The problem is, for all the problems the country has internally, a “deal” with the west is going to turn out the same way it turned out for other countries: Forced “market reforms” that really just mean allowing western capitalists to exploit the country’s resources and labor. There is no good path for a country that involves western intervention. We’ll just make it worse, or at least as bad, but for out benefit.

Besides, why would they ever trust us? We bombed them to smithereens within living memory and since then have gone out of our way to punish the people living there for whatever reason you choose to believe was our motive. If we cared about the people there we wouldn’t have invaded or embargoed them in the first place. And since then it’s not like we’ve stopped acting like that to the rest of the world. If the US cared about freedom and democracy or people’s living standards, we wouldn’t be allies with places like Saudi Arabia or Israel. We wouldn’t have installed right wing dictators in all the countries we tried to stop from having self-determination.

The best thing that could be done if we actually cared about people’s living standards would be to back the fuck off and let people sort out their own politics without a global superpower breathing down their necks. They already fought one revolution, if they really want to change their government I’m sure they could do it without our “help.” Maybe if they didn’t have an existential enemy they could deal with their own problems more easily.

Idk, sounds to me like it did a good job mimicking humans. :P

You are asking this on a platform specifically filled with people who didn’t want to be on those centralized services. :P

That said, not to be the contrarian, but I think this is one of a collection of issues where the problem is not the technology or organizational structure, it’s just capitalism. Generalizing to talk about any monopolies, there are a lot of benefits to centralized production. Economies of scale, not duplicating work/resources, etc. There is a reason why some industries, called natural monopolies, are either run by the government or a private corporation is granted a monopoly over it in a regulated way. The classic example of this is infrastructure like train tracks. You don’t need 5 different train lines going to all the same places and there’s no space for that anyway. So by having one entity run the trains, you get to avoid the problems with that.

Going back to the internet: Centralization has some of the usual benefits of a more general monopoly: If we have one social media site, we don’t need 30 different shitty versions of a video player when the first one worked just fine. But more specifically, it has network effects: The more people who use a site, the more valuable it is for everyone else to use the site. If I go to a site to chat with people and there’s nobody to chat with, there’s not much point in being there. There is a consistent UI so I don’t need to relearn how to navigate different sites. Plus it makes it easier to find what I’m looking for or discover new things.

None of what I described above is directly caused by greedy corporations. Those are just the dynamics that emerge from the material reality of the internet. If we go rid of corporations tomorrow, I think we’d still end up with a decent amount of centralization because of that. Like imagine all of the big social media sites dissipated tomorrow. Everything goes back to being individual sites with their own forums. What happens? I go to a site that has no users, realize it’s dead, and go back to the more populous one. Or perhaps in an effort to make it easier to find everything someone makes a site that links to all the other interesting sites, curated of course because a list of literally everything on the internet wouldn’t be useful. Maybe you add a forum to that site so people could talk about their favorite other sites in one place. The smaller sites where less conversation happens dry up and the big ones snowball until they’re so big that they’re the place to be. Oops we just reinvented Reddit. As much as I’m done with dealing with corporate social media and want to stick with the fediverse or other stuff, it is still just the case that these sites have less people, and therefore less stuff to do, than those bigger sites, so they lack some of the value I got from those. I’m stubborn enough to put up with that out of principle, but for a lot of people, they’re just going to see that they can’t find anyone to talk about their niche hobby they had a subreddit for or whatever and just move on. It’s hard to achieve escape velocity.

THE problem then, is that these sites are controlled by corporations with profit motives. Their goal isn’t to create the best user experience, it’s just to do whatever makes them the most money. If that means psychologically manipulating people to engage more they’ll do that. If that means censoring speech that scares off advertisers, they’ll do that. If it means making the site worse and then selling people the solution, they’ll do that. If it means abusing their position of power to take advantage of creators on these sites who depend on the site, they’ll do that. And because of this centralized position of power with all of it’s inherent monopolistic advantages, they get away with this. Wrest control away from those corporations and find a way to run these centralized sites with democratic control, and most of those problems go away and we get to keep the benefits.

It’s not obvious that there is a good way to achieve this under capitalism though. The fediverse is certainly an interesting experiment in this by allowing there to essentially be independent sites that get collated into one place with a unified standard for UX, but we’ll have to see if they can overcome inertia to reach the critical mass necessary to be a genuine replacement to centralized corporate controlled sites. I also don’t know enough about the technology to know if this is the best solution or not. So I’d be curious to see if this takes off or if people find another solution.

The way I look at it, it would be better if we had a nice, consistent language with rules that make sense but… we don’t have that. English is a nonsense language with more exceptions than rules. So if I’m going to have to deal with something that doesn’t make sense in the first place, I’d rather just go with the flow. If Shakespeare can make up words, so can I.

F-RPGs: Freedom RPGs.

I was kind of curious if this was close to true in any countries with higher urban population densities and the first one I checked was Japan since it has a rural depopulation issue and Tokyo is a pretty populous city and… it was right on the money. Japan’s pop is ~124 million and Tokyo’s is ~ 37 million. So roughly 30% of Japan’s population lives in one city/metro area. Not that this means anything for US population distribution, but I suppose it’s not THAT crazy to think the numbers could be in that ballpark if you weren’t really thinking about it too hard.

Agreed on it being a bad replacement for controller games. I got one around the time one of the FROMSOFT games came out (I think it was Sekiro?) and I tried using for that and it was just not usable for something like that. I haven’t really tried it for anything else since then because I don’t really play games away from my PC, so I don’t have a need for a worse but acceptable way to play M+KB games.

