I can still view these, but it’s much much harder for me.

I don’t know why parallel isn’t the default.

A sizable minority of Palestinians are Christians, a sizable minority of Israeli settlers are atheists, a sizable plurality of Zionists around the world are Evangelicals. This isn’t a cut-and-dry sectarian conflict.

Most of the time it’s not the most creative people trying to generate these. I think everything I’ve ever seen from the Twitter generator can be categorically ruled as textbook slop.

Most of the interesting generations are made by people who are enthusiastic about the technology, almost always running local generators, trying to nudge the model into generating images that people are not likely to make themselves. It can be a fun thing to experiment with, especially once you understand a bit more about the internal iterative process of these generators.

As a fun toy, as the ultimate content aware fill algorithm, it’s one thing. As a social phenomenon though, these generators have poisoned the internet and our relationship with visual media as a whole. I’ll watch as my scribbles are iterated into something visually interesting and then minutes later see the IDF on the news posting about terrorizing my country in a sterile cutesy cartoon style - my temporary jpegs are nothing like the latter.

It’s not a witticism. Users of a lot of modern mass media platforms (TikTok is the one that comes to mind) need to use increasingly euphemistic language to speak about anything. Unalive is a specific, famous one, you must have seen it before, even in deeply serious situations. Imagine watching someone sobbing while retelling a deeply personal experience only to say “I wanted to unalive myself 🥺” straight-faced between tears. That’s heartbreaking, disgusting stuff.

Someone sent me a cool woodworking video from TikTok a few months ago, and the carpenter man kept talking about dogs. I bought a dog of dogs here, I cut off a dog, make sure to check how many dogs your wood is. What the fuck? Checking the comments, they were all like “LMAO dog 💀💀💀💀💀💀” with zero explanation.

What are dogs? Dogs means feet now apparently. Fuck me if I know. If you say “feet” on TikTok, you get flagged as a fetish channel, so people say “dogs”. Why dogs? I don’t care. If you’re going to use stupid imperial measurements at least call them by a name I recognize.

“Corn” for porn is kind of funny because corn is a very unsexy word (and concept).

There is a lot of euphemistic algorithm evasion on TikTok, and this is not a phenomenon I’d want to see become endemic on the Fediverse. It’s also a thing on Instagram. And now it’s diffusing to unrelated places.

I’m usually not this petty on here but it really pisses me off. This is also becoming a problem on Tumblr apparently, which I intentionally mentioned up there. It is a platform with a rigorous tagging system, which lets users block what they don’t want to see, making it possible to write properly even, about rough stuff, without unnecessary self-censorship. Apparently new, younger users, coming from places like TikTok, will just write “CW:🍇🍇” in their post instead of using the word rape, for example. So people who would previously be safe, by filtering out “rape”, are now finding shit they don’t want to see in their feeds. People should have a place where they can write about their experiences, no matter how harrowing, but this cheapens it and makes it harder to properly organize.

The internet is for communication. Its usefulness as a means of effective communication is under attack from all sides. Let’s not just let that happen in our spaces, yeah

un-alives herself

For fuck’s sake. This is not baby’s first Miiworld, this is not club penguin. Say kills. Say commits suicide. Say hangs/gets strangled/finds a gun under her bed and blows her brains out, spraying chunks of bone blood and flesh on the concrete. Say murder when you see murder, say genocide when you see genocide. Words have meaning.

You can use the correct words on the Fediverse. If anyone doesn’t want to see the word “suicide” they can filter it out. Tumblr got this right twenty years ago and modern social media has been beating newspeak out of previously fully communicative human beings. I swear to fuck I would rather have every single comment on Lemmy say skibidi gyatt ohio L aura about any serious topic than to see “unalived” one more fucking time. This is embarrassing.

……. Uh anyway yeah unskippable cutscene am I right haha crazy

(I actually believe both she and Jeffy have a probable reason to kill themselves: they may be otherwise facing a fate worse than death…)

I don’t feel too offended because I’ve been lurking on Hexbear for over a year now, I understand the culture here is a bit more Twittery. I don’t think every individual here is super catty, just that there’s a lot more Twitter influence than most of Lemmy/Piefed, and as someone who fled Twitter in like 2012, it’s a bit of a damper on an otherwise fun time. I’m all for building bridges with the Only Funny Instance™, even if we do disagree on like 20% of leftism stuff.

The general federated (mostly libby) “big tent” Lemmy/Piefed culture is much closer to tech forums or early R*ddit, which is pretty pleasant most of the time. But it does come with a handful of Zionists etc. That can only be annoying, but when their pitiful replies get downvoted, contrasted with waves of support from all over the world under my posts about day to day life being terrorized by Natenyahu’s murder machine here in Lebanon, it’s reassuring to see how insignificant they are. They can keep barking.

I’ve been aware of Contra’s issues for a long time. I’m not queer so some of the controversies weren’t intuitively “big” or “insignificant” to me. But like five six years ago, when the only message successfully being boosted to consistently reach my young mind was Jorkin D Peanitson, she really was one of the first voices of reason that put the brakes on me falling into the wrong pipeline. FWIW I haven’t seen any of her videos in years.

I do expect better from one of the (formerly?) biggest and most accessible leftie video people than I expect from Mastercard, personally. Is she that comparable to [pop star] or [tv show]?

I feel like being whipped with this tweet as a reply to something I’ve written should be a sign to go outside, but I really don’t see myself in it. I really don’t follow anyone particularly closely, not in the way I’d need to to feel targeted by this, I don’t think.

At the risk of coming off as too gatekeep-y, Arabic is structurally so different from English and French (the other two languages I know). It has a reputation for being difficult for a reason.

