I live in in the southern region of brazil. The problem of homelessness here is by no means solved but at least some State and City governments are genuinely trying, through government companies (Cohab, roughly “habitation company”).

Basically: if you have no house, and your monthly income is low enough, here you can subscribe to Cohab so it eventually “sells” you a house. You do pay for it but it’s a rather low amount*. No sane mid class would ever consider those houses - but if you’re homeless, it’s still leagues above living in an irregular shitshack near the river, made of cardboard, metal sheets and random planks.

Additionally, water and electricity are really cheap if you’re poor enough, and your household consumption is below a certain threshold.

The federation also has a similar project (Minha Casa, Minha Vida my house, my life), but… frankly I can’t trust the federation to not divert tax money into someone’s pockets.

* I think R$150~300/month ≃ €25~50/month is typical. For reference, minimum wage in my State is R$1.984,16 ≃ €300 per month.

Now, here’s the catch: the local governments are doing this shit with a tiny fraction of the income the city, state and federal governments in USA have. Why the hell are they not doing something similar? Because of all that ideological meritocracy babble?

They made Atou absolutely adorable! Seeing her embarrassed at the start, then pouting after the charity…

Also, great job highlighting the contrast between how Atou sees Takuto vs. how the dark elves see him. Not just in look (he looks like a shadow, that was already in the manga and novel), but also in “mood”, he’s supposed to be an Eldritch abomination from their PoV and the anime did a great job at it.

The opening was also cool IMO.

…perhaps I’m a bit too excited because it’s one of those series I anticipated quite a bit, but so far it’s a decent start IMO.

[Warning: I’m mostly rambling.]

As usual you need to be careful with metaphors: they break once pulled hard enough.

The metaphor implies the security layers are independent, and always addictive. Often they aren’t - they interact with each other, and often the presence of one layer makes the other worse. It’s like double bagging condoms - they rub against each other, so they make you less protected than if you wore a single condom.

The “holes” are often dynamic, and they might change place over time. Sometimes the vulnerability crossed a hole of the first slice, hit the second slice and stayed there, until the second slice’s hole aligns with it. Then the vulnerability crosses into the third slice, so goes on. If you’re dealing with human beings, that’s basically any system.

“NEEDS MORE LAYERS!” is not always the solution. Sometimes you’re better off - in cost and security - if you replaced a few layers with a better one. Try mozzarella instead of Emmenthaler.

This is yet another case where people don’t notice the root of the problem, because one of the branches is so fucking large it takes the whole scene.

Spot the common element between the text and the following:

• When Internet Explorer still existed, Microsoft gave you no way to remove it.
• Later on (Edge times), Microsoft went out of its way to ignore your browser preferences and shove Edge down your throat.
• Google: Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect?
• “Because we’re not designing a desktop for people who like to choose their own terminal emulators.” - Bastien Nocera, GNOME dev
• Plenty pieces of software offer you a choice between “yes” and “maybe later”, but rather curiously avoid the word “no”
• “Subscribe to our newsletter!” (i.e. spam). The only negative answer is worded like “I’m braindead trash thus I don’t want to subscribe”.

It’s always about actively disempowering users. Even if technology was expected to do the opposite.

Why this matters: because even if the image + text generators went away, or got heavily regulated, or whatever, the problem still persists. And it’ll still pop up elsewhere.

Solve this disgusting “Stop treating those THINGS as if they were human beings! They’re users, not humans! Those things exist to be herded!” mindset and you’ll solve the problem.

If I had to guess, most people in RVs would rather live in a house. It’s just houses are not affordable in USA; I’ve seen posters from there talking about this in Lemmy all the bloody time.

Based on that I don’t think prohibition is the right way to go. Instead make sure people can afford houses, and the problem goes away. Additionally the ones living in an RV by choice would be even freer to keep with their lifestyle - those are likely not an issue when it comes to zoning laws, as the main reason you’d want to live in a wheeled home is to travel.

It’s basically my experience with translation, too: asking a LLM is a decent way to look for potential ways to translate a specific problematic word, so you can look them up in a dic and see which one is the best. It’s also a decent way to generate simple conjugation/declension tables. But once you tell it to translate any chunk of meaningful text, there’s a high chance it’ll shit itself, and output something semantically, pragmatically, and stylistically bad.

I’m not. You can’t lose trust on something if you never trusted it to begin with.

I. Talent churn reveals short AGI timelines are wish, not belief

Trying to build AGI out of LLMs and similar is like trying to build a house, by randomly throwing bricks. No cement, no foundation, just the bricks. You might want to get some interesting formation of bricks, sure. But you won’t get a house.

And yes, of course they’re bullshitting with all this “AGI IS COMING!”. Odds are the people in charge of those companies know the above. But lying for your own benefit, when you know the truth, is called “marketing”.

II. The focus on addictive products shows their moral compass is off

“They”, who? Chatbots are amoral, period. Babbling about their moral alignment is like saying your hammer or chainsaw is morally bad or good. It’s a tool dammit, treat it as such.

And when it comes to the businesses, their moral alignment is a simple “money good, anything between money and us is bad”.

III. The economic engine keeping the industry alive is unsustainable

Pretty much.

Do I worry that the AI industry is a quasi-monopoly? No, I don’t understand what that means.

A quasi-monopoly, in a nutshell, is when a single entity or group of entities have an unreasonably large control over a certain industry/market, even if not being an “ackshyual” monopoly yet.

A funny trait of the fake free-market capitalist that O’Reilly warns us about is that their values are always very elevated and pure, but only hold until the next funding round.

