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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I am also a Syncthing user. Eh. So long as they don't build SBU-approved trackers into it. But sure, it's frustrating.

Incidentally, same story (but worse) seems to be happening to DeepFloyd IF, the expected successor to Stable Diffusion and an open-source Imagen trained with Stability funding by a secretive Deepfloyd lab. It seemed to be decently complete months ago, and by now is essentially obsolete. It's still not available. I am not sure it will ever be.

Behind cringey jokes (derivative of Emad) about releasing the weights «Soon» and the stream of pro-Ukrainian signaling is what I take to be a very simple reality: the lead developer is Alex Shonenkov, ex-head of Sberbank text-to-image efforts like ru-Dalle, and a lame duck on account of his trajectory; and his Ukrainian/Israeli «friend» Misha Konstantinov of the Mishin Learning channel minor fame, despite technical ineptitude, is much, much better at reading the room, playing committees and pandering to the right people. He's maneuvered somehow to represent the effort, and now they're branding this technology as very socially responsible, very pro-Ukrainian, pro-feminist... you wouldn't like it if somebody used «your» opensourced diffusion model to produce images flattering to Putin, would you? So it should be carefully vetoed and trained and retrained until it satisfies the parasitic-management class who'll take credit for the Promethean task of endowing people with a smart drawing assistant. Here's what it should be good at:

don't be a coward”. color photo of a real leopard in a german bar with germany flags holds a sign in his hands with the text "don't be a coward".

'happy birthday mr president', color close-up photo of a ideal blond marilyn monroe in a white dress holding in her perfect hands large paper with text "happy birthday mr president". the flowers on the wall in color of ukrainian yellow-blue flag on the background.

Etc. Very much a reddit culture.

This war is really testing certain nerdy assumptions. Says Misha, showing another immaculate generation of a black woman with dyed hair and an appropriate slogan produced with the tech stack he has no relation to except as gatekeeper:

It is a very important day. But for me, it is not a holiday, but a day to reflect on the ongoing struggle for women's rights and gender equality around the world. It is a time to recognise the many challenges women continue to face, not just because of their race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability and other identities, but simply because they are women.

On this day, it is crucial to recognise that gender inequality remains a pervasive problem in different spheres of life, from work to home and beyond. Women continue to face multiple barriers, including the wage gap, lack of access to education and health inequalities.

On International Women's Day, I invite us to recognize this challenge. Let us accept that everyone in their place can make this world a better place. Albeit locally - Be the change you wish to see in the world.

who disliked the above, unsubscribe please

Comment section, meanwhile, welcomes actual, honest-to-God Ukrainian Nazis with hot takes about subhuman Finno-Ugrics and Mordva with slavery in DNA, upvoted comments advising admin to put Totenkoph in the avatar and such. Urging them not to lose control – «what is important is that we remain humans» – Misha helpfully bans Russian scum who ask «is this the channel about Machine Learning or politics?» and other retarded Putinist bullshit.

Frankly, hearing this makes me trust the developers less. A solid reason to trust, for example, Signal, is because they have straight bitten the bullet of saying, "Our software may end up helping deplorables at times, but we're still utterly committed to it, and nothing else is as important to this organization as this one thing." It's a commitment that helps me be comfortable that they're not going to roll over and sneak shady shit into the code if, like, I don't know, some Canadian truckers protest, the Canadian gov't declares an emergency, and the narrative is that they are the spawn of Satan and Hitler's gay love, and oh, if we could just peek in to their files, we'll stop the next holocaust.

I don't know that I trust Syncthing to do that anymore. I now really worry that they may be compromised... or at least that the snowball of their personnel is rolling downhill, ejecting anyone not on board with the narrative enough, on its way to being fully compromised.

This leaves me unsettled. I love their software. I use it everywhere. I might not yet be "too committed to pull out", but I'm considering revamping some things that might push me even closer to that line. Yet now, I sort of want to pull out. There's probably not a great alternative yet, I'm guessing. But is there any way for me, as a regular user, to affirmatively signal that I really really want them to make this commitment and cut the other shit out? Anything stronger than just "not donate"? Is there an alternate project that has such a commitment and which is close to being as good that I can donate to (maybe not even use yet if it's not there yet)? Anything?

A solid reason to trust, for example, Signal

I mean sure except for how they took the brave stance of deciding that they were going to completely nuke the only thing that made Signal stand out from every other p2p encrypted messaging app out there, thus rendering their software functionally no different from telegram or whatsapp or session.

What was that thing?

They integrated SMS into their app, so it was an all-in-one, and you didn't have to have two different apps. I am also salty about them removing this. I have five days to figure out what I really want to do about it. It absolutely makes their app significantly less valuable in general, but at least it doesn't indicate that they may sneak some fucky code into an update sometime that breaks how the core product is supposed to work.

