Eccitaze

Eccitaze , 1 day ago

Do you want corps just stealing every new idea and product, cloning it, and muscling out the original inventor without paying them a dime? Because abolishing copyright entirely would be an excellent way to do that.

Eccitaze , 17 hours ago

Copyright is the only thing protecting us from getting absolutely fucked even harder by the rich than we already are, yes.

Eccitaze , 4 days ago

They did use them as best they could. They were hamstrung by a filibustering Senate, and two conservative Democrat senators (Sinema and Manchin) who refused to support getting rid of it, making killing the proposition of killing the filibuster DOA. As a result, their only choice to pass legislation was budget reconciliation, which aren't subject to filibuster. The issue is that reconciliation has several big limits:

1. The bill has to be related to government spending, revenue, and the debt ceiling. You can't toss in things like minimum wage increases or voting rights legislation.

2. You can only pass one of these bills per year (theoretically you can do more, but additional reconciliation bills have to go through the budgrt committee and with a 50/50 senate the GOP can just skip those meetings to deny quorum and keep it stuck)

3. Whatever passes still has to get at least 50 votes, which means either appeasing Manchin/Sinema or getting Republican votes (which ain't gonna happen)

And despite that, we still got the CHIPS act, an infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which--even with Manchinema throwing as many grenades in the process as they could get away with--was the biggest climate change bill in our country's history. Not perfect, no, but a sizable step in the right direction, for once.

Eccitaze , 9 days ago

God, the unrelenting misery is killing me in this platform. I think the thing I'm most sick and tired of more than anything else is the constant stream of The Usual Suspects butting in with "But what about Gaza?!" on Every. Single. Post.

Post an article about Biden proposing a ceasefire agreement in the war? Complain about Biden giving support to Israel!

Post an article about Biden celebrating pride month? Complain about Biden funding Israel!

Article about Biden forgiving another batch of student loans? "BUt Biden supports israel!"

Article about Trump getting convicted of felonies? "But Biden! Gaza! Israel!"

Article about a small town library fighting LGBTQ+ book bans? "GAZA! ISRAEL! BIDEN! BAD"

Article about a goddamn random topic completely unrelated to Biden, Trump, Israel, politics, or the US at all? "GENOCIIIIIIIIIIDE!"

It's at the point where I've cut back on Lemmy usage entirely because every comment thread I click on is like navigating a fucking minefield of misery. Nothing good can ever happen, no policy changes can ever be celebrated, no events can be remarked upon, without someone butting in with a reminder that Genocide Mother-Fucking Joe is personally shoveling coal into the palestinian child incinerator. No post can ever leave you with any emotion other than the thin veil of doomerism settling upon your shoulders, a pall of depression casting itself over the tragedy of the world, and a sense that modern society is an Aristocrats joke that has long since crossed the line from "horrifying" to "funny," then back to "horrifying," then back to "funny," before settling itself so firmly in "horrifying" that the audience is casting nervous glances and hoping that someone else is the first to call the police.

Eccitaze , 14 days ago

Don't bother, he's one of the many trolls whose entire purpose on Lemmy is to shit on biden

Eccitaze , 17 days ago

And on the other side of the coin, hard-right Israelis work to paint any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, regardless of legitimacy.

So on the one hand, you have antisemites using this as an opportunity to blame all the world's ills on tHe (((gLoBALiStS))) (I really hope that came across as sarcastic enough), and on the other, you have ultraconservative Israelis using the first group to lump the people saying "please don't do a genocide" in with them. And on top of that you also have Hamas doing the goddamn Goofy "and I'll fuckin do it again" meme, along with a bunch of people in Palestine who are literally taught antisemitism and hatred in the classroom, while Russia, Iran, and the same goddamn Israelis painting everyone as antisemitic pour money into the group that would genocide Israel back in a heartbeat. And caught in the middle of this category 5 shit hurricane are a bunch of innocent people who just want to be treated like human beings with equal rights, and to be able to go to the goddamn grocery store without worrying about getting exploded by a piss rocket / laser-guided cluster bomb made by Lockheed Martin.

I'm so goddamn fucking sick and tired of everything with this. Literally the only "good guys" in this entire fucking 70-year conflict are the noncombatants on either side of the Gaza border wall trying to go about their day and whose entire lives are reduced to a casualty sheet and a propaganda blurb, while both sides just keeps fighting and killing because perverse incentives mean it's the only way both Netanyahu and Hamas can cling to power, innocent life be damned.

