Pretty hostile to us men and boys (and anyone who identifies otherwise) who dont need to be toxic to cover up fragility either

Still better than having to go right as you step under the water, and then having to perform a sacred rain dance to hold it in

I like to just take the opportunity to roast the fuck out of old me for my terrible code and then sit content knowing that I am now making much more stupid but better hidden mistakes 😌

I disagree on what you think my position is. Let me clarify. Doing nothing to me is letting progressives be suppressed and die so they can never organize and proliferate their ideas. Even in better political systems people sometimes have to vote strategically to ensure that.

I sincerely hope you are doing something more than just handing victory to republicans and hoping the dems find you important enough. The republicans will make sure you can never reorganize or even exist if you let them. Rather than it just being very hard under dems. I’ll leave it at that from my side.

I totally feel you on that. You’re right. The democrats are despicable for playing with their voters like that. They’ve pretty much always done that to lesser extents. It’s what the stalemate forces them to do. That doesnt make it right, but so long as they cant change the rules, its a constant they will work under.

Starving them of power would be the right choice if there was a viable alternative. But in this case the alternative will eventually starve progressives of power to simply exist. Your only options lie outside of politics and are often just straight up illegal, but you dont have a Trump to bail you out if you start a revolution, nor enough people willing to support it on the progressive side for obvious reasons.

At the end of the day, you do you, but doing nothing if the status quo is hostile to you is a losing strategy. Frustrating sacrifices are neccesary in the US political system, pretty much by design.

They should not be voted for in a functional voting system. But the US doesn’t have that. You have a system where your opinion doesn’t matter if they can get to 51% of the vote elsewhere. If you want progressives to matter, you need progressives to thrive and become unavoidable to win. One party wants to suppress and eliminate progressives if they could, and they are now in power. Progressives will lose even more foothold. The other party isn’t great either, but under them, at least progressives could grow to become that critical mass you need to make actual change in the party and prevent lawsuits like that from happening.

The democrats know the rules of the game, and so should you if you can vote. If you dont want to sacrifice any chance of progressive change, you cant pretend they don’t exist and that a party with disproportionate incentive to change for you has to do so in order for you to vote the survival of your ideals.

EDIT: Better phrasing

Parties change, even if slowly. The republicans changed to get to where they got now. 20 years ago they would have rejected the idea of a king as traitorous, but now they are embracing one. Why? Because it turns out that it wins them elections. They will reform voting when they can get the chance, but not to introduce ranked voting, but to eliminate voting and to permanently crown one of their own as your supreme leader. Which is where your chance for any voter reform ends.

For ranked voting to become something the democrats will change for, they need reliable democrat voters to care for it so much it wins them elections. We actually saw an example of this with the ousting of Joe Biden, as that was also unprecedented. Parties change if the pressure is too much. But that pressure simply isn’t there for ranked voting. And a good way to ensure it never will is to let the republicans create more brainwashed sheep that are told ranked voting is communist or some bullshit like that. At least the democrats cared a bit about education, free thought, love, and peace, which are factors you need for people to think for themselves and not be consumed in group think.

It’s indeed a shame that the Dems regressed on that issue, and that in the current system you have no alternative choice that can actually win, but sometimes holding a line is all you can do as a single person. The propaganda that the republicans are producing is exactly designed to make sure your position never holds a majority, as with the right stimulation, most people can be made to believe that being pro-war makes you a patriot and a ‘true’ American. And they’ve been winning for a long time on that front too.

You can’t vote that propaganda away completely with the current democrats, that’s true as well. But it’s incredibly hard to resist when that propaganda is entangled and mixed in with staying informed about the government and society. Things aren’t lost, but if they were hard to impossible before, it didn’t make it any easier like this, even progressive minds can be taught to reject progressiveness, so long as you get to them early and overwhelmingly enough.

Unlike the republicans who active embrace ranked choice voting? /s

If the republicans have no chance to get into office because the democrats reach a critical percent of the vote every time, it opens up the doors to a progressive party or reform within the democrats that would allow for ranked choice voting to become a debated issue. But as it currently sits the democrats are the ones in the hot seat to become the party that can’t be elected anymore, and then it opens the door for an even more right wing party to spoil the democrats vote, and since republicans benefit the most from the current system, and have a base that is far more easily controlled than democrats, the odds of being able to get ranked choice voting there are non-existent, compared to the alternative.

You can, so long as you acknowledge that them taking an anti Israel stance would most likely also lead to Trump due to other democrats feeling alienated, and thus, a Trump administration that will do even more genocide.

The sad truth just seems to be that not even among democrats that position is a majority. No matter what you voted for, it would most likely not have changed that. The US needs like 20-40 years of progressive change before the majority is ready to take on such positions, and the way to ensure that timeline becomes longer and longer, is by making choices that undercut even small steps there.

Don’t vote for the lesser evil, vote for the path towards that eventual US where your opinion is held by the majority.

