[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 133 points 5 months ago

Slay and serve are part of the drag/queer community lexicon that were made popular (iirc) in the NY ballroom scene. No one cares when 6th graders use them or if they stop.

If you watch queer media or hang out with The Gays, you’ll hear them all the time. They’re a bit campy, but not cringe.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 119 points 7 months ago

At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”

I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.

But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 154 points 8 months ago

First, squatters of this type are taking advantage of laws intended to protect renters from predatory landlords. Wherever you stand on people appropriating unused property, these laws need to stay in place even if they’re made more specific.

Second, news outlets like this will always quote a “guns and drugs” case and not the mom with three kids seeking employment or homeless vet cases.

Third, with security cams and doorbells being so cheap, there’s no reason why this should be an issue, especially for a large real estate rental company. That alone puts me in “cry me a river” mode. Notice again that the article lists interviews with individual homeowners but is actually profiling the impact on a rental company.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 101 points 9 months ago

Hey man, I’m really hoping you have been able to get someone to speak to about your situation as well as medication to help manage your symptoms. I did not take those options, and it has taken me years to recover.

It sounds like you’re still carrying a lot of that weight, and I hope you can put it down.

245

I have had a tendency since my earliest days on social media where I will get halfway or more through a response, and end up just cancelling it. Sometimes I feel like I’m just being to over the top with snark or otherwise don’t want to be that kind of person, but a lot of the time I’ll decide I just really don’t care enough to finish it. Sometimes I just know it’ll be an argument and I know what the person is going to say, and just have no interest in continuing the discussion. I did it on Reddit, I did it on bulletin boards, I even did it in my teens and twenties on Usenet - and I’ll probably go on doing it for as long as I continue using this medium. I probably do it a bit more than half the time. I know that lemmy benefits from more content and I have had some great discussions, but sometimes it’s just not worth it for me.

How about you? Do you hit publish or cancel more often?

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 107 points 11 months ago

Truth is an absolute defense in cases like these. They admitted to the facts of the case. The testing methodology is absolutely standard. There is no way Musk can prevail.

I just wonder if this will also fall under anti-SLAPP laws, since Musk is clearly doing it to shut down public disclosure and discussion.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 133 points 1 year ago

One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.

We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.

So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.

The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 145 points 1 year ago

Also that whole India/Pakistan thing. And I seem to remember some stuff happening in Africa.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 215 points 1 year ago

to which an excited Trump — "leaning" toward Pratt as if to be discreet — then told Pratt two pieces of information about U.S. submarines: the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected.

Holy fucking fuck.

This guy needs to be in jail. He’s deliberately leaked sources and methods, national nuclear information, and intelligence on foreign forces. Never in the history of the country has there been such a person in charge of national security. He is such a total waste that he thinks the president of the fucking United States needs to show off in front of foreign government officials by leaking national security secrets.

What an absolute piece of shallow-ego shit.

508

With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.

I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.

I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 105 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is revisionist heresy. Gary Gygax, who is expected to be cannonized via a trebuchet in the next couple of years, explicitly said that the official books are more like guidelines than actual rules.

And I mean that I actually had beverages with Gary at a science fiction convention back in the early 90s, and he said stuff like “If you want to pack a healing kit that heals +5 damage, do it.” Being serious now, it’s about the story, not the rules. I know that’s the point of the joke, but it’s been almost 50 years now and people we are still arguing about rules lawyers.

I always thought the White Wolf games that called the DM the Storyteller and explicitly made dice rolls optional were the apex of the interactive story idea.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 122 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

While that’s understandable, I think it’s important to recognize that this is something where we’re going to have to treat pretty carefully.

If a human wants to become a writer, we tell them to read. If you want to write science fiction, you should both study the craft of writing ranging from plots and storylines to character development to Stephen King’s advice on avoiding adverbs. You also have to read science fiction so you know what has been done, how the genre handles storytelling, what is allowed versus shunned, and how the genre evolved and where it’s going. The point is not to write exactly like Heinlein (god forbid), but to throw Heinlein into the mix with other classic and contemporary authors.

