ristoril_zip
@ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip
- Comment on A YouTuber let the Cybertruck close on his finger to test the new sensor update. It didn't go well. 1 month ago:
Someone should tell this guy that hot dogs exist.
- Comment on Spurred by Teen Girls, States Move to Ban Deepfake Nudes 2 months ago:
This genie is probably impossible to get back in the bottle.
People are going to just direct the imitative so called AI program to make the face just different enough to have plausible deniability that it’s a fake of this person or that person. Or use existing tech to age them to 18+ (or 30+ or whatever). Or darken or lighten their skin or change their eye or hair color. Or add tattoos or piercings or scars…
I’m not saying we should be happy about it, but it is here and I don’t think it’s going anywhere. Like, if you tell your so called AI to give you a completely fictional nude image or animation of someone that looks similar to Taylor Swift but isn’t Taylor Swift, what’s the privacy (or other) violation, exactly?
Does Taylor Swift own every likeness that looks somewhat like hers?
- Comment on Study that asked people to count squashed bugs reveals worrying results 2 months ago:
Yep! But they’re a dickens to actually eradicate. I’m going to be hatcheting some gashes in a big one or two on my property in August or September so I can poison its roots with glyphosate when it starts getting ready for fall. I’ve learned the hard way that if you leave the roots healthy you’re making tons of future work for yourself.
Privet is also a runner based plant and it’s also not from North America, but I’ve had more success looking it the old fashioned way.
It’s really gratifying to watch native species rebound and move back into the places after the introduced/invasive plants have been removed.
- Comment on Study that asked people to count squashed bugs reveals worrying results 2 months ago:
What’s really gonna suck is when people are like “holy shit why did they let us kill all the bugs if they were so important?!!”
Personally my property (2 acres) is free of all pesticides and herbicides. I’m killing introduced species of plants (trees of heaven and privet) by hand mostly pulling them out of the ground.
This year I might add Japanese honeysuckle to the target list.
I mean we’re probably doomed to some sort of major collapse either way, but I’ll do what I can on the micro scale and vote for people who will fight for the right path on the macro (e.g. never Republican).
PS - I do use poison bait inside for ants and cockroaches so not 100%. Only when they get noticable. Sorry.
- Comment on Is there a more politically and ideologically diverse alternative for Lemmy? 2 months ago:
I’m sure this will come if the wrong way but if you’re genuinely concerned about discovering diversity of thought, you’re going to have to tell us what your positions are for example.
I’m all for finding diversity, but so often what people who post these are looking for is an echo chamber. Like if you’re really wanting to be challenged, and you’re a conservative, go to socialistworker.org and read up.
But if what you’re concerned about is the nerds in Lemmy seem to be left leaning, that’s just the nature of smart creative people. We value skills and creativity over hierarchy and structure.
- Comment on Judge rules YouTube, Facebook and Reddit must face lawsuits claiming they helped radicalize a mass shooter | CNN Business 3 months ago:
Do you mean “behind” like responsible for or in favor of?
- Comment on Judge rules YouTube, Facebook and Reddit must face lawsuits claiming they helped radicalize a mass shooter | CNN Business 3 months ago:
“Noooo it’s our algorithm we can’t be held liable for the program we made specifically to discover what people find a little interesting and keep feeding it to them!”
- Comment on Republican senator renews push to make daylight savings permanent 3 months ago:
I know of several large corporations that allow “summer schedules” for their workers. It wouldn’t be hard to have four seasonal schedules.
- Comment on Republican senator renews push to make daylight savings permanent 3 months ago:
I bet there wouldn’t be a measurable increase in heart attacks that way.
- Comment on Republican senator renews push to make daylight savings permanent 3 months ago:
I mean, you’re wrong because you’re treating the times that work etc start & stop as somehow written in stone. So that deserves a down vote. We could have our schedules flex with the Sun if we wanted. Instead of flexing our labels of Sun positions to match our desired work start time labels.
