I think Lemmy in general is very against AI

I agree, although for a counter-case, db0 has involvement in community-driven image generation (Horde, some communities they host and banners they use).

My view isn’t as blanket as pro- or anti- “AI” (and I add quotes because I see that as a science-fiction term adapted into a marketing fantasy).

These technologies are powerful and there are legitimate, productive, pro-social uses of them (an obvious example is assisting in medical diagnosis). They are not inherently incompatible with social values, environmental progress, and the other problems associated with it - these technologies are tools powered by electricity and materials. But the way they are currently implemented, the economic concerns around marketing them, and the lack of broad education around them, are very very dangerous.

• The way regular people misunderstand and misuse the technology has already resulted in direct deaths, all kinds of mismanagement and mass sacking of workers. Mistrusting technology is no new issue, see ELIZA in the '60s for example, but this is so much more accessible, more misrepresented due to marketing campaigns and social media, and more powerful. Furthermore, a huge proportion of people don’t have the media literacy to instinctively doubt its output - and this was already a big enough issue with news media.

• Processing currently is largely done using non-renewable energy sources in large centralized data centers (consuming water, creating noise pollution, etc.) which has serious global and local environment issues.

• Most of our exposure to this technology as regular citizens is wasteful or actively harmful, such as propaganda/forgery, vapid industrialization of artistic aesthetics, unsolicited sexualization, scams and fraud attacks, automated bots, advertising and other ‘slop’, along with misguided attempts to eliminate workers from jobs which cannot be adequately delegated to these tools.

Somewhat relevant are the Subvertisers for London (as well as similar groups all over the world):

Another word for “marketing” or “advertisement” is Manipulation.

Don’t worry they’ve solved that, it’s called 🩷 𝐼𝓃𝒻𝓁𝓊𝑒𝓃𝒸𝒾𝓃𝑔 😎. That’s much less ominous! They just influence!

I’ll add to this that a common rationale for centrism is that significantly changing course is dangerous. However, this is obviously relative, with an implication that the status quo is not as dangerous. Lots of unnecessary everyday death and suffering is normalized, often ignored by a centrist, but any death and suffering caused in the process of fixing these problems is counted!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder

I don’t believe the words ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are useful to describe people. We can, and should, aim to be more specific.

As Cowbee pointed out already, ‘centrism’ is a vague concept, especially since this site isn’t just people from the USA. Does it mean people who are apathetic about left-right politics? People who intentionally position themselves in the middle? People resistant to changing this terrible tragedy?

Even in my country, and my country is progressive compared to the USA, both the center-right and center-left parties (I’m using Wikipedia’s evaluation here because I object to the left-right political scale) are funneling wealth up to the rich, destroying our environment, compounding housing issues, supporting an ongoing genocide and scapegoating immigrants. Seeing either of these parties as acceptable is a serious issue, and is complicity in the crises these issues create.

That doesn’t mean I absolutely judge these people as ‘bad’, perhaps ignorant or misled but not bad, there are many sincere and caring ways through life that lead people to these harmful positions, but it’s a seriously harmful political position which we, as a society, are obligated to shift. And yes, apathy is a political position too, there is no ‘apolitical’: the status quo is just the ideology of the ruling class.

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A friend of mine has their large corporate company telling everyone they have to show up to one of their offices on at least two days each week. Now a few people just walk there at 2355, clock out at 0005, and spend the rest of the week at home.

Silly conditions -> silly behaviors

' or 1+1;

he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.

If you’re able to be there for the install, then great. I’ve had a couple of times where, due to certain hardware, it needs a different sound server or some other workaround. In an extreme case, you might need to fallback to a second choice of distro.

but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience

Is there anything specific you’ve heard that applies to your friend’s needs? (Honest question, I haven’t looked deep into it.)

If it’s just small things like ‘Steam and [etc] is installed already’, then you can just do that easily anyway.

no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks [snip]

Keep in mind that Mint uses apt and (optionally, but IMO inevitably for a gamer/dev) Flatpaks integrated in their package manager, which has gotten much smoother but still is two different systems which can cause confusion. I don’t know how Bazzite handles this.