Likewise, if you want to study fine art, you do so by studying other artists. You learn about composition, perspective, and color by studying works of other artists. You study art history, broken down geographically and by period. You study DaVinci’s subtle use of shading and Mondrian’s bold colors and geometry. Art students will sit in museums for hours reproducing paintings or working from photographs.

Generative AI is similar. Being software (and at a fairly early stage at that), it’s both more naive and in some ways more powerful than human artists. Once trained, it can crank out a hundred paintings or short stories per hour, but some of the people will have 14 fingers and the stories might be formulaic and dull. AI art is always better when glanced at on your phone than when looked at in detail on a big screen.

In both the cases of human learners and generative AI, a neural network(-like) structure is being conditioned to associate weights between concepts, whether it’s how to paint a picture or how to create one by using 1000 words.

A friend of mine who was an attorney used to say “bad facts make bad law.” It means that misinterpretation, over-generalization, politicization, and a sense of urgency can make for both bad legislation and bad court decisions. That’s especially true when the legislators and courts aren’t well educated in the subjects they’re asked to judge.

In a sense, it’s a new technology that we don’t fully understand - and by “we” I’m including the researchers. It’s theoretically and in some ways mechanically grounded in old technology that we also don’t understand - biological neural networks and complex adaptive systems.

We wouldn’t object to a journalism student reading articles online to learn how to write like a reporter, and we rightfully feel anger over the situation of someone like Aaron Swartz. As a scientist, I want my papers read by as many people as possible. I’ve paid thousands of dollars per paper to make sure they’re freely available and not stuck behind a paywall. On the other hand, I was paid while writing those papers. I am not paid for the paper, but writing the paper was part of my job.

I realize that is a case of the copyright holder (me) opening up my work to whoever wants a copy. On the other other hand, we would find it strange if an author forbade their work being read by someone who wants to learn from it, even if they want to learn how to write. We live in a time where technology makes things like DRM possible, which attempts to make it difficult or impossible to create a copy of that work. We live in societies that will send people to prison for copying literal bits of information without a license to do so. You can play a game, and you can make a similar game. You can play a thousand games, and make one that blends different elements of all of them. But if you violate IP, you can be sued.

I think that’s what it comes down to. We need to figure out what constitutes intellectual property and what rights go with it. What constitutes cultural property, and what rights do people have to works made available for reading or viewing? It’s easy to say that a company shouldn’t be able to hack open a paywall to get at WSJ content, but does that also go for people posting open access to Medium?

I don’t have the answers, and I do want people treated fairly. I recognize the tremendous potential for abuse of LLMs in generating viral propaganda, and I recognize that in another generation they may start making a real impact on the economy in terms of dislocating people. I’m not against legislation. I don’t expect the industry to regulate itself, because that’s not how the world works. I’d just like for it to be done deliberately and realistically and with the understanding that we’re not going to get it right and will have to keep tuning the laws as the technology and our understanding continue to evolve.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 153 points 1 year ago

To be a little more clear than this headline would suggest, it’s not a 4% tax on millionaires. It is a 4% tax on people making over $1M per year. That’s a pretty far cry from someone who simply owns a house, retirement fund, or a stock portfolio worth over $1M. And it’s going to education and infrastructure. I would fully support this tax if I lived in the state.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 115 points 1 year ago

According to a recent review, 100% of the people falsely arrested via facial recognition findings have been black.

The technology needs to be legally banned from law enforcement applications, because law enforcement is not making a good faith effort to use the technology.

33

I deleted my reddit accounts completely by the first day of the APIpocalypse, and I removed all of the posts I had written under the principle that anything I had created was for the communities, which I saw as being destroyed by reddit’s moves. The content and moderation are the only source of value to social networks. I didn’t want what I had been doing for the past decade-plus to continue to be leveraged for monetization.

One person had replied that there are non-reddit affiliated archiving services that have been storing reddit content so deleting posts is ultimately useless. The site the person linked was what looked like a service catering to academic researchers, but O have since lost the link.

Does anyone know of such a site?

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SatanicNotMessianic

joined 1 year ago