Prophet

They are almost certainly a Russian troll. See their comment history.

I understand your point, but I think the logic you are presenting is what is enabling these people. Ask yourself - what is the nuance in the Ukraine war? Fence sitting, and talking out both sides of your mouth about how we should condemn Putin yet also accept there is nuance to these issues is dangerous. It’s not complicated. If you don’t condemn Putin’s actions, you are implicitly accepting/agreeing that Ukraine should be wiped out.

Putin relies on the populace accepting that there is “nuance” to the Ukraine war. Russia has conditioned (or at least is trying to condition) the population (in the west) into adopting this logic but the reality is that there is no nuance to this issue. What nuance could there be to an aggressor invading someone’s land?

They don’t condemn Russia or the US leaders that push Putin’s agenda here - that’s how it’s support. How could it be anything else?

Israel (at least in large part) is why they’re pushing the tiktok ban now. It is a little hard to connect the dots on this because the China-reasoning seems strong on the surface. I agree that China is bad, but there has not been any stellar evidence to show that China censors or otherwise manipulates users on the platform. You can easily go to tiktok and find videos discussing how awful the Chinese government is, information about tiananmen square, Winnie the Pooh jokes, etc. In comparison, the data that came out of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal was far more concrete, and Congress did nothing. Certainly there were not 81% of house members coming together to force Facebook to sell. Tiktok has even offered to make major concessions about data privacy.

Israel’s war in Gaza is deeply unpopular and the fascists in Israel and here in the US are concerned that they are losing popularity. Tiktok has 100+ million active users in the US and the heaviest anti-Israel sentiment (the government and the US’s relationship with the Israeli government, not the Israeli/Jewish people) is heaviest on Tiktok, which is dominated by young millennials and gen Z. This is leaked audio of the director of the anti-defamation league (a very pro-Israel organization) speaking about this. He basically tells his audience that they have a “major major major… problem” and specifically says that they have a “tiktok problem and a gen Z problem.” Listen to the audio- you can agree or not with his reasoning, but he’s essentially saying that the spread of ideas on tiktok is causing their polling issues.

People like this want to stop the spread of ideas on tiktok because young people are organizing, boycotting, and putting dents in the system. They do not like that young voters are having a larger and larger influence. These young people are also boycotting major companies like McDonalds and Starbucks who have taken pro-Israel stances, and these companies have lost profits from this. All this to say - I don’t think there is any lack of motivation by people with lots of money to destroy the platform where these people are organizing.

It is incredible how much money Israel pumps into our politicians, both Democrats and Republicans. Joe Biden himself is the largest recipient of this money. There are anti-BDS laws (specifically for Israel) in 37 states. I don’t think many people are aware of just how much influence Israel has in the US. It is surprising and disturbing, but I am equally surprised/disturbed at how little attention these topics have received on Lemmy of all places. I don’t think it takes a genius to start making these connections and to start asking questions - maybe this isn’t the full picture but there is a lot of stuff here to be skeptical about. That said, I absolutely do think this kind of information is suppressed on other platforms, and they want to suppress all of tiktok because it’s dangerous to them.

The blockchain is essentially a ledger that tracks transactions (including the creation of currency). One thing that is not always clear is how important it is for a blockchain to be decentralized. When I say “decentralized,” I mean that many different people are operating a server that performs transactions on a larger network. These people are rewarded in currency for their efforts, and are sometimes referred to as “miners,” though this term is changing somewhat.

There are thousands of these servers in a network that are operating on and tracking the ledger for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Any updates to the ledger are verified by all of these nodes. As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn’t own 51% of the network, they can’t just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.

I think this paves the way for a lot of the practical examples you’re looking for. For example, there’s no way for the network to decide to just give tons of money to a single entity for some “economic policy” like Too Big to Fail (i.e., corporate bailouts). This means you don’t have to wake up one morning worrying about whether or not your currency will rapidly inflate because of things like corruption. Another example is the true ownership of digital assets. NFTs have (rightly) gotten a lot of flack for being overpriced JPEGs, but there are real use cases here. A random middleman can’t just decide to price gouge because they own all the tickets first (Ticketmaster). Instead, artists can mint tickets on the blockchain (very important: this ensures authenticity) and then fans can buy them on the blockchain - no middle man required. You still show a QR code at the door for verification like you would now.

It is entirely job dependent. I have been in jobs where it was just a grind and going the extra mile simply put a smile on my boss’s face. In jobs like these the best thing you can do is carve out as many hours as possible during the work week to build new skills or apply to other jobs. I’ve also been in jobs where going the extra mile directly contributed meaningful skills to my resume/portfolio and helped me get a new job with way better pay.

I would add Pinta as another drop-in replacement for MS Paint

Lexmark seems like such a niche thing to put here but I know about it because it’s based in my hometown. Also it deserves to be placed next to the soyboy.

I understand your position, and I worry what will happen if Trump wins as well. But my position is not “hand the country over to Nazis.” My position is actually “we are currently handing our country over to Nazis and we need to stop!”

All it takes is one wedge issue, and they [progressives] are out.

More like all it takes is one Republican president to completely destroy the country. The fact that we’re even at this point, despite all the “checks and balances” should tell you that the “generational damage” is unavoidable at this point. What’s really gross is that liberals assign the blame to other leftists rather than uniting on these causes and forcing Biden and the DNC to be better.

I’d like to make an analogy. This is a much lower-stakes example, but several years ago, there was a huge push in the gaming community to stop preordering. If a development company hits their sales numbers with preorders, why bother delivering what you promised? Why bother even delivering a working game?

