aiislove
1d ago
Is there anything I as an individual can do to push back against Flock cameras or broader mass surveillance in the US?
Reading 1984 as a sixth grader I was horrified by Big Brother and the authoritarianism illustrated in the book and always felt that if those things came to life it would be right and imperative to fight against them, and every year I’ve seen more and more authoritarian overreach that disturbs me.
I do not vote as I believe it’s a massive waste of time at best. I am not fond of solutions such as “call your congressperson” or “show up to your local council and demand change” because these are similarly time wasting activities in my opinion.
I am frustrated by the acceptance of the public for these technologies with terrible implications for the present and the future. I don’t want to break the law in order to fight them and don’t want to become more of a target, which seems inevitable if you want to speak against it publicly. I feel very disappointed in people around me and the modern west when I realize the state of mass surveillance today.
aiislove
2d ago
I was not aware of Pongiluppi's art until just now. It is not what I'm into at all but it is effective for a certain market or applications where you would want that kind of style. You're right that a lot of AI art generators create things that look like his style, but really that's more of a problem with the taste level of the entire internet that scraping every image then weighing the output (or whatever) leads to this sort of aesthetic too often. I constantly have to tell ai generators to stop making everything look so high contrast, so epic, so deviantart, so hollywood 2010s film poster bla bla bla...........
I don't think any art style is "discredited" by AI, in the same way that PS2 graphics didn't "discredit" Alex Colville's art from the 1960s that looks freakishly similar to PS2 graphics. The reproducability of a style has more to do with the models/technology than the artists, for example AI can much more easily create artwork in the style of Van Gogh or Monet than it can create a high quality vector graphic design in the style of, say, Herb Lubalin, but it doesn't really mean that the value of a Monet painting is now less than the value of any graphic designer's work.
aiislove
4d ago
This is not my experience at all, it is mostly the bad artists and creatives who publicly dislike AI art. Kazuma Kaneko for example who is an extremely talented genius illustrator (his Persona 1/2 designs are some of the best video game related art ever IMO) has produced a video game with a bunch of AI art trained on his style, he's obviously fine with it but the reaction from the public has been hysterical. Nick Knight is a very talented photographer and embraces AI, that's only two examples off the top of my head but I can think of more if you need me to. No artist or creative who I genuinely respect has come out openly against AI. Most of the creatives vocally against it are pretty mediocre at best or just terrible deviantart level hacks
aiislove
4d ago
AI is just the democratization of slavery, bringing to the masses what used to be the exclusive domain of the few.
Yes this is a great point, and why I find the hatred of AI art from a particular class of consumers who never produce art themselves but who consume it really irritating. They want the luxury to demand that the art they consume is hand drawn or hand painted or hand sketched or hand CGI'd or hand photoshopped but never ever hand prompted. They would never demand that their checking account be artisanally hand crafted on papyrus spreadsheets and totaled by sheer brainpower but cringe at any art that wasn't toiled over by hand. They want creatives chained to their workspaces dammit! Never mind that the fundamental problem is that they lack the creativity or motivation to produce artwork themselves, and even now when the barrier to entry is as low as prompting an LLM, which makes them look even worse to anyone who actually creates things.
To your other points, noblesse oblige has died out long ago in the modern west, which is why it's so degrading to participate in society broadly. And it died off so quickly- my grandparents' generation were clean, elegant, sane people- my parents' generation, not at all.
Anything good or beautiful that happens to arise for a time is an accident that can only flourish under very precise and precarious conditions [...]
This is starting to become evident to me. It's too bad but you put it nicely.
aiislove
6d ago
Bob Dylan
I really can't stand Bob Dylan. He is the most Harrison Bergeron attendance award mealy mouthed nonsense I've ever heard in my life and boomers should be humiliated that they share a generation with him
Is Sufjan Stevens not on either of these lists? Devendra? (Both lists are paywalled for me so I can't check.) Why has the indie hipster folk movement of 2006 to 2013 been so thoroughly memory holed?
aiislove
6d ago
a rather rightest view (castrate all chads)
How is this a rightist view at all? I am not trying to be uncharitable but I broadly view all of leftism as an attempt to castrate all chads. The right is much more tolerant of letting chads be chads.
aiislove
10d ago
I am not a math person at all but I believe you could interpret 2rafa's wording in two different ways. She said:
Taking stock, in 12 years, more or less in diversified primarily-US and some global equities, with reinvestment, I made 400%
This either means that you went from, say, $100 and ended up with $400 (a four hundred percent return) or you started with $100 and ended up with $500 (a total return of 400% on top of your original principal).
