FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

All watched over by machines of loving grace.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

They won't be able to make a process in NATO to kick Hungary out because it will require Hungary to agree to adding that process.

The EU has a method to suspend Hungary's voting rights, which would let them proceed to add other rules without Hungary's intervention. Canada proposed adding suspension and expulsion mechanisms to NATO back when the treaty was being negotiated in 1948 but after a bunch of debate they were declined. Instead, it was expected that any country that needed to be kicked out of NATO would be in material breach of the treaty. At that point everyone else in NATO would agree that Hungary has effectively withdrawn from the treaty.

I mean, at the end of the day, treaties only have power because everyone agrees that they have power. All of the other NATO powers could spontaneously agree to forget about that old piece of paper they signed and sign a new one instead that doesn't have Hungary's name on it.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Okay, so you're fine with it. Bully for you. There are a lot of people in your society who are living much closer to the edge and will find themselves in a lot of trouble if prices for the stuff they need go up.

The point of why this is a problem is ripple effects. None of us own shares in Evergrande. But Evergrande's collapse could cause such big ripples that it's bound to affect us anyway, even way out at the fringes of seemingly unrelated economies. Your lifestyle may not be impacted directly but you'll find yourself wondering "why are there suddenly a bunch of wars in southeast Asia?" Then "why are gas prices through the roof?" And then "why are all the prices through the roof?" And finally "why are the poors rioting in the streets and burning my house? Don't they know how expensive it is now?"

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

It's a bit of a catch-22, unfortunately. Homeless camps are not exactly safe places to live. Fire codes and zoning laws are not arbitrary things, they exist for reasons.

I would find it reasonable to require that the government has to have someplace for those homeless people to go before dismantling their camps, though.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

The dead can't be enslaved. This is a voice emulator, not a person. It's baffling that I'm now talking to two people who think this is actually George Carlin somehow.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

"Carlin" also makes references to his deceased not-really-Carlin state throughout the show, so if you crop off the preface it still wouldn't fool anyone for long.

Edit: there's a whole section of the special starting at the 38 minute mark that's about being dead, and "Carlin" reflecting on what exactly he is and what that means. Just got to that bit, it's rather good.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

...okay? Knock yourself out.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Fans make fanfiction about stuff they have respect for, this could be considered as an extreme sort of fanfiction.

My basic point is that you're making assumptions about the motivations here that may not be warranted. Whoever made this could well be a genuine George Carlin fan and just wanted to have another new special "by" him.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Surprise!

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

They are being "forced" to accept outside culture because their inside culture has led them to a demographic death spiral. Not by any action initiated by outsiders. If outsiders were capable of forcing Japanese culture to change there are plenty of other things that would be changing that aren't.

They could always choose to continue following that spiral to oblivion, I suppose. Or they could reform the aspects of their culture that have led them there. Accepting immigration is one of the ways they could do that.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

How cold is "very cold"? I'm in Canada and right now it's -35C outside my house, approaching -50 with wind chill. If I was out there right now my main prep would be "holy shit get to any sort of shelter, outdoors is lethal tonight." I believe the city leaves the various transit centers open for people to bunk down in overnight under conditions like this.

Failing that, my first priority would probably be a wool blanket. Wool blankets are great at insulation, they work even when wet, and they can be folded up fairly compactly and worn as a shawl or cloak if a little mobility is needed. Though under tonight's conditions I wouldn't be mobile, I would have found the most sheltered place I could immediately reach and rolled up in the blanket in hopes I would actually wake up in the morning.

Cheapest I'd expect to find a good wool blanket for would be something like these $30 ones, so that's 6 or 7 blankets on your budget. Not too bad I suppose. Maybe there are cheaper places you could get some in bulk?

If I had sufficient blanket that I'm expecting to survive, my next concern would be frostbite taking my fingers, toes, or ears. So good warm mittens (for survival purposes in these conditions I'd prefer mittens over gloves), thick wool socks, and a hat might be good. Boots would be expensive and hard to ensure the right size for if you're giving this stuff out to random strangers, hopefully their footwear is loose enough that the thick wool socks will fit. I've always liked trapper hats, the chin strap keeps the ears and cheeks protected and ensures I don't lose it to a strong gust of wind or other circumstances. The nose would be left unprotected, so perhaps a scarf would be good to add to that - a scarf is like a little mini blanket and might be versatile if they need to wrap it around some other part of themselves for emergency cold protection.