It is the same in politics. By giving the DNC and Biden your vote now, by loudly proclaiming that Biden is the only choice, you are saying that there is no need for course correction. There is no need for them to push harder on healthcare, or climate change, or wealth inequality, or any other issue, because you’ve given your power away. And because of that, we stay at the brink of collapse (and arguably inch closer), where one Republican president is all it takes to destroy everything we’ve tried to build in this country.

Edit: I really should clarify that we lose our power by not seriously considering other candidates and political parties. I don’t want to advocate for simply not voting. There are people out there who want the job but don’t want to bend the knee to capitalists.

The guy who leads this group is extremely vocal (almost weirdly so) about white privilege and systemic racism. He is also white. It’s true that many AI models have white-bias. The reasons for this are multi-faceted. Our datasets are grossly imbalanced against racial minorities. I also think I understand that for some darker-skinned races, it is more difficult for the model to extract relevant features from the shitty Flickr photos they scrape for these models.

That said, injecting words into the users prompt to force the model to generate minorities more often is an extremely naive approach. Kind of like if Google added “reddit” to all searches just because it worked for some specific test cases, but ignoring that you now no longer get any site except reddit. Probably the solution here looks like paying a lot of money for high quality datasets as well as investing in user education and more AI explainability of these tools.

Bro he’s saying that you’re supposed to realize how fucked up it is (and ideally be revolted) that corporations - who don’t give a shit about you or anyone else - team up to prevent bright young adults from having a career and affording to live as payback for exposing their inhumanity/making them look foolish.

Instead you’re over here like “yeah I lick corporate boot and will gladly accept being stepped on if I get to keep my career.” This girl is a hero for standing up to the likes of cloudflare and we should all aspire to have her courage.

We literally destroy food in this country instead of giving it to people who have nothing. The “scarcity” is entirely manufactured.

I see this argument a lot, and I am absolutely a hardliner on genocide. That said, I am also aware that a second Trump presidency will be the end of our nation as we know it. It used to be so simple when voting for candidates - it was “evil” vs “more of the same”, but now it’s “evil” vs “genocide as a foreign policy.”

What is the exit strategy for us as a nation? How many times can we stave off a Republican presidency? Even voting blue we are slipping right - how many times can we vote for the Democrats until we’ve made so many concessions that the blue guy is just exactly equivalent to the current red guy?

I’m really trying to argue in good faith. If someone has a decent answer to this, I’d love to hear their side. Otherwise it seems to me like we are headed for some kind of civil war in this country.

I also really like these things. I read the article, and I got the sense that their rationalization for picking BG3 as GOTY was based exclusively on the actual game design, and before I say anything else, I agree that the design is fantastic. But, I would love to see Larian get more credit for the transparency during development, their commitment to delivering an experience of the highest quality, and the fairness and respect they give to their player base.

Whether or not a person likes games like BG3 or thinks it deserves GOTY, this stuff alone should be the bar for all games, not the scummy greedy practices we’ve become so used to seeing. Thank you Larian Studios!

So because you were able to do it, everyone else should be able to as well, huh? Already starting to sound familiar.

I’ve read comments like these hundreds of times and the takeaway is always that the commenter has fooled themselves into thinking they are some paragon of self-reliance. This is mixed with a big dose of survivorship bias: they believe they were self reliant and that their success was their own, so why can’t other people just also be self reliant?

If you have a high paying job because you have a fancy degree from a college or university, you were reliant on the institutions built by your country. If you own a business, you’re relying on roads and other infrastructure that has been socialized. If you were breast-fed as a child or had someone to buy you formula, you are not self-reliant. Obama used the phrase “You didn’t build that” and it made a lot of people very mad because they, and likely this commenter, have zero respect for the institutions and resources (state institutions, family, community, etc) that have made their success possible. Claims about “self-reliance” are just another way that capitalists, and especially conservatives, shield themselves from any responsibility for the real issues plaguing the US and the broader world today.

Oh look, another “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps” take. How have you people not figured this out yet?

I think you have the right idea but came to the wrong conclusion. Why would anyone buy office space if there is no value in employees coming to the office? Hint: they wouldn’t.

Edited to add: these properties may become a liability on their books which would impact their ability to apply for or pay for loans, as well as other negatives for the company.

Microsoft didn’t “absorb” open ai, they have a partnership where Microsoft pays assloads of money to sustain openai so that Google doesn’t get it. Ironically, this might be considered “long term thinking” but I wonder how long shareholders will tolerate such a hit to the books. There is supposed to be a profit sharing model here eventually (up to a certain point) but Microsoft isn’t getting chatgpt, otherwise bing would have replaced chatgpt. I have to wonder if, by the time chatgpt is profitable, if there will already be better models produced by other groups (maybe even open source), especially given the pace of AI innovation. I would not be surprised if this was a net loss for MS. GPT is amazing but it has numerous drawbacks at the moment. I admit that, if they figure things out quickly, this could be a huge win for them. I would go so far as to say that this is not anti consumer at all and is exactly how the free market is supposed to work.

As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it’s for boomers and don’t use it. I’m a little older and (to your credit) I check in about once a month. I know that meta has a very powerful user data harvesting business (arguably more valuable than Facebook), but Facebook’s user engagement will continue to slide if they can’t capture younger users and keep millennials and gen x users on the platform. This devalues their ability to make money from ads directly, and again, they did this to themselves by destroying their reputation for short term gains. They will eventually become like Yahoo! or AOL, both of which have almost zero brand value.