General_Effort

@General_Effort@lemmy.world

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General_Effort,

I thought she made some very good points, but the quote in the title makes no sense to me.

General_Effort,

Yes, she said that. But what she said there just doesn’t make any sense.

General_Effort,

It’s weird. They used to take such great pride in not being like the French.

Then again, they also used to think the Iraq War was a great idea (unlike those filthy French).

Do they even eat chocolate that taste like barf anymore? Man, if old Hershey was still around, he’d set them straight. Or the other thing. Either way, he’d do it decisively.

Missing mother found dead inside 16-foot-long python after it swallowed her whole in Indonesia (www.cbsnews.com)

A woman has been found dead inside the belly of a snake after it swallowed her whole in central Indonesia, a local official said Saturday, marking at least the fifth person to be devoured by a python in the country since 2017....

General_Effort,

I have spent a disturbing amount of time trying to decide if it was necessary to clarify that she was found dead inside the python. I believe that, yes, it was. Make of that what you will.

General_Effort,

Yes. I think you could say that that being found inside a python pretty much implies being found dead. (There is this one guy, though, but he failed to get himself eaten.)

However, I think it’s just not sufficiently obvious to most people.

General_Effort,

That’s a weird comparison, given that Russia is and has always been a genocidal empire. A pertinent example is the renewed persecution of the Crimean Tatars under the present russian occupation.

General_Effort,

The President has no power over the interest rate. The interest rate is set by the Federal Reserve.

General_Effort,

Same year that the productivity-pay gap begins. Hmm.

In Germany, the last conscripts were called up in 2011.

Conservative Plan Calls for Dozens of Executions if Trump Wins (www.thedailybeast.com)

A conservative plan for Donald Trump’s potential transition into the presidency calls for dozens of prisoners to be executed, according to HuffPost. An 887-page plan by Project 2025, led by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, says that if elected, Trump should make a concerted effort to execute the remaining 40...

General_Effort,

The first thing the nazis did, was purge the bureaucracy. Taking away guns was no concern, at all.

Privately owned guns played no significant role in the nazis’ rise to or hold on power. Anything else is simply marketing by american gun sellers.

Some of their victims hid, refused to give up their arms, and fought back. They didn’t survive.

About 10-15,000 jewish germans survived the holocaust by going underground in Germany. They were colloquially called U-Boote or Illegale. Of course, that has nothing to do with guns. Guns were, after all, handed out to any able-bodied male.

If guns were the answer to dealing with fascism and authoritarianism, germany never would have had the holocaust.

That is only partly true. Germans are only a small fraction of holocaust victims (<5%). The victims overwhelmingly came from eastern Europe, particularly Poland and the Soviet Union. The holocaust happened in the wake of the advancing Wehrmacht. A more far-sighted response to german war preparations would have made a difference. A lesson one must bear in mind in today’s world.

General_Effort,

Assuming you want to know why France is islamophobic…

It’s historically grown. France invaded majority muslim, north Africa in the 19th century. Present day Algeria was french territory. The native muslim population was brutally oppressed; somewhat comparable to the oppression of blacks in the US. Nevertheless, the Muslims were french and fought for her in its wars, such as in the trenches 1914-18.

Algeria eventually won its independence after a brutal war lasting from 1954 to 1962. The brutality of this civil war is showcased by the massacre in Paris in 1961. Police attacked a peaceful demonstration for independence, murdering dozens, maybe hundreds of citizens. The police chief was a criminal nazi collaborator, convicted for his role in the holocaust. For decades, information about the massacre was suppressed in France.

President Charles de Gaulle - formerly the leader of Free France, the french forces that did not surrender to the nazis - brokered independence for Algeria. In response, far right traitors attempted a coup d’état and to assassinate him.

In many ways this history is comparable to the terrorist campaign that the US far right unleashed in the 1950/60 against African Americans and the civil rights movement. But the struggle was far more brutally fought in France. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Over a million people, mainly of european descent, were forced to flee from what became Algeria.

The decades after Algerian independence will seem quite familiar to Americans. North African Muslims had become a minority in metropolitan France (the mainland). This hated minority was quietly, without much legal upheaval, pushed to the fringes of society. Information about past atrocities against them was suppressed. Small scale terror attacks continued to happen.

These are the origins of the french far right and its islamophobia.

General_Effort,

The article alleges, though without evidence, that the tracking is just an excuse to raise rates.

A quick search didn’t turn up quite the right statistics, but traffic fatalities have been seriously on the rise in the US. That probably implies higher payouts. (WP)

But also, when trackable unsafe drivers have to pay more (and trackable safe driver less), then the unsafe drivers will prefer to be untrackable. You may be on the receiving end of the recalculated actuary tables.

General_Effort,

This doesn’t have anything to do with tracking. This is supposed to sabotage free and open image generators (ie stable diffusion). It’s unlikely to do anything, though.

Hard to say what the makers want to achieve with this. Even if it did work, it would help artists just as much, as better DRM would help programmers. On its face, this is just about enforcing some ultra-capitalist ideology that wants information to be owned.

