I get the thrust of the song, but I have a question for you and/or anyone else who has insight:

I make small aggressions, like OP, where I assume I’m costing a corpo and giving to an artist through it, even if minuscule.

Examples:

Similar to OP, I have a streaming service ‘downloaded’ playlist of songs I like. I tend to leave my PC playing them in shuffle/repeat during my workday. I might have my volume on or off depending on my level of focus, but I can’t see how that “engagement” doesn’t benefit the artist without costing me anything – maybe a smidge more electricity.

Since I saw The Spiffing Brit’s runtime video, I no longer close a youtube tab if I decide I want something else. I mute the tab, set the speed to .25 and ignore it for a while. Costs me electricity, not that much bandwidth, and presumably pays the channel more than usual. Maybe fucks with analytics per-video, but probably not enough to bother the creator, and if it fucks with ‘the algorithm’ and pushes people to channels I already like, then that’s a google problem.

I also have an Epic Games account, where I “buy” every single free game. I assume these have either already paid the developer a fixed fee for supporting development, or are paying based on sales volume. Either way, they presumably paid money to be able to offer these as a loss-leader. Most are games I would not have bought anyway, so I’m not costing the developer a potential sale and I will never buy anything through Epic games, so it should be just a loss. I actually want insight on this one, in case there are devs/publishers here. If this costs you when I buy your free game, there might be others like me who just need to know we’re not helping.

Aside from the fact that my engagement with these platforms could be used as leverage (’ we have X million active users…'), I can’t see any negative to my attacks on them. It’s possible the artists can’t perceive it, but if the corpos love it, they wouldn’t make me pass a CAPTCHA to buy a game.

The question, then, is: Am I hurting the artists, or helping them?

I just tried to open a soda can with my somewhat modern can opener (try them, btw, no sharp can edges) but it doesn’t fit the lid of my can. My day is ruined.

Like many things, a tool is only as smart as the wielder. There’s still a ton of critical thinking that needs to happen as you do something as simple as bake bread. Using an AI tool to suggest ingredients can be useful from a creative perspective, but should not be assumed accurate at face value. Raisins and Dill? maybe ¯\(ツ)/¯, haven’t tried that one myself.

I like AI, for being able to add detail to things or act as a muse, but it cannot be trusted for anything important. This is why I’m ‘anti-AI’. Too many people (especially in leadership roles) see this tool as a solution for replacing expensive humans with something that ‘does the thinking’; but as we’ve seen elsewhere in this thread, AI CANT THINK. It only suggests items that are statistically likely to be next/near based on its input.

In the Security Operations space, we have a phrase “trust but verify”. For anything AI, I would use 'doubt, then verify" instead. That all said. AI might very well give you a pointer to the place to ask how much motrin an infant should get. Hopefully, that’s your local pediatrician.

We can celebrate the ideal of a person willing to fight back while still defending the actual person who may or may not have been the person who did it.

“Luigi” is gestalt:

1. An ideal of a person willing to fight for all of us against an oppressive system
2. A Human who is charged and not yet legally proven guilty of a crime; who may or may not be a scapegoat

We hail as heroes those who fight against oppression even when, and often because, their fighting breaks ‘the rules.’

If Luigi shot this CEO, then he deserves our respect as a hero: A person who has sacrificed to remove a serial killer who was above the law. If Luigi did not shoot this CEO, then he deserves our support as a victim of the above system.

Sharing memes and keeping him in the public zeitgeist supports both.

I’m no longer at my computer where typing is easy. I thank all of you for responding in good faith, and I’ll be reading the various links. Thanks for engaging with me.

Okay. My method doesn’t work. We can’t reform the system from within.

What does?

What’s your perfect solution? How do we get there?

I’m honestly curious. I’m pissed at the status quo, and don’t know how to make things better with my limited personal power.

I’m now mobile, so my formatting will suffer.

Capitalism = bad. I’m fully behind that, and see it as the root of the problem. What I don’t see is a path forward that doesn’t involve incremental progress, even if not all demographics are served. At least not without violence that will be disrupt even more.

I think this is where we disagree, but I might still be missing something.

You (assorted folks responding to me) want an epoch change where we rise up and take back the power we have. We have it right now, but the price to pay to enforce that is too high for me.

I want a progression where we work towards owning that power. We had it partially when unions were still strong, but it was undermined. In my mind, the solution is education, but I have no power to enact that directly. My ability to influence is limited to my local org and voting.

