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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Maybe learn how to use it correctly in its current state

    The slop being talked about in this article was made by OpenAI themselves. You know, the company at the forefront of the genAI/LLM bubble, with billions of dollars of money behind it?

    I don’t know what kind of mythical standard it is that you believe generative AI is capable of, but when even the organization at the forefront of the tech can’t make this shit look good, you can’t exactly claim it’s a skill issue.




  • This is tangential, but am I the only one getting sick and tired of all the topics about China? The imperial core’s news industry’s obsession with the country has never been healthy, and none of the articles being posted have had me thinking any of that is changing. I’m seeing post after post, usually from the same two users, and I’m starting to worry that the line between “documenting the atrocities of an authoritarian country” and “sinophobia” might start to get blurry.

    To be clear, I’m not trying to point fingers. I don’t want to make assumptions about the users in question. I’ve just been seeing this for a few months now and it’s getting on my nerves, especially given the political climate of the United States.


  • I don’t personally believe everything’s so bad as it looks. There’s a lot to be mad about, for sure, but it’s worth remembering that fear and anger are some of the best-selling emotions the news has to offer. Doubly so if it’s about China. But none of that means that things are substantially worse than they used to be. Some of it is that things weren’t as good as we thought, some of it is that things are being made to look worse than they are.

    Either way, we didn’t start the fire.

    Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!” Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 — I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.” The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.” Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.


  • I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality.

    That didn’t make them good either, though. Companies like them and Devolver Digital have had a bad habit of, for lack of a better term, using up developers and throwing them to the curb after. You’ll notice that a lot of stuff they publish get marketed as though Annapurna made them, which ends up hiding the actual developers behind the curtain, thereby robbing them of fans and thus seriously hurting their long-term prospects.




  • I think the real answer isn’t DIY pharmaceuticals, but rather universal healthcare, informed consent, and a medical system (both physicians and pharmaceutical manufacturers) that puts patient care above any kind of profit motive

    I think just about everyone here agrees. But the question is what to do until that becomes available. We need something in the interim; dangerous as this all is, I can’t find it in me to shun it when the alternative is letting people suffer without access to anything as they desperately wait for a better society to emerge in some unknowable, possibly distant future.




  • Organization (protests, unions, joining a local political movement), education (yourself or others), pressuring candidates (call your reps, protests), mutual aid & voter enfranchisement (food banks, clothing donations, volunteering at polling stations, any effort to protect the homeless). All of these are options, and this is just what I can think of off the top of my head. If you’d like, here’s a page with a gallery of 346 nonviolent protest tactics.

    Much of America has become trained to think only in terms of a vote – a vote in a system that was deliberately unequal from its founding through to today – to the exclusion of all other action. To say this is suffocating to any effort to enact change is an understatement; it is self-defeating in the extreme, serves only to perpetuate the status quo or worse, and yet time and time again I see so many people who have spent next to no time thinking outside these terms.


  • Monopolies depend on the government to exist.

    I very much disagree but respect a desire to not get into a debate, so I’ll leave it there.

    I really don’t know what that means

    “Your freedom ends at my face” is a saying used often here to contend with right-wing group’s insistence on “freedom,” often the kind that involves harming others; e.g. free speech absolutism and the “freedom” to spout neo-Nazi rhetoric that advocates for the murder of minorities, or the “freedom” to not get vaccinated and thus worsen a pandemic. A more full version might be “Your freedom to throw a punch ends where my face begins.” The idea is that it is fair to restrict a freedom if it supports the freedom of others — you might not trust governments to determine where those lines lie, and that’s fair, but that’s a separate issue.



  • I don’t know if libertarianism courts a different audience in Brazil, but in the U.S. it has a very rabidly right-wing audience who effectively want to tear down as much government as possible, and who view “your freedom ends at my face” as an insult. It’s the ideology of an extraordinarily unregulated market – a true “free market” – which is a monopolistic and wildly unethical disaster waiting to happen.

    Anarcho-capitalism, which your username references, is all of that, only more. So you might understand why effectively everyone here is going to treat that with extreme suspicion.