Tbh I would figure the overwhelming majority of cults are also financial pyramid schemes
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Tbh I would figure the overwhelming majority of cults are also financial pyramid schemes
This is not always true. One of the most famous cults of the modern era, Scientology, really didn't suffer from Hubbard's lack (at least in terms of influence and membership).
Swindon’s ‘UkraineFest’ has seen thousands of attendees since it was first held three years ago. While support wanes elsewhere, the festival continues to celebrate Ukrainian culture. ▶️: english.nv.ua/life/swindon... 📸: UkrianeFest
C'est du colonialisme uniquement si cela vient de la région Impériale de New York, sinon, ce n'est qu'une appropriation culturelle scintillante.
If no one is going to do anything about the attempted assassination, the assassins are simply going to keep trying until they succeed.
Yesterday Vladimir Putin learned that even an attempted assassination of the EU Commission President will have no response and that Germany will not defend itself or others. A day of incredible weakness for the EU. As the Russian Federation continues to build its war machine.
That’s deeply concerning.
I'ma get this as a tramp stamp tattoo with vines and roses
as always: my ideological disagreement with you is a substantive and principled stance. your ideological disagreement with me is wrecker shit and splitting the left
Er'ry day :(
Might be up your alley @davidgerard.co.uk
What a fun reminder that Scott Siskind is a gutter racist who thinks verbosity is a substitute for original thought
112: Water Crisis in Occupied Donbas by Ukraine Without Hype @vagrantjourno.bsky.social creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...
I'd end up on the Sangy route every time even tho I promise myself this time I'll do Curze and fix him
Former speaker of parliament Andriy Parubiy has been shot in Lviv, police are reporting. english.nv.ua/life/former-...
Ah, sorry, I mistook the dialect
If/when it happens, I need to see that meme of the Dutch newspaper reporting on Hitler's death. Except with Trump.
They should remake King of Queens and only have minorities as the main cast. This is a good idea.
Northeast Commonwealth anyone??
Y'all either have values that you share with people or you don't. And if not, why the fuck should anyone with different values vote for you?
That shit didn't fly in the 60s when white moderates said it then, it still don't fly now
when they write "Analysis" stories the analysis is always like "Trump is betting that tariffs on Mexico will revitalize American manufacturing" (absurd lie) and never like "he's putting tariffs on Mexico because his closest advisors are racist extremists who had non-white people"
this is one of the president's' closest advisors. the mainstream media refuses to reckon with this so substitutes in a fictional sanewashed trump and fictional west wing in which loomer doesn't participate in their stories. telling the truth would not help trump so they don't do it
"You will be in blast radius" - promise or threat?
I understand what an application is, yes, but since 'app' includes a wrapper around a shitty web browser, it just feels wrong. Fucks up search results too
It's been bugging me ever since it happened and every time I bring it up people look at me weird
When did programs become apps, man, am I old enough to complain about that yet?
No reason to assume it's a fait accompli, the dot com bubble didn't form the modern, ad-supported internet. It's a phase now, but since it's useless, most of the investments will fail and there'll be some new tech-fad to chase.
This, to me, is pretty much why I like and use BlueSky. So (laudatory)
Update (from Oleksii on twitter): 💰 $3,357 collected! (+$36) 🚩 $2,807 to go 📍 Pokrovsk direction 👁️ Sniper unit of the 138th Special Purpose Center ⌛️ Running for: 17 days 🎁 Donate $15 or more to join the raffle: nitter.net/olexmsv/status/1957184… PP: aaproxin@gmail.com (paypal.me/olexmsv)
CHAOS
Isn't that the Spellman house? See if you can find a snarky talking black cat
Russia's victims aren't a statistic. They were people. Individuals. Спочивай з миром, Марина. english.nv.ua/russian-war/...
Almost like humans have been using deception and its countermeasures in combat since time immemorial
Wow the age-old practice of barking 'password' at people still pays off, who knew
Imo that's why they brought Beto in, and I think it did serve to deepen the character
From my wife's FB story. She'd only just moved to Kyiv a week ago to study.
They don't get a sliver of consideration from me tbh
Jacobin spent a decade (from 2014) rejecting pitches from me about Russian imperialism, Ukrainian left identity, how Ukraine is in many ways a modern socialist state, etc. I literally had friends who were Jacobin writers pitch on my behalf, still rejected, possibly because Sunkara is a racist POS.