A green party, socialist party, etc, will never win an election in our current environment. Votes there are literally useless, if not spoiling a candidate that has at least some if your views. The system is rigged, sure, but you can’t flip this table and walk away.

Can we separate this discussion into talking about politics and elections and eliminate Israel/Palestine? I’m a-religious, pro Palestine, pro humanitarian, but having that angle seems to quickly degenerate every conversation into ‘both sides are genocide’ and avoid the’how do we move forward’ question. I think these can be separated, but maybe that is also a place we disagree.

I feel we’re playing different games, or using different terms.

Help me understand.

Firstly. Let’s define words: I’m assuming/using my view of a US-centric Liberal vs Conservative.

Liberal: Democratic party, wants to make life better for the larger segment of the population.

Conservative: Republican party, wants to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of a few.

That’s my personal and biased broad-strokes view of the political landscape.

Conservatives have managed to gather enough popular support that people will vote against their best interest for either perceived economic gain or for ‘hurt the other people more.’

Stepping back even further, what is your end-goal? How do you respect the desires of millions of people without some sort of representation, and if you have such, how do you ensure that the representative aligns with the goals of their constituents?

Sadly, I’m offline for the day, but I’d be happy to continue this conversation.

In this post: not realizing that the ideal solution is not a single step away, but rather multiple steps – and they will not be simple to sell to a general populace.

I’ll admit I’m not familiar with the term. ‘Electorialism’ seems to be, according to Wikipedia, a ‘half-way step’ between Authoritarianism and Democracy.

As far as I know, we are still not quite in an Authoritarian state here in the US. We are more likely to be headed in the opposite way from Electorialism; where we are transitioning from what is a democratic process to one where oligarchs have consolidated enough power and influence that they can just say, ‘fuck it, we win.’ In that case, yes, I do want to make a case against Electorialism.

In Electorialism, the dominant party, presumably the authoritarian one, conducts elections that allow their opponents a stage and promises to be free and fair while still controlling the levers of power. What we have seen in the last 8 years is a party, republicans, that are throwing every possible strategy at the wall in the effort to undermine and discredit elections with the end result that if they win, the election will be seen as fair and, if they lose, the election will be seen as unfair.

All concepts of what are optimal democratic processes are going to be just that: concepts. We live in the real world. There are millions of people you have to convince to move to your desired method of representation. I think we agree on the end-goal, I just disagree on how to get there and think we can’t jump from a Trump presidency directly to a worker-owned utopia.

Help me out. What’s our next step?

Mine is to help elect people to local, state and federal offices that want to make life for everyone better.

My comment was removed by the mods… probably because I let my rage show. Though the mod log shows rule 2 instead of rule 1 :P

Here’s a longer and nicer version:

I’m a (US) liberal, and I don’t approve of any of the views described by kittenzrulz123. Lumping half the country into a single bucket is not going to give you a good overview of the myriad ideals we might have individually.

You have a choice. You can look at the political landscape at the moment of the election and choose one of four options:

1. vote for the guy who will absolutely fuck over everyone he can for his own profit. We knew what he was back in 2016 and he isn’t going to change.
2. vote for the lady who has a chance to win, is probably still crappy for some demographics, but is miles better than #1 and not likely to declare war on a random country because she’s hungry.
3. vote for someone who has a 0% chance of winning, effectively throwing the vote to the rest of the population.
4. abstain, also throwing the vote to the rest of the population.

At this time, our election system really only works for two parties. Any third-party vote is useless, if not counterproductive. If you can’t understand how that math works, let me know and I’ll break it down for you. I’d love to change that, but the process is by using our ability during primaries to put forward more liberal candidates that support election reforms, not by putting our heads in the sand and voting 3rd party hoping that we will make people notice… hint: they will not.

If you don’t like your choices when you go to the voting booth in November, the solution is to get involved in late November and make things better next time. Join a local democratic organization and become part of the solution. Complaining online about how your choices suck is something we can fix if we all jump in. If you’re not doing that, then you are abdicating your responsibility and allowing others to make the choice of who represents us instead. If you choose not to be part of the selection process, the very least you can do is vote for the ‘lesser evil’ and not make things worse.

Side note: the Primary election is the end of that selection process, not the start. Putting your values on the primary ballot is where you should spend your energy if you’re mad at the status quo.

I will admit that I’m angry that we didn’t get a Democratic primary and that Harris was ordained as Biden’s successor without any popular input. The DNC is to blame for that fuck-up. It’s irrefutable, though, that Harris would have been better for Palestine, the US economy, US healthcare, foreign relations, and dozens of other topics than trump is.

