My point is that there are no “good guys” and “bad guys”. There are only differing levels of power. The US has been doing a lot worse for a lot longer. It’s just that past administrations were diplomatic about their use of power. This administration, being a reality TV star, is just choosing to be loud about it.

America under Biden supplied 80% of the bombs that Israel dropped on Gazan civilians. Obama led the illegal attack on Libya and killed Gaddafi and doomed Libya to anarchy and chaos. Bush destroyed Iraq and doomed them to anarchy and chaos- creating ISIS. I could go on and on.

Most American citizens (just like the citizens of virtually every country in the world) are not really concerned with geopolitics. They have to pay their rent, they’re gonna be late for work, their kid is failing a class, their girlfriend is pissed because they don’t go out enough, they’re tired from work, they’re working hard for that promotion, they’re worried about rent increases, etc.

So to answer your question. No, Americans don’t really care. And even if they care, they’re forced to worry about more pressing individual matters. Basically the same thing that happened in your home country in the 1930s.

A superpower by definition cannot really be a rogue state. A “rogue state” is a political label applied by dominant powers to states that defy the international order. For example Iran or North Korea are considered rogue states because they defy the international order. What is “the international order”?

Well, it’s the combination post-WW2 institutions created by none other than the US. The UN, IMF, NATO, etc. They set the norms of “legitimate” behavior. When the US participates in military interventions, economic sanctions, and other aggressive actions it’s framed as upholding “rules-based order” whereas identical actions by weaker states get them condemned with the label as “rogue states”.

To call the US a rogue state is to misunderstand power. Hegemony is the ability to define reality, not just defy it. In this way, the US has always been a rogue state in the sense that it does whatever it wants regardless of the international norms. I mean, just look at the mid 1900s and its actions in Latin America. It was involved in about a dozen states toppling governments and supporting military dictatorships- including sponsoring the genocide of natives in Guatemala.

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 exlusive 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

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

Peter Thiel is the financier behind JD Vance and one of the co-founders of PayPal- later on with Elon Musk. They’re part of the same group of people, along with various other Silicon Valley tech executives, who subscribe to what has been called the “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy

JD Vance, for example, has openly expressed his support for Nick Land and cited him as a major influence.

Both Yarvin and Land believe that gradual, incremental reforms to democracy will not save Western society; instead, a “hard reset” or “reboot” is necessary. To that end, Yarvin has coined the acronym “RAGE” – Retire All Government Employees – as a crucial step toward that goal.

Does that sound familiar?

Yarvin advocates for an entirely new system of government – what he calls “neocameralism.” He advocates for a centrally managed economy led by a monarch – modeled after a corporate CEO – who wouldn’t need to adhere to plodding liberal-democratic procedures. Yarvin has written approvingly of the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism.

They’re essentially trying to reshape the government to function more like a corporation. Something akin to the Chinese or Singapore method of governance. Democracy is not compatible. What’s interesting is that this isn’t happening in secret. They’re out in the open about it.

I’m guessing you refuse to see what’s in front of your nose out of fear, which is why you keep saying everyone else is afraid. Me personally, I’m not afraid at all. I’d say I’m more morbidly curious to see how it all ends up. I’m fairly privileged and I’ll be fine no matter what. As long as you shut up and do your job most people will be fine. Just don’t be an immigrant or openly anti-Israel

But it’s happening. We’re witnessing a coup right in front of our eyes. They are purging the federal government and Trump has started to ignore court orders- dipping his toes in the water. There’s a lot more to this if you’re interested. There’s many articles out there and you can even read stuff by Vance, Thiel, Yarvin, Land, etc. They’re not shy

then please wise one- assuage my fear by showing me how the purge isn’t a purge. release me from this trembling terror by convincing me that the administration is not actually breaking federal law. save me from this horror and show me the light

what does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment really mean? explain to me please how these ideologically aligned billionaires (who happen to control the white house) that say they want to end democracy aren’t actually planning on ending democracy

Roman history didn’t end after Julius Caesar. In fact, Rome would reach its peak a couple hundred years after that moment and then continued to dominate for hundreds of years afterwards.

It just wasn’t really a Republic anymore.

Of course that isn’t to say the US will get stronger, I think the opposite. Just that the end of democracy doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the country.