I would say this is an overall positive: The more people are aware of how easy it is to create fake this with AI the better, I would say. That would make people less likely to fall for it in the future, especially for something with greater consequences than just a parade that didn’t exist.

Well… One more reason to ditch YouTube. As always: Reminder PeerTube exists.

I know the network effect is powerful, but YouTube won’t lose until people are fed up enough to not use it.

I don’t see the logic.

I think we can all agree that genocide is bad, right? And we can all agree that is happening in Palestine is genocide, correct? And therefore we would like to elect someone who would be more likely to stop the genocide.

The Democrats don’t seem to want to stop… But neither do the republicans. I don’t see the argument.

To my understanding, neither party has any plans to stop the genocide so what the point of contention? I understand that simply voting will do nothing to fix anything, but picking the lesser evil (which is still evil) will buy us more time. Point is, voting for Trump wouldn’t be any better, nor voting for a 3rd party due to the flaws of the First Past The Post voting system.

If one should not vote for the Democrats, then who should we vote for? Trump? Seriously, what’s your plan?

Really? I didn’t know that! What is it called? How can I use it?

Honestly, I don’t see why CSS theming is important. The customization is nice and all, but that’s not going to make people switch to Firefox. There are many other things that could be improved, like adding tab grouping. I use this extension called Tree Style Tab which I cannot live without. Firefox having something like that by default instead of an extension would be nice.

However, having said that, OperaGX did find quite a lot of success by simply making it easy to theme the browser, so I can see where they are coming from.

Philosophy is fine and all but we can’t forget that from a practical standpoint, all this philosophizing is useless. We can’t live our day to day lives operating under the belief that the material world doesn’t exist and using The Problem Of Knowledge as a way to dismiss empirical evidence by stating that we can’t be sure if the material world even exist is impractical and useless. Remember: Philosophy is completely useless. The only value you will find in it is the development of critical thinking skills.

Just imagine if a murdered caught red handed could get away scoot free by just saying “Hey, you can prove the material world exist, therefore you can prove the victim ever existed!”

It’s the problem of knowledge all over again. Something which philosophers have been debating for centuries. But I highly doubt you have studied any of it.

That whole thing of “facts are just opinions” is nothing more than the devaluing of empirical evidence and turning observable facts into a matter of opinion, turning any and all political discussion into a shouting match where nothing ever comes of it because “it’s just my opinion”. This propaganda tactic is called “The Fire hose of Falsehood”.

I could go on and on about the nature of knowledge and the evolution of science, but I highly doubt you would care as you do not seem to know even the most basic things about The Problem of Knowledge and choose to go the self-contradictory skeptic route of “Knowledge doesn’t exist”.

Edit: I would just like to add that just because our sense are 100% reliable that doesn’t mean that everything is false.

Nope.

When humans make art, they are constantly making decisions. Decisions, decisions, decisions. With every stroke of the pen, with every color (not just a generic pink, blue or yellow, but specific tones and shades of those), with every everything they to while making that piece, they are making a lot of micro-decisions. Those decisions are made in respect to the person that is making the art, as their personal life experiences are what dictate how they make such decisions, even if they don’t notice it.

AI art is not like that. With AI, you type a prompt and outcomes an image. The user does not have a say in any of the micro-decisions that when into making that piece. The AI it self isn’t making any decisions either, it is just making the mathematical weighted average of what images with a description with similar tokens look like, and simply copying said decisions. The AI does not decide, it simply regurgitates previous decisions.

People that say that AI could be used as a tool to help artists clearly as never pickup a pencil to draw. The thing that makes an artists voice, that makes that art theirs are the decisions they make while making their art.

When you are drawing something, you are constantly making small micro-decisions with every stroke of your pencil, and those decision and how you make them is what makes art so beautiful, as no two artists make those decision the same way and each artist as a certain consistency in those decisions that evolves with them as a person. As such, art is so much more than a pretty picture, it is a reflection of the person who made it. Those decisions are also the fun part of making art.

AI art doesn’t let you make any decisions: you type the prompt and out comes an image. An image made of an weighted average of human made images with a similar description. You have no say in the micro-decision the machine makes, you have no say on where exactly the pencil strokes go. Therefore this machine is useless for artists. You might say “Just edit the image!”, but that doesn’t help either, as editing the image still doesn’t give you that micro-level of decision making. Also, editing a flat image with just one layer is just as useful as any other image form any search engine image search result. Unlike text, which can be easily edited to be exactly what you want.

I know their might be some wait to integrate machine learning into art, but right now the tools available don’t do that.

This image is AI generated. Look closely at the smaller text, it’s all mangled.

This kinda stuff should be opt-IN, not opt-OUT. Just think of how many people don’t even know this is happening, or that there even is an opt-out.

Capitalism is the economic model where the wealth created by the workers is owned by the people o whom the tools and resources required to created said wealth and not the workers who put in the work to create it.