No way it would happen right now if the democrats won. But so long as the constant tug of war between Democrats and Republicans happens rather than one side overwhelming the other, nobody has any reason to change other than just enough to win the next election. Political change can take a lifetime to manifest, especially in a broken two party system, but if anyone thinks it will come within a single election they’re fooling themselves. Handing power back to the party that sinks people deeper into propaganda and lies, ensures that not even baby steps can be taken forward, let alone leaps.

It should definitely be marked as NSFW, but different cultures look VERY differently to death, and to pet death as well. It should be marked for that reason, but otherwise the ones I’ve seen are very similar to a human open casket funeral / viewing.

People go to these places to show it because people with the same kind of pets can often relate better than other people. And if it gets upvotes I doubt many people there find it as objectionable.

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While I agree that the AI they will implement will likely not be very effective, it doesn’t have to be to cause massive human suffering. Eg. Google incorrectly marking exposed photos of your kid for your doctor as CSAM. There’s also no guarantee that once these companies finally wake the fuck up (If they’re not already completely aware what they’re doing is messed up) that they will close these holes they’re punching, and that could mean they could replace AI with a mass surveillance tool at any point without you knowing. Nobody should be a fan of this.

You had me in the first half, but then you lost me in the second half with the claim of stolen material. There is no such material inside the AI, just the ideas that can be extracted from such material. People hate their ideas being taken by others but this happens all the time, even by the people that claim that is why they do not like AI. It’s somewhat of a rite of passage for your work to become so liked by others that they take your ideas, and every artist or creative person at that point has to swallow the tough pill that their ideas are not their property, even when their way of expressing them is. The alternative would be dystopian since the same companies we all hate, that abuse current genAI as well, would hold the rights to every idea possible.

If you publicize your work, your ideas being ripped from it is an inevitability. People learn from the works they see and some of them try to understand why certain works are so interesting, extracting the ideas that do just that, and that is what AI does as well. If you hate AI for this, you must also hate pretty much all creative people for doing the exact same thing. There’s even a famous quote for that before AI was even a thing. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

I’d argue that the abuse of AI to (consider) replacing artists and other working creatives, spreading of misinformation, simplifying of scams, wasting of resources by using AI where it doesn’t belong, and any other unethical means to use AI are far worse than it tapping into the same freedom we all already enjoy. People actually using AI for good means will not be pumping out cheap AI slop, but are instead weaving it into their process to the point it is not even clear AI was used at the end. They are not the same and should not be confused.

The same people that build nuclear don’t build solar or wind. And yes, there is a huge shortage for these people with renewables, which is where the black and white flat cost of energy sources breaks down. Renewables are slightly less expensive than nuclear, but infinitely more expensive when their natural source is unavailable and battery / hydro storage is depleted. “far too expensive” is highly over exaggerated when nuclear costs about 1-3x as much as renewables, with newer reactors being on the low end of that scale.

On top of that there are very few moments where there is almost no wind or sunshine over a very large area all at once, making it economically unviable to an enormous degree.

To make this happen you need a massive amount of overcompensation for the times that the sun does shine and the wind does blow. The kind that isn’t economically viable. You’re building decentralized infrastructure that needs to be maintained while being essentially useless a lot of the time. You also can’t exactly build a new wind/solar park in response to short term fluctuating demand, while you can scale up reactor utility.

Obviously the best backup is battery storage, … And it allows far more decentralisation: small battery pack, which combined with some solar allows them to be basically off the grid.

The biggest users of electricity are not homes. You’re right, this is a fine setup for houses. But you’re not going to solve the biggest energy users this way. Not to mention, even for people at home, the amount of rare earth metals required with current technology is an ecological disaster in it’s own right. We need batteries, but lets not pretend they are currently a final solution. Decentralization is not a magic cure all, decentralization also causes places with outdated energy infrastructure requiring new investments to completely revamp the system. This is not economically viable.

But even something like gas is a more preferable alternative to nuclear. It’s very cheap and still viable when needing to spin up or down quickly.

This is not carbon neutral, which is what our goal is. So you’re essentially conceding the point here. You also highly overestimate how many days a year you would need them, considering the sun doesn’t shine for at least HALF the day on average.

Unfortunately it is, because money is finite. And investers choose whatever is most viable, which increasingly is not nuclear.

Which is why nuclear is necessary. As the engineers that can build and maintain renewables are busy, and the grid is oversaturated with renewables when the sun is shining and the wind blowing (causing their efficiency / utilization to fall if you build any more) they will eventually break the equation in favor of nuclear. And there are still nuclear reactors being built in places where public opinion isn’t irrationally afraid of nuclear.

The sad thing is we could have been building them 20 years ago, and have had massive steps ahead in being green now. Instead we are here hoping for some kind of miracle technology like cheap batteries, nuclear fusion, carbon capture, all which isn’t a certainty to become fruitful, yet nuclear is here right now.