Would Claudia de la Cruz have been better? Sure. Her platform looks awesome. Did she have even a chance of winning? no.

Removed by mod

I’ve not read the laws, nor am I a lawyer, but I suspect that the budget laws say something like “The [FBI] shall provide a budget by [date]”, but there is no following section attaching a penalty as there are in criminal laws, so there is likely no recourse.

I imagine that this is the same as when you don’t have that report ready for the big meeting, or skipped out early before your end-of-shift duties were done: a reprimand from your boss and potentially getting fired… but his boss is, I think, Pam Bondi, the AG, in this case.

Theoretically Kash could be impeached or censured, as could Pam if she doesn’t act. But we know how well that will go. Until then, his inaction is illegal, but unlike some of trumps actions, which can be stayed or reversed via court, I don’t think you can stay inaction.

I think there is potential that this was intended.

PalWorld was SO on the nose modeled after pokemon plus Breath of the Wild that it couldn’t be anything but a stab at Nintendo. And yet, it seems that (I’m not a lawyer) they skirted around ever actually infringing on copyrights. If you want to build a zoo full of creatures, there are only so many ways you can combine things without making a fire dog or ice dragon, and then comparisons can be made. PalWorld has many creatures that I don’t recognize as being similar to existing pokemon. Given that Nintendo has not gone after PalWorld for copyright infringement, I’d say that means they don’t have a case.

Patents are another angle, and I’m far from a patent lawyer. Have you ever read one? They are full of jargon and what seem to be nonsense words, especially a software patent for a video game. I found an article that describes how Nintendo can use a ‘new’ patent to attack PalWorld, but near the end he clearly calls out that there is a difference between ‘legal’ and ‘legitimate.’ I can’t seem to find the actual ‘throwing a ball to make a thing happen’ new patent, but I’d assume PalWorld doesn’t infringe the original patent, or Nintendo would have just used that one. The article author also notes how Nintendo applied for a divisional patent near the end of a window for doing so, which presumably extends the total lifetime of the patent protection. A new divisional patent last year probably means we have 40 years of no ‘ball-throwing mechanics.’

I hope that this whole thing is a stunt. PalWorld was commercially successful, and even if they lose and have to modify the game, it will remain successful. I think that there’s a possibility that the developer and publisher are fighting against software patents kind of in general and used PalWorld as bait that Nintendo fell for.

If they lose, then there will be a swath of gamers who are at least mildly outraged at software patents. Popular opinion can (occasionally) sway policy.

If they win, then we have another chink in the armor of software patents as a whole. See Google vs Oracle regarding the ability to patent an API.

If we can manage to kill software patents for gameplay mechanics, like throwing balls at things, being able to take off and land seamlessly, or having a recurring enemy taunt you, then we get better games that remix things that worked.

Imagine how terribly different games would be if someone had patented “A action where a user presses a button to swing their weapon, and if that weapon hits an enemy, that enemy takes damage.”

That’s really the crux. There are two trump voters: There are 1) the easily swayed, misled, gullible, uninformed, and other adjectives that imply they are just not fully aware of what is going on; and then 2) the evil assholes who know fully that they are breaking things because they stand to profit from the breakage.

Class 1 deserves our compassion, and should be helped to understand why their choices hurt themselves and society.

Class 2 needs to be evicted from this reality.

As with other responses, I recommend a local model, for a vast number of reasons, including privacy and cost.

Ollama is a front end that lets you run several kinds of models on Windows and Linux. Most will run without a GPU, but the performance will be bad. If your only compute device is a laptop without a GPU, you’re out of luck running things locally with any speed… that said, if you need to process a large file and have time to just let the laptop cook, you can probably still get what you need overnight or over a weekend…

If you really need something faster soon, you can probably buy any cheap($5-800) off-the-shelf gaming pc from your local electronics store like best buy, microcenter, walmart, and get more ‘bang for your buck’ over a longer term running a model locally, assuming this isn’t a one-off need. Aim for >=16GB RAM on the PC itself and >=10GB on the GPU for real-time responses. I have a 10GB RTX 3080 and have success running 8B models on my computer. I’m able to run a 70B model, but it’s a slideshow. The ‘B’ metric here is parameters and context(history). Depending on what your 4k-lines really means (book pages/printed text?, code?) a 7-10B model is probably able to keep it all ‘loaded in memory’ and be able to respond to questions about the file without forgetting parts of it.

