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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • As an intellectual exercise, what do you suppose are the chances that Vance is a nazi? I don’t mean ‘nazi’ in a rhetorical sense, and I don’t mean ‘nazi’ in the sense that his worldview and ideologies overlap with those of nazis. I mean, what are the chances that he’s actually in his basement with a brown shirt, seig heil-ing from time to time? It probably doesn’t matter, as long as his civic actions support that cause anyway. But I wonder this each time I hear yet another awful detail about this loser. I peg it at about 10%, low but definitely above zero.


  • First of all, there was no way for Israel to know whether the people they claim to be targeting were combatants when the attack occurred since Israel had no information about the status of these bombs when they chose to detonate them.

    Secondly, placing a bomb in a common device that you have every reason to believe will spend much of its time in the proximity of civilians, in homes, markets and other public spaces, and choosing to detonate it without knowledge of the location of the bomb, or it’s proximity to your supposed target, is actively avoiding distinguishing between ‘combatants’ and civilians. I can’t believe that western brain rot requires this to be spelled out for it.









  • This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.

    I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.

    We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.



  • Biden is ideologically committed to Israeli apartheid and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, via genocide if necessary. trump, most Republicans, and most Democrats support or at least tolerate it for political expediency. It’s so gross. Because Biden has faced very few political consequences for all this, the Harris campaign, and presumably a Harris administration will just continue on with the hypocrisy, injustice, and violence. I cannot over emphasize that, given the distribution of power in the region, this is a US endeavor.

    People will downvote this comment because it is uncomfortable to accept, not because it’s untrue.





  • The problem with what creeps like Mann are claiming comes down to the difference between “art” and buying an “interest” in art as a speculative investment. Mann conflates these two ideas, trying to bestow the wholesomeness of artistic expression with his investment business venture. I’m all in favor of getting artists paid, and structuring society in a way that encourages the production of art, but Mann wants to weaken securities regulations and consumer protections to do that. That’s a terrible idea because it will lead to many more people being conned and defrauded.

    If investors were merely trying to support an artist’s work, and not seeking to profit from their investment, they wouldn’t need a securities mechanism like NFTs to do it. We already have money for that.

    If a side effect of regulating NFTs as securities is to somehow damage the regular fine art marketplace, as I think Mann’s suit is warning, that is no great loss for society. The fine art market is a blight, a fraud-riddled playground for ultra wealthy douchebags to sequester wealth and does nothing to advance art or promote the creation of artworks writ large.

    Mann has ridden the crypto speculative bubble and has an inflated impression of the value of his work. He’s carved out a niche as a sort of court jester for billionaires like Mark Andreesen who want to rebuild financial systems in a way that would dismantle the regulatory state and enshrine an elite class as technologically empowered feudal lords. He thinks the money is compensation for his songs, but it’s largely just a side effect of crypto bros forever trying to find a greater fool to hold the bag in a pyramid scheme. In that effort, his lawsuit is basically a marketing campaign for his investment business. I hope the court puts an end to this once and for all, but I’m not optimistic.




  • The problem is that she then pairs those statements with the exact same rhetoric that Netanyahu and Biden use obfuscate the genocide campaign (“will always defend Israel’s right to defend, yadda yadda yadda”). I appreciate that some of her language is a tiny bit better than Biden, but that just not enough. She has to show some of this ‘leadership’ quality that the DNC keeps bragging about. There must be some policy shift proposed. Otherwise her language is about as meaningless as trump’s empty claims that he’ll end the war in Ukraine as president elect.