Andy

Let’s be clear, though: judicial review has no enforcement. Compliance is voluntarily, and it can’t undo assassinations and coups.

And impeachment functionally doesn’t exist. It’s been demonstrated that senators will not impeach a president of their party, regardless of whether they agree with the charges.

This sucks. I was really holding out hope that they might chart a better path forward than most of the alternatives.

To add to this, I’ve been using GIMP on and off for a decade and I’ve never given any thought to the name. It’s all capitalized. I didn’t think it was a backronym, I thought it was just an acronym.

I’ve used this in professional settings (I used to work in academic molecular bio), and I was very evangelical about it. Especially because we’re not doing high-level artistic work, we just sometimes need something for processing microscope images or making graphics for scientific publications.

I’d say to any and everyone, “You know, you don’t have to pay an annual subscription fee for Photoshop: there’s this free, open-source program called GIMP that does most of what you need and you don’t have to pay a thing! Want me to install it for you?”

I didn’t even think to be embarrassed about the name, and no one ever seemed to care in conversation. As others have said, the bigger impediments are people’s attachment to commercial software and interface challenges. This is just an absolutely silly complaint to make.

This is a great article.

First, thanks for that explanation. That’s interesting.

Is there a good place to learn more? I can see why having custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tools are good, but I still have a lot questions.

First, is there a genuine benefit to dissociating a users identity from their server? I think the connection between users and their home instances are a brilliant innovation. They seem to bring village culture back to the internet. They help people associate within networks below just the global level. I think the atomization of people online has been a part of why there is so little trust.

I don’t understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.

Decentralized? Yep. It’s got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You’ll have a lot of legal problems and most people don’t want it, but the option exists.

Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn’t controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government… well we have that. It exists. It’s pretty okay. Go use it.

Obviously not. But that’s true to some degree for all news sources. I don’t blindly trust any newspaper. I read Times of Israel through a lens of context, just like I do for the NY Times, The Guardian, The Intercept, etc.

I think it’s incredibly useful to see what a country reads about itself. Not only is that true even for countries engaged atrocities: it’s especially true for countries engaged in atrocities.

I find the Times of Israel to be a decent source. They’re obviously biased in favor of Israel, but it’s not behind a paywall and they’re far more informative than The NY Post, for instance. I think they seem less biased then the WSJ, frankly.

Overall, a useful insight into mainstream discourse in Israel with fairly accurate reporting.

I don’t think they mean that tiktok is being banned over this app specifically: I just interpreted their comment to mean that tiktok has been an ongoing nuisance to the American mainstream political establishment.

That’s cool. Do you have any details?

It’s either because of DEI or work from home. It’s not clear how, but it’s got to be one of those.

The answer is disappointingly pedestrian, I think: it’s where the clicks are. What’s he supposed to do? Post it on Vimeo and ask people to support him on Patreon?

No conspiracy needed. Lemon doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

That’s a great image.

RIP Norm.

I don’t doubt that AI tools can be used to make great games, but I think part of the reason so many people disagree with you is because:

1. You claim “The best games will mostly be AI created eventually”, and I think most people question on what basis you think that AI will produce overall better quality. If you said that it’s faster, or can allow indie studios to complete with AAA, that makes sense. Attributing quality to it – at this stage – seems odd.
2. It’s unlikely, imo, that the best games will be created by AI as opposed to with AI.

I think using AI throughout the process so that one person can achieve the productivity of a whole team is a credible vision. But to say that games will created “By AI” implies that a generative AI engine will generate the code de novo to a complete game. Which I think is already possible, but it will be very, very hard for such a system to innovate newer games. Because currently, these tools rely on replicating features in their training, so their ability to create quests that match a new genre or to generate dialogue that is funny in the context of the story is going to be very impaired.

By and large, I think current evidence shows that Human-AI cooperation almost always improves upon AI performance alone, and this is particularly the case when creating things for humans to enjoy.

Check again. He never said it wouldn’t!

He’s not forgetting: that’s what he’s proposing!

Oh! I actually already use Calibre to convert formats. It makes sense I guess that it also strips DRM. Cool!

How do you remove DRM?

I just buy books without DRM. I’ve heard about alternate licenses, but I just don’t buy those ones.

I would advise anyone who likes sci-fi to read both of these authors.

The short answer is, yes, his work is very good.

I think you’re wildly missing the point.

When someone asks to see a “white family”, they are not asking for a family with skin of a certain shade. They’re asking for an image in which our pattern recognition identifies in their clothes, posture, hair style, and facial features that they look like people who could appear in a soap ad in the 1950’s. That they look like people who feel totally welcome in their society. They live a certain lifestyle. Simply changing color is the point of the problem. Koreans look pretty white in skin color, but they have other facial features that communicate that their parents or ancestors father back left the land of their birth and traveled to the US likely after 1900. Additionally, based on their dress some people might look at an image of a family with a Korean dad and say, ‘Great, that’s a white family’, while others would say, ‘Why did the model generate this? I asked for a white family.’

There’s a world of context that our current racial terminology can’t capture because it’s not suited to our modern understanding of culture.