How long ago was this? Simplest thing to do would be to checkout an old version of the app, and compile it yourself.

The point is not that I can use it to send normal SMS messages, it's that I can convince my less tech-savvy or privacy-conscious friends and family to use it as their primary messaging app. The proverbial bridge-playing Grandma is not going to use an older version of the app, she's just going to use whatever the version on her phone is (the one that is auto-updated by the app store). And if Grandma can't use that to text Janet from her Bridge club then Grandma isn't going to use that app anymore. Which means my messages to Grandma aren't encrypted.

The point was to get users that were not privacy conscious to get onboard by having an incredibly low barrier to entry. Anyone could use it just like a normal texting app, and anyone could therefore have encrypted messaging. This is no longer the case, making Signal functionally identical to every other basic bitch encrypted messaging app, and therefore worthless.

It's actually happening in five days. I think that's ultimately a self-defeating strategy. It is only a matter of time before some change has to be made to the core functionality, whether due to discovery of a new security vulnerability, compatibility with updating to a new phone, or whatever else. At that time, which is inevitable to come sooner or later, we'll be right back in the same dilemma. In the meantime, rather than being able to just be mostly ignorant about these little details, I'd have to basically become hyper-vigilant about paying attention to every twist and turn, which is a significant cost.

I've had a similar beef with mod hosting sites like Nexusmods and Moddb regarding their recent removals.

Mods in the past could be downloaded from multiple different hosts and mirrors, but usually required you to have the awareness to seek out the dev's website. Sites like NM gave a lot of convenience of a central location for downloading, managing, and discovering content, with community tools for ranking and feedback. These days it's common for NM to be the only host for many mods, and removals were typically reserved for the truly heinous and illegal. While not perfect, it felt like a spirit of community collaboration mostly divorced from politics (more the norm 10 years ago than now) was working fine.

And now we see mods removed for petty political reasons, with the platform owners basically saying "Tough shit. You're paranoid. Don't like it? Delete your account." And boy would I (I even donated to you guys in the past!), likely while still begrudgingly downloading their hosted content without logging in. But now it seems many mods require a NM accoint, and so my options are to eat shit or just not play the mod. And if you were a modder who wanted to pull your own mods from the site in protest? Too bad, NM has made it so all mods are archived to preserve compatibility with other modlists.

It's such a blatant flex - "We dare you bigots to cut yourself off from the primary platform for modding" - and one they can only afford because of their position. I should not be feeling nostalgic about Filefront and Fileplanet.

At least there's still GameBanana, maybe?

Sadly no, game banana is worse if anything.

A couple of days ago it banned a retranslation and uncensor patch of Fire Emblem: Engage, which aimed to be closer to the Japanese version

Welp, RIP.

The hell has NM been doing?

KMC brought up the Spider Man example, and another more recent one was a mod that altered the voice of a trans character in the new Harry Potter game.

I feel like a decade ago the culture would have said "If you don't like it, don't download it". But apparently region switching your game to the Saudi version in order to remove pride flags is too much of a moral affront. It should not just be deleted, but shamed in a public statement.

And nowhere in this controversy does anybody stop to wonder if maybe the devs should catch some flak for even making this an option within the game's own code. Just burn the guy who pointed it out.

This, for one.

I don't like this. I don't like that money donated towards one cause -- supporting the development of a good piece of software -- is being redirected towards causes that are totally unrelated, solely because they developers care about those causes.

There was a slatestarcodex(?) article about two models of donations (unfortunately, I've lost the link). In the first model, you are giving to a specific cause, and trust the organization to advance it. In the second model, you are giving to agents that are aligned with your goals, and you trust them to make good decisions.

When a specific organization changes focus from [the cause they gathered donations for] to [the new cause], it's completely unremarkable to the second group of donors.

I share a lot of your concerns about the not-political politics of today and just how often every company, institution and media outlet must suddenly be on board with the latest thing no matter how little the declarations of solidarity have anything to do with the core function of those organizations. What a grocery store has to do with Ukraine, I just don’t get it. And especially since “the thing” changes quickly and it’s on to something else. I find it disgusting in a sense just because I just want to move about the world without listening to the latest opinions from all of these companies that have no reason to actually care about anything they’re telling me they care about.

You know there’s a meme I see pop up on message boards that “right thinks the left made them do it “.

I think this is true because partisanship now shows up everywhere which has caused the right wing reaction. This is problematic because now everything is politics.

One example I see is the entire etf industry. Not the specific esg funds but just normal spy. A lot of stock is in these etfs - the true owners of American companies. Most just vote according to what ISS tells them today and normal just approving board of directors or mergers etc. I don’t this the ISS is specifically woke but they don’t get into these issues. When Disney got out of their lane passive investors aren’t the ones to tell them to knock it off. Now boring functionaries because partisan fighting grounds.

