is a capitalism issue, not a GenAI issue. My perspective is that not all of us are so lucky as to live in Ireland, which I believe has recently implemented a UBI specifically for artists, and so until capitalism is dealt with, any impacts of that take precedence - including those created as a consequence. Just because something is useful doesn't mean we should be dumping it as fuel on to the fire of capitalism because capitalism is what's actually burning us. Local models using images sourced with permission from the artists is a great thing. People getting paid to make things specifically to be used for training - awesome! A win in my book. In a world where artists have a guaranteed roof over their heads and food in their bellies, I do not care at all about whether or not their work is used to train AI. I bet artists can do some really cool stuff with GenAI as well - it's basically a bigger, more advanced version of the same concept that makes the Gaussian Blur tool in Photoshop work.

    This is why I'm also pro-piracy when it comes to corporations - you aren't stealing from the workers, they got paid to make the thing, not when it gets sold - and why my opinion is "it depends." I'm completely willing to go ahead and change my opinion once something stops hurting workers and becomes nothing but a benefit now that it's out of the hands of the billionaires. There's an interesting conversation to be had over the...I can't think of a good word, ownership of identity maybe? Ownership of characters created to represent yourself at any rate (somebody coming along and saying "this is me" about a character you made as an avatar of yourself feels bad), and there's a country in Europe that made an interesting choice in response to deep fakes, CSAM, and revenge porn created by AI by giving every citizen the copyright to their own face, body, and voice, but that's a whole different conversation.

    And this concept right here:

    It assumes everyone has enough time to train on making art, which most wage-slaves undoubtedly do not. It's an inherently classist argument to assume everyone has the free time to master any artistic skill.

    Has a sense of capitalistic entitlement in it. You feel that you deserve the product of art but don't respect the people who do put in the time and effort learning how to make it enough to properly compensate them for the time that they spent learning the profession. One, because they could have spent that time learning a different trade - programming, becoming an electrician or maybe an airplane mechanic or whatever - and two, because those who do art professionally almost universally talk about how they almost never have time to make art for themselves - stuff that they want to make just for them. And art (alongside the humanities) is a universally disrespected skill, with many commission based artists working for below minimum wage. It's like arguing that because you don't have the time or money to make a car, you deserve to be able to freely take cars from people's driveways and use them as a form of public transit. In an ideal world where the US isn't a car-centric hellscape and the trams always arrive on time, we wouldn't even need for everybody to have their own personal car! But we don't live in that world and hot-wiring somebody's car to take for a joyride that makes them miss work isn't cool. Just because I don't have the genetics for it or the time to train to compete in the Olympics doesn't grant me the right to free steroid injections.

    And I use the word product up there very, very deliberately. Art is two things: the Product to be Consumed (and promptly discarded in this day and age of consumerism), which is what GenAI makes, and the Process, which is often what artists talk about as their favorite part of making art. But the end result - the Product - is just a small part of what Art is. Adam Savage said something along the lines of "I have no interest in AI art. One day, some college film student will do something amazing with AI - and Hollywood will milk it to death - but right now, I don't see anything in AI that I care about. Because you don't see anything of the artist in it, and that's what I care about. Their intent, what they wanted to say with the piece, what they went through in making it and what they learned along the way, none of that exists in AI art." I'm not religious, but as the saying goes: "God gave us grain but not bread so that we, too, could indulge in the joy of the act of creation." Making something allows us to better understand ourselves and the world around us. It's why people desire GenAI. To create something that only exists in their imagination. It's why Art Therapy exists. One time I heard a college student reflect that "art is how artists process the world around us" and I absolutely agree. Van Gogh died a pauper, having barely sold any of his works in his lifetime, only to become one of the most beloved painters long after his death for his loneliness and pain that he expressed in his brushwork. One thing that is guaranteed to make me cry is that scene from Dr Who where the museum curator talks about why Van Gogh is his favorite artist while Vincent breaks down crying behind him.

    One thing that people caught up in the GenAI arguments often miss is that artists (any worth listening to at least) aren't gatekeeping art at all. Go watch a video on color theory, perspective, or additive and subtractive palettes. Artists love sharing information, and art is a conversation itself. I'm sure you can see it in the GenAI communities on your instance as well, people love to make things and be a part of a community with a shared passion. Artists don't care if you aren't an expert or anything, so I encourage anybody reading this to pick up a pencil, make something, and just share it with the world. I've talked to artists who say that their favorite commissioners are those who send them drawings to help interpret their vision - even if it's just doodles of stick figures on a napkin or something. There used to be a tiny subreddit called r/Mona_Leslie, and it was one of my favorite places on Reddit because the whole idea of it was to professionally critique random people's stuff as if it were in a museum gallery. People praising the brushstrokes of little kids' fingerpaint art, the line work of stick figure drawings, whatever, it was just such a great vibe. In fact, I challenge anybody who uses GenAI regularly to take an image they generated and like, bring it into an image editor, create a new layer, and just start drawing over it. You can probably make it fit your original vision even more than the AI could with enough effort. Even if you just do a half hour a couple of times a week or something, what you learn simply from doing it will expand the horizons of your creativity.

    TL;DR: You're absolutely right that it's a problem with capitalism, not with GenAI itself. But until such a time as capitalism no longer creates a problem from GenAI, I am firmly in the camp of putting a leash on what can and can't be done with AI (largely on corporate AI) to minimize the harm as much as we can. Just because overfishing is a larger issue caused by capitalism doesn't mean that we shouldn't work on limiting the amount of micro plastics that end up in the ocean - especially now that supposedly something like 5-10% of the fish we eat is plastic.