Eccitaze , 21 days ago

More like we don't want to crash our only car when we don't have another means of transportation, and oops, now we can't get to work.

It's great to say "the system is broken and must be replaced." I agree! But nobody who says that, me included, has ever had anything resembling an actual plan to replace the system or to prevent something even worse from taking over once the system is destroyed.

Everyone gave the GOP shit for screaming about how Obamacare needs to be "repealed and replaced" but never saying what it should be replaced with (though that was because the "replace" part was a lie and they just wanted to go back to the bad old days of people being trapped in a job or entirely unable to get insurance because of a preexisting condition). It's the same thing with people saying the entire system of government needs to be replaced.

Eccitaze , 21 days ago

It's all well and good to say "choose another system of governance" but how do we implement this change? What is the mechanism under which we can replace our current system of government with Swiss democracy, without the old government just saying "lolno" and bombing it to shit? The only method I can think of is a constitutional convention, and right now we're closer to the right wing being able to call one and rewrite it to take pur rights back 200 years than we are to leftists implementing Swiss democracy.

Like... I would be thrilled if that were within the realm of possibility, but as it stands any possible options for dramatically overhauling our system of governance is more likely to lurch us straight into permanent hard-right minority rule by a bunch of fascists. That's what I mean when I say I've never seen an actual plan by leftists to overhaul the system--it's all arguing about what the sexy end goal should be, without bothering to talk about the boring minutiae of how to actually get to it. So far as I can tell, the "plan" to make all these needed changes, so far as any thought is put into it at all, is just a silent assumption of either "we lobby our politicians and they do what we tell them and nobody opposes our ideas" or "we do a violent revolution and kill all the bad guys without harming the good guys and we definitely win and accomplish our goal without someone else taking advantage of the chaos to do a fascism instead," depending on how radical the change is.

Eccitaze , 23 days ago

Seriously, ever since I drove alongside one of the new 2024 GMC Sierra Denali trucks and realized its hood was as tall as my entire car, I've been utterly terrified of being anywhere near them. You probably can't see anything less than 10-15 feet in front of you, which is absolutely bonkers for a noncommercial vehicle. To say nothing of how getting hit by one is going to be like getting smacked directly in the face like a brick wall, because there's no way you'll be knocked up onto the roof to dissipate the force of the impact.

Car companies have absolutely lost the plot with this whole arms race of BIGGER BOXIER TALLER MANLIER trucks ever since Ford got made fun of around 2000 or so for making a car that was too "feminine" because it dared to have a more rounded exterior. The next generation refresh made it bigger and boxier, slapped a 12" Ford badge that was 2-3x the size of the badge on the previous generation, and it's been all downhill ever since.

Eccitaze , 28 days ago

I'd say "inb4 the AI cultists invade this thread" but it looks like I'm already too late

Eccitaze , 29 days ago

I'm at about 40% income to rent, and that's with my living with two other adults. Landlord has consistently pumped rent by 20% every year, all while removing features (per-unit planter boxes demolished, fancy dishwasher & washer/dryer replaced with generic shit boxes, etc.).

I wish I'd never moved here

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

God, same. One of my little annoyances in life is that my internal voice is a goddamn motor mouth and I literally CANNOT stop it.

I can stare at a white wall and watch paint dry, and my monologue will start philosophizing about watching paint dry, where the phrase came from, why I'm doing it (to try and silence my internal voice), then go on a wiki walk about how trying not to think about something makes you think about it more and the classic example of telling someone "don't think about a brown bear" makes them think about bears, then I'll start thinking about bears and my monologue is suddenly halfway across the world.

Put me in a sensory deprivation tank, and my internal voice starts ruminating about how Daredevil uses these to sleep, then goes off about fight sequences, and then superhero comics, and whoops I'm halfway across the world.

Even when I'm paying attention and listening, my inner voice is still motoring away, it's just that it's mirroring what is being said to me instead of going on its own wiki walk halfway across the world (though sometimes someone will say something that makes my internal voice go "wait a second, that makes me think of..." and then I stop listening while I go on a wiki walk).

I have ADHD, in case it isn't obvious yet.

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

At the time, picking Garland as AG was a giant fuck you to republicans to get revenge on them denying Obama the supreme court nomination in 2016, a way of saying "ha, ha, you denied him a seat and now we gave him one that's almost as good."

