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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)JI
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920
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2 yr. ago

  • In many ways he's a unique figure. When he entered the political scene in his first campaign. The establishment republicans and conservatives didn't appear to think he'd really become a serious force. They were wrong. His ideological opponents also seemed to think he was too silly, and too extreme to be taken seriously and his domination of the right, albeit surprising, was anomalous and would never translate to electoral victory. They were also wrong. He seemed not to know how to play the game properly and was too foolish even to realise it. He probably wouldn't have been the first whack job to fail to heed his advisors and PR team and would surely fail like all of them. Viewed in that light his somehow successful manoeuvres could seem only baffling than inspired, like watching someone win at roulette by just always betting one colour. This gives his rising successes a spooky and uncanny air and not something his rivals or opponents could simply emulate themselves because when a normal person does this they just lose.

    If he'd had that final Big Mac attack in 2015 or maybe even as late as 2016, his brand of politics and the movement it seems to have inspired might have died with him but sadly it looks like now, plenty of proteges will be there to pick up the reigns. For all that can be said of the man, it appears he tapped in to and unleashed something that was waiting for its time and it's unlikely even his death will put that genie back in its bottle. The next in line might be a shrewd and clever cynic, who's studied the MAGA playbook and will exploit it to the hilt to grasp power for their own ends with no belief in the irrational or fantastical elements of this new orthodoxy. It might be an actual true believer, straight from the ranks of the deranged and mentally disturbed that Trump previously manipulated, now believing they're seeing the many real and imagined prophecies Trump used to rile them coming true. Maybe it'll be something in between, someone more like Trump himself with what seems to be more of an instinctive knack for playing these emboldened fanatics rather than a geniusly thought out strategy, they'll sometimes believe what they're saying sometimes not, a value system infinitely malleable, but reliably selfish. Either way Trump being dead will be a relief for little more than a day and after that you can either look forward to an heir apparent who'll keep it all going or a dangerous power struggle between dangerous people happy to expend lives and treasure to pick up the mantle.

  • Sure, great, but HOW? At the moment at least when a desire is held to profit from written work generated by AI, that desire and motivation comes from a human being. If the Authors Guild wants to confirm that a human being wrote something by basically communicating with that human about the work then they have no way to reliably determine if the human they're talking to generated it by writing down their thoughts or instructing an LLM.

    If the quality level from AI work is similar enough to a traditionally written work that the text on its own doesn't clearly indicate machine authorship then the fact of the submission process and the communication between a human being and the Authors Guild could really be the only means by which this is done. So basically, charm them enough and now your AI generated text output could gain extra legitimacy courtesy the Authors Guild because it's now not just you implying you wrote it, it's the respected Authors Guild outright stating it isn't AI.

    It also puts in to question some assumptions about this whole endeavour as well. If it's not a quality guarantee, only provenance, as in it can be bad writing but the Authors Guild attests it's bad human writing, then assumptions like "One cannot relate to a bot that does not have its own lived experiences to share" are undermined since that will only hold true on the basis of knowledge the reader has about the text, rather than the text itself resonating with the reader because human generated writing is inherently superior. If that knowledge can be so easily corrupted, it's worthless or at least only a couple of scandals away from being made so. It also gets very messy with things like the example they gave of KC Crowne whose book accidentally included some of the conversation they had evidently had with an LLM while writing the book. It is a hilarious smoking gun that the author used AI tools in the process of their writing, but funny as that is, the mistakenly included text shows that they're at least directing the output and seem to be using the AI to help them refine and make changes to their own writing. They're at least engaging in some form of process beyond simply commanding the machine to generate a book and then selling the result. Defence of 'AI artists' along similar lines to what I just laid out has been sharply criticised and that's pretty justified, right now at least, few would call this idea of directing the output of an LLM, this 'prompt engineering', the same thing as writing, but then again is this a question of degree? Or an absolute? Does the degree to which the author has apparently leaned on this tool affect how much value it has lost to a reader? If the mistakenly included prompt indicates that the author constructed their entire story through prompting, the illusion that the author created this work by synthesising and relating their own experiences is shattered but if it just indicates that they sometimes used it to work through problems while they wrote, is the connection to the author just as sullied, or now only partially? Or not at all? If the Authors Guild accept a submission and put their stamp attesting to its human provenance and later find out that for portions of the text the author consulted with chatGPT to help them work through ideas and test out other approaches are they going to revoke the inclusion in their database? Or is that only if its completely AI generated? In any case whatever answer they have for that can only apply to cases where they know exactly how or if any of the widely available AI tools were used.

