It’s nice to imagine we can keep living exactly as we are and not have to pay up for any of the consequences of our actions. Maybe there will be a tech miracle to save us and the non-consenting species we are taking with us, but that hope, belief, and gamble is not a solution to the problem we have.

We have the solution, we know what it is, and we know how to execute it, we just lack the will. Until that miracle appears we should try to actually fix the problem.

Waiting for a tech solution to appear is like standing on the beach after an earthquake as the tide goes out praying that it won’t come back in.

Edit: Or maybe eating a nice dinner out and continuing to order hoping they forget your bill or someone else pays it. Either way it’s not doing a thing to make the problem better.

These are great examples of that part of art AI can not capture.

The first was painted by a donkeys tail in the presence of a legal witness, sent to exhibition under a false name, and when it began to be recognized at the time by critics and media, the artist said “aha! You literally like art that a donkey can make, your taste is terrible and so is popular art”.

The second is a physical can of the artists feces (I don’t know if anyone has opened the can to be sure), this time with no explicit agenda. What did the artist mean by this, was it another criticism of art critics, was it a criticism of the commodification of art, or something else entirely?

The last was made as the artist tried to find a religious experience derived from art. He said with this piece he did. I don’t find it particularly compelling, but 100 years ago this rethinking of what art can be was revolutionary enough for Stalin to send him to the camps.

If you only value art for consumption, yes these are exactly the same as me sitting at the computer pressing generate for a few hours. If any of the context is included in your enjoyment of the art, there is no comparison.

I enjoy art for the human aspects, the hundreds of musicians performing a single piece together, the incredible talent and skill on display in a photorealistic painting of a person who died hundreds of years ago, or the incredible mind and life of a person writing a moving essay. I don’t usually enjoy art for the sake of the object or product.

AI generated material robs that intangible spirit, floods the world with meaningless content, and as a consequence makes it more challenging to find art. Even when you sort through the muck and see that photorealistic painting, you aren’t imagining the monk who painted it, you’re looking at the hands thinking I don’t know if this is real or not.

Fortunately that’s mainly online for now, you can still go to a concert or museum to confidently see art, you can opt out of the AI content experience. But this sale symbolizes a further erosion of that separation. It seems inevitable that there will be AI “concerts” and “exhibitions” which will physically take space and money from actual artists and further challenge finding enjoyment from art and artists for people like me.

I understand others enjoy art differently, as a consumable product for example, and those people may not be as bothered by AI content. I do hope those people understand that it does impact other people around them and that the generated material is coming at a cost, if not to them, to those people (and the environment, and the artists).

I’d just recommend against NVIDIA GPUs if you don’t want to tinker, I’m sure it’s not as bad as it was back when I had NVIDIA cards, but faffing around trying to get NVIDIA drivers to play nice was the bane of my existence (and where I was forced to learn the most about Linux).

Oh and the screen tearing was a nuisance too that went away as soon as I got an AMD card.

Looks like you got lots of great advice on the OS. Good luck, and enjoy whatever you end up doing!

It’s a really good video. He did a very good job putting words to my thoughts too, I’ve struggled to say why I don’t like AI beyond “it’s not very good at things”, but as he touches on in the video, that is only one small part.

I was also very surprised by the 3% statistic, I think I watch nearly everything from my subscriptions, the recommended is either completely useless from whatever the algorithm has decided I want or showing me videos I intentionally didn’t watch.

I went and followed him on Mastodon, and in that thread learned you can just add a channel to an RSS feed by using the link to their channel. I’m sure that’s old news to some, but as I already use an RSS app, I’m going to start switching over I think.

I just finished watching the series for the first time the other day. I started out a little skeptical it would have aged well and there’s a few moments that reminded me it came out in the early 90s, but wow what a fantastic show. And what a time to be watching it, some of those newscast episodes hit close to home.

I think it’ll be on my rewatch list too now.

