Carl [he/him]

It’s too case by case to make a sweeping statement. Sometimes a pet’s quality of life is extremely bad, sometimes an animal’s instincts will tell it to stop eating, sometimes you could have an old pet that does that and think that they’re going but then it turns out they have a totally treatable kidney issue and go on to live five more years after two weeks of pills. That last one happened to me with my thirteen year old cat who went on to live until eighteen.

I wouldn’t put down an animal unless they were suffering and an expert told me there was no way out of it - but of course that’s easy to say in isolation, when in the real world vet visits cost money. I guess what I’m saying is that I wouldn’t judge someone on the decision they made for their pet unless it seemed that they were acting without compassion and didn’t consider all alternatives.

break the lever so that it cannot be pulled

there should be a “block instance” option in your settings, though I don’t think that blocks them if they post in a separate instance which is the whole point of the fediverse.

I find it hard to believe that imperial china didnt invade anyone between 598 ad and 1912

Have a drink with ice. Hands down that and air conditioning would be my top two missed conveniences if I went back in time.

Lived in Japan for 6 years (2 as military 4 as a civilian), best place I’ve ever been and my number one regret in life is not doing whatever it would have taken to stay.

Also traveled to France, Italy, and Germany at different times in my life and I was pretty impressed by those places as well.

lmao okay it took me a minute to figure out, that’s great.

I instantly thought of exactly the same article. Compared to text, image generators seem much more prone to this kind of shit, just spitting society’s worst impulses back at us because that’s what its been trained to mimic via advertising.

historically accurate Ariel where she’s just a dolphin

Imagining a world where Nancy Pelosi was using her insider trading money to fund Maoist rebels in the Appalacians.

I’m a fan of this banger myself

fr prison should only even be considered if a person is a violent threat to those around them

Been rockin this for years, I will never change it

for my notifications I have a folder with all of navi’s sounds from OOT, and I used to have a program that randomized them every time I got a notification, but something changed somewhere and I haven’t been able to get that to work for a while.

I don’t think you understood what I meant by increasing demand/consumption. “Another sequel of Star Wars” or “A new season of Game of Thrones” aren’t increasing demand for art, they’re replacing previous forms of art with generated forms. And the usefulness of machine learning in fields like medical research is great - but it isn’t going to massively increase consumption.

Textile workers have been fucked by machines

I’m not a fan of this comparison because textile machines replaced textile workers at the same time as demand for textiles increased a thousandfold. The industrial revolution achieved this increased demand by increasing people’s living standards - instead of having a handful of outfits people (in the privileged parts of the world at least) started keeping dozens or hundreds of them - but with art demand/consumption is already effectively “maxed out” because every person with an internet connection already has access to more art than it is possible for them to consume in their entire lifetime, so increasing the amount of art produced can only have a “zero sum” effect on art writ large because the amount of art will increase while demand will not.

The internet we know today… We won’t miss it should it disappear.

Yes but it should disappear back into the direction of many smaller websites and more privacy, not in the direction of all of that texture being totally consumed by LLM generated search results and everyone further congregating on a smaller number of sites that collect every iota of data possible.

LLMs and image generators are incredible inventions to be sure, but my main opposition to them is related to the very real negative outcomes of flooding our society with computer generated drivel.

• Small time artists are fucked. Anyone and everyone who could make money from small commissions is now out of a job, period. Even though generators will never be as good as real artists, the fact is that most people don’t care and the generation is good enough. Oh yeah and real artist who are continuing to do real work regardless now have to live in a world where they can and will be accused of using the bots even when they aren’t.
• Internet search is fucked. Search for an image and you’ll have to sift through AI sites for the real thing, search on a topic and you’ll be inundated with language model slop. Search music on sites like Spotify and certain genres are now swamped by “artists” who make an album a week of generated trash, making the already difficult problem of discoverability that much worse.
• People with certain kinds of susceptability to addiction are fucked. There are now countless people who feel that they are in love with a chat bot, because they suffer from modern loneliness and have tricked themselves into seeing a Mechanical Turk as a real person. There are also people who have turned a chatbot into an abusive cult figure, people who’ve amplified delusions with them, and other terrible mental health related outcomes that will only keep getting more common.
• The fact that these text generators are so easily confused for thinking machines means that a genuinely alarming number of people are now offloading their ability to think critically to the bots. An entire generation of students are graduating high school and college right now having learned literally nothing. Those systems weren’t perfect before but this is definitely worse.

There’s more stuff but I’ll end this by saying that I’ve use an LLM to help me write code and it’s pretty good at doing repetitive writing that has to strictly follow a certain format. Still need to understand code in order to read and troubleshoot its output though, which is why everything the so-called “vibe coders” make is so sloppy.

It’s always projection. Even if they’re not literally doing the thing that they accuse their opponent of doing yet, the fact that they’re making the accusation reveals their intention.

Ah shit, this means they’re gonna do everything they made up about Xinjiang (if they’re not doing it already at the alligator place)

the transparent/translucent electronics trend of the 90s and early 2000s

I’ve been feeling nostalgic for this look lately. I really like how it emphasizes the artificial nature of the device in question and invites you to think about how it works and how it was put together - while minimalist electronics do exactly the opposite, almost as if you’re embarrassed about owning it and want to pretend that it’s not there.

Should be noted that Europe had commons for hundreds and hundreds of years before they all got enclosured and they managed them just fine with local-level spontaneous democracy.

Also the “tragedy of the commons” as we know it today was invented by a malthusian in the 1960s and everybody who invokes it as an argument against socialism ignores the part of the essay where the author advocates for central planning

If there’s any discounts they probably take the form of a link on a website that gets you 10% off (clicking the link installs a cookie that increases your prices on that website by 10%)