Only pedophiles defend pedophiles.
And I fucking HATE pedophiles.

Woody Allen is still a pedophile who raped one of his own young step-daughters and married another.

People who defend that shit are SICK.

  • 5 Posts
  • 126 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • They’re here to stay

    Eh, probably. At least for as long as there is corporate will to shove them down the rest of our throats. But right now, in terms of sheer numbers, humans still rule, and LLMs are pissing off more and more of us every day while their makers are finding it increasingly harder to forge ahead in spite of us, which they are having to do ever more frequently.

    and they’re going to get much better.

    They’re already getting so much worse, with what is essentially the digital equivalent of kuru, that I’d be willing to bet they’ve already jumped the shark.

    If their makers and funders had been patient, and worked the present nightmares out privately, they’d have a far better chance than they do right now, IMO.

    Simply put, LLMs/“AI” were released far too soon, and with far too much “I Have a Dream!” fairy-tale promotion that the reality never came close to living up to, and then shoved with brute corporate force down too many throats.

    As a result, now you have more and more people across every walk of society pushed into cleaning up the excesses of a product they never wanted in the first place, being forced to share their communities AND energy bills with datacenters, depleted water reserves, privacy violations, EXCESSIVE copyright violations and theft of creative property, having to seek non-AI operating systems just to avoid it . . . right down to the subject of this thread, the corruption of even the most basic video search.

    Can LLMs figure out how to override an angry mob, or resolve a situation wherein the vast majority of the masses are against the current iteration of AI even though the makers of it need us all to be avid, ignorant consumers of AI for it to succeed? Because that’s where we’re going, and we’re already farther down that road than the makers ever foresaw, apparently having no idea just how thin the appeal is getting on the ground for the rest of us.

    So yeah, I could be wrong, and you might be right. But at this point, unless something very significant changes, I’d put money on you being mostly wrong.




  • I don’t think it exists. What you’re looking for, I get with actual paid subscriptions to actual news sites. It takes several to get the spread of viewpoints I like, and of course I like them because I chose them all, lol.

    You want all that in a free sub. “No click bait, highly factual low editorial submissions,” indeed.

    For a free sub that works as a news aggregator, this community is great as-is: I very much appreciate the spread of articles as well as the time and interest people take to choose and post them. Of course some will be clunkers, but that’s on me if I clicked on them. No one put a gun to your head either.

    So if all this is beneath you like you say it is, then stop whining and start curating your own news feed with the news sources you like. It’s not like you’re actually posting any “no click bait, highly factual low editorial” articles yourself to lift the community as a whole.


  • I thought that was a good question so I looked it up, not least because one of the right’s oft-repeated accusations has been that “the libruls want to take our guns!” which to me means that the right has been thinking about taking them all along.

    Historically, authoritarian regimes are NOT big on letting citizens defend themselves against government, which is how the US got the Second Amendment to start with, so I’m still low-key convinced that the long-term strategy here is to create an environment of regular stochastic terrorism until the military is fully on board, and then to react to that public carnage by declaring all privately-held firearms illegal as part of the move to full martial law.

    But in the meantime, as the Brady Campaign, a long-established gun control group, says, for Project 2025 the plan is “Guns everywhere.”

    Project 2025 also seems to have a particular aversion to state-level concealed carry laws, and wants to overturn those as well.

    There is a good amount of information out there if you’re interested in looking further but that’s the gist of it. Project 2025 = guns are good, and lots of 'em . . . at least for now.


  • I’m sick and tired about hearing about Zorinn when there’s a dozen excellent Linux distros that aren’t derivative trash that astroturf social media and pass off other Foss projects as their own.

    Your quote, but when asked to name a better “easiest distro for Windows users” Fedora KDE was the best you could do.

    Somebody asked you a genuine question, looking for real information, and out of this “dozen excellent Linux distros” you came at her with, you lazily just shat out the name of a single one, and that being one of the more advanced distros out there.

    Hell yeah, try harder. People who ask genuine questions deserve genuine answers. Unless that’s just your best and you need pity.



  • I’d be surprised if he does. If he’s “sick and tired” of hearing about Zorin, it’s because Zorin is getting a lot of deservedly good reviews from the Windows crowd right now. If it really were ass he’d have nothing to say about it. The only social media I’m on is Lemmy, and I tried Zorin because it was highly ranked on Distrowatch, so if people are getting “astroturfed” elsewhere it’s news to me.

    But you should know I tried over twenty (conservative estimate) distros before I settled on Zorin. USB drives are cheap, and you can try as many distros as you like without ever having to install one. Don’t take my word for it, nor his: buy a handful of USB drives, create some LiveUSBs and start trying out whatever distros catch your attention. I found distrowatch.com to be a good front page to the distro world, with rankings and extremely detailed reviews: start there if you’re looking for a fairly exhaustive list of what’s out there.



  • The Dell logo is the BIOS loading, the black screen is your bootloader and the beginning of your OS loading, and of course the Z is Zorin loading. While it could be hardware, to be honest where it’s hanging for you makes me wonder about how well your Zorin video driver suits your actual hardware, based on some similar issues I had with Fedora doing the exact same thing that you describe.

