I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes.

I remember mods and admins that would ban you because you gently disagreed with something they said.

There wasn’t a moderation team – it was one weird guy that got off on power.

I just use my kindle as intended: using Calibre’s “email” button to load 100% legally obtained books via it’s _______@kindle.com address.

IDGAF. If they start yanking books off my device I’ll put it in airplane mode.

There are jobs where it’s not feasible or practical to pay an actual human to do.

Human translators exist and are far superior to machine translators. Do you hire one every time you need something translated in a casual setting, or do you use something Google translate? LLMs are the reason modern machine translation is is infinitely better than it was a few years ago.

One of the major problems with LLMs is it’s a “boom”. People are rightfully soured on them as a concept because jackasses trying to make money lie about their capabilities and utility – never mind the ethics of obtaining the datasets used to train them.

They’re absolutely limited, flawed, and there are better solutions for most problems … but beyond the bullshit LLMs are a useful tool for some problems and they’re not going away.

One: that comment you deleted where you put the dollar sign ($) in the wrong spot – nobody does that.

Two: your “American English” (while excellent) sounds … off, when read aloud.

Three: you can read the following Shibboleth aloud and you’ll have no idea what it means:

ooh day ooh yay eek spay ig pay at in lay?

Lol. Yeah, exclude opposing opinions obnoxious, idiotic noise, go live in your liberal echo chamber

FTFY

Also, why do you have such a hardon for Trump when you aren’t an American?

So it is a racial slur, thanks for the confirmation

Yes, the notoriously racially homogeneous nation of Russia. Clearly it’s a race thing, and not a nationality thing. And clearly they’re talking about the entire ethnic “russian” population – not the state itself and its leadership.

Huh. My poor, white, Appalachian relatives are split 50/50 between being bigoted shit-heads and some of the most open minded, kind, generous people you’d ever meet. The later are somehow capable of telling hilarious jokes and stories without punching down.

Turns out “being an asshole” isn’t a culture.

How dare people cope with something horrible by making jokes. Everyone knows it’s impossible to make those jokes while simultaneously being horrified by and pushing back against the thing they’re joking about.

Dual income homeowners with healthy retirement funds. The fucked up thing is 1 million dollars isn’t that impressive anymore – you can easily spend that in retirement living a middle class lifestyle in the USA. Particularly when you factor in age related medical expenses and elder care.

It’s not like our retirement, healthcare, and elder care systems are catastrophically broken or anything.

Don’t use bigoted slurs or marginalized groups as an insult, but absolutely use their other insults against them. In their minds those are the worst things you can call someone, and to hear them used against “their side” drives them wild.

Call their favorite fascist a “degenerate”, “freak”, or “NPC” – their reactions are hilarious.

I get people who voted for him in the primary being upset.

It’s the people that didn’t out of sheer laziness or willful incompetence complaining I have no compassion or patience for – the number of those I knew of was shocking to me. Calling them “morons” is being charitable.

My friends and a lot of my coworkers I were Bernie supporters in 2016 – donated, attended events, etc. I made sure I was registered to vote and strongly encouraged my friends to as well. Talking to them after the primary was depressing as fuck … most of them didn’t vote, and had the lamest excuses you could imagine. It was eye opening.

Alright: whatever. Great work guys, now we get to vote for Hillary, since it was going to be either her or Trump as president. Shockingly almost none of the aforementioned friends/coworkers voted for her, and several that admitted they couldn’t get off their asses to vote for him in the primary complained about how it was “stolen” from Bernie.

It was hard not slapping the shit out of them.

The not only jumped on it, but “identified” the shooter as “Mark Violets, a known Antifa extremist!!!111”.

Most of the calls I’ve seen to defederate haven’t been because of an instance’s content, but rather because of an instance’s users being the problem.

E.g. hexbear getting the boot during the period where some of its users thought it was hilarious to brigade other instances and spam giant emojis of a well endowed pig shitting on itself.

Any work made to convey a concept and/or emotion can be art. I’d throw in “intent”, having “deeper meaning”, and the context of its creation to distinguish between an accounting spreadsheet and art.

The problem with AI “art” is it’s produced by something that isn’t sentient and is incapable of original thought. AI doesn’t understand intent, context, emotion, or even the most basic concepts behind the prompt or the end result. Its “art” is merely a mashup of ideas stolen from countless works of actual, original art run through an esoteric logic network.

AI can serve as a tool to create art of course, but the further removed from the process a human is the less the end result can truly be considered “art”.

We still kind of owe you for everything you guys did in the revolutionary war.

Tell you what: when the time comes to fight the fascists again we’ll send your resistance movement munitions if you send us dope “uniforms” for ours.

Bigots aside, I’m convinced most people are 100% fine with queer and gender non-conforming characters so long as they’re well written.

People like characters that act like actual people – not pandering, one dimensional, rainbow capitalistic tokens.

I’m a 7 minute drive from downtown and my options are satellite, cellular, or fixed wireless. Everyone around me has gigabit ethernet, but due to costs involved in running fiber and the fact my little community is mostly old folks (and thus likely not going to buy in) ISPs don’t want to “invest” in us.

Before any tankies claim the word is a blanket slur against communists: “tankie” was coined by British communists that were disgusted by the attitudes of some of their so-called “fellows”.