Unfortunately, in hindsight it turns out that when you put a very moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican in the cabinet, they will run their department like a moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican, and that resulted in the DOJ focusing on the mooks more than the masterminds out of fear of being seen as a political hatchet man.

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

He doesn't need to be a fighter. The only reason J6 got so bad is because Trump's administration actively and directly prevented any security measures from being prepared ahead of time, and then stalled and refused to call for help when the skeletal security guards were overrun.

The default posture of everyone who handles security for these institutions and would be in charge of fighting off another J6 attempt is that they want to protect the Capital and prevent something like this from happening again by preparing adequate measures in advance and having backup ready and available. All Biden has to do is not actively block the national guard, capital security, and D.C. police.

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

You seem to have mistaken my post as defending or supporting Garland's appointment. Please rest assured that is not the case.

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

The second contempt hearing was over statements that were made between the first contempt hearing and the judge's initial ruling--i.e. they were statements made before he was initially sanctioned. The judge hasn't backed down, he's just not jailing him until he makes a statement made after his warning.

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

They can't delay it that long, they have to issue a decision by the end of their current term, which ends when they go into summer recess in late June/early July. Granted, they could theoretically say "screw the rules" and not issue a decision until after the election, but that's literally never been done, and if it did everyone would start ringing the alarm bells because it's a crystal clear sign they're corruptly abusing their power for Trump's benefit. (Yes, I know they're already doing this, but what they're doing right now is blowing hard enough on a dog whistle to draw side-eye glances from passers by, while delaying a decision past the end of term would be like blowing a train whistle right next to your face.)

If they do decide to help Trump, the most likely path will be waiting until the last minute to issue a decision and then punting it back to the lower court for further review.

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

And this is why any pro-forced birther who says it should be "left up to the states" should be treated as if they're lying. If they truly believe it's murder, then there's no world in which they would tolerate a state choosing to keep abortion legal, and if given half a chance they would immediately ban it everywhere.

"It should be left to the states" is code for "I would happily sign a national ban but I won't say it because I know it's political suicide."

Eccitaze , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Oh, okay, he's a garden variety nutjob who went off his meds for too long. Glad it could be cleared up.

EDIT: I realized this was a bit flippant after thinking back on it. It's obviously tragic that this guy wasn't able to get the help he obviously needed before it was too late. I'm relieved it wasn't because of obvious partisan leanings (i.e. he was protesting the trial in one way or the other) and that it appears his decision to set fire there appears to have been more to draw attention to his message. I won't even say that his ideas are entirely wrong--it wouldn't surprise me in the least if billionaires were pumping crypto as a rugpull, but there's a lot of obvious delusions (like claiming that the Simpsons, the Beatles, George Orwell, and various pop icons were part of a conspiracy to normalize doom-and-gloom sentiment). I just hope this doesn't delay the trial too much, and I hope it's not a sign of things to come.

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

Looks like it was mostly unrelated to Trump, he likely chose to do it outside the courthouse because there were more people and news cameras paying attention there.

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

No, but you do need enough votes that the people who like the status quo can be overriden. The last time that was the case was the brief period between 2008 and 2010 where there were 59 (and a 3-week window where they had 60) democrats in the Senate, and during that period McConnell's "block everything and don't give Obama any wins at all" strategy wasn't fully apparent yet, so there was no appetite to get rid of the filibuster because it hadn't yet been so widely abused. Then the 2010 midterm came in and democrats went from holding 59 seats to 51, and we've been stuck with Manchin (and later Sinema) having effective veto power on the Democrat agenda ever since.

Eccitaze , 1 month ago

I am increasingly convinced that the people who claim AIs are useful for any given subject of any import (coding, art, math, teaching, etc.) should immediately be regarded as having absolutely zero knowledge in that subject, even (and especially) if they claim otherwise.

From what I can see in my interactions with LLMs, the only thing they are actually decent at are summarizing blocks of text, and even then if it's important you should parse the summary carefully to make sure they didn't miss important details.

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

Notable is NPR's rebuttal to this essay: NPR responds after editor says it has 'lost America's trust'

In particular, this portion stands out:

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Nah, he just talked about how "Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace" and how a bunch of employee groups based on identity started up, and then directly linked that to the "absence of viewpoint diversity." Totally different. 🙄

I'm really tired of this weasel wordplay that constantly happens, where someone talks about X and then uses that to lead into a point about how this bad thing happened, and when called out, backs off and says "I never blamed X on this bad thing happening." Fuck off with that shit, we all know what you said and we can fucking read, you just don't want to admit it because you know that saying it makes you look racist as all hell.

