I would add Pinta as another drop-in replacement for MS Paint

Lexmark seems like such a niche thing to put here but I know about it because it’s based in my hometown. Also it deserves to be placed next to the soyboy.

The guy who leads this group is extremely vocal (almost weirdly so) about white privilege and systemic racism. He is also white. It’s true that many AI models have white-bias. The reasons for this are multi-faceted. Our datasets are grossly imbalanced against racial minorities. I also think I understand that for some darker-skinned races, it is more difficult for the model to extract relevant features from the shitty Flickr photos they scrape for these models.

That said, injecting words into the users prompt to force the model to generate minorities more often is an extremely naive approach. Kind of like if Google added “reddit” to all searches just because it worked for some specific test cases, but ignoring that you now no longer get any site except reddit. Probably the solution here looks like paying a lot of money for high quality datasets as well as investing in user education and more AI explainability of these tools.

Right. And they dismiss these really valid concerns as right wing propaganda or both-sides-isms. Polls right now show Trump polling marginally better than Biden. Shouldn’t this be sounding the alarms for more of us? Biden should be stomping Trump in polls but instead they’re neck and neck. And this is the guy that they’re determined to push.

I don’t even agree that Biden is “the best we got” but somehow everyone is convinced of that. I have a sad theory that DNC strategists see Biden as the most viable candidate because he’s a white male from a rust belt town. This profile lines up with many conservative voters that they think they need to win elections. This explains why they wouldn’t run someone “woke” like Whitmer or Newsome or maybe Michelle Obama. In other words, there aren’t any good ole boys left in the democratic party, or at least any popular enough to actually win (e.g., Joe Manchin).

From the perspective of an ordinary citizen though, Biden didn’t win because of conservative voters. He won because of a large coalition of different kinds of people - moderates, women, minority races, and leftists. Biden has upset that coalition by not pushing harder for codified reproductive rights, his stance on Gaza, and a weak relationship with labor. I worry that while moderates will turn out, that has never been enough to win.

I’m sorry you’re being downvoted for this comment. What you’re saying is absolutely true, the moderates just don’t want to hear it.

It’s the candidate’s job to assuage voter’s fears and convince people to vote for them. If Biden is too frail to do interviews, how is he going to do an election campaign? How is he even able to do this job? We have other people, why does it have to be Biden?

I liked how Jon Stewart put it - when the barbarians (Trump) are at the walls, you want Conan up there leading the charge, not a feeble old man who’s afraid to appear in front of the public.

Bro he’s saying that you’re supposed to realize how fucked up it is (and ideally be revolted) that corporations - who don’t give a shit about you or anyone else - team up to prevent bright young adults from having a career and affording to live as payback for exposing their inhumanity/making them look foolish.

Instead you’re over here like “yeah I lick corporate boot and will gladly accept being stepped on if I get to keep my career.” This girl is a hero for standing up to the likes of cloudflare and we should all aspire to have her courage.

Not a swifty but if she wasn’t a billionaire, I don’t think she would have less “political power.” She is just that popular. I think the distinction between swift and your run-of-the-mill oligarch is that they specifically use their money and power to expand their political power (e.g., buying political party members, burying any dissenters). Could she do that? Probably, and that in and of itself is problematic. I think that this is maybe what you were saying though.

I would dispute your claim about there being a “circular firing squad.” The firing definitely comes from a very specific direction. Politicians like Joe Biden run on progressive ideas (cancelling student loans, legalizing marijuana, healthcare reform, etc) and then all but drop those promises once they get into office. This is the real “backstabbing” in my opinion. These democratic politicians take massive donations from corporations, Israel, billionaires, etc. Who is going to get the most representation from these politicians? The voters or the donors? Four years later, liberals wonder why progressives aren’t willing to jump in and vote for their guy again.

It’s like a cycle. We get a blue wave thanks to young, minority, and progressive voter turnout, then those same voters become completely disillusioned after four years. Why? Personally I think it’s because liberal (especially white middle class) voters subscribe to “vote blue no matter who,” and it’s been going on since well before Trump. They see the success of right wing candidates with total voter unity and think they can do the same thing with their superior numbers. However, these liberal voters get too invested with can we do this when they should be thinking about should we do this.

I personally think this mentality has given Democratic politicians a license to ignore their voters, because they essentially have a monopoly on votes from anyone who is not a crazy fascist. This in turn leads to the same repeated stalled progress and disillusionment. As long as Dems don’t piss off their base too much, they can maintain this position forever while also providing a ton of value to their donors.

All of this has led me to believe that ranked choice voting may be the best thing we could do to turn our country around, because it would give third party candidates an actual shot and force Democrats (and maybe Republicans) to actually compete for votes because voters would feel more freedom to vote their conscience without pissing their vote away. If there are any initiatives in your state to put ranked choice on the ballot, please get involved.

I see this argument a lot, and I am absolutely a hardliner on genocide. That said, I am also aware that a second Trump presidency will be the end of our nation as we know it. It used to be so simple when voting for candidates - it was “evil” vs “more of the same”, but now it’s “evil” vs “genocide as a foreign policy.”