  • Here in Australia Trump puts us in an awkward position. For a long time we've meshed our interests with those of the US both necessarily and very much unnecessarily. Some say we're the 51st state. This makes the increasing power of the US' executive branch over the past 2-3 decades and the decision to put a joke candidate with the mind of a child in charge of that branch particularly worrying. Our politicians did what you'd expect and more or less refused to make much comment about this and publicly and emphasised the strength of our relationship with the US and how we'll work with the incoming administration like any other. Unfortunately though we couldn't really avoid being hit by some of the whirling shitstorm going on over there.

    Last time he got his knickers in a knot about a refugee deal from the previous administration where we'd send refugees headed to Australia, to the US. I have to provide some context for that to make sense so I'll be as brief as I can. I'll just point out that this deal was the crowning capitulation on top of about 15 years or so of absolute bullshit xenophobia and cruelty on behalf of our successive governments who used refugees as political pawns and entered into a brinkmanship of which party could more cruel. For most of that time the public enthusiastically cheered them on but around the time of Trump's presidency there'd finally been a seachange and the government of the day found themselves needing to avoid allowing refugees in to the country or be accused of no longer believing in cruelty to refugees as policy whilst also needing to seem maybe not quite so cruel anymore so they tried to make it the rest of the world's problem instead by finding other countries to dump them in. This mostly involved Papua New Guinea who they paid to take them but who had little capacity to do so and also, but also a small handful of them to the US to try and take the sting out of some of the criticism about dumping them all in PNG where the locals were already threatening violence against them.

    Obviously this deal would look bad for Trump given his politics. Known for his tendency to try to solve problems by personally throwing a tantrum at people, he did just that to our Prime Minister at the time in a phone call. That Prime Minister wasn't, nor really is anyone else in our political system, known for his backbone or courage but nevertheless the leaked phone call seems to show that while he was mostly confused and bewildered by Trump's directness and stupidity, to his credit he still didn't give him what he wanted which was a demand to immediately cancel the deal. You could say he stood his ground, I personally think he was more just confused about what to do next probably because I assume politics doesn't usually work that way and they'd normally operate through technocrats and underlings on anything of consequence rather than deranged phone calls but however you look at it he didn't concede and the only consequence was that Trump had a big public sissy fit, that he somehow didn't realise made him look even weaker, and then he just moved on to the next mess of his own making in the 20 minutes it likely took him to make it.

    Basically, by that example I want to highlight that, though he is a threat, he does make things hard for us, and in general, long term, moves need to made to begin the long path of finding ways to live without such dependence upon the US, the good thing about Trump is also much of what makes him bad. He's a baby, he's got a very short attention span, and he doesn't like it when he can't win quickly by just throwing a tantrum and so it appears that when he indeed can't, he has a little cry about it and then seems to just kind of move on and pretend he was never interested in the first place. This is a kind of silver lining because it seems like you can pretty much just ignore the dumbest of his statements and just try to put out smaller diplomatic and economic fires as he creates them. We're still in a pretty shitty position here though because we're so interwoven with the US culturally, economically and as far as defence is concerned entirely, that trying to untangle from that is going to be really complicated and long term and looks near impossible. Unfortunately the chickens are coming home to roost on some seriously dumb and unimaginative decisions for 30 plus years.