That’s capitalism. “I luuuv freerum!” until it gets in the way of the money.

IV. They don’t know how to solve the hard problems of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) still hallucinate. Over time, instead of treating this problem as the pain point it is, the industry has shifted to “in a way, hallucinations are a feature, you know?”

Or rather, they shifted the bullshit. They already knew it was an insolvable problem…

…because hallucinations are simply part of the LLM doing what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t understand what it’s outputting; it doesn’t know if glue is a valid thing to add to a pizza, or if humans should eat rocks. It’s simply generating text based on the corpus fed into it, plus some weighting.

V. Their public messaging is chaotic and borders on manipulative

O rly.

Stopped reading here. It’s stating the obvious, and still missing the point.

And people who don’t have bread to eat should eat cake instead. *sigh*

After Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, now it’s Lyon.

I expect “[insert European government] ditches Microsoft” to become more and more common news, until it becomes non-noteworthy.

Yes. All my yes.

If my analysis is correct, the people in the Ukrainian government do know that Putin and Trump are on the same team. And they’re trying to break it, by exploiting the fact Trump has a huge ego and a small brain. That’s why Podolyak is framing the attacks as humiliating Trump.

After Zelenskyy was humiliated in the White House no less, he must know these people are Demons right?

When fighting a devil, sometimes you need to make a deal with another.

I’m low-key excited. It has been a long time since the anime series, it was a blast, and based on this trailer it seems the movie keeps rather well the “everything is so fucked up might as well laugh” feel.

I’m going to reply to myself because there’s a huge discussion in the comment chain, and I’d rather speak freely than specifically address what they’re saying. And because this is 90% rant.

A country is not the people it rules over. A country is not a human being. A country is an abstract structure of power. A country is an “it”.

No country should be seen as having a “right of self defence” or crap like that; it’s the same as saying “I hate people so much I’d put them on the same level as an abstract structure.” It’s genuinely disgusting.

And someone might say “well ackshyually the Israelis have a right of self defence”. Sure; unlike the state of Israel, the Israelis are human beings, they do have the right. However (and this is important), the ones joining the war against Hamas and the Palestinians are not just “defending themselves”; they’re putting themselves at risk to defend that abstract structure.

And people keep oversimplifying this shit as if it was “Israel was attacked, so it’s self-defending”. More accurately, what’s happening is that the state of Israel was attacked by Hamas, and using the attack as excuse to kill the Palestinians.

It gets worse. The continued existence of that “it” is causing people to be killed, since it’s an ethnostate on the same level as Apartheid South Africa. By assigning “it” a human right of self-defence, you’re giving the “it” an implicit thumbs up to kill actual human beings. Now you aren’t even putting human beings on the same level as an “it”, you’re putting them below the “it”.

inb4 something that sounds pretty much like “B-but right of self defence! Apartheid South Africa is defending itself, from terrorists like Rolihlahla! Are you siding with the terrorists?”.

(I do plan to read replies but I’m not arsing myself to reply to them.)

Time to cancel my Crunchyroll subscription. Oh wait I don’t have one, I simply torrent my series.

Seriously now. The anime fansubbing scene is one that makes me genuinely happy. It shows me there are plenty amateurs out there that are as good or better than plenty professionals like me.

I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.

Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don’t get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It’s like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don’t want to do it regularly!

If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

That “business” is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.

Check how the whistleblower phrased it: “advertising posts”. If that’s accurate they aren’t buying reserved ad space in 4chan, they’re simply paying people to post this shit there, as if it was content.

Clothoff is seemingly hoping to entice more young boys worldwide to use its apps for such purposes. The whistleblower told Der Spiegel that most of Clothoff’s marketing budget goes toward “advertising posts in special Telegram channels, in sex subs on Reddit, and on 4chan.”

advertising posts on 4chan

Is Clothoff asking to be raided? Because that’s what happens when you spam 4chan. Ask Anontalk aka AnT.

if [[ instance == "lemmy.world" ]] && [[ topic == "Palestine" ]]; then echo "PTB"; fi

Serious now, PTB.

Since the existence of the state of Israel causes violence in the Levant, anyone defending the “survival” of that ethnostate is promoting violence. And yet you don’t see LW mods removing comments defending it - why?

All science is junk science when you care more about enforcing your own views than about accurately describing how things are.

The problem with landfills is widespread, not just in USA. And the solution is simple in theory, hard in practice: we shouldn’t be using landfills at all. It’s hard in practice because it means:

1. Reducing the average amount of waste per individual. Yeah. In an economic system that encourages mindless waste.
2. Sorting the waste so it can be processed (recycled, composted, etc.). Waste is messy, so you need to rely on human labour (that’s expensive). And people throw dangerous junk away, things the workers won’t know how to deal with, things that are so oddly specific you won’t be able to pile a large enough amount of it to process it further (and yet since there are multiple types, they’re together a big problem). Ah, if you’re composting it, give up using the compost to fertilise food crops - odds are it’ll be contaminated as fuck.
3. Creating and maintaining facilities that process that waste. Except people nowadays really, really, really love plastic; and plastic is not just “it’s plastic lol process it together”, each type must be processed separately (this compounds with #2).
4. Deciding the less shitty way to handle what you won’t process. Burning is often a solution, and often a problem on itself; let’s not forget that decomposition is never complete unless you reach high temperatures (here’s some additional cost!), and if it’s incomplete you’re releasing harmful substances in the atmosphere.

So… yeah, we got a bunch of ticking bombs, all around the world. Yay, capitalism. /s