kava @ kava @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Sometimes I feel like I was the only one who remembered that this is what it was like the last time he was in office

I feel like it's worse this time. Darker. We didn't have the Ukraine or Israeli war. We didn't have perverse AI videos like the Gaza video with a giant golden Trump statue.

2016 was the rise of Trump. Right now we are in the age of Trump. Trump is steadily increasing his power and I believe fairly soon he will be able to more or less unilaterally control the federal government as he continues his purges.

just means they are in bed with Nazis

Fascism is always the best business decision. This is the inevitable result of capitalism. The institutions on a good decade are strong and resilient. Oligarchy, yes, but still a more or less free society.

Eventually though, there will be a series of crisis in succession that causes the establishment to weaken just enough for a strongman to slip in and take the reigns. In the 20th century it was the fallout from WW1 and the Great Depression. In our time it was COVID and the Ukraine + Israeli wars (and to some extent, 2008 housing crisis)

One key part of fascism is that it is almost paradoxical

a) A populist-driven ideology, which means it appeals to the lowest common denominator

b) An elitist-driven ideology, which means it idolizes and puts value in the elites of a society

What ends up happening is the state picks and chooses elite groups of people who end up running the show. So for example, if you are Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezos.. you know that if you play nice with Trump that he will reward you and you will have certain advantages by having a friend in an authoritarian government. You also know that if you don't play nice with Trump, he will try and hurt you using both legal and illegal mechanisms.

Therefore, the best investment you could make is aligning yourself with the fascist state.

This was always going to happen. Sort of like how humans eventually will catch a cold or develop cancer. The immune system on a good day is strong enough to repel these types of problems. But eventually, you will be under some stress for one reason or another and your immune system is not enough to stop the inevitable cold or what have you.

yeah well said. and while there probably isn't much of a difference to the people getting rained on with bullets and bombs... i think there is a fundamental ideological difference between at least pretending like you care.

we've reached the point where the executive is so powerful he doesn't feel the nice to put the mask on. it's a blatant and almost ostentatious use of power.

i think one thing he said in the 2016 election cycle was so spot on.

“I have the most loyal people – did you ever see that?” “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” “It’s, like, incredible.”

Trump says and does ridiculous things (did you see that Gaza AI video?) that have no coherence because he understands his power lies in the chaos. one day he says one thing, one day he says another. ukraine and US will make a good deal one day, zelensky's a dictator the next day, zelensky's a good leader one day, and then zelensky's disrespectful the next, etc etc

it's sort of like when Stalin would go through one of his purges. He would have a long list of names on a paper and he would look through him. Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, he would cross a name off the list. He was reminding everyone that his power was absolute and he could arbitrarily choose to end you or spare you.

Trump is toying with this same type of arbitrarily derived chaos but instead of it being occasional he seems to be embracing it as his source of power. everyone (both his opposers and his appeasers like rubio) get their nerves frayed. you don't know what's coming next. who is next on the chopping block. the truth is slowly dissolving until it's meaningless

and privately supported

we openly sent over thousands of MK84 2,000lb bombs that have used to kill thousands of civilians. not really private to be honest

hell, right after Oct 7 Biden personally made the trip over to Israel to bend the knee on live TV

kamala was more biden. the same group of people that was around behind created the conditions for a kamala run to even be possible.

they had to pull some weird "democracy games" to even get her on the ballot. pretend like biden was gonna run so he automatically wins the primary and only then announce he's gonna leave. really shows how far this democracy has fallen

as for kamala, biden's immigration proposals were "compassionate approach" and "immigration reform"

if you went to her website and looked under immigration there was only "strong border" and "border security"

to be honest, i only wanted kamala to win because she was a woman and that woulda been cool. but the descent into fascism would not have been meaningfully slowed down, i think

a chromium skin

i don't think it's so simple as they worship power. i think there's a very strong inbuilt desire to belong to an "in-group" when you feel insecure and vulnerable

and if unchecked neoliberal capitalism has done anything over the last half century, it's made average americans feel insecure. financially and emotionally

so sort of the same reason there's race-based prison gangs is the same reason fascism tends to flare up when the system is going through severe stress. just like when your immune system is weak and the herpes virus manages to break out. we always have fascism possible yet most of the time the immune system is strong enough.

