EldritchFemininity

I didn’t mean that as a literal quote but as sarcastic air quotes to evoke the exact imagery that you came up with. Although, I have actually seen a Hexbear or (what’s the other one, Beehaw?) user use that phrase. Of course, they also said that only capitalist pigs die in China, so it’s hard to tell if they were serious or if it was full commitment to the bit. That part of Lemmy is fairly indistinguishable from a leftist version of 4chan.

Like I said in another comment, ML has an issue common to many leftist communities in that old saying of “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” And that can manifest as behaving like more moderate leftists (not liberals - actual leftists) may as well be centrists or conservatives, or treating Europe as being just as bad as Trump’s regime. Purity tests and trolling rather than the mutual cooperation that Cowbee posted.

I guess? I don’t think I’ve ever really stayed in a memes community where that’s the case, though on Reddit I was largely in places like egg_irl and traaa, where everything was focused around a shared experience of a minority group.

Besides, it’s not just the memes community, the memes is just where it appears the most blatantly and loudly. As the person above me said, it’s an instance wide thing. ML is nowhere near as bad as Hexbear (or I have yet to see any targeted harassment campaigns against an instance for failing a purity vibe check come from ML, at least) but, as they say, “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” Leftist spaces tend to have a bit of an undercurrent of only being welcoming to the “right kind of leftist.” I used “decadent West” up there very purposefully. There’s a bit of a vibe to ML that’s less “uniting various leftist groups” and more “preaching The Good Word to those poor ignorants” proselytizing.

Every time I see Cowbee in a thread like this, it’s like I walked into a restaurant to see someone trying to explain to somebody else why their friend who just spat in their food is actually a cool dude doing great solidarity because the owners of the restaurant treat their employees poorly.

ML in my experience has very little to do with engaging with leftists and more to do with bashing the “decadent West.” Anytime I see memes.ml pop up in my feed, it’s a 50/50 shot between me finding something funny or something that makes me debate blocking the instance as much as I can at an account level.

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.

How long did it take before you bought acrylics and a pad of watercolor paper to replace it?

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?).

“The only people worried about privacy are those with something to hide.”

This is how you do it. You create clear and direct laws that specify what isn’t okay. New Hampshire banned all billboards. I believe Vietnam recently banned all ads longer than 15 seconds online. These make it absolutely clear what is and isn’t okay, and leave no wiggle room for companies to try to circumvent the laws on technicalities.

Since you have the help of a therapist, you should use them as a resource to help formulate any plans and put them into motion. Therapists aren’t just there to talk to, they’re good for sound boarding ideas like this off of because they have access to resources that other people might not necessarily have. A therapist’s word or signature can get you access to medical care or services that would otherwise be more difficult to get, and they know the ins and outs of systems like social security or aid programs. Their job is to help you, and by telling them straight up that you need help getting a plan together to get out of your living situation they can focus on that.

In the short term, I would recommend putting together a “bug out” bag that you can stash somewhere safe in case you need to leave quickly. Ideally, you should have copies of important documents such as social security cards and stuff that you might not be able to go back for later, but it should at least be just enough stuff to get you by for a couple of days if you need to drop everything and leave. Stuff like a change of clothes, a water bottle, and some cash.

I literally had this happen with my desktop last night, and it’s entirely down to Windows actively choosing to go into sleep mode or not. No activity on the computer, click on sleep, the monitors go off and I started to walk away except I noticed that my keyboard and mouse were still on (the first things to turn off when Windows goes to sleep for me) and the fans were still running. Wiggled the mouse and it had only turned the monitors off. I tried it 2 or 3 more times and Windows kept doing the same thing - putting the monitors to sleep and nothing else. I eventually just straight up shut it down with the power button.

I was literally just about to post this:

Multiple forms of life evolve to fill an extent niche.

My problem is that I love the state/region I live in, but large swathes of the rest of the country are a risk to my life and my age, skills, and minority status don’t make me appealing from an immigration standpoint, let alone that many places have just as much of an issue with people like me as the Republicans do.

The thing is that it would take an extremist left wing government to bring it back to some level of normality. FDR was a Democratic Socialist (officially), and the New Deal was one of the best improvements for the country we’ve ever had (minus all the blatant racism and destruction of minority communities that the highway projects caused). It was American socialists and anarchists who fought a bloody struggle that won the world the 40 hour work week and weekends. And even that was merely considered a stepping stone on the path to a 20 hour work week. The Overton Window has been pushed so far to the right that we’ve forgotten what it truly looks like to have 2 sides in the government.

Isn’t cough medicine more cost effective per alcohol percentage? That’s what I remember the alcoholics drinking when I was younger.

“Something something piracy is a service issue.”

-Gandhi, probably

AI run on statistical probability. The more options there are in something, the harder it is to get right. A clock face becomes hard because practically the entire clock changes from moment to moment, and logos on shirts are similar in that they’re largely all in the same place but vary dramatically in shape to be as distinct from each other as possible, which is basically the exact opposite of what an AI wants. When your whole thing is basically averaging stuff out on a probability curve that’s weighted towards specific keywords, having massive variation in your data points is bad.

Many years ago, I worked at a fish market and one of the guys who sold us fish during the summer won a big fishing tournament one year where he got a brand new truck and a bunch of money. When they asked him what he was going to do with the money, he said, “Keep fishing until it’s all gone.”

Approach Moshe Safdie’s company about building Habitat 2027, 60 years after the scaled down compromise was built:

Habitat 67

I don’t either, I think it’s super weird and creepy, but most people that I’ve talked to about it have never even thought about it before, and the people around my parents’ age consider it “patriotic.”

This makes sense as I was in school before 2010, so my experience would’ve been from before more schools started adopting them. And my dad would’ve probably been in school in the 50s, so when he was wearing a school uniform with a tie everyday, it was absolutely a rich private school thing.