From a privacy perspective, I also HIGHLY recommend not using the various online front ends. There’s no guarantee that any info you upload to them stays private and generally their privacy policies have a line like ‘we collect information about your interactions with us including but not limited to user generated content, such as text input and images…’ effectively meaning anything your send them is theirs to keep. If your 4k line file is in any way business related, you shouldn’t send it to a service you don’t operate.

Additionally, as much as I enjoy playing with these tools, I’m an AI skeptic. Ensure you review the response and can sanity check it – AI/LLMs are not actually intelligent and will make shit up.

While I am not defending Rodney, who is has not been found guilty of the charges, I cannot tell you what I would do if my child was taken from me.

I have a spouse and multiple kids. I have parents who still live. I have siblings. Intellectually, I think I would not murder my child’s murderer and inflict extra harm on my family through my actions… but that situation hasn’t happened and I have no clue how I would actually react. Right now, my blood is boiling just contemplating it, though.

If I were a single parent of one child, and that child was killed, then I would turn into fucking Liam Neeson without hesitation.

edit: I finished reading the article after posting this. It’s not clear that the officer Rodney struck was the same officer who shot Rodney’s son, and seems to be unrelated from the wording. I feel for Deputy Henderson’s family, and hope he wasn’t an innocent who happened to be wearing the same uniform.

Police in the US regularly choose to escalate, and our politicians choose to keep firearms available. All these deaths are on Congress.

In November I woke up ready to bail. but upon reviewing my options, I determined that nowhere was really better.

There seem to be precious few countries that aren’t flirting with authoritarian parties right now and leaving this one, where I have my social safety net (friends and family, if not government aid) and at least a small amount of power to vote for my values, to go somewhere where I am an immigrant or refugee and lose the power to change policy seemed to be a poor choice. so far. I’m white, straight and middle class, though, so that may be entirely different math for other people.

I’m choosing to stay and fight.

reviewing my replies much later.

What you are doing is perfect. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is normally a quote around material goods, but still applies to things like time and involvement. If you are uncomfortable calling your elected officials, that’s fine. Adding a person to a protest is still an addition that shows engagement.

Your points indicate you are not only voting in presidential elections. You have choices to make things better: ‘Vote blue no matter who’, ceding your choice of “who” to others more involved; or to become involved even though it’s uncomfortable.

I’m not talking to you alone, but also to all those who read your comment, identified with it, and then could use a prod to get involved. I’m also poking at those who vote once every 4 years and are unhappy at their options.

Don’t just hope, Act!

Find and join your local democratic organization. The initial cost in time is almost nothing. Just meet up and introduce yourself.

Once part of the conversation, you can help influence your local party and select candidates for local office that share your values. You can select delegates who vote in larger offices, and through them promote your goals.

It’s not perfect, and we currently don’t have a flawless democratic system, but participating only every 2-4 years during the major elections is not how you get the results you want. A lot of complaints exist online around weak candidates, or ‘opposition party’ that exists only to be a foil for the Right. Those things can only exist if we are not engaged.

The time to be engaged is NOW. Help find or support new House and Senate candidates for your state legislature as well as federal. Contest every office. Even if your precinct/district seems 100% red, not having candidates on the ballot is a huge disservice to anyone who would want to vote for them and hides our strength.

Now is the time to be loud.

I don’t know that ‘Conservative’ exists anymore. I’m American, but I think these comments work everywhere else, as Authoritarianism rises.

Growing up, I believed that liberal/conservative was just a difference in approach, but not a difference in end-goal. Both ‘teams’ wanted the country to prosper. In my 40s, now, I clearly see that we have different goals: Liberals want everyone to be prosperous, healthy, fulfilled. Conservatives value the prosperity only of those on top.

You may identify as conservative, little ‘c’, respect tradition and be careful with spending, etc; but I want you to closely evaluate the actions of people using that label across the globe. A vote for a conservative or right-wing candidate is a vote for the top 1% or less of the population of the planet. They may align with you on some topics, such as religion, abortion, fiscal policies, regulations, and more; but that is a ploy and they are absolutely willing to throw you away as soon as they have your vote and will cut everything you depend on once in power in order to pad their own pockets.

There are certainly perverse incentives and systemic issues that make even liberal politicians support bad policies, but the voter bloc that is ‘liberal’ wants to make things better for everyone. The conservative politicians, at least in the US where I’m paying attention, seem to be hell-bent on making things worse instead.

This has less to do with Trump’s actions, and more to do with how the convervatives behaved…