You may or may not be correct in hating me but do not let my comments bring down the good name of kava

As for “doubling down so hard” I’d flip the message and ask you why you are simping for mega corps? simping for mega corps is about as fascist as you can get- a populist ideology idolizing elites

An AI is not doing anything a human wouldn’t do. You look at a bunch of content. You learn from it and incorporate it in new synthesis.

It’s not fundamentally different. So unless you can make a meaningful statement (beyond mild personal attacks) that illustrates the difference between the two, you will convince no-one

first let’s get something out of the way

the actual way that copyright works is that a few giant megacorps buy up everything and they end up owning copyrights to the vast majority of recognizable content.

so for example in 2019 over half of the movies released in theaters was owned by Disney. The same company that unilaterally has the ability to change US federal law when convenient for them.

studio ghibli is no different- they’re a subsidiary of Nippon Television which has a $2B+ annual revenue

so keep in mind when you advocate here for stronger copyright protections, you are essentially saying that the biggest companies in the world deserve more money.

2nd- the “style” is not copyrightable. anybody can mimic the style. and guess what? if I make a cartoon and I make it look like studio ghibli style… people are still gonna recognize it as “studio ghibli” style. they are basically getting free marketing. they are not losing out here.

They’re trying to make some type of argument that a private studio should have exclusive rights to a specific style of art and that by openai allowing users to generate art in that style, we are slipping into anti-democratic authoritarianism.

My opinion is that you can’t own “styles” of art and that there’s nothing wrong here. Legally speaking I can copy any art style I want.

but_what_about_.jpg

whataboutism isn’t some magical phrase that you can utter every time someone brings up hypocrisy

if we’re going to support sanctioning civilians based on their countries breaking international law, then we should not have double standards. otherwise it’s very clear to anyone paying attention that this is a geopolitical issue and not a moral one.

and that’s what this is actually about. the US sanctions on Russia are a geopolitical tool meant to make the Russian re-subjugation of Ukraine more expensive. that’s it. US doesn’t actually care about Ukraine- neither this administration or the last.

to me, that doesn’t justify banning individuals from participating in OSS projects. anybody that wants to contribute should be able to.

Attacks against civilian targets are war crimes. When you do it through sanctions its OK.

I’m just asking that we are more honest about it. For example instead of putting sanctions on Venezuela we could have just done what Israel is doing to Gaza and gotten similar death toll.

Research has shown it has historically had very little to no impact on policy. What it does do is harm the lowest rungs of society.

For example a 2019 report on Trump’s Venezeuala sanctions estimate up to 40,000 people died. Mostly poor people who went without healthcare and medicine because the US froze all of the government’s funds and access to credit.

In my opinion, I’d prefer if we just bombed civilians in the countries we sanction. It’s more honest. It really is a form of low level warfare. Something akin to a medieval raiding party

When the big tech guys showed up to the inauguration and sat in the front row to pay tribute it was such a clear example of how capital always yields to authoritarians.

The US supplied 80% of the bombs dropped on Gaza.

Do you believe US civilians should be prohibited from interacting with the rest of the world?

imagemagick handles almost all image files

images ) ls
001.jpg  002.jpg  003.jpg  004.jpg  005.jpg
images ) convert 001.jpg example.pdf

ffmpeg handles almost all video files

ex ) ls
rock.mp4
ex ) ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi

if you use gnome there’s a nice little feature of the file explorer where you can just drag and drop scripts into ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/

for example

make a fish script (ignoring error checking for brevity here, my real script had a couple guard rails)

/#!/usr/bin/env fish
set file $argv[1]
convert $file (basename $file .png).pdf

then when you right click on a file in your gnome file explorer you can click the scripts option

and the script is right there so you can just easily convert with the press of a button

note, i crossed out some stuff that includes client names

tldr: there are so many ways to do what you need to do there’s no reason to trust random websites you don’t know. there’s a lot of slimey people out there wanting to take advantage of people. and everybody should strive to be at least a little computer literate. the examples i gave here aren’t complicated. they’re simple commands

absolutely. people gotta realize when they put themselves in a bubble and not project that experience outwards to everyone else

there’s a word for this… lemme see if i can find it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

The curse of knowledge, also called the curse of expertise[1] or expert’s curse, is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person who has specialized knowledge assumes that others share in that knowledge.[2]

niche:

relating to or aimed at a small specialized group or market

Browser stats: https://gs.statcounter.com/

Do you see LibreWolf on here? Do you see Brave on here? Do you see Vanadium on here?

