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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The yelling about TikTok going to give your data to China is pretty silly now that DOGE is probably exposing far more personal data to all the adversaries along with hacker data brokers who sell it onto scammers and advertisers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

When news dropped that one of them was a former member of a cybercrime group, I thought the same thing as the writer stated: now this big amateur-run data source is a target for cybercrime prestige and rivalry, on top of state sponsored adversaries who are probably already on their way in. I admit I haven't read this article yet, but even already it's clear that DOGE is a threat to the USA on yet another profound level. Even if this government sabotage is an intentional attempt to discredit public services and national government (aligning with the ideological strategy of Elon, Thiel and the rest of their circle) I think they're ripping down their own foundation in the process.

CISA, NSA and the rest are probably screaming right now.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Their point is that Nazis weren't eradicated. They were often integrated.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

Remember: these neo-Nazis are usually tourists from interestate. Look at Patriot Front for example, where arrests proved what antifascists already disclosed - the arrested were often from other states around the country. They do these rallies to provide an illusion of decent membership and locality, but it's complete bullshit. Same strategy is used in other countries too.

While I haven't seen a source yet, I see a post already claiming the names of all 5, only one of them is even from Ohio. If true, it's completely unsurprising.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

(yes, it isn't even protected speech under 2nd Amendment, but that doesn't even matter; fuck them, even if it was protected speech)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I do not believe in protecting literal neo-Nazis because of some idealistic notion of free speech. They want to exterminate most of the country.

If the police don't combat them effectively, then communities should, by any means effective.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Look into the Vietnam War for a quick reference of some challenges an invading US army would face. I think the big two will be:

Not to mention the likelihood of embargo and other international pressure on a US hostile to NATO countries.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

and am not so sure direct democracy is a good idea at all, anymore.

Personally, in an ideal world (and it's feasible to test on a small scale like an organization election), I would advocate a certain kind of mass conditional democracy where everyone has the right to vote but must answer some very basic objective questions to verify they understand (e.g.) the candidate positions and election basics. The answers can all be found in an educational pamphlet published collectively with candidate approval prior to the election. The goal is to allow as many voters as possible, so long as they can demonstrate a basic awareness of the situation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

are actually very well defined

Eh, I can't quite agree with "very well defined". Even Nazism isn't really internally coherent, it's surprisingly nonsensical, let alone all the variants of fascism straying so far from classical fascism.

But that's me nitpicking academically. Fascist organizations are crystal clear about their association, beliefs and what they want. When they heil or wear neo-Nazi symbols in a political context, there's no longer any need to doubt.

It is a concerted effort to redefine or undefine them so there is no longer a word to describe them.

Absolutely. Nazis have been made very aware that most communities reject them on sight and so wolf-whistling and pathetic attempts of plausible deniability are used to pretend they're just 'regular' patriotic nationalists (see: Musk salute, and this related salute overseas a few weeks earlier). But even then, these are paper thin attempts. "You're the real nazis!" "Oh everyone's a nazi these days!" "Actually they were a specific party at a specific place at a specific time!", you just gotta laugh.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Well, in countries like mine there’s donation limits (with teeth).

Refreshing to hear!

That’s not really the issue so much as the majority of voters that barely know what they’re voting for

I haven't looked into this but I'm tempted to believe that immediately. Election awareness is amazingly low, even among people who do have strong political beliefs.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago

Sell it to who, Ben? Fucking Aquaman?

Good choice, no point throwing it away if it was too late for you to realize, but it's more powerful as a platform to disavow Musk and Tesla.

The US is collapsing and all I got was this lousy car

 

There is a well-known internet proverb, the bullshit assymetry principle:

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

Anyone who has been in a few software chatrooms, a political communities, or any hobby groups has probably seen the eternal fountain of people asking really obvious questions, all the time, forever. No amount of patience and free time would allow a community to give quality answers by hand to each and every one of them, and gradually the originally-helpful people answering get sick of dealing with this constantly, then newcomers will often get treated with annoyance and hostility for their ignorant laziness. That's one way how communities get a reputation for being 'toxic' or 'elitist'. I've occasionally seen this first hand even on Lemmy, and obviously telling people to go away until they've figured out the answer themselves isn't a useful way to build a mass movement.

This is a reason why efficient communication matters.

Efficient teaching isn't a new idea, so we have plenty of techniques to draw from. One of the most famous texts in the world is a pamphlet, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a way for the Communist League to share the idea of historical materialism to many thousands using a couple of dozen pages. Pamphlets and fliers are still used today at protests and rallies and for general promotion, and in the real world are often used as a resource when someone asks for a basic introduction to an ideology.

However, online, we have increased access to existing resources and linking people to information is easier than ever. I've seen some great examples of this on Lemmy with Dessalines often integrating pages of their FAQ/resources list into short to-the-point replies, and Cowbee linking their introductory reading list. So instead of burning out rewriting detailed replies to each and every beginner question from a propagandised liberal, or just banning/kicking people who don't even understand what they said wrong (propaganda is a hell of a drug), these users can pack a lot of information into their posts using effective links. Using existing resources counters the bullshit assymetry principle. There's a far lower risk of burnout and hostility when you can simply copy a bookmarked page, paste it, and write a short sentence to contextualize it. No 5 minute mini-essay in your reply to get the message across properly, finding sources each time, getting it nitpicked by trolls, and all that. Just link to an already-polished answer one click away!

