“First they came for the transgenders’ guns, but I didn’t speak up because I’m not transgender…”

The point is, I don’t care about the process so much, I care about the end result

And here a lot of artists would disagree with you. Because for artists, the act of creating is as important as - if not even more important than - the end product. To quote a smart college student’s musings I once heard: “Art is how artists process life experiences.”

The rest I agree with, AI is a tool and the biggest issues with it are the people who are creating it and the people abusing it and making life for artists worse. Adam Savage once said that someday some film student will do something really amazing with AI (and then Hollywood will steal it and copy it into the ground), but that hasn’t happened yet. He said that what he cares about when he looks at a piece is what he can see of the artist in that piece, and with AI, you see nothing.

As an aside, there’s a real conversation to be had about how the word “consumer” has replaced all forms of interaction in our vocabulary. We no longer enjoy or appreciate art - we consume it; we’re not customers, we’re consumers, etc. But that’s not really relevant to the conversation except as a comment on how companies have pushed all forms of enjoyment down to the level of eating a fast food burger.

This sounds like something right out of 1930s Germany.

I honestly have no idea, that would be going much farther back in Reddit’s history than I was on the platform for. It reminds me of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, though. It’s true until somebody realizes that there’s a lot of money to be made doing the thing that you said you wouldn’t do.

Most likely because they care less about the idea of federated platforms and more about “not Reddit” and “not Twitter.” I’m one of those users personally (not that I don’t care about the idea, it’s good to have a return of what is effectively 3rd places of the internet). Most of them, like me, probably came here during the Reddit migration and moved to BlueSky when that took off in popularity.

If I didn’t dislike the Twitter format as much, I’d probably spend more time on BlueSky than forgetting about it until one of these threads appears, and I’d probably be on Tumblr still if I didn’t only use social media from my phone and Tumblr didn’t have such a horrible app.

People are going to go where the people are, for better or worse, until something pisses them off enough to go somewhere else. I originally created a Twitter account to follow a bunch of artists I followed who left Tumblr during the porn ban. I didn’t care for the platform (I hate the tweet format) but that was where all the artists went so I followed. Similarly, when the 3rd party api fiasco hit Reddit, I left and immediately went looking for where the people from the subs I read by “newest posts first” went - except the communities fractured and disappeared. It was the possibility of them reforming here that made me go through a GitHub to figure out how to make an account (spoiler: they never really did reform). I had no idea what a federated platform was supposed to be or do.

The fact that Lemmy is so niche is its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. You either love how small it is, like Reddit back in the day, or you suffer the lack of population for the things that you’re into, and the very nature of the federated platform makes it that much harder to centralize enough people in one niche to form a community (there we go again - centralization). Lemmy is the Wild West frontier town to the big social media giants’ company towns.

Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it’s usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.

They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it’s just a buzzword, I believe.

Laser is classified as temporary because about 10% of hair will come back while electrolysis is 100% effective if done right.

As for at home solutions, I’ve heard that at home laser isn’t strong enough/isn’t the right type of laser to be permanent, and shouldn’t be used on facial hair anyway because it’s thicker and stiffer, which makes laser less effective on it.

Considering what weekend this is, you should check out the history of Labor Day and why the US celebrates it in September while almost the entirety of the rest of the world celebrates it on May 1st.

In short:

Canada’s Labour Day is also celebrated on the first Monday of September. More than 150 other countries celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1, the European holiday of May Day. May Day was chosen by the Second International of socialist and communist parties to commemorate the general labor strike in the United States and events leading to the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago, Illinois, from May 1 – May 4, 1886.

Despite Labor Day in the rest of the world being celebrated in recognition of an American union worker, socialist, and anarchist movement that limited working hours to just 8 hours a day (which was also a stopgap on the planned road for even shorter workdays, fun fact), in the US it’s a completely unknown history.

The date of May 1 (an ancient European folk holiday known as May Day) emerged in 1886 as an alternative holiday for the celebration of labor, later becoming known as International Workers’ Day. The date had its origins at the 1885 convention of the American Federation of Labor, which passed a resolution calling for adoption of the eight-hour day effective May 1, 1886. While negotiation was envisioned for achievement of the shortened work day, use of the strike to enforce this demand was recognized, with May 1 advocated as a date for coordinated strike action. The proximity of the date to the bloody Haymarket affair of May 4, 1886, further accentuated May First’s radical reputation.

There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe. In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative, formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.