The first gives you 12% the second gives you 14.34%.
aiislove
10d ago
Gender identity immediately breaks down outside the context of the narcissistic modern west. Everyone else who's ever lived has lived in direct relationship to those around them. Placing the onus of deciding the gender for ourselves leads to strange or ridiculous outcomes some percentage of the time. Traditionally you are just whatever gender the people around you assign to you which would correspond to genitalia nearly all the time.
If someone asks for my pronouns I am irritated that I have to decide for myself because I think it should be designated by someone outside of myself in relation to the averages and experiences of society. If they assign an exogonous gender to my imagined self then it will tell me something about me, or them, but at least it relieves me of the pressure of having to assert something about myself.
Picking your own gender and asserting its correctness is dumb and ridiculous but completely consistent with the dumbness and ridiculousness of the modern west.
aiislove
14d ago
According to English grammar and logic, if you say "There's not nothing," you are saying that there is something. According to Spanish grammar, if you say "no hay nada," you are asserting that there is nothing. But within Spanish logic, should "no hay nada" mean that there is nothing, or that there is something? I understand the level of "logic" of Spanish that dictates that the "no" must agree with the "nada" but in English the "not" cancels out the "nothing" and makes it something (even though most people who use double negatives- "ain't nothing" for example- are implying the Spanish "logic" of matching.)
In other words, if you have grown up speaking only Spanish your whole life, would you believe that the "no" SHOULD cancel out the "nada," in the way that English speakers often understand that "I could care less" is used to mean "I couldn't care less," or is it completely logical within the language of Spanish for the "no" to match the "nada"?
aiislove
15d ago
Does anyone else ever watch/listen to Glenn Diesen's "The Greater Eurasia Podcast"? The tone of the show is rather dry and boring but many of his guests seem to talk about Europe getting nuked like it is as inevitable as the weather forecast.
I am no geopolitical expert by any means so my first reaction was that this was just a tactic to kick Europe/NATO into action to better defend itself against Russia, but one of the main guests proposing the nukes is Stanislav Krapivnik, (who sometimes seems slightly drunk in my opinion,) and apparently is on Russia's side in the Ukraine conflict. Since that's the case I suppose he might be exaggerating Russia's power boastfully or trying to instill fear into the West but he is not the only guest who seems to treat nuclear action as an inevitability. And it is not that Russia would nuke Ukraine, but rather they mention targets like Germany or Finland or other NATO nations.
Can I get a sanity check on this? Does anyone on this board share the view that Russia is going to use nuclear weapons on Europe in the next year or two?
aiislove
21d ago
Gemini's voice chat has been out for a while (a few months at least) and I will use it occasionally. The other day I drove to a random historic town and didn't feel like reading so I just pulled it up to ask it about the town I was in and specific things I'm interested in (asking about the architecture and for unusual facts and so on.) It did an ok job but was a bit repetitive and didn't have a super deep understanding of the town. I wanted to keep talking to it but I got back into my car and when it went to the car's speakers, it would begin to talk and then apparently hear itself and immediately stop talking, and then just loop that over and over. I hope they fix that soon.
When they first came out with it I would use it to practice German and then Spanish and then Japanese all in the same conversation so that was fun. It was pretty good at telling me mistakes I made in a constructive way.
aiislove
21d ago
book a Motel/Cheap Hotel instantly on my phone. Think "Holiday Inn Express" grade of places. Clean enough
Any tips for sussing out hotels without knowing the area? I have stumbled into some horribly seedy hotels lately that all have cheerful 4+ average ratings on every website. It makes me really hate the entire yelp/google maps/whatever system as a whole.
(Staying On food) the reality really is grim for truckers
Have thought about this a lot lately. Idk if it's true in the entire country but at least I can always count on Panda Express and Chipotle in most places I've been for a relatively healthy relatively cheap meal. You're playing Russian roulette with a lot of other places imo and I just don't like regular tier fast food (so expensive now and really unsatiating)
aiislove
21d ago
Cool video, thanks for sharing it. I don't really have much to say about it and I'm not an expert at all, I'm mostly responding to boost engagement and hope someone with some good theories/explanations responds to your video.
