iridaniotter

joined 5 years ago
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[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If natural disasters are going to occur and intensify from human activity you're (American state) responsible for and you're not going to do anything to mitigate them, it's better to just not acknowledge it whatsoever I guess?

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 8 points 4 days ago

The military almost put its foot down when the executive branch told them to kick out all the trans soldiers. I wonder if they will actually do it this time?

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 9 points 4 days ago

Military bans permanent shaving waivers, which are predominantly used by people with pseudofolliculitis barbae, which predominantly affects black men, and the article discusses the possibility of laser hair removal, which also infamously is not as effective on dark skin! Wow!

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

So why even place it in the media? Why not just do what they do in Lebanon and strike without warning and announce the results later?

If the goal is to destroy cultural heritage sites then it makes sense to prime Americans to expect it and be okay with it before you do it.

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 8 points 4 days ago

Aufheben moment

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 35 points 6 days ago

finally I can use my tens of thousands of dollars of estrogen as collateral

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 13 points 6 days ago

If you don't want high wages then you need low cost of living. There is no one who understands the economy less than a small-business owner.

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 31 points 1 week ago

I mean, there are people telling New York Jews to move to Israel, "the only safe place for Jews in the world," quite literally days after it got its ass handed to it by Iranian missiles. Sure, in some cases it's complete derangement, but also:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Vinylon

omg juche fiber mentioned

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 6 points 1 week ago

"We need a real fourth International" My comrade in social democracy, we are still in the eternal Second International

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

depressing rant about personhood

Doppelgänger fiction is depressing because the angst characters have that others only like the mask and not the self is just true, and the trope where another character realizes there's an impersonator is just cope. No one expects a doppelgänger, so a convincing impersonation is not even necessary. While humans are biosocial beings, under any organization of society where embodiment is critical to its functions, "person" becomes nearly synonymous with "body". So it is not even necessarily the "role" a doppelgänger must take on convincingly. The most important "role" a person plays is just their physical presence. Actual behavior can be quite inconsistent!

Written a couple days after watching Episode 14 of Ergo Proxy via proxy, ha.

So anyway this is why we must all aspire to be more like Fai Rodis from the hit untranslated novel Bull's Hour.

 

This brings me to the debate over training AI and copyright. A lot of creative workers are justifiably angry and afraid that the AI companies want to destroy creative jobs. The CTO of Openai literally just said that onstage: "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place":

Many of these workers are accordingly cheering on the entertainment industry's lawsuits over AI training. In these lawsuits, companies like the New York Times and Getty Images claim that the steps associated with training an AI model infringe copyright. This isn't a great copyright theory based on current copyright precedents, and if the suits succeed, they'll narrow fair use in ways that will impact all kinds of socially beneficial activities, like scraping the web to make the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

...

Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don't want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai's CTO's use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.

This isn't hypothetical. Remember last summer's actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?

This is true across the board. The Big Five publishers categorically refuse to include contractual language promising not to train an LLM with the books they acquire from writers. The game studios require all their voice actors to start every recording session with an on-tape assignment of the training rights to the session:

And now, with total predictability, Universal – the largest music company in the world – has announced that it will start training voice-clones with the music in its catalog:

It would be really great if someone would do a study on artists' views on generative models & copyright law that also took into account the kind of work they do and their class position. I say "what they do" because doujinshi circles have an interest in weakening intellectual property contrary to other freelance artists, although I'm not sure if this is reflected in reality...

 

In contrast, our societies today instead try to maximize consumption, which devalues our people as they get softer, flabbier and, even, fail to reproduce.

This does not mean consumption as measured by economists, in dollars, although there is substantial overlap. It means consumption in the sense of satisfaction of individual human appetites, eventually to the detriment of the whole human being and his or her society.

The most unimaginably challenging megaprojects are not even interplanetary, but interstellar. A civilization genuinely committed to undertaking such projects would finally generate the political capital necessary to streamline the economy, eliminate rent-seeking, and solve a million other minor and major problems, annoyances, and inefficiencies. It would also finally generate demand for human beings and therefore offer the possibility of solving the fertility crisis.

 

A much needed addendum to the previous post on this subject from 8 days ago: https://hexbear.net/post/4615155

 

And on the American website, the MSRP is $80, with no distinction made between digital and physical yet.

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