I really wish they'd rerelease this in 4K, the visuals are spectacular.

But between Biden's ego and the DNC's determination to stick with a wholly-owned establishment neoliberal hack at all costs - even if it means losing - I expected that they wouldn't take this golden opportunity.

Biden has objectively been the most progressive president since LBJ, and the most effective progressive president since FDR. And he did it with about the slimmest possible congressional margins, a situation which would have made it very easy for an actual "establishment neoliberal hack" to say "my hands are tied" and accomplish nothing of substance. Instead we got the biggest climate reform package ever, the biggest infrastructure package since the Interstate Highway system, a child tax credit that massively reduced child poverty, the most significant industrial policy in decades (CHIPS and Science), a veritable bulldog FTC chair with an aggressive anti-monopoly stance, and that's just for starters.

M O I S T U R I Z E M E

Need to call a special fact-finding hearing featuring the editors of Merriam-Webster's, Collins, and the Oxford English Dictionary. Let's pencil it in for three weeks from next Monday.

I'm all for shitting on Xitter, but this is a pretty bad article. It's written like somebody put it through Google Translate a few times, and doesn't cite any sources for any of its claims. Closest I could find was this Business Insider story on a report by Apptopia, which only says that its downloads in various app stores declined 30%, not its overall userbase.

It's something I started noticing shortly before the API stuff. Bot accounts using ChatGPT to respond to random posts and comments. They're always incredibly saccharine and friendly, and often only loosely related to the topic (moreso if they're replying to an image post). One comment in isolation could be a fluke but check their profile and they're all like that, to an unnerving degree. I imagine they get sold off to spammers once they get enough karma. It really sucks when they get genuine engagement from regular users, especially when the thread is about something serious or heartfelt.

Convenient (for them) that they start this only after destroying all the coins people earned over years of using the site. I had over 80k coins and 18 years of premium from various awarded posts (all OC) that they just threw away for nothing.

If they respected my contributions, I might be excited about this, but now I plan on contributing absolutely nothing of value ever again.

Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate -- seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It's a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that's honestly pretty fair.

Defederating Beehaw would not only weaken it as an instance, but remove its positive influence from the wider fediverse. The big platforms wield so much power and influence and money, the smaller upstarts need to connect as much as possible to stand a chance at relevance as a credible alternative. We're all better together. I really hope you reconsider.

"WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, DON'T MAKE LEMONADE. MAKE LIFE TAKE THE LEMONS BACK! GET MAD! I DON'T WANT YOUR DAMN LEMONS! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THESE?! DEMAND TO SEE LIFE'S MANAGER! MAKE LIFE RUE THE DAY IT THOUGHT IT COULD GIVE CAVE JOHNSON LEMONS! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! I'M THE MAN WHO'S GONNA BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! WITH THE LEMONS! I'M GONNA GET MY ENGINEERS TO INVENT A COMBUSTIBLE LEMON THAT BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!"

Context: https://godotengine.org/

I fear this is going to be a turning point for the party to turn fully against Ukraine. McConnell apparently argued forcefully in favor of keeping the funding intact, but got overruled by most of the caucus, including Thune (one of the top candidates to replace him). And this is the Senate Republicans we're talking about, the House caucus is even more openly antagonistic.

Keeping Democratic control of the White House and Congress next year could be key to Ukraine defeating Russia.

Oh, I totally get where you're coming from! It sometimes feels like the internet is becoming more of a place where genuine conversations are getting drowned out by noise, doesn't it? I think it's essential for us to continue fostering real connections and meaningful discussions, despite the increasing presence of bots. Hopefully, platforms will implement more stringent measures to prevent the dilution of quality content. Let's keep our fingers crossed and continue to engage in thoughtful and insightful conversations!

(I felt so dirty copypasting that...)

So, for that matter, is Reddit. I have an RSS subscription to /r/all (routed through a mirror) and a sizable fraction of posts hitting the front page are word-for-word reposts of old popular content by bots. Even the top comments are recycled. It was always a problem, but the loss of good moderators and the shutdown of projects like BotDefense due to the API fiasco has caused it to absolutely skyrocket.

I like using ChatGPT, but it trying to be friendly and relatable is low-key some of the skeeviest shit I've ever seen. Reminds me of the old Patton Oswalt bit about "clean filth". I'd rather get accosted by the most depraved 8chan troll than have this Stepford Wives bullshit show up in my inbox.

And a significant part of the remainder are repost bots recycling old popular posts and comments in order to farm karma, which will eventually be sold to OnlyFans spammers, political ops, and corporate shills.