One example I see is the entire etf industry. Not the specific esg funds but just normal spy. Most just vote according to what ISS tells them

Can you speak plainly, please? Your thicket of context-free acronyms is entirely impenetrable.

Thought these were common terms but maybe cause I work in finance.

ESG - environmental social justice

SPY - largest passive index for cheaply investing in the SP500. Basically they raise 100 billions and own the top 500 companies market cap weighted and charge minuscule fees like sub 10 basis points

ISS - Institutional Shareholder services. They tell a large of big money managers but mostly the etfs how to vote when corporate votes happen. Basically their outsourced fiduciary services.

ISS - Institutional Shareholder services. They tell a large of big money managers but mostly the etfs how to vote when corporate votes happen. Basically their outsourced fiduciary services.

The first two I got, but I was wondering why the International Space Station was telling ETFs how to vote...

That sounds like the start of an amazing David Icke-style conspiracy theory.

I think you have the Dixie Chicks example exactly reversed. The Dixie Chicks decided to speak out against the United States as part of their public performance. In other words, they're analogous to Synchthing here, and the people who boycotted them are analogous to someone like you who refuses to contribute to Synchthing because of what they are doing with their politics.

Also, this keeps getting brought up over and over again as the only right-wing example anyone can think of that's analogous to cancellation, and it really isn't. Doing something in front of a friendly audience that you don't want the rest of your audience to hear about is not the same thing as doing it in private. It's just something that you really wish were private even though it's not.

(reposted at the right place)

I think that there is implicit expectation that we expect things with utility to be apolitical unlike things without utility. So a singer shouting Slava Ukraini while being unable to find it on a map is one thing. My screwdriver being painted in ukrainan flag is something else.

So - if it is something like art that I am consuming - politics is fine-ish. If it is something I am using it is not.

I think we might not expect things without utility to be completely apolitical, but that's different from expecting nothing.

I have the same complaint about the Great Awokening in 2020 alongside the George Floyd protests: I felt like every institution in the world had to share their views on the situation, no matter how disconnected they might actually be from it. It became totalizing, overwhelming. I would compare it to a moral panic.

It will never stop being funny that fucking Call of Duty felt the need to weigh in

Oh god this gives me flashbacks of summer 2020 when Rockstar literally closed down their servers temporarily. I recall feeling a sense of rage and frustration that was so over the top that it was rather calming. It wasnt even that I couldnt play my stupid game, it was that I somehow wound up in this timeline. I was already dying of virtue signalling poisoning from covid, god those times were rough.

Seriously I dont even live in the US.. Why the fuck do I have to pay a price or care at all for whiteys sins on the other side of the world. I literally cant even.

We're all living in Amerika...

for better or worse, and without the benefits that come with it.

Oh god this gives me flashbacks of summer 2020 when Rockstar literally closed down their servers temporarily.

I never heard about this, and I would assume that anything I found on a Google search would be misrepresentation written as propaganda for the future, so I leave it to you, a rando blinded with rage so hot that it loops back round to calmness, to tell me the tale.

Rockstar posted about it themselves. They took down the servers for 2 hours "in honor of George Floyd".

I dont recall exactly what happened but my rockstar games launcher was acting real buggy and the game was taking forever to load when one of the people I was playing with checked if the servers were down and they were actually down but for the most clowny reason. 🤡

Straight from the horse's mouth:

Black Lives Matter.

To honor the legacy of George Floyd, today, from 2:00-4:00 p.m. ET, we will be shutting down access to our online games, Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online. Following the memorial, we hope you will join us in further honoring the many victims of America's racial injustices by supporting their families, black-owned businesses, those marching on the streets, and coalitions through the various organizations listed here: http://rsg.ms/a401443.

What the hell is the legacy of George Floyd? Putting aside the circumstances of his death, and even agreeing that negligence and bad decisions on the part of the cops did cause it, he was a petty thief and drug addict (and if I believe half the rumours I read online, an unpleasant guy to be around even when he wasn't high on a mix of drugs and attempting to pass funny money).

Unless they mean the looting, burning, rioting, property destruction, and shootings by the self-appointed militia of CHAZ and CHOP, as his legacy, what the hell are they even on about?

The surgeon general's pop-up shop, Robert Iger's face

Discount Etsy agitprop, Bugles' take on race...

"this isn't about politics, this is about HUMAN RIGHTS."

True, human rights are political. Who defines them? Who interprets them? Who enforces them and in what contexts? What is the cost-benefit tradeoff in terms of expected deaths/complications from doing something? These are political questions!

Reminds me a little of the Yes Minister scene: "my facts are merely statistics but your statistics are facts?"

Also "war is a continuation of politics by other means" and "Diplomacy without armaments is like music without instruments".