I am reminded of how the DSA published a piece written by a leftist who visited Ukraine to speak with Ukrainian socialists titled "Whose Side are We on?" and it was pulled by the DSA shortly after being published because "the writer of this article does not align with our values"
Though the culture was less online at the time and people felt just as comfortable being nasty and manipulative to your face.
Wow that's exactly my experience with pre- and Occupy-era left orgs in NYC! Plus ca change...
Amazing to see a piece like this in a left pub. Maybe, just maybe, the Western left will find its morals.
Tried the new Shinobi reboot. Pretty good. Great cartoon animation with plenty of references to the original games, especially Shinobi 3. You can see my review of the earlier series here. youtu.be/hZuLyis4P6s
Can Americans stop using the spectre of civil rebellion to justify the utterly insane amount of private arms they own? There's a fash takeover ongoing now, and the most dangerous weapon used in opposition so far has been a ham sandwich.
Should people have the government they voted for? The rurals overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Let them have their government and it's attended consequences.
www.972mag.com/maryam-abu-d...
Chatbot-written text
Did you mean to call White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt a dumb fucking bitch? Would you like me to complete the phrase?
The longer the West pretends Donald Trump is a legitimate world leader who can be bargained with, the swifter the democratic world signs its own death warrant.
Oh I'm fucking sure Trump absolutely has a preferred end to the war - one that leaves Kyiv with about 2/3rds of Lviv Oblast and nothing else.
I love Jessie and think they're one of the most prominent (deservedly so!) voices in the fandom and it seems so weird that I have such a different reaction to the ep than them.
The DNC actually did set up a "shadow cabinet" back in April. It was just a list of people available to be interviewed, who weren't assigned to any specific departments or areas of expertise, and it immediately disappeared and was never heard from again.
this is correct and you can see it in the runup to basically every severe crisis, even as it becomes increasingly obvious one is coming 2008 was a great example - "the entire financial system is going to start falling apart like dominoes" was a bridge too far for conventional wisdom until it wasn't
This is what the world allows every day. This is what we have to live with, every single day.
She was seventeen. Her mom had already lost her own parents. Her own grandparents. She was estranged from most of her blood relatives. And now she's dead, another statistic in some Russian commander's logbook to present as 'another kokhol neutralized'.
Russians killed a kid today. They killed a lot of people. But I can tell you about this kid. She was seventeen. She was a college student, brilliant and beautiful and an entire lifetime of potential. She took full advantage of the opportunities her mom struggled to earn. Russia killed her.
Also the scene between Pike and La'an in the corridor was just...peak Lower Decks. As in I'm not kidding, there's a Lower Decks with nearly that exact scene, and that makes my heart cry a little bit. www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Uw...
Alright, that was a good episode of Star Trek. Did it speak to some deep condition about the human spirit? Sorta, but it was also just...fun. The stakes were low but not zero, and we got to see the regulars hamming it up in a new role, always fun. As a fan of Our Man Bashir - good TV.
The smile on my keeps growing larger when I see Kirk on screen, and considering they started with a heavy frown that's a helluva job - legit am getting excited for a potential TOS remake.
Look I know that he's supposed to be Vulcan for this ep but the hell is up with his accent, I've never heard anyone try so hard to enunciate 'civilization' #startreksnw
Unreconstructed, unassimilated hostile separatist population has remained so, unfortunately, despite Mr. Grant's booze-addled efforts.
I'd like to note, that contra: Mr. Grant, the Mason-Dixon remains an amazing predictor of intelligence vs superstition and ignorance.
It seems to me that a world where this capability isnt limited to simply those with the technical skills to achieve it is preferable to the current one.
The counterpart of surveillance is sousveillance - where we all can watch each other, at least in private. In large parts of the world, this can be already be done by those technically skilled enough to find unsecured webcams or poorly patched smarthomes.
The fact is that surveillance is both dirt cheap and easy to do at scale. And it can be done equally easily by public, state, and private actors. There is no putting that genie back into the bottle. And we shouldn't want to.