There are many FAQ sites for different topics and ideological schools of thought (e.g. here's a well-designed anarchist FAQ I've been linked to years ago). There are also plenty of wikis, like ProleWiki and Leftypedia, which I think are seriously underused (I'm surprised Lemmygrad staff and users haven't built a culture of constantly linking common silly takes to their wiki's articles. What's the point of the wiki if it's not being used much by its host community?).

Notice that an FAQ is often able to link to specific common questions, and is very different from the classic "read this entire book" reply some of you may have seen before - unfortunately when a post says "how can value com from labor and not supply nd demand?", they're probably not in the mood to read Capital Vol. I-III to answer their question no matter how you ask them, but they might skim a wiki page on LTV and maybe then read further.

(Honestly, I think there's a missed opportunity for integrating information resources into ban messages and/or the global rules pages, because I guarantee more than half the people getting banned for sinophobia/xenophobia/orientalism sincerely don't think anything they said was racist or chauvanistic - it's often reiterating normal rhetoric and ""established facts"" in mass media; not a sign of reactionary attitude. The least we can do is give them a learning opportunity instead of simply pushing them further from the labour movement)

 

Films and TV shows and more often have subtitles, which are helpful for enjoying muted video, translation, people with hearing impairment, people struggling to understand accents, checking fast unclear dialogue and other reasons. They are important, and sometimes it's clear when they do something right or wrong.

Maybe we can't expect them all to be works of art, but there are certainly some easy wins even in the industrial media environment. What do you think?

 

The English-speaking web has many different types of websites. For social media, there are link aggregators (Lemmy/Mbin/etc., reddit), microblog sites (Mastodon/Pleroma/etc., Xitter), forums like BBS boards, and more.

This post talks about Misskey and how it diverges from Western-made Fediverse culture. This reminded me of some other Japanese-style websites, such as textboards, chan imageboards and booru sites (booru imageboards are essentially a tag-based media archive, which similarly to chan boards have entered into the English-speaking internet but remain niche, mostly centered on art communities such as anime and furry fandoms).

What other styles of websites exist beyond the English-speaking internet? Does their design reflect a different culture? Are they better in some ways?

 

Maybe it's just a reddit/Threadiverse thing, maybe it's stronger in political communities, but I constantly see sarcasm everywhere online, far more than anywhere else. Scroll down and you'll even see it here.

Funnily enough, in a vacuum, one might expect online forums to avoid it more, since written text can mask tone and make sarcasm unintentionally ambiguous, to the point where it's common to see people adding tags to clarify. It's not rare to see arguments started when people don't recognise non-literal language.

Is it merely a habit being repeated? Is it a widespread coping mechanism for frustration? Is it simply the lowest form of wit, a simple and popular way to make fun? Is it an effective way to normalise unpopular views with the plausible deniability of just making jokes?

 

The megathread mentions Diffusion Toolkit, although this is a Windows-only tool.

There is also Breadboard, however I consider this abandoned and lacks some features like rating/scoring.

My hacky tool and why I want something betterI've been using a hacky Python script to interpret prompts and other PNG Info metadata as tags and inserting them into a booru-like software which lets me search and sort by any of those tags (including a prompt keyword, seed, steps, my own rating scores). This tool was useful in a lot of ways when using tag style prompting, but as I move towards natural language prompts with newer models, a tag-based media software will make it harder to search and to compare prompts between images. Also, my hack was hacky and somewhat manual to use, images wouldn't automatically be imported when generated.

­

So I'd like to start using a purpose-made tool instead, but I'm struggling to find any other options. I'd rather know if a good tool exists before I start rebuilding my duct-tape conveyor belt.

 

I want to buy a new GPU mainly for SD. The machine-learning space is moving quickly so I want to avoid buying a brand new card and then a fresh model or tool comes out and puts my card back behind the times. On the other hand, I also want to avoid needlessly spending extra thousands of dollars pretending I can get a 'future-proof' card.

I'm currently interested in SD and training LoRas (etc.). From what I've heard, the general advice is just to go for maximum VRAM.

  • Is there any extra advice I should know about?
  • Is NVIDIA vs. AMD a critical decision for SD performance?

I'm a hobbyist, so a couple of seconds difference in generation or a few extra hours for training isn't going to ruin my day.

Some example prices in my region, to give a sense of scale:

  • 16GB AMD: $350
  • 16GB NV: $450
  • 24GB AMD: $900
  • 24GB NV: $2000

edit: prices are for new, haven't explored pros and cons of used GPUs

 

At the end of the day, my hardware is not appropriate for SD, it works only through hacks like tiling in A1111. And while that's fine for my hobby experimenting, I would like other people, or even myself once I finally upgrade my desktop, to be able to recreate my images in better quality, as closely as possible (or even try and create variations).

I already make sure to keep the "PNG info" metadata which lists most parameters, so I assume the main variable left is the RNG source. Are any of the options hardware-independent? If not, are there any extensions which can create a hardware-independed random number source?

 

Every place has its different environment, whether it be the level of organisation, reputation of socialism, dominant values of society, history and experiences, conflicts and crises. Because of these dynamics, I'd expect to see stark differences in what the movement looks like around the world. An obvious example familiar to most here is seeing the widespread and militant union mobilisations in France's retirement age protests.

Which countries do you have experience in, and how are their labour movements different?

The title is intentionally vague by saying 'labour movement', so you're welcome to talk about workplace attitudes, unions, socialist organisations, legislation and more.

 
21
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone!

(Found this on Nuclear Change's /social/)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14112766

25
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone!

(Found this on Nuclear Change /social/)

188
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Dear consumer: do not operate this motor vehicle while experiencing emotion

edit: I've updated the title as I've discovered more information: a credible death threat isn't quite the same as attempted murder

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