Yeah - while Temple was my first exposure, but Ice Station is the best place to start, and up there with his best work. Later stuff goes from silly fun to just… lost.

Cancel culture strikes again… From the right as usual.

Palestinians killed in Gaza aren’t terrorists - they’re the victims of a genocide.

Since October 7th, 44,000 Palestinians have been killed compared to 1,706 Israelis. The stats over the past few decades don’t deviate much from this ratio. Israel is killing many times more Palestinians, and a higher ratio of children, they’re seizing land, holding many times more hostages, and committing and proudly documenting countless warcrimes.

Does Palestine have the right to defend itself like Israel? What would that look like to you? I ask mostly because you’re actively supporting an ongoing genocide while blaming the victims of that genocide while applying inconsistent, nonsensical standards across the two groups.

As an alternative, you could try self-hosting searxng if you’re that way inclined.

For anyone that couldn’t bother reading the above comment, I’ve given a summary…

hurrrrr I’m incapable of engaging the point people are making.

The cartoon plays with the emotions like the ai image, but the important difference is that people won’t mistake the cartoon for documentation of something that happened.

The cartoon is a fairy tale, that AI image is a lie - the distinction is important.

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There’s self-hosted LLMs, (e.g. Ollama), but for the purposes of this conversation, yeah - they’re centrally hosted, compute intensive software services.

Unlike regular piracy, accessing “their” product hosted on their servers using their power and compute is pretty clearly theft. Morally correct theft that I wholeheartedly support, but theft nonetheless.

Yeah - that’s all part of the “unless enough people leave” point.

It really depends on the market though - if it’s not an essential good, it doesn’t need to be replaced (online games). If there’s adequate competition, there’s largely undifferentiated alternatives (utilities around me)… and if not, you probably don’t have a choice (your local government services, monopolies, and shallow markets for essential goods).

Unless they hate it enough to ditch a business or service in great enough numbers that it costs the business more money than they save by outsourcing to a computer, people had better get used to it.

Strange of you to respond to a comment about the fakes being shared in this way…

Do you have the same prescriptions in relation to someone with a stash of CSAM, and if not, why not?

The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.

And is that OK?

I’m going to jump in on this one and say yes - it’s mostly fine.

I look at these things through the lens of the harm they do and the benefits they deliver - consequentialism and act utilitarianism.

The benefits are artistic, comedic and political.

The “harm” is that Putin and or Trump might feel bad, maaaaaaybe enough that they’d kill themselves. All that gets put back up under benefits as far as I’m concerned - they’re both extremely powerful monsters that have done and will continue to do incredible harm.

The real harm is that such works risk normalising this treatment of regular folk, which is genuinely harmful. I think that’s unlikely, but it’s impossible to rule out.

Similarly, the dissemination of the kinds of AI fakes under discussion is a negative because they do serious,measurable harm.

Vetting of the app downloads should fall on the app stores.

Vetting of the platform usage should fall on the platform owners.

The app isn’t the problem any more than a web browser is - it’s a dumb front-end for the platform. The platform is the problem.