- Comment on Republican senator renews push to make daylight savings permanent 3 months ago:
The thing about this argument though is that what time we call the particular position of the Sun in the sky is up to us, and the way we schedule our lives around those times is also up to us.
If what is problematic to you about locking in either DT or ST is the way your work or school schedule interacts with it, change those schedules.
Or put another way if it’s more important to you that sunlight time lines up with your arbitrarily imposed schedule is more important to you than the health & safety of your fellow Americans, you’re “worse than dead” to us.
- Comment on To the top 1% truly smart people the other 99% are dumb as a box of rocks. But exactly how fucking stupid is that 99% ? 3 months ago:
Don’t get to excited about 1%
NdGT points out that 1% difference in DNA has within it somewhere the difference between chimps and humans. Think about that 1% between us and the post humans that come after us, or aliens that are out there already.
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 5 months ago:
The answer is “vote” but not just once. Not just for federal elections. Every election, you should be there. Show up to candidate forums and bother your current electeds.
Every government is like a ship of various size, it takes a while to see the turn even start, let alone have the course actually get corrected. The bigger the government, the harder it can be to get long lasting positive change accomplished. (This isn’t a “small government is better” thing either, it’s just how large organizations work.)
If you can, run for office. If you can’t, find someone you trust who can and support them. Not just Congress or president or governor. City council, county government, school board, on and on…
- Comment on ‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit 5 months ago:
I dunno the front page seems way lower quality than it was before we left. Like not just a little.
I basically only go there for the two stupid flash games I play on my phone and sometimes a Google search ends up with reddit as the best answer. Otherwise I don’t go. I used to go there dozens of times per day.
- Comment on You understand? 6 months ago:
Santa & his coterie are quantum so it doesn’t matter what you think his velocity is
- Comment on Sigma college loans 6 months ago:
fortune.com/…/biden-canceled-one-hundred-billion-…
They’ve forgiven $132 billion so far. It’s not what we wanted, but unfortunately the Republican stacked Supreme Court said Biden couldn’t do blanket forgiveness.
It’s almost like it matters not just who the president is today, but who the president was for the past several decades. And who is and was in Congress.
We can build on what Biden and the Democrats did accomplish, but only if we give them the tools to do so. If we want more stuff like the child tax credit expansion that we got in 2021, we have to reelect Biden and get strong Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. If we want more stuff like the inflation reduction act that is creating jobs and repairing infrastructure, we have to vote for Democrats.
They’ve made it clear they want to do more (i.e. build back better, blanket student loan forgiveness, protect abortion rights). Those long drawn out fights with Manchin and Sinema weren’t just for show. They were a clear indication of what the Democratic Party wants to pass if it has the votes in Congress.
- Comment on Hormones are powerful drugs. Taken by everybody. Creating massive aggresstion, obsession and mental disturbance. What would freedom from its influences look like for a society? An individual? 6 months ago:
The problem honestly is your concept of hormones is incomplete. There are no hormones that only do one thing. They might have a primary function. But they all have secondary and tertiary functions. They all regulate other hormones. Evolution doesn’t do single functions.
If you knock down a “fight” hormone you’re probably going to mess up the homeostasis of the body in other ways. You can probably “fix” that artificially, but you’ll be constantly chasing the next side effect. Humans are chemical Rube Goldberg machines of infinite order. Disrupt one thing and it all goes out of whack.
- Comment on Covid lockdowns had ‘catastrophic effect’ on UK’s social fabric, report claims 6 months ago:
It’s quite cunning of the capitalists to blame COVID lockdowns for their acceleration of the wealth gap that was clearly growing faster and faster before COVID.
Never mind that the lockdowns kept people from dying, right? Kept the hospitals from being even more overwhelmed. The capitalists would rather have a bunch of dead workers than lose productivity.
Let’s see if we keep falling for it. I know all the MAGA people in America and their ilk internationally have already. Next will be the people who don’t really pay attention to world events.