To me it does look like a sort of four-pointed beam of light from a spotlight situation because otherwise I don't know how four "crafts" could so quickly move out from a central point like that. I have a hard time making out details in dark videos- did you splice together multiple clips, or is this the same clip slowed down/zoomed in several times? Was it over land or sea?
aiislove
24d ago
ACNH. They seriously need to add some passive income systems in the next game, it is just so tedious digging up fossils and taking them to the museum all the time, and not the kind of tedious that is fun.
Also got through Once Upon a Katamari recently, I have always been a fan of the series. I am really grateful they decided to do an entirely new game, but it has some rough edges. The controls are pretty frustrating (pro tip: turning off rumble/vibration helps A LOT), the music is probably the worst in the series, and there aren't enough eternal levels. I do hope they keep making new Katamari games though.
aiislove
24d ago
I sold a bunch of clothing on Vinted and eBay last year because I didn’t like the idea of some awful thrift store employee reselling it
What? Are they awful because they're scalpers (which you are too now) or are they awful because you wouldn't want someone else making money off of something you donated when you could make the money off it yourself, or are they awful because you see yourself superior in class to thrift store workers?
aiislove
28d ago
Why does the bulk of the evidence of extraterrestrial life that people focus on recently seem to come from the government rather than from scientists? It seems that every time you listen to the latest news on the topic, the government is providing wild claims while mainstream scientists seem to accept or provide nearly nothing as evidence of ET life.
I usually like Ross Douthat but I recently watched his video with Diana Pasulka regarding UFOs and ETs. I am not predisposed to making accusations of government plants everywhere but the interview was so bizarre that it felt like she was just a plant to sow chaos and confusion in the space to me. I have always felt that the term "UAP" was suspicious as it is exactly the sort of SEO hashtag you would create if an entity wanted to track and analyze a certain specific narrative or conversation around a topic that already exists but within a specific context (like government-synthesized data.)
I have always had nightmares about UFOs and found aliens very scary. Have any of you ever seen a UFO or encountered an alien?
aiislove
1mo ago
This reads like a feminine fantasy of the male psyche. You hope that the man you admire wants to be an alpha chad. In reality the average man prefers something like 50s white America or postwar Japan, where every man is guaranteed an acceptable female mate. Every man knows that if he lived in Alpha World he's screwed. Every man! Every man who has ever lived has grown up around men older and taller than they are. We have all been cucked by the father, the uncle, the brother, the cousin, the grandfather, and the jock down the street since the day we were born. I have met men a hundred times hotter than I am desperate to be screwed by a man 10 percent hotter than they are. Every day I see extremely hot men who seem completely unaware of their attractiveness with ridiculously ugly women.
In the 50s housewife-for-every-man scenario, all he has to do is behave, fit in, and one woman out there will be fine for him. We all know that as soon as that breaks down we're in a horrible competition with the fittest guy around. Men are obsessed with NOT being alpha chad males: Every day I see dozens of men who would be so hot if only they didn't have some fugly male ponytail or godawful neon polyester workout gear or xy other little signaling device that says to women they're vulnerable, to treat them easily, that they are not a rugged alpha male so please don't expect much, because they're embarrassed of their ranking in the sexual world of competition. Do women really like this? Men want to have their vulnerabilities assuaged by a woman but I think women find this off-putting.
Men relish competition, hierarchy, inequality and status.
As a man, I find competition unfair, hierarchy a hideous evil, inequality morally repugnant and status an empty and sinister mirage. I relish none of these things. If I find myself winning in any of these areas, it boosts my ego, but in an immoral and unethical way.
males cannot ever have true gender-based in-group solidarity
I think it is possible but only in extremely small groups of people, no larger than an extended family. I can accept that my father and uncles are perhaps a better mate for the women in my group, but that is with the understanding that they will step down at some point and I will dominate once their time passes. The complexity of modernity and the city erases the stability of this and erodes in-group solidarity. I suspect men in pre-60s America were able to come to some sort of equilibrium of understanding among each other that echoed this sort of arrangement in modernity but its undoing has been nothing but terrible for men after its interruption.