Even Firefox, of which LibreWolf is essentially a reskin of, is at 2.6% and considered niche

And i don’t have the strengh to care about the CEO of them. I don’t care. i’m tired

you care enough to find multiple niche browsers and write comments about them

I think the question already contains a sort of ideological trap: it assumes that a specific company can be uniquely evil, as if morality were some trait that varies between company to company.

I’m sure everyone’s heard this before:

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

It’s not just a slogan. It gives us insight into the very structure of capitalism. That doesn’t mean every individual act is equally bad, but the system demands a sort of baseline complicity.

CEOs and executives are legally required to maximize shareholder profits. Not just encouraged— legally obligated. So when Coca-Cola, for example, hires paramilitary death squads to kill labor leaders in Colombia, it’s not because it is uniquely monstrous. Replace Coca-Cola with Pepsi, or Nestle, or Amazon, or Raytheon… whatever. The logic of the system would produce the same result. If I gave the same chess position to 30 different Grandmasters… if there is a best move they will all see it and choose that best move.

Think of an ant colony. An ant colony doesn’t decide to be cruel; it expands, consumes, protects its territory, destroys threats. Is it evil when some colony wipes out another for resources? A colony committing what we could term ant genocide? No it’s not. The colony is simply acting in its nature. Much like a slime mold would expand in a radius looking for food in a petri dish.

Large corporations are like ant colonies. Complex emergent behavior resulting from a large number of individual units acting by a set of rules. The intelligence or perspective of the individual does not actually matter for the organism as a whole. As long as the individual units follow a set of rules it creates a sort of “hive-mind” pseudo-intelligence that acts in its own interests and has an almost Darwinist natural selection process.

So this is all to say that I reject the question. I don’t believe in uniquely evil companies. The horror is precisely that they’re all, in a sense, innocent. They act not out of hatred or sadism or cruelty, but because the system itself has carved out the pathways where the ball inevitably rolls down the hill following the path of least resistance.

Chick-fil-A is actually pretty good near me. I get them once a month or once every other month or so.

In terms of fast food, I’d definitely say there’s in the top 20% in terms of food quality.

One big plus for Obsidian in my book is that it’s just plain text. All your notes are stored in simple .md files

So even if Obsidian goes to shit you can use virtually any text editor to edit and view your notes

Plus it has a vim mode and allows css style changes since it’s Electron

Kava

That’s true although it’s quite impressive regardless.

First, the Florida state government is actively hostile to solar. Just a couple years back they passed a law that made it so you couldn’t sell your excess power back to the grid- a huge benefit of installing solar.

This was at the request of FPL (Florida Power & Light) because just like in the federal government, the Florida government is essentially bought and paid for.

So I don’t know the specifics in CA, but I’d imagine their government is more friendly to renewable energy.

And we also need to consider CA has a little less than double Florida’s population and a little more than double Florida’s GDP.

So the fact that Florida surpassed California’s solar usage is actually quite impressive, especially considering CA had a significant head start.

It’s really a testament to how useful this technology is. Solar is not growing in Florida because it’s renewable or has lower carbon emissions, etc. It’s growing because it’s economically feasible.

And I think it’s a good sign for the future of renewable energy. Also goes to show Florida is rapidly growing. Few years back we surpassed NY as the 3rd largest state (in terms of population).

Right now Texas & Florida (and certain states in the SE like S or N Carolina) are the fastest growing states. Meanwhile states like New York, California, and Illinois are stagnating.

In the next couple decades, Florida and Texas will eventually surpass NY and CA as the two most important states. And I predict they will both turn blue just like what happened to California.

The federal government’s countermeasures will come into effect at 12:01 a.m. on March 13. The 25 per cent tariffs will hit steel products worth $12.6 billion and aluminum products worth $3 billion.

In addition, Canada is hitting another $14.2 billion worth of imported U.S. goods with fresh tariffs, totalling $29.8 billion in retaliation.

I wasnt aware new ones from yesterday. It was for $30B, though. Combined with the last set of tariffs its $60B total out of $350B of US exports to Canada

So about 17%. So let’s say Canads is at a conservative 3 generous 4

pretty much. we all grew up in the US being taught it’s a country of immigrants and the “bring me your weary your hungry your whatever masses to be free”

it’s actually kind of fascinating to see that ideology shift so fast it’s giving whiplash. turns out we actually kinda need these people for our economy otherwise we’ll end up like European countries with stagnating economies until we eventually get overrun by China

if you look at the numbers, Canada’s not that far from Australia. they’ve only instituted a tariff on like 10% of American imports