My current tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory is that’s exactly what they’re banking on. They’ll draw the trial out until right before the midterm election… Then Trump will use the resulting riots to declare martial law and cancel the upcoming midterms, so he doesn’t lose control of congress. After he has cancelled the election, he’ll make a final push to clean house, and will start ousting liberal congress members by accusing them of being riot conspirators.

The Mangione Riots will be Trump’s Reichstag Fire.

This is actually why I’d be in favor of AI generators creating a hash database of their generated images. If legalized, they should be required to maintain records of the images they have produced. So that if those images appear elsewhere, they can be verified as AI generated.

It would be a monumental effort to actually get the AI companies to agree to it willingly. But that’s why legislation exists.

The fact that you don’t need to actually supply any real CSAM to the training material is the reasoning being offered for supporting AI CSAM. It’s gross, but it’s also hard to argue with.

Yeah, this is basically the crux of the issue. When you get into the weeds and start looking at more than just surface-level “but it needs CSAM to make CSAM” misconception, arguments against it basically boil down to “but it’s icky.” Which… Yeah. It is. But should something being icky automatically make it illegal, even if there are no victims?

I hate to make the comparison (for a variety of reasons) but until fairly recently homosexuality was psychologically classed as a form of destructive/dangerous kink. Largely because straight people had the same “but it’s icky” response whenever it got brought up. And we have tried to move away from that as time has passed, because we have recognized that being gay is not just a kink, it’s not just a choice, and it’s not inherently dangerous or harmful.

To contrast that, pedophilia has remained stigmatized. Because even if it passed the first two “it’s not just a kink/choice” tests, it still failed the “it’s not harmful” test. Consuming CSAM was inherently harmful, and always had a victim. There was no ethical way to view CSAM. But now with AI, it can actually begin passing that third test as well.

I don’t know how I feel about it, myself. The idea of “ethically-sourced” CSAM doesn’t exactly sit right with me, but if it’s possible to make it in a truly victimless manner, then I find it hard to argue outright banning something just because I don’t like it.

This is really the biggest hurdle. To be clear, I’m not arguing that being an active pedo should be decriminalized. But it is worth examining whether we’re basing criminality purely off of the instinctual “but it’s icky” response that the public has when it gets discussed. And is that response enough of a justification for making/keeping it illegal? And if your answer to that was “yes”, what if it could help pedos avoid consuming real CSAM, and therefore reduce the number of future victims? If it could legitimately help reduce the number of victims but you still want to criminalize it, then you are not actually focused on reducing harm; You’re focused on feeling righteous instead. The biggest issue right now is that harm reduction is very hard to study, because it is such a taboo topic. Even finding subjects to self-report is difficult or impossible. So we’ll have no idea what kinds of impacts on CSAM consumption (positive or negative) AI will realistically have until after it is widely available.

Designing foot-operated things tends to fly in the face of modern accessibility standards. Wheelchair users already have enough problems using public toilets.

Do yourself a favor and soak them in some vinegar water after you get them home. About a 1:4 mixture of white vinegar to water. The acidity will kill the mold spores that cause the berries to go bad, and it won’t be strong enough to affect the taste after you rinse them.

I usually just dump about a cup of vinegar into a mixing bowl and top it off with water when I’m getting groceries in. First thing I do is drop the berries in to soak. Then I put away all of my groceries, which gives the berries a few minutes to soak. Finally, I dump the bowl and give the berries a quick rinse with the sink sprayer.

I haven’t had strawberries go moldy since I started doing it. If I forget about them in the fridge for a week or two, they’ll simply dry out instead.

It will only take two years if people actually fucking vote in the midterms. But midterm turnout is historically… Well… Complete dogshit. And republicans are statistically more likely to vote in midterms.

That’s why Trump is moving so fast to try and secure things; He doesn’t truly have four years to cement himself as god-emperor. He only has two before he potentially loses his majority in congress. So he has to be crowned before then.

But even with that being said, I don’t have high hopes. As I said before, republicans are more likely to vote in midterms. Maybe Trump’s antics will be enough to get some blue voters off of their asses. But at this point, I’m not holding my breath.

+1 for Voyager. It feels like a spiritual successor to Apollo.

I’ve long said that every retail worker should be legally allowed to physically fight ten customers per year. And not a calendar year, where all the employees would be out of fights by the time holiday shopping season rolled around (or would be forced to save all of their fights for the holiday season). Give them ten points, and each point takes a year to fall off of their record once it is used. And the retail employee would have zero obligation to tell the customer if they have any points. Leave the customer guessing until the employee swings on them.

As gun nuts are so fond of saying: An armed society is a polite society. I think it would solve a lot of the problems with Karens. Karens only go full Karen because they hold all of the power in the relationship. But the threat of potential violence would go a long way towards quelling the most unreasonable ones, and people would only bother going full Karen if they truly felt they were justified and were willing to back it up with a fight.