I saw somebody claim that in $CURRENT_YEAR what most people mean by "that's unconstitutional!" isn't "I've read the US Constitution and it's amendments and found this specific text which clearly prohibits it". What they mean is "I feel so strongly that this is wrong that I don't want to have to argue with anybody about it anymore". Saying that something isn't political because it's a human right is pretty much the same.

True, human rights are political. Who defines them? Who interprets them?

This is the biggest "emperor's new clothes" problem in all of modern politics. When it's pointed out that "human rights" were pulled out of some committee's ass 70 years ago and have absolutely zero philosophical grounding**, the room gets quiet for a moment, people clear their throats awkwardly, and then a few seconds later conversation picks up again and politics continues as usual. I can't stand it.

Obligatory Legutko quote (long but well worth reading):

Especially striking is a change in the meaning of the word "dignity" which since antiquity has been used as a term of obligation.

If one was presumed to have dignity, one was expected to behave in a proper way as required by his elevated status. Dignity was something to be earned, deserved, and confirmed by acting in accordance with the higher standards imposed by a community or religion-for instance, by empowering a certain person with higher responsibilities or by claiming that man was created in God's image. Dignity was an attribute that ennobled those who acquired it. As noblesse oblige, dignity was an obligation to seek some form of self-improvement, however vaguely understood, but certainly closer to the Socratic way and further away from its opposite. The attribute was not bestowed forever: one could always lose it when acting in an undignified way.

At some point, the concept of dignity was given a different meaning, contrary to the original. This happened mainly through the intercession of the language of human rights, especially after the 1948 Universal Declaration. The idea of human beings having inalienable rights is counterintuitive and extremely difficult to justify. It may make some philosophical sense if derived from a strong theory of human nature such as one finds in classical metaphysics. However, when we accept a weak theory, attributing to human beings only elementary qualities, and deliberately disregarding strong metaphysical assumptions, then the idea of rights loses its plausibility. It may, of course, be sanctioned as a mere product of legislation through a Parliamentary or court ruling, which entitles people to make various claims called "rights," but these claims will be no more than arbitrary decisions by particular groups of politicians or judges who choose to do this rather than that due to circumstances, ideology, or individual predilections or under pressure from interest groups. It would indeed be silly to call such claims "inalienable," because inalienability by definition cannot be legislated.

Thus, in order to strengthen the unjustified and [...] unjustifiable notion of human rights, the concept of dignity was invoked, but in a peculiar way so as to make it seem to imply more than it actually did. This concept created an illusion of a strong view of human nature, and of endowing this nature with qualities nowhere explicitly specified but implying something noble, being an immortal soul, an innate desire for good, etc. But on the other hand, in using this concept, unaccompanied by other qualifications, the framers of the human rights documents apparently felt exempted from any need to present an explicit and serious philosophical interpretation of human nature and to explain the grounds and the conditions on which one could conceive of its dignity. This operation-or more precisely, sleight of hand, and not very fair to boot-led to a sudden revival of the concept of human dignity, but with a radically different meaning.

Since the issue of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, dignity has no longer been about obligation, but about claims and entitlements. The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for any moral merits or deserts; it allowed them to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born without any moral achievement or effort. A person who desired to achieve the satisfaction of a pig was thus equally entitled to appeal to dignity to justify his goals as another who tried to follow the path of Socrates, and each time, for a pig and for a Socrates, this was the same dignity. A right to be a pig and a right to be a Socrates were, in fact, equal and stemmed from the same moral (or rather nonmoral, as the new dignity practically broke off with morality) source.

Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything par ticularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness, generate anything that would be essentially undignified and nonhuman?

The idea of human rights goes back well before 1948, though I agree that they have never been successfully grounded. The closest anyone has ever come is Hobbes, who does so by asserting that everyone has a natural right to everything they can possibly do or obtain, even to kill another person, and then explaining political order in terms of individuals collectively agreeing to give up some of their rights in order to maintain peace.

The problem of course being that Hobbesian natural rights are wholly negative unlike "human rights" which tend to be positive affirmations of State granted privileges.

Are you sure you meant to reply to me? I didn't mention the Dixie Chicks.

It wasn't a whole heaping lot of money (seems like about 1000 Euros each) but in terms of small-scale software donations I think that is rather a great deal of cash.

Does the donation matter at all? Money is fungible; they'd either pay for hosting/infra out of their own pockets or give it to themselves to use as they please. It doesn't seem that relevant whether they say the contribution to the Ukrainian Red Cross came from the Syncthing foundation or from themselves (perhaps tax wise? though I'm not particularly in tune with Swedish nonprofit law).

My general response is to shrug my shoulders: it's signalling, neither costly to Syncthing nor onerous to users. War has a totalizing, corrosive effect on society, but the West's engagement in Ukraine is less a war and more of a financially cheap trolling action to kneecap a not-quite competitor. The banner ad reflects just that level of Western commitment.

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