Here is a comic that might help you understand:

Reminder that neutrality and compromise isn’t always a good thing.

I don’t think you understand exactly how theses machines work. The machine does not “learn”, it does not extract meaning from the tokens it receives. Here is one way to look at it

Suppose you have a sequence of symbols: ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ And then were given a fragment of a sequence and asked to guess what you be the most likely symbol to follow it: ¹§ Think you could do it? I’m sure you would have no trouble solving this example. But could you make a machine that could reliably accomplish this task, regardless of the sequence of symbols and regardless of the fragment given? Let’s imagine you did manage to create such a marvellous machine.

If given a large sequence of symbols spanning multiple books of length would you say this pattern recognition machine is able to create anything original? No… Because it is simply trying to copy it’s original sequence as closely as possible.

Another question: Would this machine ever derive meaning from this symbols? No… How could it?

But what if I told you that these symbols weren’t just symbols: Unbeknownst to the machine each one of this symbols actually represents a word. Behold: ChatGPT.

This is basically the general idea behind generative AI as far as I’m aware. Please correct me if I’m wrong. This is obviously oversimplified.

It’s funny because I’m pretty sure you haven’t lived in a communist country either. So you’re arguing that lack of personal experience invalidates all arguments in favour of communism, but your lack of personal experience living in a communist country somehow doesn’t invalidate your arguments against communism. Yup, perfectly consistent.

Huh, how does the action of one political party dictate what a global movement want?

Do you even know what the terms “Left” and “Right” mean in this context? (No, they are not a synonim of “Democrat” and “Republican” party of this one country)

Also since when was Biden on the left?

I’m far from an expert, but Vanguard is a kernel-level program. If a kernel-level program crashed, the whole system crashes. So yes, any kernel-level program could do the same thing CrowdStrike did, intentionally or not.

Kernel-level programs can do whatever the hell they want.

And who will create the automaton? How do we select people to maintain the automaton that will play the role of government?

That automatic government has to be created by a group of people. How do you plant to select them? The government automaton would also need to be maintained, as it is impossible for the authors of the machine to predict what humanity is going to look like 500 years from now. How do you select those?

The logic of “code is impartial, therefore code should be law” is flawed because code as to be written by someone, and that someone is not impartial.

Republics aren’t necessarily democratic.

A country is considered a republic when it’s government in comprised of representatives of the citizen body. But how should those representatives be selected? The concept of “republic” does not specify how. You could choose them through democratic means; You could elect a president who in turn selects the representatives; or you could have them be chosen based on who is the richest. That would still be a republic.

Democracy comes from the Greek demos, which means people or district, and kratos, which means power. Democracy is when the power is on the people.

Republic simply says the government should be ruled by representatives of the citizen body, Democracy states how those representatives should be selected.

(Please correct me if I’m wrong)

Democracy bad? OK, then I guess you won’t mind if Great Britain comes back to their former colonies and enslave everyone.

Have we all developed selective amnesia to the dictatorships that happen in Europe around the time of the second world war? Do you really want to live in those places? Or go back to monarchy?

I’m assuming you are an American… America as pretty much always been a democracy since it’s independence. You don’t know how life is like outside a democracy. You’ve never heard of horror stories of those who lived under fascist dictatorships during WWII. My country was one of those… for 41 long, long years… The International and State Defence Police (Policia Internacional de Defesa do Estado, or PIDE for short) had eyes everywhere… Even the most banal things, like owning a lighter, was outlawed - unless you had a license (if you read the article about that lighter license, you will notice that it doesn’t just say “lighter”, it is worded in such a matter that outlaws anything that could possibly be used to start a fire… You can start a fire with two sticks…). No one was safe. Gatherings where outlawed. Saying anything even remotely against the state would lead to to be captured and tortured for months on end, making death look like an unreachable dream. Worst of all… the PIPE’s torture methods were notorious for not leaving any markings on the victims bodies.

This GOP stuff reminds me a LOT of The New State, as it was called. Salazar, the Dictator, was also a conservative determined to bring Portugal back into it’s former glory. He hated democracy and felt like the new more progressive ideas were destroying our country, and, of course, he demonized the immigrants…

“Portugal is not a small country”

He had strong (and fake) Christian values, which where present in State propaganda.

“Salazar’s Lesson”

“God, Homeland, Family: The Trilogy of National Education”

In the picture above, you can see Salazar’s ideal family: The husband comes home from work, the wife an kids all stop what they are doing to greet him back home. The wife was to be an overzealous mother, a devoted wife, a true fairy of the home. A life of endless submission. They were trained to be like that from birth. First submit to their father and brothers, then their husband. The only future she could hope to have was a stable marriage.

I could go on and on on the horrors the the New State. I don’t know what kind of world you what to live in but I can assure you that, if you advocate for an end to democracy, you will not be the one in power.