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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 15th, 2021

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  • Idk why communists defend China’s every move. Communism can be defended without excusing China’s authoritarian practices. I have Chinese friends living in China who tell me all kinds of horrific stories that they’ve had to deal with because of China’s mass surveillance (and more). That isn’t western propaganda, that’s people’s lived experiences. There is literally a “Great Firewall of China” lmao. China IS bad when it comes to their mass surveillance and suppression of speech. USA IS bad when it comes to their letting giant corporations have such free rein that it makes us all into serfs. Why compare to China? Because China is a great comparison.




  • Ironically, cars are stopping me. Roads used to be for walking, and now they’re for cars. They gave us sidewalks and now some places don’t have them, and are unwalkable. The bike lanes either don’t exist or are too dangerous to use. It’s all roads and stroads now, with speed limits dangerous to pedestrians, and large SUVs meaning that car crashes with a pedestrian are more likely to end in death.

    The amount of people in cars has also crippled public transportation. Buses aren’t quick, and there are so few of them in general. Not to mention the lack of high speed trains, and the inefficiency of our subways.

    Giant parking lots with no cars took our parks. Took our public spaces. Took our nature. And they’re everywhere. Everywhere I look is dull, grey asphalt.

    It’s depressing to be outside. And where would I walk to? Everything is too far away to walk to. It used to be a 5-15 minute walk away. Now it’s more like 40 minutes to hours…

    I’m tired of human interests and public transportation being overlooked so that people can drive a couple minutes faster to their destination. When people in Europe, Japan, and China can just… get on a train.

    Sorry for the rant but I hate this bs




  • It has been found that the greatest deterrent is “likelihood of getting caught”, and not the actual penalty. Think of the war on drugs. No matter how harsh they made the consequences, the drug trade continued. It’s like this: how likely are you to return a wallet you found to a lost and found if a cop was watching you, versus if you were out in the middle of the woods when you found the wallet?

    It doesn’t matter if the penalty for not returning the wallet is death. If the likelihood of you getting caught is tiny enough, you will feel less terrified of playing those odds. Or at least, the average person will.

    The death penalty isn’t a deterrent if you’re certain it will never apply to you.


  • Ok doomer.

    I say the above not as an insult, but because I want to make a point.

    Look up doomism. It’s a tool of climate change deniers. We are not dead yet. Nothing going on now is truly impossible to fix. It’s certainly not easy. It’s hard af. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we should let ourselves give up. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into a doomer mindset. Because the very moment we do, the moment we accept the doom, then the doom becomes our fate.

    Don’t give up. Don’t encourage other people to give up. Don’t say it’s over when we’re still fighting. It’s only over when it’s over.

    I bet World War II must have been psychologically devastating to witness. It must have felt like the whole world was falling apart. Like it would never bring itself back together. Can you imagine? Watching Hitler take over country after country. Watching the bombs fall in London. And the Cold War. Where people were so sure it was the end of humanity, because we were going to kill ourselves dropping nukes on each other.

    There are so many moments it was horrible. So horrible that we couldn’t even imagine there would be a way out. A good future.

    But there was. Things got better. Countries rebuilt. The Cold War ended. No one dropped any nukes.

    See, climate change, and companies taking our data, and AI, and the rich getting richer… all that? That’s our WWII. That’s our thing causing hopelessness and devastation and fear in everyone.

    The doomism is a plague we’ve been dealing with since probably the dawn of humanity.

    We can get through this. Maybe we won’t. But the chance we will isn’t even that small. As long as there’s a chance: fight for it.


  • I got a 17/20, which is awesome!

    I’m angry because I could’ve gotten an 18/20 if I’d paid attention to the thispersondoesnotexists’ glasses, which in hindsight, are clearly all messed up.

    I did guess that one human-created image was made by AI, “The End of the Journey”. I guessed that way because the horses had unspecific legs and no tails. And also, the back door of the cart they were pulling also looked funky. The sky looked weirdly detailed near the top of the image, and suddenly less detailed near the middle. And it had birds at the very corner of the image, which was weird. I did notice the cart has a step-up stool thing attached to the door, which is something an AI likely wouldn’t include. But I was unsure of that. In the end, I chose wrong.

    It seems the best strategy really is to look at the image and ask two questions:

    • what intricate details of this image are weird or strange?
    • does this image have ideas indicate thought was put into them?

    About the second bullet point, it was immediately clear to me the strawberry cat thing was human-made, because the waffle cone it was sitting in was shaped like a fish. That’s not really something an AI would understand is clever.

    One the tomato and avocado one, the avocado was missing an eyebrow. And one of the leaves of the stem of the tomato didn’t connect correctly to the rest. Plus their shadows were identical and did not match the shadows they would’ve made had a human drawn them. If a human did the shadows, it would either be 2 perfect simplified circles, or include the avocado’s arm. The AI included the feet but not the arm. It was odd.

    The anime sword guy’s armor suddenly diverged in style when compared to the left and right of the sword. It’s especially apparent in his skirt and the shoulder pads.

    The sketch of the girl sitting on the bench also had a mistake: one of the back legs of the bench didn’t make sense. Her shoes were also very indistinct.

    I’ve not had a lot of practice staring at AI images, so this result is cool!


  • Actual Budget went open-source a while back! It’s self-hostable and fantastic alternative to YNAB. YNAB’s budgeting philosophy has garnered a bit of a cult following, and I highly recommend their budget method (which is a mix of envelope and zero-based budgeting, iirc). Actual Budget is built to mimic YNAB, so it’s perfect. There’s a community of contributors adding features. There’s an option to encrypt your budget, so that whatever server you host it on cannot see it. I highly recommend this app.

    Another up-and-coming alternative to YNAB is Budget with Buckets, which is not free. But does have an unlimited free trial lol, and a good privacy policy. It’s still developing though, but it is good!