Are they also returning all of the tuition money paid for said degrees, along with fairly compensating the graduates for the (now wasted) time they spent in classes? No? Yeah, I didn’t think so either…

Same here. It’s just a silent video with no way to unmute.

Yeah, there’s also the “debugging is just as hard as writing elegant code” side of things. Vibe coding is largely just putting yourself in a permanent debugging role.

The big issue I see with vibe coding is that you need to know best practices to build secure code. Even if you don’t adhere to them all the time, best practices exist for a reason. And a programmer who doesn’t even know them is a dangerous thing, because they won’t even be able to see what is insecure (until it’s far too late).

Studies have found that vibe coders tend to produce less secure code, but have higher confidence in their code being secure; It’s essentially Dunning-Kruger in practice. I’d have no issue with someone using AI to get the broad strokes down. But then they need to be able to back it up with actual debugging. Not just “I didn’t even bother looking at it. If it compiles, push it to prod.”

If you already have a Plex instance running, Prologue is an app that turns it into an audiobook host as well. Plex doesn’t natively support audiobook metadata like chapters, but Prologue simply uses Plex’s remote access to reach the files.

All you do is throw the .m4b audiobook files into a music library on Plex, sign into your Plex account on Prologue, and Prologue handles all of the metadata for the audiobooks instead of using Plex’s built-in music player.

I mention this because I had massive issues trying to get ABS to work on my setup. It simply refused to read or write any data from my NAS. After a day or two of throwing myself at it to no avail, I found Prologue and haven’t looked back. I already had Plex running for some friends and family, so setting up the music library was as easy as dropping the audiobooks into a folder.

Beans were just some sort of meme that popped up randomly. I think it was one of those “mods are asleep quick post [x] before they wake up” types of things, and it quickly spiraled until half of everyone’s feed was just beans.

I was around when it happened, and even I don’t understand it.

Yup, camp toilets are a similar concept. It’s just a 5 gallon hardware store bucket with a snap-on toilet seat lid. You line it with what is essentially a trash bag, just to make disposal easier. Then you use a gelling agent (just like what is in disposable diapers to allow them to soak up a bunch of moisture) to reduce sloshing and smell. It’s handy for when you’re going to be away from toilets for a day or two, but don’t want to (or aren’t able to) dig a hole to shit in.

But the same concept applies for when you’re going to be trapped somewhere (like a classroom) for an extended period of time. Like, for instance, during a school shooting. When you have 30 kids in a classroom, there’s a very good chance that at least one of them will need to piss after an hour or two. And nobody wants to deal with human waste in something like an open trashcan during a lockdown.

And as an added bonus, the bucket can be used to store all of active shooter supplies when it’s not in use. So everything is in a single location to quickly grab and prep. Active shooter happens? Great, just grab the big bucket out of the closet, dump all of the supplies out, and you’re ready to go. Now all of your tourniquets, styptic bandages, etc are accessible.

But it quickly got distorted into “they’re making kids use litter boxes to indoctrinate them” instead.

The lesson here is don’t troll these idiots, they’ll fucking believe it and then start passing idiotic laws for non-problems.

Throwback to when 4chan started memeing about pizzas, and the resulting chain of events led to a real pizza parlor being shot up by a right-wing nut job who thought it was full of pedophiles.

For anyone looking for a wonderful example of this, check out the RuneScape wiki. It’s hosted by a company that is partnered with the game maker, and is fully maintained by the community. It is the single most expansive and in-depth wiki I have ever seen. It is truly the gold standard for what a wiki should aspire to be.

It has everything you could need to play the game, all the way down to automatic calculators (with built in character lookup functionality, using the game’s high score leaderboard system) to tell you things like how many of [x] resource you’ll need to get [y] experience, or what your estimated return on investment will be for turning [x] resource into [y] product.

The game has over 250 quests, (and not just basic fetch or kill quests like most MMO’s have) and the wiki has in-depth walkthroughs (including in-game screenshots) for every single one.

You can even open the wiki directly from the game. There’s a “Wiki” button on the chat box, so you can search the wiki directly via chat, and it opens in your desktop browser.

This is also why so many Christians immediately assume all non-Christians are immoral. Because they derive their morals from Christianity, they default assume that people can’t have morals without Christianity. Like if you ever talk to one about it, they’ll be genuinely confused about how someone can be moral without religion.

I’m not sure, but I’d die happy.

Hah yeah, Lemmy is a much smaller community than Reddit. I have started tagging users, and it’s surprising how often I see the same tags in the comments sections.

This is true in America. In the EU, Apple was recently forced to allow third-party browsers. But even in the EU, developing those third-party browsers will take time and money.