I really do understand the privacy concerns of AR glasses. I also think that privacy as envisioned in the pre-net age is simply incoherent when applied to the modern world, and we all need to seriously rethink not just privacy, but really consider - who gets access to data?
Screenplays can be read in book form! I actually have books for both Doll House and most of Tennessee Williams
If you honestly believe the Russians hit the EU delegation in Kyiv by accident, I don't think you should be allowed to operate heavy machinery and I frankly question if letting you dress and bathe yourself is a violation of our collective duty of care.
These ideologies are a little like genetic code. They do stuff but have no meaning. You can track where it came from, but there is nothing at its core to be understood. It has function, but lacks a telos
Russia's economy would collapse quicker if international firms such as Mondelez, Raiffeisen, Pepsi, Philip Morris Intl, Leroy-Merlin & co had stopped trading & paying taxes feeding Russia's war on Ukraine ($20 billion in 2024, $60 billion since 2022). More about this here 👇 unn.ua/en/news/inte...
Yeah pretty much. Will is often wrong BUT crucially is just as often if not moreso right! Push back on the stupid things, promote and amplify the non-stupid things.
These are the kind of posts that make me keep following Stancil despite calling him a moron like, weekly Sometimes he actually perfectly identifies shit that should be obvious that tons of Democrats and "Never Trumpers" just don't seem to understand
Tom Clancy's Waiting for Godot Tom Clancy's Doll House Tom Clancy's A Streetcar Named Desire
My life every night is praying not to wake up to any of my friends and family missing or dead. Europe /must/ close our skies, or they will continue to be complicit in the genocide of Ukraine.
629 missiles and drones launched against peaceful, sleeping Ukraine last night. This is what happens when the world allows fascists to consolidate power. It is the present and the future, if nothing continues to be done. english.nv.ua/nation/russi...
The dough rises, brother!
Just realised that not enough of you have cited this paper. Worried about what that portends for racism. philpapers.org/rec/HEEPBI
ya there's a lot of that too bsky.app/profile/kief...
many professional political observers are closet or open trump supporters - when he fails or stumbles, as he frequently does, they cover for him and insert a fake, fictional trump into their stories that's doing smart stuff for normal reasons.
Curious. What if it is provable that biographical information on non-public figures can be retrieved from an LLM via prompting?
Don't we only have their word for it?
But wouldn't the existence of that data in a training scrape also allow me to in theory request its deletion?
? I can request Meta to remove my profile and all posts made from it, yes?
My most hated int'l econ factoid is that Belarus' GDP is significantly higher than Ukraine...
Take 'right to be forgotten'. How does that apply to say, a scrape of Facebook posts Ive gotten Meta to remove but still exists in training data, which theoretically can still be replicated without my consent
How well is the training data scrubbed? It's irrelevant to me if the model can reproduce it or not (though I have seen apocryphal cases of that), but the very existence of possibly privileged data being exploited by an unacknowledged third party is a violation, especially if that includes bio data
There are very good reasons to oppose the widespread and unregulated use of training data on privacy grounds, unrelated to any questions of copyright, even. So there are tons of mechanisms available to limit the spread and harm of automated snake oil vending machines.
China has disproven that quite strongly imo
Anyway miss me with that AI doomerism shit. It's a shitty tech with use cases outvalued by BPM software (I can do nocode too lmao), investments into it are just money pits, and there is no return good enough to justify even a fraction of the interest.
Without the training data, models are worthless. Without training data, there is no LLM.
Training data, as has widely been reported, is largely pirated content scrapped without consent from across the internet. There are a multitude of ways to stamp down on that.
You can't ban AI, but you /can/ introduce regulatory measures for training data. And that would effectively cripple the industry.
For all the dog lovers. This is a classic. Worth seeing again.
If anyone deserves to have their swords replaced after a theft, it's Talia
How very terrible for them. Perhaps Russia should focus on its own problems instead of inflicting war and death on others.
I am glad more academics are calling this out. If we want people to fight fascism, and be antifascist. They need to understand what Fascism is, the historical parallels and how it grew and governed. It is wildly irresponsible to invent a fantasy of Right Wing Socialism.
I knew this shit was a scam “Despite $30 - $40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return.” www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...
ChatGPT feelings matter, but fuck you if you wanna take a piss without one of JK's pedo friends giving your kid a proper tug first