Yes. They should have voted the dictator puppet out. That’s how we got rid of Hitler and Mussolini, and besides, their close neighbors are all democracies who would never interfere in any other country’s elections. Fruit companies aren’t that important, you know.

Free market trade! Except Cuba, they don’t get to trade.

The easiest way would be to quickly look up the ones you don’t know yet. Many have Wikipedia pages and the others usually have good home pages explaining what they do. But as you can see, there’s a wide range for hosting different kinds of media and discussions.

I would take the job just to make sure we can sabotage it. And I’m not even affected by their adblocker detection; I just yt-dlp and NewPipe the videos.

Classical liberalism (just to give a concrete political term for those old school liberals) is admirable. I broadly agree with its values and I support all those points you mentioned. The progressive and conservative variants we often see in US politics are blatantly hypocritical and broken.

Unfortunately, liberalism’s core issue is that it’s an ideology based on an abstract concept rather than our physical conditions - it starts with the abstract, fair idea of freedom and attempts to apply it onto material reality. For example, the liberal approach to free speech, which theoretically creates a marketplace of ideas where the best prevail, just turns into a propaganda echo chamber when huge media organisation are owned by business tycoons with political agendas, and when social media companies are financially punished by their advertisers for allowing controversial expression. The utopian marketplace of ideas never really manifests at scale when that marketplace is collectively dominated by the like-minded owning class.

Without adding restrictions (a contradiction of liberty), the huge wealth of some people turns their freedoms into their political power. If the rich owning class can control the economy through a monopoly or similar, they have the freedom to control what news you can find, what products you can buy (if you can’t DIY it, like a computer) and their quality and how safe they are, what jobs they will give you, and so much more.

There are also plenty of other contradictions which we see play out, such as:

• How can we balance freedom of religion with giving people rights that a religion rejects? (e.g. abortion, homosexuality)
• How can we balance someone’s individual rights with someone else’s right to private property? (e.g. trespassing, restriction of the commons)
• How can we balance someone’s individual rights with community safety needs and expectations? (e.g. weapon rights, industrial and environmental restrictions, speech laws)
• Should liberalism be allowed to defend itself against a democratically-approved transition to dictatorship, or does this contradict political freedom?

In these situations, we have to resolve them somehow, so we end up with liberalism variants like conservative liberalism and progressive liberalism, straying further from the pure old-school liberalism they necessarily contradict. Even without corruption, liberalism decays, distancing itself from its ideals, and ultimately turns into a playground for the powerful who have far far far far far more ability to realize liberty than almost everyone else.

You make a good point about the primaries. In the previous elections, Bernie Sanders getting shafted definitely shifted a lot of their supporters away from the Democrap Party and Bernie’s social democracy towards socialism (like, working class seizing means of production). It had a real radicalising effect on people. They were being disenfranchised by federal politics so they looked towards unions and direct democratic organising away from the broken electoral system.

Whoever is making the controlling decisions behind the party facade

Money talks - you can’t dominate a US election without it. And most people don’t have the kind of money that talks, so both parties inevitably end up representing the owner class rather than popular opinion of their supporters. Democrat donors don’t want radical changes which would threaten their wealth, so no matter how popular a Bernie is, they’re going to do all they can to block them. On the other hand, while Trump is similarly unorthodox and controversial like Bernie, they’re not really a threat to the owner class’s wealth (Trump himself is a business owner!). So even while many Republican donors did object and push hard for alternatives, they didn’t do a Democrat and obstruct him.

Republicans like Trump are also liberals. [wiki]

For what it’s worth, I’ve personally never found it controversial to talk about in person. And this includes in countries where it’s a prosecuted crime.

Copying is not theft, artificial scarcity in the digital world is a tragedy, and I intentionally avoid paying middle-men distributors (like streaming services and record companies) for art.

What does that have to do with Cory’s concerns? They don’t want to build an audience on Bluesky because that promotes Bluesky, a dangerous place to build up, in the view given by the article. It would be neglectful to let it gain enough power to become a Twitter 2.0, we have an opportunity to prevent us repeating history.

The more important thing is to never pretend your vote is a valuable political action.

If you think there’s a point to voting and picking a lesser evil, go ahead, but at the end of the day you must admit that no viable candidate is adequate. Both major parties are the playthings of the owner class, not representatives of the population. The last 4 years have demonstrated that clearly; the house always wins because the game is rigged. The point being, voting cannot and will not solve these systematic problems.

If you want to stop the descent into hell, you have to actually participate in political organization beyond the electoral circus.

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Thinking of the projects I work on, I don’t understand the value in categorizing by language, rather than theme (~/Development/Web/, ~/Development/Games/) or just the project folders right there.

That’s serious stuff if true. I would often the upload date to avoid reuploads and regurgitated (and lower visual quality) content. It’s also extremely useful to know how outdated some advice or guide is.

All the people trying to dissect you for science.

As OP mentioned, a lot of replies focus on loss, that friends will inevitably die and objects will break… we already face that reality with regular life! That’s hardly a downside of immortality itself.

I assume you also have to trust the servers which the accounts you’re messaging are stored on. (Although there are real situations where all users will be on the same server, where this is obviously a great benefit.)

It turns out, mods are gods.

I don’t see irony there. I think calling this FOSS community ‘filled with Linux-crazed people’ is a stretch, but even then, it’s very different to:

or even just hating a niche product whatsoever. It’s not like Linux is EEE’ing or being invasive, so it’s hard to equivocate being a passionate fan to being a passionate hater.

Haha they thought it was too easy and were proven wrong!

Honestly, if a place is obscure enough, even smaller barriers of entry help, like forums that don’t let you post on important boards until you build a reputation. There’s only so much effort an adversary is willing to put in, and if there isn’t a financial incentive or huge political incentive, that barrier could be low.

Seeing the previous krita-ai-diffusion demo and the skill of the demonstrator in selecting and img2img’ing encouraged me to give Krita a second try (it turns out my laptop+Mint had a keyboard setting which made the panning shortcut break, so I’ve fixed that and now it’s far more usable. It was ‘disable touchpad when typing’, so Space wouldn’t pan with the touchpad).

As for this video, it’s great to see the ComfyUI integration (and with a logo on the node too!). The tool was already powerful and impressive, and this seems like a huge step up.