  • What instance has mostly reasonable moderate conservative/liberal people?

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  • Quick question: Are you a cis, white, heterosexual male with Christian/agnostic beliefs? Or at the very least, could you be mistaken for somebody like that? And do you live in an urban area, or a suburban or rural area?

    Because as a bi trans woman who grew up in a relatively red part of one of the deepest blue states in the country and spent a LONG time being able to hide as a cis white male, it is two very different experiences of life in the US before and after transitioning and what kind of area that I've lived in. Cities are natural melting pots of diversity and run very liberal/leftist as a result, suburbs can be a mixed bag depending on where they are (though like often follows like and you tend to get concentrations of similar beliefs close together due to socio-economic factors), and rural areas are often very group-think oriented and form cliques like it's highschool. I also spent a lot of time listening to what conservatives say when they think they're in like company. And it's very political.

    You know how people say that the two things you should never bring up at work are politics and religion? Every place that I've worked, the people who cannot stop talking about politics have always been conservatives. From hating on immigrants or trans people to the guy yesterday who went on and on about how people only hate Teslas because they're liberals who hate Elon and how great Teslas are while we all side-eyed each other (somebody said that the cyber truck is dangerous and looks ugly), they are constantly either trying to convince you that they're right or just assume that you agree with them in the first place. I had a "both sides" so-called "centrist" trap me and another coworker in a conversation about another one of our coworkers after he found out that they were a trans man and just kept going on and on about how they had trans friends but our coworker would never be a "real man," just like his trans friend would never be a "real woman." Didn't stop talking about it for over an hour, just talking in circles with barely a moment to take a breathe before he started talking again. I would've thought he was gonna pass out if I didn't already know that he's one of those people who would probably die if they ever stopped talking. He would also go on and on about the "violent left" but would get oddly quiet whenever a right-winger or MAGA voter would shoot up a place or something. Despite the fact that the US accounts for something like 95% of all school shootings in the world, and all but a couple of those have been committed by white men who either traditionally voted for Republicans or grew up in a conservative household, and that in the past 10 years something like 80% of mass shooting victims were shot by people (most often men, and usually white men) who also either traditionally voted for Republicans or grew up in conservative households

    It's only been in about the past 6 months that I've mostly stopped seeing MAGA flags outside people's houses or on people's trucks. Though there is one pickup at work that the owner stuck a "MAGA Edition" label onto just above the branding, and there is one guy who up until recently would wear a Trump 2024 shirt occasionally. He might still, but I haven't seen it in awhile.

    There are now about 20 states where it is either unsafe for me to travel due to state laws or where my existence is outright illegal in some way. Trans people were having their passports, driver's licenses, birth certificates, and other forms of identification confiscated by the DMV after the election but before Trump even entered office. A law in Utah banning trans girls from school sports got overturned because it affected a total of 3 girls in the state and it was therefore considered a law targeting specific individuals, which is illegal. You can make it illegal to turn right on a red light at a particular street corner, but you can't make it illegal for Tom, Larry, and Diane to turn right on a red light.

    You can have reasonable discussions with conservatives, but because conservatism largely consists of the belief that there are groups that the law should protect but not bind, and groups that the law should bind but not protect, it can very quickly fall into arguing what kind of people do or don't deserve to be treated like humans. Very often with them, respect means "respect my authority or else I won't treat you like a person." Back before 2001 and the rise of right-wing extremism these past 20 or so years, there were much more mild discussions between Democrats and Republicans, but that's because the US largely has no true leftist institutions. The Democrats are largely a moderate conservative to left-leaning centrist party with a few moderate leftists thrown in (who are unpopular with the party leadership but usually popular with voters). So debates were largely about whether or not the tax break for corporations should be 5% or 7% higher than last year. Both parties largely agreed on policy.

    In the US, there are two genders: Man and "political." Two races: White and "political." Two sexualities: Straight and "political." Two religions: Christian and "political" (and which flavor of Christian you are can be considered "political" based on the region of the country that you're in). If you can fake being in the former group in any way, you'll have a very different experience living in the US than you would otherwise.

  • Idaho Republicans pass bill making it a felony for transgender people to use public bathrooms

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  • That's part of the point. Anybody who steps too far outside the "cultural norm" (read: that one look Republican women all have) will be weeded out of public life as well.

  • Do you feel that use of generative AI and LLMs is ever justifiable? If so, when and where? If not, why not?

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  • And yet, again, the instance has communities for every single big tech genAI model. That's definitely not anti-corporate. Using those models both contributes to their shareholder value/profits and the theft of wages from workers.

    And where do they get the training data for AI Horde? From scraping the web and all the freelance artists on there, like all of the big corporate models? Because then they're just justifying exploitation of workers as benefiting everybody when what they really mean is benefiting themselves.

    It's like the argument pro ChatGPT airheads use constantly about how genAI "democratized" art. You know what "democratized" art and made it freely accessible to everybody? The pencil. It's just making up excuses for wanting the product of skill without putting in the effort to learn the skill or pay appropriate compensation to somebody with the skill to give you the product that you want. It's upper management thinking.

    And this is why I say that it depends. Horde AI could be great - so long as the people whose work is being used to allow others access to skilled labor that they don't want to do themselves are being properly compensated for their work. Otherwise, it's no different from the corporations. Just because it's free doesn't mean that nobody is going hungry as a result of it. Unless it's trained exclusively on products from big corporations. Those artists got paid when they did the work, so nobody gets hurt there except in the theoretical sense of freelance artists potentially losing customers down the line to "good enough and cheap" genAI from people with the above upper management mindset.