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not to be alarmist but I fear the UK government is critically underprepared for the spread of H5N1, they've taken no action at all to address our population's unique cultural susceptibility
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How To Fall for Reactionary Conservative Propaganda In A Marx-Honoring Way
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I love survivors guilt so much, what do you mean you’ll betray everything you’ve lost if you make your life into something other than a monument to suffering
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Photo










Iranian photographer Hossein Fatemi, offers a glimpse of an entirely different side to Iran than the image usually broadcasted by domestic and foreign media. In his photo series An Iranian Journey, many of the photographs reveal an Iran that most people never see, presenting an eye-opening look at the amazing diversity and contrasts that exist in the country.
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no offense but you guys need to learn the difference between someone implying their experience is universal and a post simply just not being about you
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I thought you might like these moss-filled pawprints in concrete which I saw earlier. :-)


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Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.
But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:
Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology
Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how
Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"
Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy
Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can
Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon
It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).
It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.
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I went to this Northwest Passage museum once where they had the white explorers' journals on one side of the exhibit and the native people's accounts on the other side of the exhibit and the explorer journals were like "our canoe had almost sunk when we encountered some kindly Indians" and the native histories were like "we watched a bunch of strangers come down the river in the shittiest canoe you'd ever seen. Also, they had no rain gear"
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The threat was loud and clear: Report your so-called “DEI” employees or else. What exactly “DEIA or similar ideologies” means is up in the air, but the message was out there. And so was the email address of the DEIA snitching hotline. Fake emails quickly started to roll in. ‘I don’t care, fuck these McCarthyite bastards,” one BlueSky user said, with an screenshot attached of an email to the hotline where he ironically reported Donald Trump and JD Vance for being “put in their positions solely because of their race and/or gender despite the fact that they are wholly unqualified for their jobs and, in some cases, have criminal records.” “Anyone have a script to fire off a billion e-mails an hour??” another user asked in the replies. “Anyone can email anything of any size even if it crashes the site,” one X user noted. The scope and effectiveness of this latest phase of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade remains to be seen.
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"This again?" the dragon said. "It's been just a few centuries since the last time.'
"Please," the knight said.
"I asked you to make sure you had a way of getting rid of bad kings yourself, before you made any new ones."
"We didn't understand we made a king."
"You are such fools. Very well."
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Ah these children who always create problems for poor mothers....
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just met a three month old pomeranian named horchata. her paw was the size of my fingertip. she looked like half a dandelion fluff
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