AFAIK, there’s nothing stopping any company from scraping Lemmy either. The whole point pf reddit limiting API usage was so they could make money like this.

Outside of morals, there is nothing to stop anybody from training on data from Lemmy just like there’s nothing stopping me from using Wikipedia. Most conferences nowadays require a paragraph on ethics in the submission, but I and many of my colleagues would have no qualms saying we scraped our data from open source internet forums and blogs.

I hate that I am defending Israel when I say this because what is occurring in Gaza is tragic, but a lot of people are confusing “Genocide” for perceived “War Crimes” as defined by international law and also confusing “Hamas” for “Palestine” or the “Palestinian Authority”.

Hamas is terrorist government (similar in nature to the Taliban) that receives a lot of external funding from countries that actively wish to see the death of Israel and all Jews, making Hamas the chief perpetrators of Genocide in this conflict despite how ineffective they have been in their goals.

Israel was attacked by this terrorist government, and is now defending itself with the expressed war goal of destroying Hamas. While Israel has had a tenuous relationship with the Palestinian people (namely the government’s active efforts to limit the Palestinian Authority and drag their feet on grant the PA more autonomy and their own state which is deplorable and inexcusable), they do not and have not wished to kill an entire culture of people.

Complicating matters, Hamas commonly employs warfare techniques that go against the Geneva Convention like placing government and military headquarters in basements of protected buildings like Hospitals and places of worship. The moment they do that, and abuse those international recognized sanctuaries, they become legitimate military targets leading to the tragic deaths of unwitting civilians.

People can object to the war on the grounds that war is tragic and results in many civilian casualties, but to make meritless claims is detrimental to both international institutions and to the definition of a Genocide. South Africa calls what Israel is doing a genocide, but also explicitly looks the other way with Ukraine and continues to forge close ties with Putin? (For the record, Russia’s actions in Ukraine are also not considered genocide under it’s strict international definition, but they have been found guilty of war crimes).

Israel has an internationally recognized right to defend itself, and it is doing that by dismantling Hamas through force. The Palestinian people are unfortunately caught in the crossfire. With that said, Israel’s methods to this end are not above criticism, and they have faced pressure from the US and Biden to limit civilian casualties wherever possible, and use ground forces to directly attack Hamas rather than relying on airstrikes that have resulted in many innocent deaths.

For those reading who think all war is bad, I’ll leave you with this quote from John Stuart Mills:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

Not quite, this was made with a ControlNet. A hybrid image wouldn’t work as well as this does. But the underlying visual phenomena is the same.

This is done by combining a Diffusion model with ControlNet interface. As long as you have a decently modern Nvidia GPU and familiarity with Python and Pytorch it’s relatively simple to create your own model.

The ControlNet paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.05543.pdf

I implemented this paper back in March. It’s as simple as it is brilliant. By using methods originally intended to adapt large pre-trained language models to a specific application, the author’s created a new model architecture that can better control the output of a diffusion model.

The aircraft hold their value, and actually appreciate. The actual cost is about $10k a year. Lots of people spend far more than that on other hobbies.

Over half of all pilots in the US (200k) hold a commercial pilot certificate and use flying as their sole source of income or as a way to supplement their income. Commercial pilots makes $50k a year until they can become airline pilots which have salaries starting at $100k.

My 1961 plane burns 25mpg, carries 4 people, and goes 160mph. I own a car that gets worse fuel economy.

Because us plane people have a crippling addiction…

Small aircraft have a carbon equivalent to large cars. My plane is from 1961 and has a fuel economy of 15mpg as the crow flies (arguably closer to 25mpg because of straight line measurements versus winding roads that can almost double the distance), seats 4 people comfortably, and flies at 160 mph.

The honeymoon phase for Lemmy is over. No one cares anymore about someone expressing themselves (I still do–this is based on my observations).

A lot of people in this situation have already tried everything, and they are complaining on the internet because they feel like there is nothing else they can do. Most people won’t even complain about it with their friends. I know I didn’t until one day I got drunk camping. That was the trigger for me to do something about it, because it was clearly eating away at me.

I had many conversations with my wife following that, and how much our sexless marriage really bothered me, but that I am still completely and totally in love with her. We don’t have kids, so there’s not anything keeping us together. We agreed to an open relationship with our rules, and each of us has a veto which could stop the arrangement at any time. We are still completely committed to one another and love spending time together. Things haven’t been better, now when I think about being with another woman, I don’t need to feel guilty about it.

And I think this is the natural state of humanity. Everyone needs a long-term partner for stability and to care for one another, but people always felt the need to cheat as well. Monogamy is as core to our DNA and survival as is Adultery. But because we’ve talked about it, there is no sneaking around necessary, no lying. We are completely honest with each other on everything.

The same argument could be said for an apartment building too. We need to collectively realize that Single Family Houses are a luxury that most of us will never see in our lifetimes. Our grandparents were able to enjoy them at low prices because the US had half the population it does today.

Restrictive building codes that only permit building SFH is the cause of our housing shortage and not short term rentals that consist of 0.2%-1% of all dwellings.