2008 + covid + ukraine + more have left us vulnerable

so is that the key differentiating issue here? whether someone can mistake it for a real photo?

what if I'm a really talented artist and make a realistic drawing of you posing in a sexually suggestive way. Should that be criminalized?

if I put a watermark "AI generated" on some of this AI porn, does that make it OK? if the issue is someone mistaking it, then the watermark would remove that doubt.

i'm trying to get a sense for the rationale here. basically- does this issue at its core really have anything to do with AI?

not claiming private organizations don't have to the right to regulate speech on their platforms. was responding to statement

I understand why there are exceptions for those in positions of power, but I’d be more than happy to live in a world where there weren’t.

which to me implies some sort of state censorship on this type of material

Really, I just wanted to understand the rationale behind the desire to ban this type of material.

On the topic of Judge Roberts, on a similar although different legal issue

He wrote the Court’s opinion in United States v. Stevens (2010), invalidating a federal law that criminalized the creation or dissemination of images of animal cruelty. The government had argued that such images should be a new unprotected category of speech akin to child pornography. Roberts emphatically rejected that proposition, writing that the Court does not have “freewheeling authority to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment.” Roberts also wrote the Court’s opinion in Snyder v. Phelps (2011), ruling that the First Amendment prohibited the imposition of civil liability against the Westboro Baptist Church for their highly offensive picketing near the funeral of a slain serviceman.

In oft-cited language, Roberts wrote:

“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.”

If Judge Roberts were to be consistent, and I make no such claims that he will ever be consistent, I believe he would likewise not support banning fake AI porn.

In this case, it's clearly a form of speech and therefore protected under the 1st amendment.

I also don't understand such a strong reaction to non-consensual AI porn. I mean, I don't think it's in good taste but I also don't see why it warrants such a strong reaction. It's not real. If I draw a stick figure with boobs and I put your name on it, do you believe I am committing a crime?

As shady as Mozilla is, they’re competing against a functional monopoly

yeah this is a part we need to recognize. right now there are essentially three browsers. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Every other browser is some derivative of one of these- mostly Chromium.

Google can change some small detail about how they render HTML or a small part of their JS engine and that has global effects all over the internet. Without a Firefox to compete, they will implement policies to hurt the consumer. People think just because Chromium is open source that this mitigates the risk.

Google's V8 javascript engine does not only power all Chrome and chrome-derivatives, it also powers nodeJS and therefore vast swathes of server-side javascript as well.

it's actually difficult to understate how much raw power Google has in determining what you see on the internet and how you see it

we desperately need Firefox. I really hope that an open source alternative could be viable but it's been decades and we haven't had a real browser pop into existence. will the death of Firefox mean something else comes out? Or will the death of Firefox be the last nail in the coffin for a free internet?

Saying “kidnapping” and “brutal measures” is a little saucy when this is

Well, it is extreme. Let's not pretend like it isn't. Legal technicalities aside, it's not a good look. People walking with their families down the street suddenly get ambushed and then thrown into a van? Old woman or wife trying to fight off the military recruiters?

The Russians don't do this. The Americans didn't do this back during Vietnam. Etc. It's understandable because of the existential nature of this war, like you pointed out, but it is abnormal when you look at other drafts in other countries.

Part of the reason they're having such a hard time is again, the recklessness with which they have, at certain points of this war, treated human life. Russia's running into this same issue. Although Russia has a bigger population and is able to offer higher incentives in the form of payouts, along with a more centralized and mature propaganda system. Because of this, they haven't had to rely on a draft and mobilization. They are still mostly a volunteer force.

They had lower tolerance for casualties, but that’s just because it was an optional war rather than an existential one.

Lower tolerance for casualties is a bit of an understatement. Over the course of 5 years or so there were less than 5,000 American deaths. Since 2022, we're looking at a very conservative at least 100k dead from just the Russian side. The more generous estimates have 200k+ dead on both sides.

We're talking at least an order of magnitude difference

That’s pretty much the job description of a soldier

When military strategy is controlled by the generals, they will prioritize manpower over political goals. When military strategy is controlled by the political regime, political goals become more important.

Retreating from a piece of land that has little strategic significance is the correct move so that you conserve resources and manpower. A soldier is a human being, a life. Not only does this have some sort of moral worth and should not be thrown away recklessly, it has real strategic value.

Both Russia and Ukraine in this war have made awe-inspiringly bad decisions at specific points. If I were a man who was being compelled to serve in either army, I would run away as far as possible.

It was less that OP pointed out this stuff, and more that their “friend in Kiev” apparently phones them up about this and doesn’t mention anything about the Russians who are perpetuating all this and could leave at any time.