- Comment on This scary AI recognizes passwords by the sound of your typing 6 months ago:
For QWERTY users this is a problem
- Comment on Climate tipping points are nearer than you think. Our new report warns of catastrophic risk 6 months ago:
Typing points for human habitation. Obviously some other species, too. Maybe one that will evolve into a technological species that can NOT wreck whatever climate has enabled their advancement.
- Comment on Study finds that Chat GPT will cheat when given the opportunity and lie to cover it up later. 6 months ago:
I feel like “lie” implies intent, and these imitative large language models don’t have the ability to have intent.
They’re imitating us. Or more specifically, they’re imitating the database(s) they were fed. When chat GPT “lies” to “cover it up,” all it’s actually doing is demonstrating that a human in the same circumstance would probably lie to cover it up.
- Comment on There's no money for education and health care but they'll always find some for war. 6 months ago:
It’s important to be clear about “they” here. Most of the Democrats in Congress and President Biden tried to pass money for education and health care, but they were blocked by all the Republicans and a couple Democrats. If John Fetterman had been elected in 2020 instead of 2022, there’s a decent chance we could’ve gotten it. Not a sure thing, but decent.
On the other hand, almost everyone in Congress supports military spending because it almost always benefits their constituents directly because military contractors have shrewdly built production facilities in nearly every state.
If we can give Biden another term (moderately difficult against Trump, hard against anyone else), expand the Democratic lead in the Senate (difficult), and flip the house (probably easy), we can probably get some education and health care spending. Maybe even a minimum wage increase and a permanent expansion of the child tax credit. Maybe a small UBI. Lots of things!!
(And yes the lavish spending on the military will certainly continue.)
- Comment on If power corrupts, or power attracts the corrupt, why do we have moderators? 7 months ago:
Unchecked, unanswerable power corrupts. On lemmy everyone is free to create their own sub. Heck they’re free to create their own instance. That makes the “power” of moderators pretty tame.
Compare that to the power a corporate CEO has over the typical employee. Especially since the 1970s and 1980s redefinition of the primary responsibility of the directors of a corporation to be “maximize shareholder value” instead of “maximize stakeholder value.”
Even in (small d democratic) politics, at least an aggrieved voter can run to replace a corrupt, abusive politician. Not many companies, probably no publicly traded ones, have a mechanism for the workers to replace the management. That’s where major corruption by power can be witnessed.
- Comment on So angery 7 months ago:
Probably has braces
- Comment on Do you think that membership into suicide pacts will increase dramatically within the next decade because the world is falling apart at the seams? 7 months ago:
It’s easy to focus on the negative, especially because that sells more toilet paper and beer on TV (and Internet sites).
But as Mr Rogers instructed us, when you see bad things going on, look for the helpers. There are a lot of people out there working to put the seams back together even as others are picking at them.
So far, the seam fixers have been winning. I think they’ll still win. For all its downsides, there is a huge upside to globalization: the wealthy people have more to gain from a mostly peaceful planet than from a mostly war stricken planet. Now, there’s profit in that “mostly” that is - to my way if thinking - bad. It’s something that (small “d”) democratic people should push back against.
Like, think about the American bullshit in Iraq and Afghanistan. We actually stopped being at war in those places in the recent past. We don’t have large deployments of active duty troops out there killing poor brown people. That’s good.
Biden also seems like the most likely guy to strongly resist the inevitable calls for war from the military industrial political media complex. Not only does he have personal experience with the loss that comes from war. He has decades of experience in government which makes him less likely to be hornswoggled by generals who want to blow shit up. (If he can purge all the white supremacists from the military that will also help.)
Don’t only look at the bad news. There’s good news out there, too.
- Comment on We have had guns for 200 years but mass shootings only became common in the last 30. So what changed? 7 months ago:
I love how all the people talking about how semi auto guns have been around for X years and blah blah blah completely ignore the massive uptick in production, sale, and distribution of those guns in the past 30-40 (or so).
People have more or less been able to buy assault style semi auto rifles for a long time, but they only “recently” (I guess 30-40 years might not be so recent?) started actually buying them in large numbers. Mostly thanks to the NRA, if I had to point a finger.