Monogamy was imposed on young men
I doubt this. I have always imagined it as a gentlemen's arrangement to equally distribute sex to everyone other than the alpha chads. Monogamy of 1950s seemed to result in millions of the offspring of non-chad-alpha men being now sexually outcompeted by minority and immigrant chad offspring in the USA today. Imagine men of any race moving en masse to Japan, or look at mating patterns of Thai nightlife: more dominant men of non-Asian descent outcompete the local 10th generation beta sons. If given a choice, these men should choose the monogamy path for solidarity with each other rather than screwing over the 90+% of men who are not alphas.
aiislove
1mo ago
I am confused by the narrative or popular opinion surrounding Elon Musk today. Every time I get on X he has retweeted some inflammatory race baiting thing that gets millions of views (which I generally agree with for context) and yet outside of a handful of "I bought this tesla before he was a nazi" bumper stickers which apparently exist I see little to no pushback on him or what he has done with X. Maybe I'm in a filter bubble and have really managed to mute leftist views in my life but a lot of his views are to me essentially white supremacist by the standards of the overton window of the west and yet he seems to suffer nearly no consequences for it. And at the same time he seems not to be doing anything outside of having too many white kids to raise with sufficient attention and retweeting about how bad things are in the UK or how the west is all going to be South Africa in a few years. Am I wrong? Is he doing anything to try to reverse the great replacement of whites? Has he suffered any major consequences for his beliefs?
aiislove
1mo ago
imo, ai generated porn other people created feels very cringe, but ai generated adult imagery I have prompted myself is not cringe at all, to me. I am sure the ai generated adult imagery that I have prompted myself is cringe to other people.
aiislove
1mo ago
I scored 64. This is such a crazy way to test face blindness. Once it got to the pixelated faces I did not recognize any of the faces. I have done other face blindness tests online in the past which have been a bit easier to me but I scored about the same in relation to the test's "average." I also know that I am significantly more face blind toward women than men: when I am meeting a bunch of new people in a new class, for example, it takes me a really long time to memorize the names of females especially. I do think I am relatively face blind though, recently I made the mistake of introducing myself to someone I had just met 5 minutes prior (granted it was in an overwhelming social situation where I'm usually anxious, but my friend and the person I did this to were both a bit annoyed with me.)
aiislove
1mo ago
He just did a long as hell Soft White Underbelly video too. (yes the channel which usually interviews prostitutes and child abuse victims and whatever). I watched the whole thing. He's kind of flat and creepy like a lot of recovered drug addicts. I'm surprised he's a democrat. His paintings are bad enough that they trigger a Harrison Bergeron response in my brain.
aiislove
1mo ago
The movie is very pretty, specially compared to the original series. This is to be expected; the animation of a 1979 TV show cannot possibly compete with the animation of a 2025 theatrical film. The colors are vibrant, with red and blue uniforms popping out of the screen.
I haven't watched the Netflix adaptation but I just watched the trailer and the OP sequence for it and I have to disagree. I am a huge fan of 70s anime (shoujo especially) and think the art style in the original version is a million times more attractive and effective than the art style of the new version. The 70s artists communicate so much in their sparseness and simplicity. The new version overloads you with a maximalist scrapbook aesthetic that looks very like, illustrator vector frutiger metro but sort of adapted to the 2020s. I mean the techniques of reproduction (the camera work or whatever process is used to convert the illustrations to a final image) has obviously "technically improved" but the charm and soul of the original is missing. It is similar to how AI generation or smartphone cameras continue to improve in clarity and definition but degrade in terms of soul and art and the sort of in between imprecision of the act of creation. The color grading also seems to lack cohesion in the new version compared to the original anime. And really I don't mean to disrespect the artists working today and it's good that they have careers at all but the taste to me is just a world apart from the taste of the 70s illustrators and animators.
aiislove
1mo ago
This status-and-love-seeking behavior from full grown adults seems increasingly cringe to me the older I get. I can't help but imagine it's downstream of feeling unloved by the parent as a child and they are desperate to seek love from the world instead. This hit me so hard a few years ago when I met up with a few friends while I was in another country and they insisted that everywhere we eat was statusmaxxing or whatever, the type of place you could brag about going, even to the extent that they wanted to walk out of a place run by a sweet old man when they deemed the food subpar. This stems from insecurity and once you grow out of it it's horrible to see in other people. The full grown adult who wants a golden child actor or a star is doing something so horrible and so tacky and I really doubt most of them are happy at the end of it. Britney's parents raised a global superstar and they probably spend every night wishing she was bringing in more money instead of dancing half naked on instagram. I don't sympathize with the parents.
Ah, this is a good idea, I don't know why I didn't think of that myself. I'd love to know if anyone here who knows of any good places to donate for this sort of thing. The other night I did a little research on the topic and the ACLU had a long screed against Flock cameras but I know the right generally dislikes this organization. I'd be happier donating to a neutral or bipartisan org instead if anyone can recommend one.
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