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Cake day: January 17th, 2025

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  • drthunder@midwest.socialto196@lemmy.worldTheater Rule
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    2 days ago

    I’ve mentioned in previous comments that I’m trans. The regime is specifically targeting trans people by reverting our passports, erasing us from government websites, defying court orders to move trans women to men’s prisons, making it legal to surveil us, etc.

    None of this would have happened if Harris was president. I agree that a lot of Democrats fucking suck, but trans people wouldn’t be freaking out trying to figure out how to survive if Harris had won. Everyone is going through shit, but we’re going through more. Republicans’ endgame is to have us either in the closet or dead. They’re probably getting away with disappearing Mahmoud Khalil and if they do they’re probably gonna go for trans organizers at some point.

    Biden being president gave us four years to breathe. Harris would have given us another four years. I think the country would have had a complete fascist takeover in the next fifteen or twenty years regardless, but we could have at least given ourselves more time to prepare.


  • drthunder@midwest.socialto196@lemmy.worldTheater Rule
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    2 days ago

    People who refused to vote and are now complaining about either the Democrats or about Trump doing what he said he’d do are similar to people who voted for Trump and are now complaining about Trump doing what he said he’d do. Like what did you expect? And thanks for letting me as a trans person get erased from existence, by the way.






  • Art is more than a job, it’s one of those fundamentally human things that we all do. Half the value of any form of art is the fact that a person made it and put their thoughts and feelings into it. I can make some guesses about the person who made this by their artistic choices. I’m a musician and when I listen to a song, I like to listen for the artist’s influences, how the guitarist plays a certain note or phrase, etc.

    Probably no one is a bank teller for fun. A lot of the hate for generative AI comes from the broader circumstances around it too. The people making money off it haven’t shown that they value anything besides money and power, it uses an insane amount of energy, etc.




  • Open source software isn’t the same as generative AI at all, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people who put stuff on GitHub pre-ChatGPT don’t want their code scraped for Microsoft to profit off of. I took my personal projects off of GitHub a year or two ago for that reason. Aside from that, open source code is put out there with the intention of being used freely and a lot of art isn’t. Art floating around the internet pre-2022 was made either with the intention of not getting paid for it, in which case whatever, or the artist wanted to get paid and was presumably paid but their art ended up on the internet anyway (but they still got paid at least).

    My main issues with generative AI models are that most if not all of them were created without the artists’ or developers’ permission, the profits are going entirely to oligarchs, and training the models takes an obscene amount of energy that contributes to global warming. These models devalue actual art even further and have made the internet a worse place by making it easier to make spam and disinformation. It’s too late to fix spam and disinformation, but we can still value art. I think indie game devs would be singing a different tune if Steam was flooded with games made entirely with AI slop.

    edit: For what it’s worth, I paid for my copy of Reaper and the drum plugin I use. I also paid for all my guitar gear.



  • drthunder@midwest.socialtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldWhy isn't anyone helping?
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    17 days ago

    I don’t claim this election was in isolation but I agree with everything else you’ve said. We need people to vote for the harm reduction, and we need people to organize because our system of government is trash. Biden being in office gave us four years to organize with the usual amount of opposition instead of the federal government being ordered to go after anyone the fascists don’t like; his response to the Gaza camps last year was fucked up but if/when something like that happens again, Trump’s gonna have the military kill people.

    I think this was inevitable too, it would have taken the people at the top choosing to fight fascism like the threat it is and I didn’t/don’t see that happening. I voted for Harris because it gives us breathing room, and if Trump doesn’t survive the next four years it would be harder for the fascist movement to retain its power if they didn’t have complete control of the government. At the same time I’ve been involved in activism for the last few years, because we need people to do both.


  • drthunder@midwest.socialtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldWhy isn't anyone helping?
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    17 days ago

    I think if you voted for Democrats you get to complain, but if you were eligible to vote and didn’t have to jump through a ton of hoops to do so you don’t get to complain. This could have been avoided.

    edit: to be clear, I don’t think Democratic leadership really cares that we’ve got a dictator. But voting for them was harm reduction and too many people couldn’t be bothered, whatever the reason.