Always remember that 50% of the population is more dumb than the average American.
Which begs the question of whether or not the median would be pushed up by conservatives actually being a minority in the US (studies claim that 60% of the population is more left leaning than the government regardless of who is in office), or if it would be even worse because we’re all actually just that dumb.
If this man had run in any recent US presidential election, he would’ve gotten a noticeable chunk of the votes.
He’s basically Trump before Trump thought he could get elected. Talks a lot about changing a broken system, personal freedom, and how might makes right, while the system he proposes is basically identical to the system he promises to change, only more cruel because it will be run only by those with the strength to plant their boot on the neck of everyone else.
“We must tear down the oppression of the orphan crushing machine! Then every orphan will be able to make their own choices, and fight their own fights, in my new orphan gladiator arena!”
Didn’t he also follow her to Twitter or something and harass her there as well after banning her?
It’s been a while since I saw this going on, but I swear that that was part of the outrage.
I checked, and the link is to a post from about 10 hours ago talking about how the person in the screenshot, liv, was banned for that post earlier today.
So, in short, they were banned for a post from 503 days ago - from back in December of 2024.
The context of the post that they were banned over is exactly what it says: the head of Trust and Safety got caught liking teen porn from a spam bot on his work account by a bot designed to post what posts his account likes (very similar to the Twitter account that used to track Musk’s airplane - both are publicly available information), and he panicked and banned the bot and the account of the creator, a (from what I understand) well liked trans woman back in late 2024. This caused major backlash for a number of reasons that included the large trans population of users on BlueSky and the general distrust and discontent with the staff and their actions, but also due to the staff reaction to the outrage, which was to ban more people. And, if I remember correctly, the head of Trust and Safety followed the trans woman onto another social media platform after banning her to harass her there.
Snow and ice are not conducive to wearing a head piece with similar sightlines as a medieval jousting helmet.
Apparently turkeys eat ticks. We just need to keep the wild turkey population up and they’ll help cull the infestation.
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.
LGBT people also seem to have a natural proclivity to forming friend groups with each other even before coming out/realizing that they’re gay, trans, etc.
Source: I’ve had it happen like 6 different times with different groups of friends in wildly different contexts. And that’s not even including the gay kid I knew in college whose dream for college was to turn a straight guy gay.
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.
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.
Just my personal take, but my opinion basically boils down to “they can be.”
It’s all about how ethically they’re handled, and that can be good or bad at any scale. Take your very own instance, for example. Not that it’s hosting a local LLM (maybe they are, IDK), but the instance openly supports GenAI and has instances for all the major GenAI companies/models. GenAI without ethical sourcing - which none of these companies do - is one of the most blatant examples of a corporation using technology to steal the skilled labor of workers to avoid having to pay them what they’re owed for that skill. So your own instance is pro-corporatism, so long as they’re benefiting from stealing from workers. Not very anarchist if you ask me.
On the other hand, there’s a company that I believe partnered with Affinity a few years back that is a website design company that was hiring artists to create UI pieces for a training set for their LLM that they were going to use to create website templates for customers as part of their service (and I think they were also guaranteeing royalties for those who contributed as well?).
I haven’t played KSA yet, forgot that it was a thing, but one of the big ones is a custom engine as opposed to the cobbled together mess of code that is KSP, which is running on an engine that is absolutely not meant to do what KSP does. All the weird physics glitches in KSP are because it’s trying to wrangle the engine into functioning in this way.
KSP2 was actually supposed to fix this as well with a brand new engine, but the publisher forced them to use KSP’s engine “because it would be faster” (it wasn’t).
They probably misconstrued “pick-up artists aside” as being very specifically about literal “pick-up artists” rather than as a generalized hitting on someone in public thing.
I do agree with them, though, in that it’s very culturally dependent on how okay it is. I remember from a long time ago now one of those “kids today are always glued to their phones” memes where somebody just responded with a photo of a commuter rail car from the 50s where every single person in the photo was reading the newspaper, and I have a similar story from my dad about my grandfather: My grandfather worked in NYC for over 20 years and he commuted by train. During those commutes, he sat next to the same man, twice a day - on the way there and on the way back - for years, and only once in at least a decade did they ever speak to each other. “Are you finished reading that?” Those were the 5 words that man spoke to my grandfather, who handed him the paper he had finished reading, and they never exchanged another word again. I don’t think they ever even looked at each other.
I would also add that it’s a very extroverted thing to do, and not in the sense of social anxiety or something, but in the sense that introverted people burn mental and emotional energy in social interaction, and by trying to engage with a stranger in a random conversation, you might be using up the spoons they have that day. I’ll talk to random people in public as well, but I keep it to one-off statements that people can either leave be or reciprocate with if they want. A joke about the traffic in trying to navigate the grocery store, that sort of thing. I’m very good at talking with people, I learned it from working a service industry job as a teen, to the point where I was basically the public face of a company, but I find it EXHAUSTING to do. I’m an introvert, pure and simple, and social interaction simply takes energy to do. At the end of the day, all I want to do is isolate myself so I can recharge and unwind.
