Prophet

They are almost certainly a Russian troll. See their comment history.

I understand your point, but I think the logic you are presenting is what is enabling these people. Ask yourself - what is the nuance in the Ukraine war? Fence sitting, and talking out both sides of your mouth about how we should condemn Putin yet also accept there is nuance to these issues is dangerous. It’s not complicated. If you don’t condemn Putin’s actions, you are implicitly accepting/agreeing that Ukraine should be wiped out.

Putin relies on the populace accepting that there is “nuance” to the Ukraine war. Russia has conditioned (or at least is trying to condition) the population (in the west) into adopting this logic but the reality is that there is no nuance to this issue. What nuance could there be to an aggressor invading someone’s land?

They don’t condemn Russia or the US leaders that push Putin’s agenda here - that’s how it’s support. How could it be anything else?

Israel (at least in large part) is why they’re pushing the tiktok ban now. It is a little hard to connect the dots on this because the China-reasoning seems strong on the surface. I agree that China is bad, but there has not been any stellar evidence to show that China censors or otherwise manipulates users on the platform. You can easily go to tiktok and find videos discussing how awful the Chinese government is, information about tiananmen square, Winnie the Pooh jokes, etc. In comparison, the data that came out of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal was far more concrete, and Congress did nothing. Certainly there were not 81% of house members coming together to force Facebook to sell. Tiktok has even offered to make major concessions about data privacy.

Israel’s war in Gaza is deeply unpopular and the fascists in Israel and here in the US are concerned that they are losing popularity. Tiktok has 100+ million active users in the US and the heaviest anti-Israel sentiment (the government and the US’s relationship with the Israeli government, not the Israeli/Jewish people) is heaviest on Tiktok, which is dominated by young millennials and gen Z. This is leaked audio of the director of the anti-defamation league (a very pro-Israel organization) speaking about this. He basically tells his audience that they have a “major major major… problem” and specifically says that they have a “tiktok problem and a gen Z problem.” Listen to the audio- you can agree or not with his reasoning, but he’s essentially saying that the spread of ideas on tiktok is causing their polling issues.

People like this want to stop the spread of ideas on tiktok because young people are organizing, boycotting, and putting dents in the system. They do not like that young voters are having a larger and larger influence. These young people are also boycotting major companies like McDonalds and Starbucks who have taken pro-Israel stances, and these companies have lost profits from this. All this to say - I don’t think there is any lack of motivation by people with lots of money to destroy the platform where these people are organizing.

It is incredible how much money Israel pumps into our politicians, both Democrats and Republicans. Joe Biden himself is the largest recipient of this money. There are anti-BDS laws (specifically for Israel) in 37 states. I don’t think many people are aware of just how much influence Israel has in the US. It is surprising and disturbing, but I am equally surprised/disturbed at how little attention these topics have received on Lemmy of all places. I don’t think it takes a genius to start making these connections and to start asking questions - maybe this isn’t the full picture but there is a lot of stuff here to be skeptical about. That said, I absolutely do think this kind of information is suppressed on other platforms, and they want to suppress all of tiktok because it’s dangerous to them.

I would add Pinta as another drop-in replacement for MS Paint

The guy who leads this group is extremely vocal (almost weirdly so) about white privilege and systemic racism. He is also white. It’s true that many AI models have white-bias. The reasons for this are multi-faceted. Our datasets are grossly imbalanced against racial minorities. I also think I understand that for some darker-skinned races, it is more difficult for the model to extract relevant features from the shitty Flickr photos they scrape for these models.

That said, injecting words into the users prompt to force the model to generate minorities more often is an extremely naive approach. Kind of like if Google added “reddit” to all searches just because it worked for some specific test cases, but ignoring that you now no longer get any site except reddit. Probably the solution here looks like paying a lot of money for high quality datasets as well as investing in user education and more AI explainability of these tools.

Bro he’s saying that you’re supposed to realize how fucked up it is (and ideally be revolted) that corporations - who don’t give a shit about you or anyone else - team up to prevent bright young adults from having a career and affording to live as payback for exposing their inhumanity/making them look foolish.