I agree.

if you go on reddit to certain pro-russian combat footage subs dedicated to the war, you'll see one or two new videos a week of Ukrainian men being kidnapped off of the streets and stuffed into a van

they really are taking people off the streets there. they're low on manpower and the men remaining are all those that don't want to die so they've been ignoring any draft summons. so the Ukrainian gov has been resorting to increasingly brutal measures.

i'm honestly just so glad i wasn't born in post-soviet slavic country , lol. i swear the value of life there is not nearly what it is here. on the Russian side they'll force thousands of men forwards into a meat grinder trying to win with pure brute force. if a soldier tries to go backwards, the Russians themselves will shoot you as a motivation for the others to go forwards. hundreds of thousands of men dead or maimed for what? a couple miles of land a day?

then on the Ukrainian side they'll keep you defending some worthless piece of land forever as all the supply lines slowly close around you. once you're cut off, you know you and the wounded with you are all gonna die. command promised reinforcements when they had no intention of sending reinforcements. to them , the political benefit of holding onto that land for just a little longer is worth more than the lives of real human beings. you are a soldier and you are expendable. (this also coincidentally makes it harder to get fresh recruitment because ukrainian men aren't stupid and propaganda can only hide so many deaths)

i've seen confirmed cases of both sides killing POWs. men walking out of a trench with their hands up surrendering just to get mowed down anyways. men trying to surrender to drones only to get blown up anyways.

war is hell. it's barbaric and highlights the absolute worst nature of humanity.

having said all that, yeah the commenter does seem like an astroturfer or at least a biased pro-russian poster if organic. but the statement with ukrainians being kidnapped, at least from what I've seen, is true. it has been happening at increasing frequencies

really it's a cautionary tale about the intersections of different technologies. for example, csv going into a sql database and then querying that database from another language (whether it's JS or C# or whatever)

when i was 16 and in driver's ed, I remember the day where the instructor told us that we were going to go drive on the highway. I told him I was worried because the highway sounds scary- everybody is going so fast. he told me something that for some weird reason stuck with me: the highway is one of the safest places to be because everybody is going straight in the same direction.

the most dangerous places to be, and the data backs this up, are actually intersections. the points where different roads converge. why? well, it's pretty intuitive. it's where you have a lot of cars in close proximity. the more cars in a specific square footage the higher probability of a car hitting another car.

that logic follows with software too. in a lot of ways devs are traffic engineers controlling the flow of data. that's why, like you said, it's up to the devs to catch these things early. intersections are the points where different technologies meet and all data flows through these technologies. it's important to be extra careful at these points. like in the example i gave above..

the difference between

    
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true);

  

and

    
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true, NULL '');

  

could be the difference between one guy living a normal life and another guy receiving thousands of speeding tickets https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/

believe me, i'm not under any illusion. but i do genuinely encourage you to do whatever you think will make things better. can't get much worse

How do devs make this mistake

it can happen many different ways if you're not explicitly watching out for these types of things

example let's say you have a csv file with a bunch of names

    
id, last_name
1, schaffer
2, thornton
3, NULL
4, smith
5, "NULL"

  

if you use the following to import into postgres

    
COPY user_data (id, last_name)
FROM '/path/to/data.csv'
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true);

  

number 5 will be imported as a string "NULL" but number 3 will be imported as a NULL value. of course, this is why you sanitize the data (GIGO) but I can imagine this happening countless times at companies all over the country

there are easy fixes if you're paying attention

    
COPY user_data (id, last_name)
FROM '/path/to/data.csv'
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true, NULL '');

  

sets the empty string to NULL value.

example with js

    
fetch('/api/user/1')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => {
    if (data.lastName == "null") {
      console.log("No last name found");
    } else {
      console.log("Last name is:", data.lastName);
    }
  });

  

if data is

    
data = {
  id: 5,
  lastName: "null"
};

  

then the if statement will trigger- as if there was no last name. that's why you gotta know the language you're using and the potential pitfalls

now you may ask -- why not just do

    
if (data.lastName === null)

  

instead? But what if the system you're working on uses JSON.parse(data) and that auto-converts everything to a string? it's a very natural move to check for the string "null"

obviously if you're paying attention and understand the pitfalls of certain languages (like javascript's type coercion and the particularities of JSON.parse()) it becomes easy but it's something that is honestly very easy to overlook

So, your solution is to quote Marx and hope the revolution will materialize.

it's actually not quoting Marx. Marx believed that a capitalist society will over time always result in a worker's revolution. I'm more pessimistic about human nature. I think a capitalist society will always result in fascist authoritarianism

I wish I had the privilege of letting things get worse

do it then. make things better, I'm rooting for you.

a capitalist society will always inevitably devolve into fascism, as short-term profit-driven thinking dominates decision making

the DNC is right up there with the GOP in terms of causing this clusterfuck. decades of neoliberal policies have left Americans financially insecure which has caused a total loss of faith in institutions over the last few decades.

in a good decade, a little crisis here and there is maintainable. but when you have dramatic knock-off effects of new technologies combined with global economic shockwaves like COVID and the Ukraine war, all of a sudden the establishment hold on power starts to slip. the corporate world doesn't care about democracy. they're more than happy to switch over to a fascist government- there's a very high potential ROI in bending the knee.