I can't imagine how soul-destroying it must be to put so much time and effort into a big-budget game like this only for it to flop so utterly. Even notoriously bad games sell at least a few thousand copies; being ignored is even worse. I'd say "at least it's not an indie game," but then most indie developers would expect their games to have minimal uptake these days.

Sinfest. Used to be a charming and funny daily webcomic about an eclectic cast of colorful characters getting into surreal and philosophical situations. Then one day in 2011 it suddenly swerved hard into radical feminism. I'm not anti-feminist myself, but the comic became obsessed with it -- literally every strip was related to The Patriarchy in some way and it became extremely preachy and boring.

I checked out for the better part of a decade, and when I randomly revisited a couple years ago it turned out that the author had transited the TERF-to-fascist pipeline and turned into an extreme-right antivax conspiratorial fascist loon, of the "teachers are secret pedos" and "the war in Ukraine is a hoax" variety. Super sad to see.

Horrible. These fascists need to be held accountable, including the judge who authorized such a flatly unconstitutional raid.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS7AF2mgEYQ

It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It's neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.

The Rosenbergs were executed for treason

Espionage, actually.

idk, I think it's worth stopping to recognize how incredibly fucking weird it is how there's this whole segment of the population who spend an inordinate amount of their time and attention just absolutely obsessing over their hatred of trans people. Rowling is the public face of it but she's hardly alone.

I imagine it's because of the generative AI stuff. If they're using their servers to generate, they're going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it's just responding to user prompts.

Assuming you mean the actual Soviet Union, Chernobyl was incredibly well-done.

She's also diabetic, a former chain-smoker, and has to travel with a medic.

Read the Conservapedia pages on Russia, Putin, and NATO sometime. The far-right is firmly pro-Putin now, and see his Russian autocracy as a model for the US to follow under Trump.

ABC cites an odd claim:

Detectives allege that Darien used his Large Language Models, such as OpenAI and Bing chat, to create the recording. The charging document claimed that Darien has a paid OpenAI account, which gives users more features than the free version.

You can't make audio using OpenAI or Bing, just text and images. I really hope they didn't arrest the wrong person based on a hunch and office politics.

You can do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself.

Same as it ever was.

I get people not taking the IDF at face value, but Hamas ain't exactly trustworthy, either.

That was before the GOP became the party of sociopathy. I'm sure loving dogs will be the next symptom of the Woke Mind Virus.

It's not real-time, but the Institute for the Study of War puts out very well-regarded daily updates on their site. They're very detailed and talk about both military and political developments, with bolded summary points at the top if you don't have time to read the whole thing. You can also subscribe to their RSS feed to stay up to date, which includes similar updates for Iran, Taiwan, and jihadist movements.

The irony is that the situation is pretty much the opposite of this -- the US vetoed a symbolic, non-binding resolution for essentially messaging reasons (it didn't explicitly acknowledge Israel's right to self-defence), but when it comes to concrete action it's providing millions in humanitarian relief, and Biden is pressuring Netanyahu privately and publicly to pull back from a full invasion and allow a relief corridor.

Euler's identity, which elegantly unites some of the most fundamental constants in a single equation:

e^(iπ)+1=0

Euler's identity is often cited as an example of deep mathematical beauty. Three of the basic arithmetic operations occur exactly once each: addition, multiplication, and exponentiation. The identity also links five fundamental mathematical constants:

• The number 0, the additive identity.
• The number 1, the multiplicative identity.
• The number π (π = 3.1415...), the fundamental circle constant.
• The number e (e = 2.718...), also known as Euler's number, which occurs widely in mathematical analysis.
• The number i, the imaginary unit of the complex numbers.

Furthermore, the equation is given in the form of an expression set equal to zero, which is common practice in several areas of mathematics.

Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin has said, "like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence". And Paul Nahin, a professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, who has written a book dedicated to Euler's formula and its applications in Fourier analysis, describes Euler's identity as being "of exquisite beauty".

Mathematics writer Constance Reid has opined that Euler's identity is "the most famous formula in all mathematics". And Benjamin Peirce, a 19th-century American philosopher, mathematician, and professor at Harvard University, after proving Euler's identity during a lecture, stated that the identity "is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth".

When the sun is very low (nearly touching or even partly below the horizon), it's typically shining through such a large amount of atmosphere that the sunlight is significantly weakened by the time it reaches your eyes. This isn't always true though, for ex if the air is unusually dry, clear, or thin (such as near the poles). Good rule of thumb is that if it looks red rather than yellow or white, it's likely safe to look at for at least a few seconds.