Depending on where you are sweet potatoes are often grown as an ornamental vine but the tubers are literally what you eat. You can grow them in the ground or in pots (I recommend pots so it’s easier to harvest, ymmv). Tomatos, blueberries, herbs, sunflowers, and strawberries are probably pretty easy to get away with too as long as you keep them organized looking.

If you don’t have an HOA and you live in its native range, central north america, the sunchoke is a crazy good source of food. Honestly too crazy, once you start growing it, it’ll be there forever and it’ll try to take over everything, but you’ll have the food there buried waiting for you year round. You can also grow it in pots, just be careful with the tubers and the soil, they will seriously spread out of control.

I don’t think the US is as bad (in this respect) as media would have you believe. Having grown up in a relatively large dwindling industrial city in the Midwest, visited Chicago very regularly for a time, lived in the southeast, and now in one of the cities often cited as ‘crime ridden’, I know one person who was mugged and they knew their assailants and it was in my hometown which no one would recognize.

I have friends from St. Louis and Detroit, some of the percieved ‘most dangerous’ cities here. While they recommend caution or street sense when I visit, I haven’t experienced anything but kindness or indifference from strangers. On the other hand, one of my friends was hit and killed by a car in Detroit, and when I left town in the southeast once, saw a bunch of white power banners on someone’s house, which is kinda a promise of crime.

None of this is to say I think the US is better than Brazil or Estonia or anywhere else, I’ve got endless criticism for this country. I mean that the crime reported on is usually exaggerated, and the likelyhood of experiencing the crime that does happen increases as the money you have decreases.

And not to make this even longer, but the people with the means to move to another state much less another country are the wealthy. The poor, who are the ones who might benefit most from moving, are unable to, trapped in the cycle here.

I don’t think you’re going to find peer reviewed studies on something that happened a month ago, but I would be very sure to say someone is working on it.

But if you’ve used Twitter you can recognize when something changes. I haven’t used it for years, but secondhand I’ve heard it was pretty egregious. Obviously this could be due to external parties heightening a disinformation campaign, but I’m not sure that really matters.

American social media platforms creating an environment where propaganda and misinformation flourish and refusing to take action against it has the same net effect as TikTok altering internal algorithm. Arguing that somehow TikTok is worse because it’s a foreign government is nonsense when every social media platform is manipulated by foreign governments to the same effect.

Doesn’t help the US government just keeps saying “trust us bro, we have reports that say China is spying on us” while they threaten to ban one platform. Nobody trusts that, it looks like a witch hunt, and sounds racist when they single them out this way.

Yeah I think “evangelical vegans” or “bad vegans” are a sort of caricature made for comedians and then everyone else to punch down on. Sure annoying vegans exist, and so do annoying meat eating people, but diet isn’t necessarily why these people are annoying.

I imagine there’s also an element of defensiveness from meat eaters as well. Even reasonably stating “I don’t eat meat because of the cruelty in the industry and the negative environmental impacts” is implicitly challenging a meat eater to consider those things, which they likely never have. And being faced with the certainty that the vegan is making that statement (the cruelty of the industry and environmental impacts are objective), the meat eater is possibly going to feel like they are being judged or attacked.

To be clear, the EU developing an operating system for EU use is not a dystopian vision without assuming many things about the theoretical future project. The petition is asking for this for transparency and independence from an actual dystopian vision coming to fruition in a ‘forced’ Windows standard. That doesn’t really lead me to imagine a dystopian nightmare where the EU forces everyone to install their distro (A potentially comical vision on its own).

I rather like the idea that governments contribute to open source projects, sounds a lot better than the same contribution going to private institutions. The use of open source software may introduce some vulnerabilities, but those are replacing vulnerabilities that are already there. I would also imagine investment in some open source projects would encourage more development in adjacent areas, much like Valve, Proton, and gaming.

I would be interested to hear what alternative you have to solving the problems that the project in this petition is attempting to solve. It’s easy to shoot down something for not being perfect but it’s pretty challenging to come up with a theoretical proposal that pleases all.