RSS feeds. It’s digital so probably not what you’re asking for, but I would often drain time checking tabs or bookmarks for updates each day. Now I just have a specific list of updates from feeds I’ve subscribed to: no ads, no recommendations, no scrolling, no manual refreshing every hour. Just what you ask to see.

Website doesn’t supply one? Luckily some RSS tools let you create one from most websites.

Also, relevant youtube video from Technology Connections about feeds in general.

And, on the topic of digital simplification, learn how to mute specific conversations on your chat apps. Many even have temporary muting (mute for 1 hour). You don’t need constant pings distracting you from life.

All black t-shirts, same pants, same sweaters, same socks, share socks with my wife.

I’ve similarly simplified my wardrobe. It’s been great.

Most of my clothes are made from the same (or at least non-delicate) materials and all my daily wear aren’t light clothes, so they all go in the same wash.

Did this next one with a few things, so for example, socks: Bought one type of daily-wear sock, made sure I liked it and then bulk bought them, so apart from a few special pairs (sports, decorative pattern, other colors), I don’t need to care about pairing socks because they’re all the same. Growing up with 3-pair packs of socks all in different paired-colors, and then socks with the same brand and same colors but different length, was a waste of time.

Yep, I’ve also gotten responses pretty reliably from professional artists, including those I’d assumed would be far too busy to answer (including the directors and writers of famous tv shows).

Are you looking for the Animal Smoothness Scale?

I would like to join the single-day general strike that is being called for the US this Friday, January 30th

What backing is there for this strike? For example, are there any labor unions, community organizations, and cultural leaders involved like in the recent Jan 23rd Minnesota strike? [Edit: the answer is a pleasant yes! https://nationalshutdown.org/home#endorsers ]

Take a sick day regardless, unless you’re going to use them all in the future, but if it’s just a few social media posts saying “general strike now!”, of which there have been hundreds of attempts over the past few years, without any institutional backing, then temper your expectations. Worker unions exist for us to organize us! So if it’s a real strike you want, unionize, and push the union to act.

It’s worth acknowledging that superior firepower hasn’t directly resulted in success for the US military. Guerilla armies like in Vietnam and in many countries in the Middle East such as Afghanistan have repelled US invasion, and wargame simulations (including US on US wargames!) have repeatedly shown this.

Add into the mix that there was a serious degree of military revolt (complemented by homeland revolt) in the Vietnam War (and other later wars too). While this was largely boosted by it being a conscription army at the time, I still believe an internal US war would make the military similarly vulnerable to internal conflict, and even external sabotage by citizens.

We saw ICE disarm and shoot a citizen who had a gun. A lesson from this is that a weapon is only threatening if we create an environment where it’s a credible threat, like outnumbering them with armed citizens.

Masks? I could go either way on this. Masks can be protective, and can also be seen as alienating from the community. That alienation is not some unchangeable truth, it’s just a result of how they’re perceived in our cultures (often associated with crime). For a counterexample, look at the Zapatistas who regularly wore masks to protect them from cartel and state violence:

Stop throwing trash […] because it ends up in the dirt thus the food.

This reminds me that most of the anti-littering ads I’ve seen are more about shaming or about dying wildlife than about direct impact to all of us. This is an issue that could be simple to illustrate with a video PSA, following how littered trash contaminants find their way into our food chain and to our mouths. Makes it more personal and hopefully icky enough.

Daggers in a select few hearts may be enough to shift things.

If you’re proposing what I think you are, it’s sounds like something we tried in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Our lesson was that this tactic won’t solve a systemic problem, at least in isolation. Action without a surrounding social movement is lost. Just ask Luigi - despite the widespread bipartisan approval of their action, there weren’t many copycats nor long-term changes in our conditions. And, if you saw much of other Lemmy instances at the time of that event, you may have seen various people denouncing it as ‘adventurism’, despite how cathartic it was.

So, many of the socialist organizations aim to develop the surrounding movement needed to cause systemic change.

I wonder if this has any practical benefits over running a Windows OS in a VM…

edit: piping, or easier collaboration between, Win32 and Linux programs could be an example. The creator mentions creative and gaming applications.

Win32/Hurd when?