This is all just off the top of my head, mind you. I've dealt with Canadian winters all my life but I've fortunately never had to deal with them as a homeless person, so I could easily be missing something.

Perhaps you could call up a homeless shelter and ask whoever's running it for advice? I'm sure they'd have more direct experience.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

They're not going to force the Gazans, no. They're just going to systematically flatten Gaza and shoot people and if the Gazans choose to flee to Egypt, well, that's out of Israel's hands.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

This is the sort of thing that I like to send to people who assure me that "all AI generated art looks wrong" or whatever.

No, the AI generated art that looks wrong is the only AI generated art that you notice. The rest slips by.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Ha, no. Trump isn't likely to win but if he were then the urgency would be to defeat Putin rather than to appease him.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

"We are talking about a desire to improve the living situation of Gazans…the ones that refuse to live in these conditions."

The living conditions that they imposed on them.

What next, load them up into cattle cars for the trip? If irony died when Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize, then this is surely desecrating the corpse.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

It was a very Kerbal landing technique they were attempting, got to respect them for attempting new things even when it's their first try at a lander.

Last I heard, speculation was that the solar panels were pointing to the west and so it might "wake up" again later in the Lunar day when the Sun gets past zenith. They landed in Lunar morning to maximize the usable duration of sunlight, so right now the panels would be pointed directly away from it.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Abrams wanted to have Starkiller Base blow up Coruscant in "The Force Awakens" but he wasn't allowed so he made up Hosnian Prime as an indistinguishable stand-in. He seems to really like blowing up a key planet whenever he takes over a setting.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

It's always a crapshoot "psychoanalyzing" anything over the Internet, let alone an AI, but I'm betting that some of the concepts involved in the image are coming along with baggage that the AI is having a hard time getting over.

• Ghosts are usually depicted chasing something, not being chased themselves.
• Pac Man is a protagonist, usually when there's art depicting Pac Man he is depicted front and center.

So it's weighing your "have Pac Man chase the ghosts" directive against "but ghosts normally do the chasing" that it has learned from its training set and it ends up that way.

Not sure what to try to swing the interpretation. Maybe describe the ghosts as cowardly and terrified to put more weight into "they're being chased?" Describe Pac Man as menacing or looming to make it more appropriate for him to be behind them?

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuckerberg: People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me" Dumb fucks.

This exchange was from 2004, when Zuckerberg first launched Facebook from his college dorm. Facebook has never pretended to be anything other than what it is, people keep giving it their information, and then they make a surprised-Pikachu face and complain when Facebook does exactly what they've always done with it. What Facebook said they would do in the TOS that they agreed to.

Dumb fucks.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

By this argument nothing should ever interoperate with anything else because clearly that's the first step toward destruction.

I'm writing this on Firefox, which interoperates with Chrome and Edge. Oh no! We need to get these browsers operating on incompatible protocols stat, before they all extend and extinguish each other.

In reality, "embrace extend extinguish" is not a law of nature. XMPP is not ActivityPub. They are separate things with separate circumstances. Did you know that XMPP is actually still functional and open and you can download clients and servers that use it to this day? The stories about how Google "destroyed" it have become wildly distorted folklore at this point.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

The great thing about the Fediverse is that you can choose that even if Threads federates. You pick what you engage with, which communities and instances you subscribe to and which you block.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Lemmy instances are hosted all over the world, by people in a wide variety of jurisdictions. A particular instance of Lemmy might be risking trouble, but Lemmy as a whole (and the Fediverse as a whole) is not.

If I were to write up a simple forum server and post the code, and it happens to lack the ability to delete comments, I've done nothing wrong. Someone running that software in the EU might run into some trouble, but I'm not on the hook for that.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

And even if someone is in the prison system for entirely correct reasons, forcing them to work is still slavery. I don't care if they're the most guilty awful person ever, if they need to be put in prison then put them in prison. That's the purpose of prison.

Trying to get economic benefit out of holding people in prison is not a slippery slope, it's a slippery cliff. The moment you try to justify it for anyone you're opening the door to a moral disaster.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

"You can work and spend your entire pittance on ramen noodles, or you can go stir-crazy in your cell and eat stewed cardboard" is a voluntary choice only in the most strictly pedantic sense.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

I'd take a step farther back and say the argument hinges on whether "consciousness" is even really a thing, or if we're "faking" it to each other and to ourselves as well. We still don't have a particularly good way of measuring human consciousness, let alone determining whether AIs have it too.