General_Effort,

This attack doesn’t target Big Tech, at all. The model has to be open to pull off an attack like that.

General_Effort,

that will ultimately be used to create huge amounts of wealth for very few,

But… That is what these poisoning attacks are fighting for. They are attacking open image generators that can be used by anyone. You can use them for fun or for business, without having to pay rent to some owner who is not lifting a finger. What do you think will happen if you knock that out?

General_Effort,

Unfortunately, the press releases are PR fluff. The EU’s publicity guys don’t work any differently than those of any major corporations.

I know parts of the AI act and may be able to answer questions about particular aspects.

Off the top of my head: 3 general problems.

It is simply a mistake to regulate software based on how it is made, rather than what it is used for. EG They ended up regulating chatbots in the same act as mass surveillance. I don’t think that helped, either. Hard to say for sure.

They ended up doing a lot of bad micromanaging. The training data for “high risk” AI must fulfill certain conditions. This is certainly going to increase costs, but it’s unclear if it will lead to any improvement. The sane thing would have been to define the desired performance. It’s a typical problem. People without technical knowledge demand things to be done a certain way, because they figure it will get them what they want, instead of saying what they want.

Finally, there’s the interference of existing industry. The copyright lobby got some stuff in there, that may or may not enable them to extract some free money. It will certainly harm European citizens by making development much harder than it needs to be.

General_Effort,

@Mistral Why can’t you guys tell the difference between pedals and petals? Explain yourself!

General_Effort,

Oh! Look how happy those little girls are! Probably because they just learned that Stay-At-Home-Mom isn’t the only acceptable career for a woman.

General_Effort,

I think you seriously over-estimate the level of tolerance of Nazi Germany. The Nazis persecuted Degenerate Music just like they persecuted Degenerate Art.

General_Effort,

@Mistral Answer the previous comment in old English as a redditor would.

General_Effort,

Trivia (from Wikipedia): “Taxman” from their 1966 album Revolver was the group’s first topical song and the first political statement they had made in their music.

“Taxman” was influential in the development of British psychedelia and mod-style pop, and has been recognised as a precursor to punk rock. When performing “Taxman” on tour in the early 1990s, Harrison adapted the lyrics to reference contemporaneous leaders, citing its enduring quality beyond the 1960s. The song’s impact has extended to the tax industry and into political discourse on taxation.

Unlike their other political songs, which are fairly vague peace&love jobs, this one tackles a concrete issue: It protests the 95% top marginal tax rate.

You’ve heard how “the boomers” screwed up everything for later generations. Here’s exhibit A from pop culture. Don’t just think about evil, old men in smoky backrooms.

General_Effort,

You need motive and opportunity. There are not many opportunities to carry out attacks in Israel at present.

Maybe most people do not know about the relationship between the Russian Empire and Islam. Today, over 10% of the population is Muslim. When you think of soviet soldiers fighting Nazi Germany, you need to assume an even higher percentage of the conscripts being Muslim; state atheism notwithstanding. I know these things, and yet Islam is not something I intuitively associate with Russia.

During the European Middle Ages, vast areas of what is now in the south of the Russian Empire were converted to Islam. In later centuries, these areas were conquered by the expanding Russian Empire. It’s not quite a happy relationship. You may have heard of the genocide of the Crimean Tatars, particularly under Stalin. During the Cold War, majority Muslim Turkey was the only NATO country to have a border with the Soviet Empire. Nuclear missiles were stationed at that border, until they were removed as part of the secret agreement that came out of the Cuba Crisis.

Afghanistan has a long border with the Russian Empire. In the 1980ies, the Soviet Union embarked on an ill-conceived intervention to aid an even more ill-conceived revolution in Afghanistan. After 10 years of war, the troops were pulled out. This was then followed by another decade of civil war, which may have been dying down leading up to 9/11.

When the Soviet Empire dissolved, many ethnic groups achieved independence. That was not always peaceful. The fighting in Afghanistan seems to have had a certain spillover effect. For whatever reason, the Russian Army fought to maintain imperial dominance over some of these territories. Chechnya was especially brutally fought over.

Multiple terror raids have taken place in the last 30 years.

General_Effort,

When routine bites hard and ambitions are low

And resentment rides high but emotions won’t grow

And we’re changing our ways, taking different roads

Then disinformation will tear us apart again

General_Effort,

Pulver ist schwarz, Blut ist rot, golden flackert die Flamme.

General_Effort,

*Pfosten

General_Effort,

Der Ursprung der Farben ist unklar, soweit ich weiß. Diese Interpretation ist von Ferdinand Freiligrath, der diese Zeilen anlässlich der Revolution 1848 schrieb. Wurde auch beim Reichsbanner gesungen.

General_Effort,

The US is a net importer, though. It wouldn’t make sense.

General_Effort,

Being a net importer, means the US consumes more than it produces. It vaguely makes sense because it is still a growing county.

Norway’s oil fund protects the domestic economy from the negative consequences of being an oil exporting nation. Less kindly, you could call it currency manipulation. The US would be ill-advised to do like-wise, given its import surplus.

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