What is the exit strategy for us as a nation? How many times can we stave off a Republican presidency? Even voting blue we are slipping right - how many times can we vote for the Democrats until we’ve made so many concessions that the blue guy is just exactly equivalent to the current red guy?

I’m really trying to argue in good faith. If someone has a decent answer to this, I’d love to hear their side. Otherwise it seems to me like we are headed for some kind of civil war in this country.

This comment is so shitty and condescending and completely devoid of intelligence. It reads the same as “Please do not invoke my white privilege as an excuse to let Trump take away my white privilege.” Liberals love to act like they care about issues but comments like these come off so self-centered. I don’t live in some fantasy world where a second Trump presidency is better than a second Biden presidency, but liberals are so adamant that it has to be Biden. Why aren’t liberals outraged that the DNC is forcing an unpopular candidate down our throats again? The most common response I see is “it’s complicated” but it’s not fucking complicated in the slightest, liberals just want to be comfortable and they’ll gladly roll over and take it from anyone who promises them to at least use lube. Yes I’m talking about you.

I’ve been having the same thoughts. I think liberals, especially white liberals, are scared of a Trump presidency because, for once, the fallout might come down on them. They don’t have to be scared of a Biden presidency, because their lives can continue on as they have been. So then they attack you for saying that the US is already a fascist state, even though it already is for anyone who isn’t white and straight.

To add to this, genocide (as defined by the UN) does not just include directly killing a particular group:

Definition Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group; 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

So in addition to killing 20k+ Gaza civilians, Israel’s response has displaced countless others with their intense and indiscriminate bombing (see points #2, #3, possibly #4). NYT and other sources claim that up to 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced, which NYT claims is 80% of their population. This is in addition to the conditions Gaza was already being subjected to, such as being denied water and electricity (#3) by Israel.

The evidence overwhelmingly shows that this is genocide. “Figurative” is such a sleazy doublespeak way of excusing the behavior here.

Edit: sorry my link should work now

It’s true. Even in the comments on this post there’s someone adamantly claiming (without evidence) that masks don’t work, despite being presented with a full literature review of studies showing that they do work.

It shouldn’t even take a full scientific study to convince someone that covering their nose and mouth helps to prevent the spread of airborne illness. Their egos are so fragile that any critical introspective examination of their viewpoints would destroy their entire identity. What even are they without their vitriol and hatred for the truth?

Funny that you don’t even try to deny that Trump may have been involved in inciting/leading an insurrection. It’s only that he hasn’t been found guilty of it by the courts. How will the goalposts shift if he is found guilty?

Thanks for the catch, I edited the comment.

A lot of people in the comments are saying how this won’t hold up or how unconstitutional it is but 35 fucking states have already passed anti-bds (boycotts, divestment*, and sanctions) laws that do the same thing as this bill but Israel. If the politicians are sufficiently bribed enough, they won’t care what the laws actually are.

I caught her clawing the couch this morning. We just purchased a new lovesac with velvet covers, which are pretty resilient to this kind of abuse, because she is so inclined to do this. I think what happened was that she chased her little toy over to that corner and then had pent up aggression or energy that she decided to take out on that juicy couch corner. She has a scratch post on the other side of the couch because she is only very rarely on that side.

I tried picking her up and moving her to this scratch post (she hates being picked up) and putting her paws on the scratch post, but she gave me her most pitiful meow and decided she was done clawing lol. I’ve caught her clawing the couch on the other side right next to this scratch post, so maybe this scratch post isn’t as good as the couch for some reason. We know she likes vertical scratch posts and sisal, and she’ll definitely use that one, so beyond that I’m not sure what’s wrong with it.

Thanks. I’ll try this in the future. She has scratch paraphernalia of various sorts that I’ve seen her use and enjoy but maybe the reinforcement part is what’s missing.

Is the secret just that you socialized them as kittens? We have an older cat that we adopted who is generally very well behaved but loves to sink her claws into whatever she can, so we find little puncture holes in our leather stuff regularly. It is just cheap stuff, so no big loss, but I would love to feel comfortable splurging on something other than the 1-3 materials that are somewhat claw-safe. We try to clip her claws but she does not behave for that at all.

Obama’s presidency was the first presidency with a truly contrarian congress. Dems should have done more when they controlled both houses, because once they lost the senate, Republicans blocked Obama’s agenda in every conceivable way, and that has been their modus operandi ever since.

Just for reference, Obamacare was supposed to be fairly close to single-payer insurance, with both public and private options (which would force private insurance to compete with the government). What we got in the end was a neutered, emaciated shell of what the original bill was supposed to be, but at least insurance companies couldn’t deny you based on preexisting conditions anymore. This was considered a huge win at the time. It’s laughable though, because this was when everyone was pointing at Canada and claiming they had death panels because universal healthcare couldn’t handle all the patients (complete bullshit/propaganda), as if our own insurance companies weren’t doing exactly this.