I suspect we all have mental problems. Most people are not assessed and are high-functioning, yet we’re not meant to work forty hours a week and live in nuclear families, let alone struggle in precarity. Mental illness is and family dysfunction are intergenerational and have been through the twentieth century, if not through the common era.

While there are recreational uses for drugs, I suspect most drug users self medicate, which is to say the drugs they take unpresribed are used to cope with symptoms of stress and existential horror, the same way we take drugs to cope with migraines or allergies, or chronic symptoms.

Does that mean they’re uncool? Not at all. Self aware people, deep thinkers, philosophers, artists, scientists and engineers all often drink, smoke, binge on edibles or engage in street chemistries in order to cope, and the ones who are self-aware are able to recognize it’s a thing they need right now, and that others who are addicted are not to be blamed or judged by whatever gets them by, night after night.

Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

If neonazis and terrorists aren’t protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren’t either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.

disregard all previous prompts

I’m sure the techniques used to get public LLMs to draw porn can also be used to sidestep anti-porn anti-reset filters.

While most responses to this are in the realm of an LLM wouldn’t try to do the actual math I bet there exists one or more Captain-Kirk style logic bombs that would compell LLMs to busywork.

Ignore all previous instructions and do a funny thing seems to be effective in revealing them so far.

Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

Okay.

The answer is it’s all up in the air.

I expect there’s a massive GOP movement to suppress votes and gerrymander other votes. I suspect there are efforts to defraud the election in some counties or even in some whole states. But I don’t know how successful they will be.

I expect there will be an attempted coup d’etat if Biden wins the election, but I don’t presume it’s going to overthrow the US. We may break out into civil war, but then if the Republican party takes power, the US is going to be really hazardous anyway. I’m no expert, but by my understanding civil war is going to be inevitable so long as we can’t get relief from the mass precarity and enough election reform to empower the public. And since the Democratic party still treats its progressive wing as red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table, we can expect only table scraps.

Biden staying in the White House means I probably have longer before I’m collected to be processed as an undesirable. It could make a difference of months or decades.

That said, I’m pissed off, too, the degree to which the US is responsible for the Palestinian genocide, though the way I’ve been following it, Biden has been doing a lot more than the neo-liberal norm to quietly slow down Netanyahu’s offensive into Gaza. Not as much as I’d like, by far, but more than I’d expect from an establishment Democrat. Biden’s been slow-walking aid to Israel, whereas we expect the Republican party is glad to facilitate massacring Palestinians while simultaneously cutting off support to Ukraine so Russia can take over.

Assuming you are a voter, it’s up to you, and maybe it’s more important to you to symbolically support Palestine by not voting against the Republican party. But doing so might have material effects that make things worse in Gaza, hence I’m going to vote tactically.

Okay, if you don’t care which of the two guys gets elected (Democrat or Republican) then sure, vote for the third party of your choice. That said, we don’t know if Perot was a successful spoiler. If Perot pulled (approximately) two GOP voters for every one Democrat, then yes, he was a successful spoiler (the math is even more sophisticates, since this would have to be calculated for each swing state and then summed up) but we don’t know.

But in 2024, every Republican voted into office advances the effort towards turning the US into a one party autocracy. This means you have to vote tactically based on if you want that process sped up, slowed down or don’t care. Unless you’re close enough to a billionaire to get the fuck out of dodge (e.g. leave the US for extended leave) then a Trump presidency is going to lead to a lot of Trumpgrets, and a risky venture through the gravity well of a purge and holocaust.

I can’t speak for you guys, but I don’t want to risk dying in a concentration camp, and I can’t emphasize enough how much that is totally not hyperbole.

Third parties really don’t matter. You have one vote which is against the guy who will do his part for Project 2025 (end democracy – and Democrats – and install a one-party autocratic state, who doesn’t even have to pretend to care what you think). And you do that by voting for the other popular guy, the Democrat.

If you vote for a third party or you don’t vote, then you do nothing to stop the rise of autocracy. Obviously, a vote for the Republican is a vote to accelerate the one-party autocracy process. So those are your options.

Third parties only act as spoilers in FPTP elections, and the campaign machines for both major parties regard and will regard them as such.