Trump took advantage of this and beat them. We saw the corporate world switch sides during the inauguration. He is now purging the federal government of any elements that may oppose his further renovations.

This problem did not start last year in November. This problem started decades ago and spans generations.

It's unfortunate but it's the reality. We as a society are sick. We are fundamentally sick and getting worse. We ignored it and persevered, but it can only be ignored for so long. We are now starting to see serious symptoms, like a person who gets a fever and starts shivering.

Trust me, it's going to get a hell of a lot worse before it ever gets better. We're in for a rough decade.

The devs have the same kind of “we know better than you do” mentality towards design

It's not "we know better than you do"

It's "we have a vision for the desktop environment"

If you granted the user every little thing they wanted, you don't become a better piece of software. You end up middle of the road. There are limited resources and by keeping a limited scope and having a clear idea of what you want to accomplish- you can do what you aim to do really well. Instead of being mediocre at a lot of things.

My experience with Gnome- it does 95% of what I need a Desktop Environment to do (and certain things others don't do very well). Some features like

• Being able to push a button, start typing an application's name, and push enter to start that application
• Being able to push a button, and immediately see at a glance all of the windows I have open and quickly navigate to them
• Being able to easily set keyboard hotkeys so that I launch applications and can run my own custom scripts with the push of a button

Example- I have a script that I set to "Control+Num Pad 5" that opens up a Gnome folder search dialog. I navigate to a folder and click "Ok" and then 4 terminals open on my left monitor. Three small ones stacked on top of each other on the left, one big one on the right. Basically like a tiling window manager. This script has custom commands that run depending on the directory. If I open a react-native folder, it runs an Android emulator and neovim on the big terminal.

Setting that script to a hotkey is as simple as going to "settings -> keyboard -> shortcuts" and just typing in the path to the script and the hotkey combination

• Being able to easily run scripts on files and directories directly from Nautilus (Gnome's file manager)

Example- When I right click on a pdf file in Nautilus, I have custom scripts that I can run. One is "splitPdf" which creates a new folder called "split" and then creates n.pdf files where n is the number of pages in that pdf. I also have "compressPdf" which will compress the pdf as much as possible and pops up a notification showing you how much. I have one for .xlsx and .doc files called "printPdf" that converts those to pdf files.

Those scripts can be whatever language you want, they just have to be executable, and you just drag and drop them into a specific folder ( ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts if I remember correct)

Those 4 things I think Gnome does better than any other default desktop environment I've ever used and I've used a lot over the course of my life. The remainder of the items (the 5% of stuff Gnome can't do) I have found custom plugins and in one scenario it only took me a couple hours to write my own custom plugin.

MacOS does #2 and #4 well by default (although it's harder to write scripts with their clunky apple script language whereas with Gnome because you can just use regular old fish or bash scripts). With certain applications (like better-touch-tools or karabiner) you can get similar functionality as Gnome.

Windows with Autohotkey does #3 although you have to again use a clunky language (even clunkier than Apple script)

KDE can do #1 (search/launch apps), but feels slower and less streamlined than Gnome's immediate overview. It does #2 (window overview) and #3 (keyboard shortcuts), but buries these features under layers of settings and inconsistent menus. For #4 (file manager scripts), Dolphin technically supports actions, but configuring them requires wrestling with clunky .desktop files whereas on Gnome you just use fish or bash or python or javascript or whatever the hell you want and stick it in a directory.

In my opinion, Gnome is miles ahead of KDE and while it's obviously not as polished as MacOS, it has accomplished so much more with its limited resources than a megacorp like Apple does.

What I love is it gets rid of stuff that's useless. For example desktop icons. What's the point of having some directory on your computer that's somehow different than all the other directories? So that you can clutter up your background?

I 100% agree that desktop icons are an outdated concept and I love that Gnome got rid of them in order to focus on the fundamentals. It's often not about what you add, but what you take away.

NP++ was good 20 years ago during a time with much weaker competition and it's been coasting on that good will ever since

It's OK for a text editor (compared to something totally basic like notepad) but other text editors have caught up in every single category

like you said, VS Code is now the default go to code editor for a lot of people. if you don't use VS Code, you use vim.

for non-coding uses, I don't see the functional difference between NP++ or something basic like Gnome's text editor