And of course, the picture wouldn’t be complete without some good old American fascism:

Since the mid-1950s, the United States has celebrated Loyalty Day and Law Day on May 1. Unlike Labor Day, neither are legal public holidays (in that government agencies and most businesses do not shut down to celebrate them) and therefore have remained relatively obscure. Loyalty Day is formally celebrated in a few cities, while some bar associations hold Law Day events to celebrate the rule of law.

Everyone after high school should work mandatory 1 year of retail…Would curb a lot of this holier than thou narcissism bullshit really quick and have people treating each other with more respect.

I’ve been saying the same thing since I worked retail many years ago. Would either save the world or destroy it, and I’m not sure which would be better.

GenAI is turning the gooners gay!

Malgus did nothing wrong.

Fun fact I found out recently, we figured out how bumble bees fly sometime in the past decade.

In short, at that scale the laws of aerodynamics as we know them break down and the bees are basically swimming in air instead of flying.

No, you’re absolutely right. Discord is incredibly impermanent. Besides the lack of being able to search for things or split conversations into separate threads for every topic because it’s a chat tool, not a forum, as soon as a server disappears, everything hosted on that server goes as well (as far as end users are concerned. I’m sure Discord can pull stuff from their backend).

We need a return of niche forum communities and the like for the sake of the preservation of information.

There are people who take Work from Home jobs in high CoL areas and then move to low CoL places to pocket the difference, so that’s not too far off from what already happens.

Plus, on the other side, incentivizing companies to hire locally could cause companies to be selective in their location to maximize the convenience of commuting from multiple areas for reduced overhead, or increase the desire for increased urban density and lessen suburban sprawl, which is literally choking the life out of places in infrastructure costs alone. Garbage and water services for the wealthy suburbs is subsidized from the taxes of poor people’s apartment buildings.

Of course, we all know that what would really happen is that we’d see the return of company towns where you sleep in the same bed as 2 other guys on 8 hour shifts so the bed has 100% occupancy 24 hours a day.

This timeline needs a new writer…

Quite literally for those who think it’s a joke. Judges have ruled that the cops can refuse to hire you if your IQ is above a certain score. They have also ruled that cops are not required to know the law.

They don’t need the excuse, just look at D.C. in the past week. And escalation will only make things worse for them. They’re looking at an armed insurgency situation akin to the “War on Terror,” which proved that an entrenched group amongst the populace is impossible to oust because anybody could be an insurgent, and taking one out will create more people willing to take revenge. There used to be an excellent Flash game about this very point where you shot cruise missiles at terrorists walking across the screen. And every time that a missile would explode, it would inevitably hit civilians in the area, and those nearby would turn into more terrorists. You’d just continue to fill the screen with more and more terrorists than there were originally until eventually you gave up.

Somebody a few weeks ago said in a thread on a similar subject that the military’s conclusion was that you need about 3 soldiers for every insurgent in a population. There’s no way that they can draft as much as theoretically 75% of the population.

It’s a whole lot of bluster, and if we could get organized we could topple the whole thing. ICE has homes they go back to at the end of the day. They don’t have army bases to hide in.

You’re thinking of Gandalf Big Naturals. Easy mistake to make.

It absolutely is. It’s a thought process people use to make their actions easier to justify to their own sense of morality and empathy. Militaries drill that same thought process into soldiers for the same reason. It’s much easier to shoot something than it is to shoot somebody, so your enemy must be less than human to make pulling the trigger easier. So you turn a group of people into the Other. And the more you do it, the easier it gets, and all it takes is somebody convincing you that the wrong group deserves the same treatment.

“My enemy isn’t human. My enemy is less than human. Since the dawning of Mankind, this has been the battlecry.”

Also, I take issue with the entire concept of “sin,” so that argument holds no water for me. I mean, what a meaningless “argument”. How does it absolve them of anything??

I don’t care one way or another about the theology around the word “sin,” but it’s the perfect word to describe their actions. By reducing them to subhuman, you make it easy to remove their free will in the equation - it becomes the “just following orders” excuse - and it’s incredibly important to remember that they chose to do this. Nobody is born hateful, hatred is learned. They made the conscious choice to be hateful and act this way, and they should be held accountable for that choice.

People have a hard time accepting that the worst people this planet has ever seen are as human as you and me, but to deny it is to turn a blind eye to the fact that the people in that video could be our neighbors, friends, or family. Because we know them, and they’re good people, so they’d never do something like that, right?

This is only one study, but I saw an article a few months ago talking about a study by a major phone company that found that the vast majority of people (80% or more IIRC) either didn’t care about AI features on their phones or actively disliked them.

I think most people don’t really care one way or another but hate that it’s being shoved into everything, and those who know the stats on how often it’s wrong are a lot more likely to actively dislike it and be vocal about their dislike.