Nuclear is there as a back up for when the sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow, you don’t have enough space for renewables, or you’ve reached the capacity for building and repairing renewables (Either logistically, in lack of expertise, or lack of public support). If you can’t find a solution for that the result you end up with is just going back to fossil fuels when the times are tough. That’s not carbon neutrality.

Battery storage is also still a breakthrough away from being viable enough to store all the electricity renewables could potentially generate to be able to sustain a 100% load when they are less effective, not to mention the amount of infrastructure required for them to be able to do so. You need some kind of baseline to supplement it that works when nothing else does.

We need both renewables and nuclear, and nuclear should never be a reason not to invest in renewables. But the same goes the other way around. We’re in a crisis, we can’t be pedantic about this stuff when the world waited out the clock to the very end like a teenager the day before his exam. We can pick the perfect options when it is no longer the enemy of good options. Until then every option should be explored.

Sadly, it’s just not. Looking at just the price to generate is just too one sided. Renewables need a lot of expensive infrastructure due to being decentralized, land which you might not have, and experts that are already in huge shortage. Energy storage especially is hard and expensive with current technology due the massive amount of rare earth metals you need for it, and even the current largest storage facility can’t even provide enough energy for 2 million people let alone 8 billion of them.

I calculate it and explain it in even more depth here: https://lemmy.world/comment/13508867

TL:DR; currently, renewables + nuclear + storage is the closest we can get to carbon neutral. With just renewables and storage you don’t get anywhere close and are still forced to fall back on either fossil, (stored) hydro, or nuclear. Of which the only really viable green option for most places is nuclear. When the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, when the alternative is the exact pollution we are trying to nullify, that should be more important than paying a few cents more per kWh. In that moment the cost for renewables might as well be infinite if they’re not producing anything and we don’t have enough batteries to store it.

Definitely not just you, I instantly said “holy shit this is one ancient meme”. I remember it too from the early 2000’s.

You don’t solve a dystopia by adding more dystopian elements. Yes, some companies are scum and they should be rightfully targeted and taken down. But the way you do that is by targeting those scummy companies specifically, and creatives aren’t the only industry suffering from them. There are broad spectrum legislatures to do so, such as income based equality (proportional taxing and fining), or further regulations. But you don’t do that by changing fundamental rights every artists so far has enjoyed to learn their craft, but also made society what it is today. Your idea would KILL any scientific progress because all of it depends on either for profit businesses (Not per se the scummy ones) and the freedom to analyze works without a license (Something you seem to want to get rid of), in which the vast majority is computer driven. You are arguing in favor of taking a shot to the foot if it means “owning the libs big companies” when there are clearly better solutions, and guess what, we already have pretty bad luck getting those things passed as is.

And you think most artists and creatives don’t see this? Most of us are honest about the fact of how we got to where we are, because we’ve learned how to create and grow our skill set this same way. By consuming (and so, analyzing) a lot of media, and looking a whole lot at other people making things. There’s a reason “good artists copy, great artists steal” is such a known line, and I’d argue against it because I feel it frames even something like taking inspiration as theft, but it’s the same argument people are making in reverse for AI.

But this whole conversation shouldn’t be about the big companies, but about the small ones. If you’re not in the industry you might just not know that AI is everywhere in small companies too. And they’re not using the big companies if they can help it. There’s open source AI that’s free to download and use, that holds true to open information that everyone can benefit from. By pretending they don’t exist and proposing an unreasonable ban on the means, denies those without the capital and ability to build their own (licensed) datasets in the future, while those with the means have no problem and can even leverage their own licenses far more efficiently than any small company or individuals could. And if AI does get too good to ignore, there will be the artists that learned how to use AI, forced to work for corporations, and the ones that don’t and can’t compete. So far it’s only been optional since using AI well is actually quite hard, and only dumb CEOs would put any trust in it replacing a human. But it will speed up your workflow, and make certain tasks faster, but it doesn’t replace it in large pieces unless you’re really just making the most generic stuff ever for a living, like marketing material.

Never heard of Cara. I don’t doubt it exists somewhere, but I’m wholly uninterested in it or putting any work I make there. I will fight tooth and nail for what I made to be mine and allowing me to profit off it, but I’m not going to argue and promote for taking away the freedom that allowed me to become who I am from others, and the freedom of people to make art in any way they like. The freedom of expression is sacred to me. I will support other more broad appealing and far more likely to succeed alternatives that will put these companies in their place, and anything sensible that doesn’t also cause casualties elsewhere. But I’m not going to be in favor of being the “freedom of expression police” against my colleagues, and friends, or anyone for that matter, on what tools they can or cannot not use to funnel their creativity into. This is a downright insidious mentality in my eyes, and so far most people I’ve had a good talk about AI with have shared that distaste, while agreeing to it being abused by big companies.

Again, they can use whatever they want, but Nightshade (And Glaze) are not proven to be effective, in case you didn’t know. They rely on misunderstandings, and hypothetically only work under extremely favorable situations, and assume the people collecting the dataset are really, really dumb. That’s why I call it snake oil. It’s not just me saying exactly this.