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Joined 4 days ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2025

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  • Sure, but as a leftist who grew up in a deep red area, I can tell you that those people are, largely, uneducated and ignorant.

    It is because of that ignorance that they’re able to believe the lies that led them to acting the way that they did. The people who bear the majority of the responsibility and blame are the ones who know that they’re taking advantage of and cultivating that ignorance.

    I get to hear, in real time, the propaganda engine work on these people (which includes most of my family). I see how topics are framed, by media personalities, into palatable actions. As I’m writing this, there’s a podcast playing at my job, where DOGE is being celebrated for finding ‘fraud and abuse’. I know, for a fact, that the listeners don’t have a high school education and have no idea how the government’s payment systems work… but the radio is telling them that DOGE is doing good work.

    So, how can they know any better? These are not people who’re ever going to continue their education and their media literacy skills were developed in the 80s. They’re simply not equipped to handle the scale of lying that exists in the modern world.

    On the other hand, the person talking, has multiple degrees and has served in the federal government. That person KNOWS they’re lying but continue to do so because it is profitable. I find people like that to be far more culpable. They’re lying for profit (grifting, to use an over used term) and their lies reach millions of voters.

    Then you have the people who benefit from the lies. Trump and Elon know that they’re dealing with ignorant people, they know exactly how to use populist rhetoric at public events. While, in private, they’re using the power that they’ve obtained to corruptly enrich themselves and their sycophants.


    Direct your ire at the people who’re actively profiting off of lies and corruption. Help to educate the other people around you when they’re being fed lies.

    Attacking your neighbor while Elon and Trump ransack the government is not only pointless, it’s completely counter-productive and ensures that we’ll never unify against this kind of power grab.


  • Hot take:

    The problem isn’t the other middle class people who’ve been convinced to wear a different color hat.

    The problem is the oligarchs who’ve been plotting to take over and destroy the power of the people by dismantling the government. The people who are actively doing that exact thing while the ignorant masses engage in tribalism and attacking people for voting.

    Engaging on this topic is just furthering the distraction tactics. The people who’re actively working to destroy the government or implementing policies targeting minority populations are not your neighbors or anybody that you will run into on social media.



  • There are thousands of different diffusion models, not all of them are trained on copyright protected work.

    In addition, substantially transformative works are allowed to use content that is otherwise copy protected under the fair use doctrine.

    It’s hard to argue that a model, a file containing the trained weight matrices, is in any way substantially similar to any existing copyrighted work. TL;DR: There are no pictures of Mickey Mouse in a GGUF file.

    Fair use has already been upheld in the courts concerning machine learning models trained using books.

    For instance, under the precedent established in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust and upheld in Authors Guild v. Google, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that mass digitization of a large volume of in-copyright books in order to distill and reveal new information about the books was a fair use.

    And, perhaps more pragmatically, the genie is already out of the bottle. The software and weights are already available and you can train and fine-tune your own models on consumer graphics cards. No court ruling or regulation will restrain every country on the globe and every country is rapidly researching and producing generative models.

    The battle is already over, the ship has sailed.


  • I know that it’s a meme to hate on generated images people need to understand just how much that ship has sailed.

    Getting upset at generative AI is about as absurd as getting upset at CGI special effects or digital images. Both of these things were the subject of derision when they started being widely used. CGI was seen as a second rate knockoff of “real” special effects and digital images were seen as the tool of amateur photographers with their Photoshop tools acting as a crutch in place of real photography talent.

    No amount of arguments film purist or nostalgia for the old days of puppets and models in movies was going to stop computer graphics and digital images capture and manipulation. Today those arguments seem so quaint and ignorant that most people are not even aware that there was even a controversy.

    Digital images and computer graphics have nearly completely displaced film photography and physical model-based special effects.

    Much like those technologies, generative AI isn’t going away and it’s only going to improve and become more ubiquitous.

    This isn’t the hill to die on no matter how many upvoted you get.





  • It’s not the eggs that you should worry about, salmonella is largely controlled by the egg processing company. The wheat used to make flour can be contaminated by rat feces, which is then ground into the batch.

    If you want to eliminate the risk, and still eat the raw cookie dough, you can brown flour in the oven before making the cookie dough. It won’t work well if you try to bake it, but if you want to use raw cookie dough (like, in a batch of ice cream) but don’t want to contract e.Coli then brown flour is the way to go.

    I mean, I still taste the raw cookie dough before I bake… but just in case someone needed to know, there’s a safe way to do it.