  • The printed sign with the broken English seems to indicate that even their stickering eventually couldn't keep up with the pace of their price increases and they eventually had to just say they're going to charge a different price than what's on the screen. The fact that the business seems to be closed down adds a sad coda to their story.

  • I don't know that that would have been better oddly enough. At least not without specific plain English references to which particular lies and from whom they came. The problem with your more fiery poetic version is that people will simply assume the liars and oath breakers being referred to are just whoever their particular ideological opponents are so it could easily be dodged by assuming they're just calling out someone else.

  • Yeh I figured it needed to be active, couldn't find any and the ones that claimed (and ultimately turned out to be lying) to be dual link weren't active so unsurprising they didn't work.

    That's a very interesting idea about the double conversion with displayport though, I never thought of that. Are the displayport to DVI dual link cables easier to get or are they unicorns as well?

  • "Simplicity is key, a good cut of beef, salt, pepper and olive oil". Ironically I suspect that, despite it being steak and being posted by a woman talking about cooking, such a post would still cop a lot of flack and trigger a lot of the type of people that would choose to use Truth Social because of the mention of seed oil over animal fat.

  • Maybe you can tell me why I can't find a usb-c to dual link DVI cable that is actually dual link and also didn't lie about being dual link even when it explicitly said it was dual link on the box.

  • The extent of the problem seems to be progressing. The retry button worked for me for the most part at first but then by the next day had stopped working at all. Interestingly though, I discovered that loading the video in portrait mode first, hitting the play button and waiting for it to actually begin playing before going landscape seems to work. Don't get why that makes a difference.

  • What's the context behind the original image? Is the girl in the car holding a handful of pet food!? Why is she so anguished? Why is the other girl pressing her tits against the window?

  • Apple @lemmy.ml

    How can I create an automator or shortcut to take selected image files and use exiftool to strip them of their metadata?

    Hardware @lemmy.ml

    Do mini eGPU enclosures work with any PCIe device or just GPUs?

    Apple @lemmy.ml

    If I buy a preowned Sonnet echo TB2 PCIe expansion chassis and use a TB2 to USB-C connector adaptor would it still work on an M2 mac?

    Android @lemmy.world

    On Google pixel, is there a way to search ONLY locally when searching apps?

    Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world

    Do you ever feel nostalgia for a type of sadness?

    Android @lemmy.ml

    Is there any permanent risk to the phone itself if you install graphene OS?

    Matrix @lemmy.ml

    Does Matrix have anything akin to 'posts' as in Lemmy and Reddit?

    Android @lemmy.ml

    How do I confirm if a certain phone supports VoLTE?

    Android @lemmy.ml

    If GSM arena lists a certain band frequency as supported by a phone but says - USA at the end of the list, does that mean the same phone won't work in another country operating towers on that band?

    No Stupid Questions @lemmy.ml

    I have accepted a job starting late this year, but may be about to receive another offer much sooner. I definitely want to do the later one, how bad would it be to accept the first then leave?

    Plex @lemmy.ml

    Can you use PLEX to stream local media to gen 1 chromecast WITH subtitles?

    Android @lemmy.ml

    How do you make the 'video' tab in VLC only display local videos on the internal memory?

    Apple @lemmy.ml

    How do you disable focus/do not disturb mode?

    Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

    Did Australia ever have television commercials from the D.A.R.E. program?

    Firefox @lemmy.ml

    Why does the FX_cast extension work on some youtube videos but not others?

    Gaming @lemmy.ml

    Anybody know of games similar to Dito Seregin's 'Escape Pod'?

    uBlockOrigin @lemmy.ml

    Why do all my (desktop) casted youtube videos cast low quality?

    uBlockOrigin @lemmy.ml

    Did ublock origin used to work with chromecasted youtube videos?

    Apple @lemmy.ml

    Can you prevent the lockout screen from occurring during display sleep when streaming to chromecast?

    Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

    why do hangover symptoms come on in waves