Instead you’re over here like “yeah I lick corporate boot and will gladly accept being stepped on if I get to keep my career.” This girl is a hero for standing up to the likes of cloudflare and we should all aspire to have her courage.

I think you have the right idea but came to the wrong conclusion. Why would anyone buy office space if there is no value in employees coming to the office? Hint: they wouldn’t.

Edited to add: these properties may become a liability on their books which would impact their ability to apply for or pay for loans, as well as other negatives for the company.

Seems like anything you buy is somewhat of a gamble. Internal combustion engines/gasoline could be gone or (more likely) far less desirable in 10 years. As manufacturers begin switching to primarily electric cars, finding parts/labor for these vehicles may become challenging. With a hybrid, I wonder if you carry all the same risks (as far as the long term value of the vehicle) as a normal gasoline-powered car.

But maybe the timeline for this is more like 20 years.

But doctors are required to report anything that they identify as an immediate physical threat (e.g., to the patient or because of the patient). I found out recently that this is entirely subjective - different doctors have different ideas about what constitutes a threat. So, in a lot of ways, no, medical secrecy may not protect you if you tell the wrong doctor.

We already have DNA tests for that which don’t require a whole database? A comprehensive DNA database could be used for extreme evil, such as mass systemic genocide or eugenics.

I feel like I need to step in and personally rebuke this shit. Voting absolutely does work. Showing up to vote once isn’t going to magically fix everything - it’s going to take many election cycles to reverse course. US policy doesn’t reflect the will of the people because we’ve been apathetic for so long. Saying “voting doesn’t help” implies there’s no point in voting, and not voting guarantees that we will lose our democracy. I’m sympathetic to those who have been hurt by the conservative and capitalist agenda in this country who are losing hope, but making claims like this essentially makes you an ally to the corpofascist machine.

Please vote.

There’s a restaurant in my hometown of Lexington, KY called "“Frank and Dino’s.” It’s owned by Carlo Baccarezza who has ties John Gotti, who was Italian mafia. He’s a horrible person and has been sued by former employees of the restaurant for discrimination.

He opened this place just before the pandemic. It’s supposed to be a fine-ish dining establishment with authentic Italian. The prices are high, but the food is terrible. It might be passable for someone who doesn’t know authentic Italian. In any case, the restaurant sits empty most of the day, and it doesn’t make sense to me why you would open a place like this and just allow it to have a terrible reputation that’s mostly empty day in and day out.

The whole industry is hellbent on a race to the bottom, with the exception of a few companies who release extremely high quality content once every 5-10 years. I would say that I’m less of a gamer today because of so many disappointing letdowns from groups like Activision. I’m honestly surprised that this is more of a problem than purchasing Bethesda or Obsidian. The court case basically only focused on COD - what about the rest of Activision’s massive IP portfolio?? It just seemed like an afterthought in comparison.

I think we’re in a weird spot where there is currently less competition to make amazing games because Sony has been so dominant. It came out in the FTC trial (or because of it?) that Sony just pays developers for exclusivity. If the console with 80% of your sales is going to also give you extra money, why wouldn’t you take that?? Then as a consumer, the pattern becomes that Xbox gets less exclusives (or gets games a year later). Why would I buy an Xbox if it’s roughly equal to PS but gets games a year later lol?? This is like a vicious cycle.

The exclusivity deals and consolidation are 100% anti-consumer but I’m hopeful that this will redouble PS-Xbox’s competition. E.g., it looks like Xbox really wants starfield to be a massive success; they could have released the game last year but they opted for another year of polish in order to cement a huge winner for the platform. What if every major exclusive got that treatment? That is a win for gamers imo. Only time will tell.

There is absolutely alt-right content on lemmy. That said, it is mostly drowned out. I saw several alt-right communities when I joined lemmy 3 weeks ago with only 1 member. These people were trying to build echo chambers by themselves. Other lemmy users would come in and start posting articles from regular media which pretty much shut down. I think it’s great that users here don’t want to allow it to be a safe haven for that kind of stuff, unlike the numerous other “free speech” websites that actively encourage it.