Plus, there’s the whole “women having to handle a man” aspect. Women have to treat men differently and behave differently to protect themselves when interacting with men (ones they don’t know in particular), and so a random stranger trying to start up a conversation is A Situation that they have to analyze. It goes back to the “women would prefer to be in the woods with a bear” thing. Women would rather a random bear try to start a conversation with them in public, or something.
…Give me two weeks and a ballgag and I’ll have them whispering cursed knowledge of the void like a good cosmic horror should.
I was literally just about to post this:
Multiple forms of life evolve to fill an extent niche.
Not quite the same, but The Matrix and so-called “red-pilled” Republicans make me laugh every time for this reason. The Wachowski sisters have flat out and openly said that The Matrix is a transgender story about the prison of toxic masculinity and escaping it by transitioning. The red pill is Premarin, an estrogen pill from the 90s, and the blue pill is a testosterone steroid (I forget which one), both of which were produced in those exact colors. So every time a conservative talks about being “red-pilled,” they’re actually talking about taking estrogen.
Trump actually got less votes the second time than he did the first time. Voter turnout in the US is miniscule, with less than half the population voting for a variety of reasons (gerrymandering, voting day is not a federal holiday so people still have to work, the lack of politicians who do what they promise, etc.).
So roughly a quarter of the country voted for him, and some of them voted for him because he isn’t a Democrat. There’s a great story about how a trans person who ran on a defund the police campaign got elected county sheriff in Vermont because she ran as the Republican candidate. Enough people showed up and voted for whoever had the R next to their name without ever listening to any of the candidates to know what their stances were that she won by a landslide.
Except that the US government and corporations have spent the years since convincing the people that there’s a right way to protest, and that it’s by holding signs on a street corner - preferably out of view. This is why MLK was seen as a violent thug during the Civil Rights Movement and is seen as a hero today. Their struggle has been whitewashed to remove what actually happened and turned into an example of changing things the “right way” - by gently asking your oppressors to stop oppressing you. The US is one of the most propagandized populations on the planet. Our children pledge their undying loyalty every morning to the flag that hangs in every classroom. The only other countries on Earth to have done that are North Korea and the Hitler’s Youth program in Nazi Germany.
They’ve also gutted any form of support network for the same reason. The US populace is staunchly anti-union because companies have convinced us that worker’s rights are bad. They’ve made everybody dependent on keeping their job to keep food on the table and a roof over their head, of course, but also to see a doctor if you have a fever. And God forbid it’s anything worse than that. It’s bread and circuses with a dash of the Sword of Damocles.
So not only do we have to convince people to risk their lives to fight a fascist regime and their police force that is armed as well as many countries military, we have to convince the pearl clutchers that snarky taglines on signs aren’t going to solve things, and reconstruct support networks that haven’t existed for over half a century, and prevent the 45% of the population who support the fascists from voluntarily drafting themselves to root out any resistance, if not start shooting them in the streets. The FBI spends half their time putting down white supremacist militias. All they’d have to do is stop doing that and let the Trump regime do the rest by tweeting from the toilet at 3am. Those most likely to take up arms against the system are the same people who support the current system.
The average person isn’t brave enough to risk their life. If they were, we’d see Canadians coming down to burn down the White House again. We’d see Mexicans crossing the southern border. We’d see aid networks forming from other countries to provide support for anybody willing to resist. But we don’t and we won’t. And I don’t mean that in a “other countries should solve American problems” way, but that people in other countries are just as likely to say, “Not my fight, not my problem. Somebody else should deal with it” as Americans are. It’s human nature. If it wasn’t, we’d see more people taking out healthcare CEOs. More people would’ve supported the IRA. We’d have far more examples instead of Blair Mountain and the Haymarket Affair.
It’s easy for the armchair generals of the world to say that Americans should just arm themselves and go to war against the largest military on the planet when it isn’t their necks on the line.
They refuse to let overtly LGBTQ people stay and demand that gay men break up with their boyfriends by policy. People have frozen to death outside their centers after being denied entry or being kicked out for being LGBTQ as a result of their bigoted policies.
Homeless shelters are usually locally run, and I’m sure your local Food Pantry or something would appreciate a donation (especially this time of the year), but if you want to help LGBTQ people worldwide, you could do worse than donating here: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
It’s all conjecture at this point, but there’s an argument to be made that increased funding (like when Biden quadrupled their budget, as someone else said he did during his term) could have pushed it back as the Darian Gap is a natural choke point that provides much better bang for your buck compared to having to fight it back across what could potentially be the entire continental US in a few years (or less).
If the feral hog population is a vector as well, we could see it explode like a wildfire out towards the east coast, and with climate change who knows how far north they will go. I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of us ever being able to contain it like that again. In 5 years time Canada might be allocating funds towards trying to contain it at the US border.