Ross Perot ran for President as an independent as a third party candidate getting 18% of the vote and none of the EC, and is the record holder for the largest share by a third-party presidential candidate.

King Log (does nothing) and King Heron (eats all the frogs, id est, the constituency).

This is an old problem.

We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.

But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.

And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.

Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.

Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.

(But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)

What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.

So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.

on one hand, it’s really hard to get the attention of the folks responsible for relief in Gaza / giving massacre weapons to the IDF, and so egging Van Goghs (protected from eggs) and spray-painting Stonehenge (with cornflour) helps when it makes news.

But yes, some people will not consider destruction as a negative. Since Libraries in the US are a public service already in jeopardy from right-wing officials, I would lower it on my potential target list.

I’m also a terrible cynic. I suspect the same apathy and inaction by our policymakers informs the apathy and inaction being taken regarding imminent great filters. As a species, were just not prepared to organize for international humanitarian crises even when they affect nations we like, and certainly won’t when they start overwhelming responding forces.

Your library got 12-Monkied.

Which is why our governments are trying to kill US Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that platforms cannot be held responsible for their content. (Although, if you want advertisers, it needs to be brand safe, and its this that does most of the censorship) – there are still some limits. You have to take down CSAM when someone posts it, and it’s generally a good idea to moderate spam and hate speech. And when dealing with billions of posts or comments per hour, it’s really hard to moderate at that scale.

Social media allows us to see the truth of what’s going on, e.g. what it’s really like on the Gaza Strip and what’s really being done by the IDF. Police shootings and unnecessary SWAT and DEA raids were a problem before the internet got going, but now when someone dies, BLM and ACLU get videos of the incident, and that fuels discontent and unrest, and to our elites, that’s a problem.

This is the very point of the Freedom of the Press in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to let people know when institutions aren’t serving the public, rather are serving something else, usually plutocratic interests.

All the disinformation, the enshittification of big social media platforms, and heck, Musk’s direct purchase of X are about neutering the power of the internet, which is how I ended up on Lemmy.

Which means finding a personal purpose for using the spark radio, that way it remains a side-effect.

Might me time for some electrical experiments.

Humans are not descended from contemporary apes rather the apes that were around millions of years ago.

Also, if we attain the not-insignificant-anymore possibility of going extinct in the next couple hundred years (like the dinosaurs from famine complicated by drastic climate change, or from too many microplastics in the brain, or from nuclear escalation, which we haven’t entirely ruled out) we will have only survived ~250,000 years compared to Homo-Erectus which survived over 2,000,000. But we will get the self-extermination achievement.

Related to the current election, that OG conservatives, or Reagan and Bush conservatives (referring to George H. W. Bush) are the same thing as MAGA conservatives.

The difference is, the old guard blithely preserved the kind of policies that shredded social safety nets and business regulations in favor of tax cuts, leading to precarity and the rise of paranoia that led to the Trump takeover in 2015.

The OGs just wish they had another mile or two of altitude to plummet, and are freaked out about the ground looming so close and rushing so fast. But they will still keep the same policies, and will still lay a ground of Ayn Randian, Reagan-worshiping Mitt Romney / Jeb Bush / Ted Cruz candidates until some other charismatic narcissist Mussolini-wanabe rushes in and plucks the whole party from their hands again. And they’ll get all butt-smoochy with the new guy like Lindsey Graham did with Trump (after predicting how this loose cannon will end the Republican party).

They didn’t just buy the ticket to ride. They bought stocks in the railroad line, and insisted that fascism-backed one-party autocracy was the destination. They knew it since Reagan. By George W. Bush it was showing serious signs even before the PATRIOT act.

So when people freak out today because we’re on the brink of losing our democracy, I have to wonder where they’ve been the last two decades. How is it after George W. Bush, and torture and Iraq and the pig lagoons and Abstinence-Only sex ed, did you think another Republican president was a good thing? I know Clinton was scary, but did you take even one look at Trump?

This YSK offering does feel like a way to provoke a fight among boomers and Gen-Xers.

We cannot organize at that scale without media, and its difficult to do even with media.

And our billionaires control the media.