Despite it being my native language I’ll occasionally still think of an idea phrased primarily in English, and contorting it into Arabic is very clunky (despite Arabic being much more loosey goosey with word order, in general, you can figure out how to tie up an idea as you go - this applies more to MSA, dialects usually sway more towards a small number of forms).

While strictly more rigid, you might be better off at least grasping the basics of MSA first before jumping into a specific dialect. It is antithetical to how I think about languages (go learn the specific prescriptive form of Arabic instead of the most commonly spoken popularly developed one) but it might be easier to learn that way.

(I’m thinking of it like learning piano (or MIDI?) as a baseline for music and more instruments vs learning guitar first and having an understanding of notes and scales that is very closely associated to the relational positioning of these notes on these strings.)

Or maybe it might not be easier that way. I didn’t learn Arabic as an adult with a background in western languages, fuck if I know what the pedagogically optimal way to learn Arabic is. Arabic is hard, dude. Doesn’t help that half of all Arabic media is (I say this as an Arab) embarrassing mindless drivel.

I usually don’t give a fuck when someone I follow online decides to become a vocal spokesperson for awful shit, online or in person, you have to expect some number of the agreeable people around you to have skeletons in their closet that you are just not okay with.

Contra’s collapse I didn’t call. This one is really unfortunate. It was her videos that got me out of “I don’t know about this trans stuff, I don’t care, just keep it out of my face” to something a bit more understanding. Nobody was putting anything in my face, etc

This is one of the few “celebrity” “betrayals” that really sting. Her, Ethan Klein, Steven Wilson, I can’t think of too many.

Can’t wait to wake up tomorrow to news that Grant Imahara personally signed the Ottoman horses that were used by officers rounding up Armenians or some shit

The oil industry is famously completely independent from government subsidy. Especially when it comes to setting urban development policy and planning transportation systems, these have no bearing at all oil demand and they also cost nothing.

This one pisses me off.

I fixed it.

That model is over a terabyte, I don’t know why I thought it was lightweight. Not that any reporting on machine learning has been particularly good, but this isn’t what I expected at all.

What can even run it?

I’m not in academia, but I’ve seen my coworkers’ hard work get crunched into a slop machine by higher ups who think it’s a good cleanup filter.

LLMs are legitimately amazing technology for like six specific use cases but I’m genuinely worried that my own hard work can be defaced that way. Or worse, that someone else in the chain of custody of my work (let’s say, the person advising me who would be reviewing my paper in an academic context) decided to do the same, and suddenly this is attached to my name permanently.

Absurd, terrifying, genuinely upsetting misuse of technology. I’ve been joking about moving to the woods much more frequently every month for the past two years.

It’s as simple as getting the EU site and privacy policy when you connect from an EU IP. These systems are typically not as rigid as you might expect and the only friction might be around things like payment processing or things like that.

I get relatively uncensored internet access through UK/Ireland servers. This law and this type of law completely terrifies me.

I do have an oversized battery buffer. Most people are discouraged from cooking or using any resistive load on the batteries, but I opted to invest in a bigger battery backup specifically to be able to do that, it’s why I said 85%+ and not like 40%. The battery buffer really is the point of this system, having 24/7 electricity in my home that I can pull over 20 amperes out of at the drop of a hat is without a question the most decadent luxury I have ever experienced. That’s not something I can just hook up to my house.

If I reconnect the grid-charging circuit, it is more than enough in the winter months nowadays (the grid was down more often in 2020-2023). But that gets really expensive, and relying on the grid is not wise.

If I use the secondary (mafia) grid more frequently (as I did in 2020-2023 out of necessity) I can pull a tiny amount of amps at an extortionate kWh rate, that’s enough to keep things like the fridge and lights and the water pump running. But turn on one hot plate or accidentally use the microwave, turn on the heater to the wrong setting (or the AC to the right setting but at the wrong time) and you have to cover up to get to the freezing street to switch the breaker back on. Sounds obnoxious? Well pre-solar that was the only option for 12+ hours of the day. I remember going down to flip the breaker over twenty times one day as a kid.

Let’s not get into the water situation. I just spent a weekend grappling with neighbors and floater valves.

They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.

I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.

I might be the wrong person to answer in this community since I daily drive Windows, but my Tongfang has been a dream and I’m thinking of buying a new one.

Although in OP’s case I’d probably still be looking for the cliche used Thinkpad. Unbeatable.

I live in a country with abhorrently unreliable electricity.

Even now that I have solar and even if I mostly (85%+) cook on a plug-in resistance hob and electric oven, gas is just unbeatable as a backup during the winter. No sun? Grid down? Milk boiled over and got into the hob’s thermostat? Need to cook more than one pot at a time? Israel decided to bomb a fucking residential substation for no reason again? Power company operator decided to accidentally pull an epic prank and route the wrong voltage to everyone’s house, frying a whole town’s fridges, during a year when people couldn’t afford to replace them (I can’t find an English article to link but I promise this happened)? No problemo

I also got a plug-in induction infrared plate and while it is pretty much magical it also makes my inverter shit itself uncontrollably (all my LED lights flicker and it makes an uncomfortable noise) so I really only use it when the ”good” grid is on (the bad one can’t handle it, the good one is the one from the prank above).

You can pry my backup butane from my cold dead hands. I replace the tank less than once a year, it’s fine. Not everyone who wants this option to stay is a regressive cultist.

As someone who VPNs into the EU specifically for the privacy laws, this is troubling. I do wonder what my next move should be. I’d hate to lose my Steam account in particular.

It’s not, but you need over twice the current to supply the same power, and since many safety measures and physical constraints limit the current, it effectively means the power limit is more strict.

This is assuming the same cables and breakers etc being used for both voltage ratings. I know there are specific wiring and connection systems for high amperage stuff in 110v places (probably for some 220-240v places too, but I’m in a place with notoriously bad electrical everything, fuck if I know)