The insane thing about it is it’s not like this is an unprecedented kind of racism. Tying your enemies to foreign nations is a great way to separate them from everyone else and take away their rights. The Nazis ranted about “Jewish Bolsheviks” to tie Jews to the Soviets. Catholics in America were thought to be agents of the church, answerable to Rome before the country, hence why JFK was such a notable president. There were the Japanese internment camps during WWII. Obviously for the past couple decades we’ve had right wingers try to tie Muslims/Arabs to terrorists or Iran or something.

Nothing is new if you pay attention to history, which is why it’s so depressing when we just keep seeing the same shit happen over and over again. This time it’s just so much dumber than normal because people who are supposed to be from our group are doing it while claiming that their support of a current genocide is because of them supposedly remembering the history of the last genocide against them. It’s so unbelievably cynical while somehow also being so dumb and shortsighted that I can’t understand how they don’t see that.

I think assuming any issue that affects capitalists is unpopular because it doesn’t win US elections is just ignorant of basically every part of our electoral system, government, media ecosystem, etc. People don’t have that much input and to the extent that they do, they get constantly mislead by the people who have both the means and motive to push their message against popular will or interest.

We have to reckon with THAT problem instead of just incorrectly despairing that people don’t care. That doesn’t get us anywhere.

There is literally only one season of the year where I get to be comfortable: Fall. Winter is too cold. Summer is too hot. I have allergies in the Spring. Fall is just right.

I’m so glad this show is back. It just makes me so happy to watch.

Also Japanese question: What was the word confusion that made craft store guy misunderstand what Gojo meant? It wasn’t clear from the subtitles.

I guess it was like this before, but it’s only something I really thought about now: It’s nice that the fake anime looked lower fidelity than the real one. I have a running joke with friends whenever we see an anime in an anime and ask whether the anime is photorealistic in their world. But here the thing one level down from their reality looks less real than their normal animation, so it kinda works out. All I’m saying is I want to see an anime where their world’s anime is in 1D just for the gag. The audience never actually gets to see it properly and the characters talk about it like it’s completely normal to them.

Having seen way too many rom coms… I give it a zero parcento chance of that going anywhere other than just getting interrupted or awkwardly shrugged off.

All I’ll say is:

• try to remember how you got the frisbee
• you’re not going to be able to do this without some action.

It’s always kind of hard to nail down trendy slang terms, but from what I’ve gathered, and the interpretation I think is useful, is less to do with AI, quality, or effort (although those are certainly common elements of slop) and more to do with what the thing’s role is. What was it made for? What is expected of the audience? Regular art or non-fiction stuff is meant to communicate something to its audience. An emotion, an idea, etc. it requires the audience to engage with it if only in a fairly limited way.

Slop, by contrast, is a product meant to take advantage of the increasingly marketized internet. It’s there merely to capture some small share of the attention economy on a mass scale. It’s not trying to communicate anything to the audience, what it specifically is doesn’t matter, it’s just, to play into the metaphor, feed to fill the trough so people stick around and keep paying, generating data, or looking at ads. All that matters is that it takes up space. It requires nothing of it’s audience, in fact it’s probably advantageous that they don’t spend too much time looking at it, lest they notice how vacuous it is.

Under this definition, we can better sort things out. Someone making art because they want to share an idea or feelings but they use AI because they don’t have the skill to make it themselves? Not slop. Someone making propaganda or misinformation? Not good, but also not slop. It has a purpose which couldn’t be achieved if someone scrolled by it after a second.

Meanwhile, this definition can identify slop, or at least slop-like elements, in other pieces of media you may not have considered. Streaming services have been making movies and TV differently based around the assumption that the audience isn’t actually going to be paying that much attention, so either the content needs to be really attention grabbing, or it needs to be so unremarkable that you get as much out of it while looking at your phone as you would actually giving it your full attention. They make all of this because it’s a cheap way to make it look like their service has a lot to watch so that people keep subscribing. They don’t even necessarily need people to watch it for it to achieve its goal. Just having it existing in the service gives the appearance of value they’re going for.

I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.

That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.

Ok this one got me laughing. Congrats.

Most of them don’t seem to give a shit about Jewish people, they just have ulterior motives for supporting Israel. Arm sales, geopolitical strategy, hating Muslims, lebenstraum, and then there’s the crazy Christians who support it because of the rapture stuff. Then there are the Jewish people who delusionally believe that somehow having a state which is solely dependent on the US empire’s support is somehow going to protect them from another holocaust and think that priority overrides everything else. I can’t think of ANYONE I know who can genuinely square support for Israel with any kind of Jewish religious values. Because they can’t. Because that would be insane.

When an actual Jewish person comes out against Israel, they just call them a self hating Jew. Yup. Nothing antisemitic about that. They must just really want to protect Jewish people from… checks notes… ourselves.

Nice ending to the season. I figured the kids were coming back to life. I don’t know if that was meant to be a twist with just how telegraphed it was over the last 2 episodes. I was both surprised and not surprised by Shi Sui being alive. I thought she didn’t seem like she was planning to die and had some kind of plan, but then she got shot… a lot. I don’t know how she survived that. Did she have ye olde bullet proof vest and blood squibs?

Jinshi still can’t take a hint. That whole relationship feels like one of those things that would be creepy if they weren’t playing it off as cutesy/comedic.

I’m looking forward to S3. From the teaser trailer I’m hopeful that we’re going to get some kind of status quo shift/reset so we can get back to the more Mao Mao focused stories. But we’ll see.

Yeah as much as I love the show, the political intrigue has mostly just confused/bored me. I just want more bits with Mao Mao being Mao Mao. I don’t know the source material, but the S3 teaser makes me think we’re going to get away from all of that since it says they’re going to a distant land. Seems like a reset.