I can still view these, but it’s much much harder for me.

I don’t know why parallel isn’t the default.

A sizable minority of Palestinians are Christians, a sizable minority of Israeli settlers are atheists, a sizable plurality of Zionists around the world are Evangelicals. This isn’t a cut-and-dry sectarian conflict.

Most of the time it’s not the most creative people trying to generate these. I think everything I’ve ever seen from the Twitter generator can be categorically ruled as textbook slop.

Most of the interesting generations are made by people who are enthusiastic about the technology, almost always running local generators, trying to nudge the model into generating images that people are not likely to make themselves. It can be a fun thing to experiment with, especially once you understand a bit more about the internal iterative process of these generators.

As a fun toy, as the ultimate content aware fill algorithm, it’s one thing. As a social phenomenon though, these generators have poisoned the internet and our relationship with visual media as a whole. I’ll watch as my scribbles are iterated into something visually interesting and then minutes later see the IDF on the news posting about terrorizing my country in a sterile cutesy cartoon style - my temporary jpegs are nothing like the latter.

It’s not a witticism. Users of a lot of modern mass media platforms (TikTok is the one that comes to mind) need to use increasingly euphemistic language to speak about anything. Unalive is a specific, famous one, you must have seen it before, even in deeply serious situations. Imagine watching someone sobbing while retelling a deeply personal experience only to say “I wanted to unalive myself 🥺” straight-faced between tears. That’s heartbreaking, disgusting stuff.

Someone sent me a cool woodworking video from TikTok a few months ago, and the carpenter man kept talking about dogs. I bought a dog of dogs here, I cut off a dog, make sure to check how many dogs your wood is. What the fuck? Checking the comments, they were all like “LMAO dog 💀💀💀💀💀💀” with zero explanation.

What are dogs? Dogs means feet now apparently. Fuck me if I know. If you say “feet” on TikTok, you get flagged as a fetish channel, so people say “dogs”. Why dogs? I don’t care. If you’re going to use stupid imperial measurements at least call them by a name I recognize.

“Corn” for porn is kind of funny because corn is a very unsexy word (and concept).

There is a lot of euphemistic algorithm evasion on TikTok, and this is not a phenomenon I’d want to see become endemic on the Fediverse. It’s also a thing on Instagram. And now it’s diffusing to unrelated places.

I’m usually not this petty on here but it really pisses me off. This is also becoming a problem on Tumblr apparently, which I intentionally mentioned up there. It is a platform with a rigorous tagging system, which lets users block what they don’t want to see, making it possible to write properly even, about rough stuff, without unnecessary self-censorship. Apparently new, younger users, coming from places like TikTok, will just write “CW:🍇🍇” in their post instead of using the word rape, for example. So people who would previously be safe, by filtering out “rape”, are now finding shit they don’t want to see in their feeds. People should have a place where they can write about their experiences, no matter how harrowing, but this cheapens it and makes it harder to properly organize.

The internet is for communication. Its usefulness as a means of effective communication is under attack from all sides. Let’s not just let that happen in our spaces, yeah

un-alives herself

For fuck’s sake. This is not baby’s first Miiworld, this is not club penguin. Say kills. Say commits suicide. Say hangs/gets strangled/finds a gun under her bed and blows her brains out, spraying chunks of bone blood and flesh on the concrete. Say murder when you see murder, say genocide when you see genocide. Words have meaning.

You can use the correct words on the Fediverse. If anyone doesn’t want to see the word “suicide” they can filter it out. Tumblr got this right twenty years ago and modern social media has been beating newspeak out of previously fully communicative human beings. I swear to fuck I would rather have every single comment on Lemmy say skibidi gyatt ohio L aura about any serious topic than to see “unalived” one more fucking time. This is embarrassing.

……. Uh anyway yeah unskippable cutscene am I right haha crazy

(I actually believe both she and Jeffy have a probable reason to kill themselves: they may be otherwise facing a fate worse than death…)

At the risk of coming off as too gatekeep-y, Arabic is structurally so different from English and French (the other two languages I know). It has a reputation for being difficult for a reason.

Despite it being my native language I’ll occasionally still think of an idea phrased primarily in English, and contorting it into Arabic is very clunky (despite Arabic being much more loosey goosey with word order, in general, you can figure out how to tie up an idea as you go - this applies more to MSA, dialects usually sway more towards a small number of forms).

While strictly more rigid, you might be better off at least grasping the basics of MSA first before jumping into a specific dialect. It is antithetical to how I think about languages (go learn the specific prescriptive form of Arabic instead of the most commonly spoken popularly developed one) but it might be easier to learn that way.

(I’m thinking of it like learning piano (or MIDI?) as a baseline for music and more instruments vs learning guitar first and having an understanding of notes and scales that is very closely associated to the relational positioning of these notes on these strings.)

Or maybe it might not be easier that way. I didn’t learn Arabic as an adult with a background in western languages, fuck if I know what the pedagogically optimal way to learn Arabic is. Arabic is hard, dude. Doesn’t help that half of all Arabic media is (I say this as an Arab) embarrassing mindless drivel.

The oil industry is famously completely independent from government subsidy. Especially when it comes to setting urban development policy and planning transportation systems, these have no bearing at all oil demand and they also cost nothing.

They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.

I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.

I might be the wrong person to answer in this community since I daily drive Windows, but my Tongfang has been a dream and I’m thinking of buying a new one.

Although in OP’s case I’d probably still be looking for the cliche used Thinkpad. Unbeatable.

“But if they say an illegal sentence like “child murder is bad” then we deport them too.”

Know a few people who emigrated to Germany. They aren’t thrilled. One of my friends was basically snubbed by all of his coworkers for months until one of them told him on the side that people suspect they’d get in trouble if it turns out he’s a “Syrian Islamic Extremist” down the line. My guy isn’t Syrian or Muslim. His name is Joe. Not even Youssef. Joe. جو. Fucks sake

“Doctors in Racism” is the way he described the people of Germany. Which is incredible because we’re from Lebanon and “Doctors in Racism” should be our rightful title. Geopolitical events are happening as we speak and people are talking about US stuff and changes in the US since it is so influential on what happens here, and I’ve heard someone say something about “that slave Obama”. This fucking week. Come on now.

FWIW Germany looks like a nice option for me, but I can’t say I’ve been convinced that the good will fully outweigh the bad. If I’m going to be a second class citizen I might as well go to the US and get a shot at making a bit more money.