That, plus I think its to get you more invested. Like if you have the app on your phone you might want to use it again, or youll forget about it and then see it later and think about their product/service/whatever.

In the modern age so many things that should just be websites are apps and many things that should be apps/programs are websites

Democratic primaries do have issues, yeah, particularly in the presidential race. But I wouldn’t say theyre meaningless in local elections. Still, definitely a lot of issues, but voting in primaries still does far more than refusing to vote in the main election ever would.

Every year the DNC says “we got less votes this year! Must be the centrists voting for republicans, we gotta be more moderate!” and then somehow those folks turn around and say “the democrats are too moderate, if enough of us don’t vote, the DNC will see they are losing support and realize they need to come back left!”

I will always understand having grievances for the democratic party because all they do is defend the status quo - I do too - but not voting over that is just fucking stupid. You want to change that? Go to protests, vote in primaries, support local initiatives for ranked choice voting, donate to causes you find actually beneficial, support local politicians that dont just support the status quo, support movements you believe in. If its about Gaza, speak up about that, donate to humanitarian funds, etc. There are ao many things you can do that can impact these things. But refusing to vote does actually fucking nothing for that cause.

There is no world in which more people refusing to vote for Kamala would have gotten us a better president or stopped genocide in gaza. Or really had any impact in any way that wasn’t making trump more likely to win. IMO the folks that did that were doing it more for themselves so they could feel morally superior because they didnt vote for the candidate that supported genocide or the “status quo” even though it literally never would have had any impact on either of those things.

(And let’s be real - trump is way worse for Gaza than Kamala would have been. I’m sure she wouldn’t have done enough, just like Biden, but at least there are voices in that party calling out Israel. Those voices fall far more deaf on this administration’s ears)

Free speech has returned guys!!! Comedy is legal again!!! You can say whatever you want as long as it aligns with the vision of the glorious leader!

Yeah this is a weird selection of companies. What about Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, even 4chan?

At the very least the social media sites that use algorithmic recommendations heavily. The recent shooting in Colorado got me thinking about how social media algorithms that repeatedly pushes content thats found to engage can easily cause people to fall into a spiral of radicalization. Even just the slightest interest in something, or even shock, can trigger their algorithms to get to work recommending similar stuff. News sites mentioned the kid in Colorado that shot up the school had social media accounts full of shit that glorified school shootings. How’d that start? Maybe something popped up that made a joke about school shootings and he thought it was funny cause its “edgy” or something? And then it remembers that, and pushes another similar post, and another, and on and on until this kid’s feed is supposedly full of this kind of content. I don’t know if that happened but it seems likely.

But nah, its valve that they’re going after. Cause I guess its always the video games that are to blame, right?

And discord? That’s just a fancy chat board. What’s next, should we question IRC? Email?

I’d argue they do make strategic decisions, its just that the strategy is always increasing quarterly earnings and their own assets.

A game made for kids should not allow sexually explicit material on their platform. And, in fact, they don’t, this kind of content is very clearly and explicitly against roblox’s content policy but they fail to enforce it.

This isn’t an age verification problem, its a moderation problem. A massive one. There’s hundreds of games that exist almost entirely for the purpose of grooming ppl (a common one is so called “bathroom simulators” iirc) and roblox frequently doesnt do anything about them until there’s public outcry about ine particular game, no matter how many reports come in or how obvious it is.

I mean I could almost see that? Helldivers is kinda a satire on the american brand of fascism so it could be argued its an anti-fascist peace of media. But that’s a stretch to say the least.

But my real issue with this is that federal investigators saw something they had absolutely no clue what it is and called it a transgender symbol. Its an incredible amount of bias in a particularly very bigoted way.

Reminds me of a lyric from The Clash - “taking off his turban, they said, ‘is this man a jew?’” They see something unknown to them and just assign it to the marginalized group they have a preconceived notion of being bad.

At least its 2 games bundled together?

Inb4 they say “its two games, so this will be $140!”

Ok but these are meant to be in bike lanes, sharing space with regular bikes. Part of the point of bike lanes was because it was dangerous for bikes to be sharing space with vehicles that can go so much faster than them.

Edit: imo if it has a throttle which can be used to keep up with motor vehicles then it is a motor vehicle. It should be classed with motorcycles.

If its gonna be considered a bicycle, it should have at the very least a speed limit on the throttle, or maybe no throttle allowed at all and pedal assist only.

The same day, a school in Colorado got shot up by someone who had fallen deep into the alt-right pipeline. It was known that this student was viewing white supremacist, extreme right content. Not a word from the president about that radical right wing rhetoric being to blame or anything of the sort.

Edit: kid also shot himself after. Alt-right pipeline hurts those that fall into it too.

This says that the “sequence of arrows” was interpreted as a transgender symbol.

Now we know that the sequence of arrows was “up, right, down, down, down”

…that’s the strategem code for the 500kg bomb in helldivers 2.

The ATF interpreted a video game reference as a transgender symbol…

Edit: another claim I’m seeing, quote from snopes:

Some users online claimed officials had misinterpreted “TRN,” an engraving found on ammunition produced by Turan Ammunition, a Turkish company, as “transgender ideology.”

This is a more logical mistake to make but is also an embarrassing and irresponsible mistake from the ATF if true.

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Yes. People seem to be saying this is not a real video and that the white house generated it with AI. That is what I would say it means to say the video “is AI” - particularly because an AI interpolated video is still a real video.

Whether the interpolation is done with AI or not, I don’t know. AI interpolation is fairly common but there are older methods that produce similar artifacts. Based on some of the interpolated frames I’m leaning slightly towards it being AI interpolation but I don’t know well enough to say.

See some of my later replies. I’ve looked at it frame by frame and it looks exactly like the artifacts you’d see from motion interpolation. They can look very similar to AI artifacts.

I know. But that can totally happen in interpolated frames. Look at the cat video on the Wikipedia page. There are moments when the toy dissapears, when the kittens head splits into two, when one arm morphs into another… stuff like this is totally possible and even common for motion interpolation.

I’m looking at it more and I’m fairly certain this is just interpolated.

Look at this frame:

Seems to me to be pretty normal. No weird hand stuff, fingers look fine.

Now look at the next two frames, particularly the second one:

Totally jank. Fingers are blotchy, there’s a ghost finger, overall looks super fake. But then look at the next two frames:

Second to last has a little bit of weirdness still, but by the last frame it looks totally legit and real. No blotchy fingers, no ghost fingers, overall looks very normal.

That kind of behavior - where some frames look completely fine and in between ones look blotchy and weird - is exactly what you expect from motion interpolation.

Look at the example on a cat video on wikepedia, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation

The framerate is much lower on the original video here, but you can see a lot of the same kinds of artifacts. Blotchy limbs, “ghosts” in movment, things morphing in ways they shouldn’t… its very similar to what’s seen in the trump video. And mind you, to my knowledge this video is done with older interpolation methods that had nothing to do with genAI.