The problem is that a really angry or disturbed or whatever person with access to a high rate of fire weapon and lots of ammo (because they’ve been told that next election Jack Johnson or John Jackson will be taking their guns) can literally just pick it up and go kill half a dozen or more people in 30 minutes. There’s nothing we can do to intercept that. (And “good guys with guns” have a terrible track record, including cops.)
We even had a little experiment in the 90s where people were buying a lot of these and then we banned them. Mas shootings (4+ victims according to the FBI if I recall correctly) had been going up but then they went down until …
W and his Republican stooges (or maybe he was the stooge?) let the ban expire, mass shootings started ticking up.
The drivers that lead people to mass violence probably are the “root” of the problem, and I would guess hypothetically that if we could snap our fingers and solve those it wouldn’t matter how many or what type of guns there are out there. The problem is that we aren’t even trying to fix those problems, and the Republican Party is actively making them worse, AND we’re making these literal weapons of war easily available to everyone.
- Comment on Ozempic Threatens Profits at Food and Beverage Makers Worldwide 8 months ago:
Jesus do the masters of the universe really want a recession bad. Just constantly telling their media companies to report in a definite economic downturn coming any day now.
I guess the COVID recession just wasn’t on the right timetable for them? Or they were too busy trying not to die that they couldn’t maximize their recession profiteering?
- Comment on Why do people say that "return to office" is about raising commercial real estate prices? 8 months ago:
Considering that the Muskrat can apparently be the full time CEO of 3 companies simultaneously you might be surprised.
CEOs think they’re different from us normies, and have a lot in common with other
superstarsCEOs such that their interests seem more shared.It’s complex, for sure, but yes to some extent the “back to office” CEOs care that the commercial property market stays “healthy.”
- Comment on Why do people say that "return to office" is about raising commercial real estate prices? 8 months ago:
It’s simple supply and demand. If lots of white collar workers are WFH, then hiring new people doesn’t require more office space. If you can grow your company without leasing office space, or by leasing a smaller office, demand for office space goes down.
Office space owners who use that for income suddenly don’t have (as much) income. So maybe they lower lease rates to attract new tenants. Well, now tenants stuck in higher rate leases start doing the math on penalties for breaking their existing lease vs the new prices.
If remote work stays popular or grows (hint: it’s growing), this CAN result in a race to the bottom on commercial real estate leases, which makes them less valuable investments, which could lead to a massive sell off.
All of this makes CEOs itchy. So they try to justify return to office policies. This just chases their best people into the arms of competitors who will support WFH (and naive pay more without high office space leases to pay).
I think the era of regular office work for white collar workers is over. Maybe a couple days a week for client meetings. But why not just go to the client site?
Office work was killed by COVID. Good riddance.
- Comment on I believe science but I don't understand science. Does that make me religious? 8 months ago:
You’re falling prey to a common trope from religionists: an ambiguous usage of the word/concept “belief.”
I trust what experts in fields outside those I’m deeply familiar with because generally speaking people like them have gone to the trouble of demonstrating what they claim is actually true in the past. That makes it rational, in my opinion, to trust claims that they make today and in the future within their field of expertise.
So to some extent I get the religious commitment of people who have directly experienced what they consider to be miracles. It’s rational, in a way, to become religious after experiencing what you consider to be a miracle.
The vast majority of religious people have not directly experienced a miracle the way I’ve directly performed scientific experiments that validate others’ reported results. They’ve heard about miracles. They’ve read about miracles. That’s not the same, and I’d argue it makes their religious beliefs irrational.
Now, what would probably happen if people were only religious after directly experiencing miracles? I bet religions would just fade away and eventually people who experienced “miracles” would instead contemplate then as unexplained phenomena that could probably have AB explanation rooted in the physical world, and also but become religious.
In a world where religion is encouraged and celebrated, of course people who experience what they consider to be a miracle will first turn to a religious explanation. But if we imagine no religion…