    I am still learning Linux myself so I am not the best person to tell you what to do, but I know where I’d start if I were in your shoes: use the lshw command (see below) to get the details on your actual hardware, specifically the graphics chip; see if anyone else is having similar problems with the same graphics hardware; and in the meantime put Mint on a LiveUSB and run Mint for a while to see if it performs better or ends up doing the same thing.

    That’s just beginner tips off the top of my head; I know you will get better advice if you run your problem by the Linux communities, esp because they can tell you how to capture the load process to see exactly what’s causing it to hang, and I’m just guessing. But at least you now have some hints of where to start.

    Quick primer on lshw: To use lshw to see your hardware specs, type at a command prompt:

    sudo lshw -short

    If it says it’s not installed, to install it type

    sudo apt-get install lshw

    That will get you started, I hope. Either way, whatever you do will get you further toward a solution, whether that solution is a different distro or tweakling this one. I hope this helps.


  • Love it. Just wrote a separate comment about it. I ran the free versions for over a year, then decided to go to paid just to support the project. Paid gives you GUI for appearance adjustments and desktop “personalization” but not a whole lot else; other than superficials like that, under the hood the free version is exactly the same. I can’t remember what the Zorin folks say about it, get the details directly from them of course, but IMO don’t feel like you have to buy the paid version to get a true taste of how it will work for you.

    EDITED to add: This incessant, eternal negging shit from the Linux crowd kept me away from Linux for a long time. I found OPs question legitimate, which is why I answered it, but whether you like Zorin or not noobs should not be downvoted for simply soliciting opinions on a distro. I’m very fortunate that some people were generous enough with their time and answering questions to make me give it another go, but there were over thirty years between the first time I tried Red Hat that came on a dozen 3.25" floppies in the early 90s, and last year when I tried Linux again: that absence had EVERYTHING to do with the core haters that apply purity tests to any mention of any Linux distro that they personally find some fault in. Seriously, for the sake of Linux, shut the fuck up and piss off, unless you’re just concern trolling for Microsoft or some shit, in which case you’re doing a fine job, never stop.




  • Zorin is working out really well for me, esp on my older machines with slower processors and less RAM that choke a little on fuller distros. I enjoy the KDE Plasma distros, for example, but they’re a little too heavy for my older boxes and I was getting a lot of video stutter and unexplained shutdows, etc. I don’t get that with Zorin or Mint. For me Mint works just as well as Zorin and picks up all my hardware just as handily, it just feels a little basic for what I’m used to. But Zorin hits just right in every direction for my needs. It’s a good distro for Windows noobs, that’s for sure.


  • It’s from an Arthur Conan Doyle story; Sherlock solved the case of the horse stolen at night by noting that the dog didn’t bark, ergo, the dog was a direct familiar of the person who stole the horse, because it would have barked at a stranger. It’s a statement about guilt, and how silence is itself a powerful accusation in the right context, like when you’d expect a dog to bark (or a noise to be made in a way it usually is) but strangely nothing happens, all remains silent.

    The way the phrase is used in the email is a bit off because the guilty party is neither a barking or non-barking dog, but look at the date of the email: April, 2011, after Epstein’s first conviction and around the time that victims started filing serious lawsuits, especially Virginia Giuffre, and going after the powerful men who not only abused them but then defamed them.

    At the time this was written, the previously reliable walls of wealth, connection, and privilege were already unraveling, Epstein was getting sued, the media kept poking around, his own moneyed friends were already starting to distance themselves . . . so in this email Epstein is essentially pointing to the unspoken guilt surrounding the ONE person in the middle of all his troubles for whom the dog hasn’t barked.




  • I’ve been using Duckduckgo with uBlock for years, so I had no real problems with anything like the hell of Google “sponsored content” until Duckduckgo started putting up their own AI search assistant. Since then I’ve gone from start.duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got tired of turning their search assist off and couldn’t reliably block it with uBlock because they kept changing it. (I delete all cookies after every browser session and do not maintain individual app accounts, so their AI settings options were never gonna work for me.)

    Because of the way my brain works, I literally don’t even want to see what AI says until I’ve done my own looking. Yet I never failed to turn it off, because I just can’t rely on it.

    Usually when I’m looking for something I’m in a hurry, so it’s less trouble for me to just pick my own sources, preferably older than 2023 if possible, and read a bit myself than to spend time getting blithely lied to, or even just suspect hallucination/omission to the point that I think I need to verify it before I can rely on it.

    It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, it is literally faster to skim three or four completely different primary sources than it is to try to verify the assertions in a single search assist paragraph: one is just light reading, the other is point by point comparison of the AI offering against multiple independent sources. So I read.

    I’ve never regretted summarizing a topic myself, but I’ve definitely gotten some rotten eggs from AI, both in blatant non-truths AND in holes of omission you could drive a truck through. I won’t make that mistake again. So for me, AI summaries are well worth staying wary of for now.