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

This article is excellent, and raises a point that's been lingering in the back of my head--what happens if the promises don't materialize? What happens when the market gets tired of stories about AI chatbots telling landlords to break the law, or suburban moms complaining about their face being plastered onto a topless model, or any of the other myriad stories of AI making glaring mistakes that would get any human immediately fired?

We've poured hundreds of billions of dollars into this, and what has it gotten us? What is the upside that makes up for all the lawsuits, lost jobs, disinformation, carbon footprint, and deluge of valueless slop flooding our search results? So far as I can tell, its primary use seems to be in creating things that someone is too lazy to do properly themself like cover letters or memes, and inserting Godzilla into increasingly ridiculous situations. There's certainly something there, perhaps, but is it worth using enough energy to power a small country?

Eccitaze , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

It's a specific form of trolling/bad-faith argument based on this comic. The idea behind sealioning is that you feign politeness and badger someone with seemingly-simple questions (that in reality require spending a sizable amount of time to answer) to get them to try to debate you. This can take the form of asking someone to elaborate a point, or provide citations to support a claim. If the victim takes the bait and responds legitimately, the troll ignores most of the message, claims any citations are invalid for some reason (biased source, misrepresenting what the article says, or just ignoring it exists entirely). The troll then cherry picks a few statements, and asks more questions about those, continuing the cycle, If the victim refers to previous posts, the troll pretends it either didn't happen or didn't actually answer their question (it did). If the victim refers to previously linked articles, the troll dismisses them and insists the victim provides "better" articles (that the troll will also dismiss out of hand). If the victim ever tells the troll to fuck off, the troll claims the moral high road and says they just "want a civil discussion" and "reasoned debate" over the topic.

The goal is something like a reverse Gish Gallop. Where a gish gallop aims to overwhelm the victim with more arguments than can be addressed quickly in the hope that your opponent can't/won't take the time to respond and walk away, allowing you to claim victory, sealioning aims to trick the victim into spending hours writing a messages that you can respond to in under a minute with a few simple questions, creating a kind of denial-of-service attack.

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

Yeah, happy to help. Sealioning really fucking sucks, because the only ways to counter it are:

• Insult the troll until they go away

• Refuse to play their game and give short, pithy responses without doing any research (or not linking the research you did)

• Ignore the troll entirely

• Copy your response and paste it whenever you see the troll asking the same question (which someone is doing in this very thread)

• Create and maintain a collection of ready-to-go arguments with citations that you can copy/paste at the drop of a hat, which is a fair bit of work in of itself

In case it's not obvious, most of the counters for sealioning look almost exactly like trolling itself, and it's almost impossible to tell a sealion from someone apart looking for a legitimate discussion at first glance--short of keeping track of individual usernames and watching them in multiple threads, the only way to know if someone is a sealion for sure is for at least one person to feed the troll at least one good response. It's what makes sealioning such an insidious technique, because fighting a sealion almost always results in a lower quality of discussion itself, giving the sealion another type of victory.

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

LMFAO "uhm ackshually guys AI art takes skill just like human art"

yeah bud, spending 30 minutes typing sentences into the artist crushing machine is grueling work

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

People dismiss AI art because they (correctly) see that it requires zero skill to make compared to actual art, and it has all the novelty of a block of Velveeta.

If AI is no more a tool than Photoshop, go and make something in GIMP, or photoshop, or any of the dozens of drawing/art programs, from scratch. I'll wait.

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

Y'know, that was a hell of a lot of words to say "I'm an asshole who thinks that ripping off peoples' work and claiming it as my own by laundering it through the Torment Nexus is good, actually"

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

Compared to how much effort it takes to learn how to draw yourself? The effort is trivial. It's like entering a Toyota Camry into a marathon and then bragging about how good you did and how hard it was to drive the course.

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

And look at the ttrpg.network community for a counterexample, they still have a pinned post on the dndmemes subreddit advertising Lemmy and ttrpgmemes gets like .1% of the traffic dndmemes does. And this is still after a months-long rebellion complete with allowing NSFW and restricting submissions to a single user account, both things that would normally kill a subreddit dead.

Eccitaze , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

He says himself that he was there to protect businesses, but he had no relation to the business beyond that of a standard employee, and his help was never requested--he didn't know the owners, his family didn't own the business, and he wasn't even a frequent customer IIRC.

