Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.

Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don’t need to give a shit about the lead developer’s politics, because he’s not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

I feel you. It’s not practical to buy a phone that doesn’t have some aspects that I hate (like a notch or punch hole, glass back, or an absurd overabundance of cameras).

Same deal with small phones. There hasn’t been a viable option in close to a decade. So yeah, I’ve bought some stupidly large phones. What’s the alternative? A “compact” phone that’s still too big to comfortably use one-handed? Not much of a choice.

Reminds me of the tiny or non-existent pockets that are so common in women’s clothing. Yes, there are some options, but they are few and far between, and it’s not like pocket size is the one and only priority.

I have no knowledge of Brazilian Butt Lifts specifically, but here is some related information about how fat works in general, which I hope is a good starting point:

Fat cells don’t die easily. They just shrink. See: https://news.yale.edu/2015/03/02/study-new-fat-cells-are-created-quickly-dieting-cant-eliminate-them

When performing skin grafts, fat cells retain the characteristics of the original skin location. For example, here is a paper that shows a soldier who had a skin graft from his stomach to his hand, and later developed a kind of “beer gut” on his hand. Content warning: graphic images of open surgery in related articles section if you scroll down. If you are even a little squeamish, do not scroll down. https://journals.lww.com/dermatologicsurgery/citation/2006/03000/does_transferred_fat_retain_properties_of_its_site.12.aspx

Or metamorphosis.

I’ve also heard “the War of Northern Aggression”. No idea how common either is. I assume it’s just a handful of crazies playing pretend.

Totally agree, there’s a big hole in the current crop of applications. I think there’s not enough focus on the application side; they want to do everything within the model itself, but LLMs are not the most efficient way to store and retrieve large amounts of information.

They’re great at taking a small to medium amount of information and formatting it in sensible ways. But that information should ideally come from an external, reliable source.

I’d reframe this as: “Why AI is currently a shitshow”. I am optimistic about the future though. Open models you can run locally are getting better and better. Hardware is getting better and better. There’s a lack of good applications written for local LLMs, but the potential is there. They’re coming. You don’t have to eat whatever Microsoft puts in front of you. The future does not belong to Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.

They are called sillcock keys. They come in a few different sizes so you’ll often see 4-way tools like this one: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-4-Way-Sillcock-Key-16PL0129/304217572

You can find these spigots on buildings all over the place. Sometimes they are locked behind a panel that you can also open with that same tool. Great for nomads.

Does population decline worry you?

I mean, it’s super important. The population of all of the places we love is shrinking. In 50 years, 30 years, you’ll have half as many people in places that you love. Society will collapse. We have to solve it. It’s very critical.

Uhhh…what? There are a handful of countries with recent population decline, but most of the world is still growing even if growth rates are slowing. I’ve never seen any credible projections of catastrophic population decline.

I think you are confused about what “AI” means. You are referring to a very small subset if AI.

All “AI”

Not even close to true.

In the context of video encoding, any manufactured/hallucinated detail would count as “loss”. Loss is anything that’s not in the original source. The loss you see in e.g. MPEG4 video usually looks like squiggly lines, blocky noise, or smearing. But if an AI encoder inserts a bear on a tricycle in the background, that would also be a lossy compression artifact in context.

As for frame interpolation, it could definitely be better, because the current algorithms out there are not good. It will not likely be more popular, since this is generally viewed as an artistic matter rather than a technical matter. For example, a lot of people hated the high frame rate in the Hobbit films despite the fact that it was a naturally high frame rate, filmed with high-frame-rate cameras. It was not the product of a kind-of-shitty algorithm applied after the fact.

AI-based video codecs are on the way. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it could be designed to be lossless or at least less lossy than modern codecs. But compression artifacts will likely be harder to identify as such. That’s a good thing for film and TV, but a bad thing for, say, security cameras.

The devil’s in the details and “AI” is way too broad a term. There are a lot of ways this could be implemented.

This is not a hill I’d want to die on, but I do understand thinking this photo is fine. If I hadn’t been told it was from Playboy, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. It’s a conventionally-attractive woman in a hat showing a little shoulder. I wouldn’t be upset over Michaelangelo’s David either. It is less sexual than like 90% of modern TV or mass-market advertising. I suspect a similar image of “cleaner” provenance would not garner much attention at all, honestly.

But it is weird that an image from such a source was chosen in the first place. It is understandable that it makes people uncomfortable, and it seems like there should be no shortage of suitable imagery that wouldn’t, so…easy sell, I’d think.

On a related note, boy oh boy am I tired of every imagegen AI paper and project using the same type of vaguely fetishized portraits as examples.

F-Droid has verified and reproducible builds.

On the Play Store or iOS App Store, though, anything goes.

Valiant effort, but the top minds of the world, whether human or machine, are no match for Charmin’s obfuscation techniques. https://bangyourbuck.com/search/charmin ultra strong/Count/US/table

Looks okay until you realize that the “count” field refers to different things across different listings. Some count rolls, some count sheets, some count packages.

Comparing prices of toilet paper and papers towels is 100x harder than it needs to be.

The $10 plan gives you unlimited searches. The $25 plan has additional features like AI. For comparison, OpenAI charges $20/month for premium access to ChatGPT, with free accounts being rate-limited, and not having access to the latest model. And of course all ChatGPT users have their usage tracked.

I haven’t signed up for a paid plan yet, but I’ve been using the free plan (which has limits on searches and AI use) for a little while now and it seems pretty good. It’s not a slam dunk, since I found myself going back to Google a couple times and getting better results there. But it seems pretty good overall, and the FastGPT chatbot has been consistently giving me better results than Bing Chat.

If you believe Kagi’s privacy statement, they are not logging your searches, and the account is only used to track membership. I don’t like the idea of being logged in either, but it’s something.

I will likely revert to duckduckgo or something similar for incognito search, personally.

Paying for web site access is a hard pill to swallow, but I’m afraid the time of reckoning has come. I’ve been part of the problem for decades, using sites and services that are, by their ad-supported nature, misaligned with my interests. Google’s dominance has ruined not only the quality of searches, but the quality of journalism and other content across the entire internet, since the primary goal of anyone trying to make money on the internet is to get at the top of Google results. This is why you can’t find a cookie recipe without scrolling through some absurd human-interest story. It’s why you can’t read news articles without clicking through slideshows. It’s why you can’t find pretty much any meaningful product reviews without researching it like it’s a goddamn dissertation.

The poison of advertising has seeped into the groundwater of the internet. I hope that in time we can reverse the damage. I don’t know if Kagi’s business model is the way forward, but I’m damn well sure the status quo of advertising and user tracking is not.

The default “Active” sort option does that. Try “Hot” instead.