I use MXLinux, picked it somewhat at random when I was frustrated with windows 10 privacy settings and haven’t looked back since. I tried mint, mint cinnamon, Ubuntu, and Fedora before MX, and Fedora is the only other one I have stuck with, to use on a Surface Pro (I needed Wayland for the touchscreen).

MX has been really stable, light on resources, and has worked really well through two complete hardware upgrades. I play games on steam, some brand new some old, and I haven’t found one that I can’t play yet. That is due to steam/proton/proton GE more than the OS I expect but I’m happy nonetheless. I also run my home entertainment box on MX on an old PC (I know there are better choices for os for this, I was just comfortable with it).

I like it because I haven’t felt any reason to try anything else, perhaps someday I will and I’ll just find a new OS then, but until then it’s my favorite I think.

If I’m reading that right, that could also say that Instagram is suppressing anti-israel content? It’s just saying that in comparison to Instagram tiktok is showing more x, y, z. But Instagram is absolutely not a neutral point to measure from.

For starters there’s different demographics on each one, but I’m sure you could adjust for that, maybe the study did. But I don’t think you can adjust for the impact the US government has on Meta. I don’t believe for an instant that some US agency isn’t manipulating algorithms or requiring certain tweaks to steer discourse just like they did with US news outlets.

I’d diagnose the problem similarly to the person you replied to and I don’t think I’d feel compelled to offer a specific remedy either.

People have been experimenting with economies and societies for thousands of years and we are in a relatively new money/power/control stuck spot right now. I’m sure there’s been a system in history that would work much better than what we’ve got, but I just read recreationally so I dunno what it is and just because something worked 1000 years ago in North America doesn’t mean it’ll work here today. I wouldn’t mind giving something new a shot though, what we have is not working for most people.

I don’t think that is a safe conclusion at all, the colonial Europeans were pretty notorious for removing anything or anyone or anything they didn’t see as civilized in the Americas. They also brought disease that wiped out an astounding number of the native people. From an also uninformed view it would be just as likely the native dogs suffered a similar fate, or simply disbanded and roamed free when their companions died.

Second for guild wars 2, the world is huge when you first start playing, and though the initial levelling experience can feel like it takes a while, once you have hit the cap you can go pretty much anywhere. The story is pretty linear, though, so if you want a deep and complex story it might be better to look for a single player game.

I’d also say the combat system in Guild wars is fantastic, it’s simple enough to pick up and not have to stress about playing the game, but if you want to engage and get better there is so much to learn about and improve.

I am not traveling to go see this one, but did for the one that went across the US a few years ago. I thought it was really cool and would go again if it weren’t so far away. The way the hot Tennessee day got so much cooler, the way the evening bugs came out, the birds stopped singing, the shadows looking like they had a bite out of them, all together with being able to see the suns corona for a couple minutes made for a really really cool experience for me. It was also a big party/camping trip with friends so that helped too.

I could see it not having that impact for everyone, but I figured I’d share.

I’d argue that, while reductive, “it’s bad” is probably a pretty safe takeaway from this, given that the article says if you are of a healthy weight and activity level that you can get away with eating a less balanced diet. Most people in the areas interacting with this post aren’t probably doing that exercise and weight thing, so the carefully balanced diet it is for us. Based on North American red meat consumption this is likely much less than the reader currently eats, so they should probably cut back.

Internet translation of that resoning: “it’s bad don’t eat it”.

You can play with no survival mechanics on peaceful mode, but then there’s no mobs. I’m sure you can mod out hunger though for that og feel, theres a mod for everything.

First: she doesn’t need to say anything specifically or explicitly to be a transphobe actively hostile to the existence of trans people.

Second: she says things and creates spaces that are very specifically and explicitly hostile to the existence of trans people.

Third: she associates with and collaborates with people who openly advocate for “reductions in trans people”.

Honestly I could go through my understanding of her issue, but many people have spoken at great length about why her behavior is harmful. If you’re truly interested seek them out.