The most charitable interpretation is that an untrained, underage civilian took a semiautomatic rifle across state lines, to a protest happening in a town he didn't live in, to guard a business that he had no special relation to, and that never asked for his help.

The more probable interpretation, given posts on his social media before the shooting (that weren't allowed to be shown in court), is that he wanted to play action hero and shoot some scumbags, and he got exactly what he hoped.

EDIT: Apparently he worked at the business he was guarding, but the point still stands--he never got permission to defend the business, nor was it ever offered.

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

You may have gotten this very belief from this comic

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

At this rate we're going to start getting memes about Lemmy reading comprehension lmao

Eccitaze , 2 months ago

Lmao, from an NPR article on the same topic:

They filed an affidavit from an insurance broker saying it is "not possible" to find a bond that big. The broker was an expert witness for Trump during the trial.

The trial judge already noted in his decision that this broker was a "close personal friend" of Trump's and had a financial interest in the outcome. A decision could come from the appeals court later this week.

I'm sure the judge will give the broker's opinion all the deference it's due. /s

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

This bird definitely listens exclusively to metal bands from Nordic regions featuring an opera singer dressed like an ice queen backed by instruments that sound like they just got dragged through a tar pit

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

What system do you think is better, then? Because, reading that post, the main takeaway I got was basically "the people that lost a vote don't have much say in government," which... That's how democracy works? I'm confused.

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

But don't you get it, the only way I can show support for Palestine is by staying home, even if it means electing a fascist who promised to promised to wholeheartedly support Israel in their genocide! /s

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

Trump will make sure to thank you for your efforts getting him elected.

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

Meh, I upvoted you. I personally think he's been about as good a president as someone could hope for, which is a pretty fucking low bar, but I still voted uncommitted in my primary yesterday even though I would crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump in November. I don't blame anybody who holds their nose and votes as a pure harm reduction measure.

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

IIRC they ejected them because Rasmussen Reports put out a ridiculously flawed article that called the results of the Arizona gubernatorial election into question based on a study whose methodology was so flawed that it could be torn apart by a particularly sharp grade schooler--they took a poll, sponsored by a Republican group, four months after the election, then weighted it against exit polls (not the actual election results), and then used that to claim the Republican won by eight points instead of losing by 1. This prompted the guy in charge of 538 to send them a letter basically saying "are you gonna fix your methodology to reflect something close to reality, orrrrr...." and Rasmussen said "lol no"

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

Oh, I think they can precisely articulate exactly what they're angry about if you let them, but they know if they do that in public it'll show just how crazy, hateful, ignorant, and bigoted they are. What they're struggling with is how to articulate what they're angry about in a way that doesn't immediately expose them as a modern-day KKK for LGBT+ folk.

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

An honest answer: It would likely increase the progressive voter turnout, but I am unsure about the net effect. I would certainly hope it increases total overall turnout, but unfortunately a large chunk of the voting populace--including a lot of reliable Democrat voters--are still very much pro-Israel.

That said, I would also like to confirm: Assume for the moment that Biden and Trump wins the nomination, and there is no change in the status quo between now and November (this is unlikely, given Biden's recent shifts in policy signaling a possible change in trend, but I want to check against the worst case scenario). Would you still vote for Biden, or would you stay home? Would you staying home potentially affect the outcome (I.e. are you in a solid red/blue state like Alabama or California, or are you in a swing state like Michigan or Georgia)? What would need to change for you to vote for Biden in November?

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

Yeah, IIRC a knight's suit of armor and weapons alone were worth more than most people in medieval times would ever earn in their entire lifetime. Knights traveling on horseback were the modern day equivalent of a celebrity rolling around town in a Ferrari

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

Things in either list Biden has the ability to directly influence policy on:

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

It's almost as if structural flaws in our government mean Trump would have a more cooperative congress and the willingness to outright ignore the rule of law to accomplish his goals...

Eccitaze , 3 months ago

The problem is that there's no incentive for employees to stay beyond a few years. Why spend months or years training someone if they leave after the second year?

But then you have to question why employees aren't loyal any longer, and that's because pensions and benefits have eroded, and your pay doesn't keep up as you stay longer at a company. Why stay at a company for 20, 30, or 40 years when you can come out way ahead financially by hopping jobs every 2-4 years?

Eccitaze , 4 months ago

The 14th Amendment's 3rd clause is self executing, so arguably he's just disqualified himself from office.