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RIMR

2,314 karma · joined August 6, 2014

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RIMR··on Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking
Look, I'm usually pretty sympathetic when people complain about drive-by AI scraping like this, but the amount of pearl-clutching here is exhausting.

Yes, it's a game for kids. Yes, the company that makes it just scraped up a bunch of adult content. No, that does not mean they are going to give adult content to children.

Whoever wrote this was aiming to be as aggrieved as possible. It's performative, and I am having trouble taking it seriously.

RIMR··on Peta releases video showing experiments on infant monkeys at Univ of Washington
This is a wildly dishonest take. The only reason there's less animal testing now is that they defunded science across the board. The current administration absolutely does not care about animal rights.
RIMR··on Peta releases video showing experiments on infant monkeys at Univ of Washington
I understand what they are saying. It makes me sad too, but I still support it. I "don't care" in the sense that I have zero intent to make it stop, but I still feel empathy towards animals.
RIMR··on Peta releases video showing experiments on infant monkeys at Univ of Washington
The average factory-farmed animal is treated with even worse levels of cruelty than this, for a far lesser return, and I still eat meat because it is the path of least resistance.

The benefits of animal research for medicine, even if "there is no clear evidence that the experiments led to changes in public health recommendations" for any one specific lab, are too great to throw away over a bleeding-heart animal welfare story.

I don't celebrate the cruelty; in fact, I think things should be far different, mostly for the current state of factory farming, but I am not an idealist who thinks that the suffering we bring these animals invalidates the benefits we bring our own species through these experiments.

There are some recent breakthroughs that make it way easier to do testing without animals, including biochips that use human cells for drug testing. I greatly support this and hope it spares more animals from experimentation, but for certain domains like one highlighted in this story (neurological research), I am willing to accept that animal testing is still necessary.

RIMR··on Railpass
Why are the stops in Germany, but the ticker sign says "somewhere near New York"?
RIMR··on Woman charged with computer fraud due to scam CashApp account being in her name
WA here.

Most definitely are.

RIMR··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
And barring people from "labeling things" is censorship, so I don't understand your point.

Speech that is hateful towards people because of their identities is hate speech. That is the widely accepted definition. It is not even a legal designation, nor does it need to be to concretely exist.

Denying the existence of hate speech isn't logical, because there are many unambiguous examples of it, and individuals and businesses have plenty of valid reasons not to tolerate it from the company they keep.

RIMR··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
This lesson doesn't make sense in a two-party system where the two parties have wildly different levels of trustworthiness.

The left suppressing lies only opens the door to the right suppressing the truth, because the right was an enemy of truth and a spreader of lies from the beginning. The answer can't be "allow the lies so the truth has a chance to survive", that's just a compromise that brings us further from the truth.

Demanding neutrality on truthfulness in mass communication, especially during extreme political turbulence, is a terrible idea.

RIMR··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
Anyone who is "fired up" about free speech but feels that their freedom of speech is being violated by someone other than the government has an explanation to give.

If the explanation is that they feel that other people have an obligation to listen to them, then I don't care.

My freedom of speech includes the freedom to reject other people's speech. If they can't tell the difference between a disagreement and suppression of speech, then that's their problem. The generous interpretation is that they don't fully understand the issue. The realistic explanation is that many people value their own freedom of speech over the freedom of others to the extent that they view disagreement with their views as an attack on their right to hold their views.

Essentially, "freedom for me but not for thee", and I don't rightly care about what enemies of freedom are "fired up" about.

But at the end of the day, much of what conservative "free speech" protests against big tech have been about has been that big tech drew a line on things like violence and hatred of protected classes, and conservatives don't like being told that their ideas, while legally allowed, are not welcome in polite company.

RIMR··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
I think there is still consistency between these two things.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to tolerate a business platforming hate speech. Any platform that stands behind the "free speech" of neo-nazi groups, white supremacists, and violent nationalists deserves criticism for turning a blind eye to what they are enabling. The First Amendment wasn't built to protect citizens' speech from each other; it was built to protect us from government censorship. Facebook doesn't have a legal responsibility to protect that, and I as a consumer can expect them to take an ethical stand against things like ethnic cleansing.

And that is exactly the point the author here is making. Facebook, X (Twitter), even places like Fediverse instances and Bluesky/AtProto sites are privately run spaces with no obligation to respect your freedom of speech.

If you choose these spaces to organize your political cause, you put your movement into another person's hands. Stop doing that. Host your own infrastructure, make it easy to recover and migrate, and start organizing outside of corporate-controlled areas.

Turning to Facebook for political organizing "because everyone is there" is like doing your town-hall meetings at Walmart "because everyone shops there", and then wondering why small businesses don't feel represented in your town anymore.

It's easy to blame big tech, but you can also ask your local bar why they only advertise events through Mark Zuckerberg, and ask why their website is mostly just links to Mark Zuckerberg's websites. Ask them if they have considered that Mark Zuckerberg might not a good obligatory middleman between them and their customers. The core problem is that people have accepted the lie that these corporate-controlled spaces are "the public square", when they are the exact opposite.

RIMR··on An Israeli firm is sending zero-click spyware through online ads
I was also mad about that. Is this supposed to be a gotcha?
RIMR··on An Apology
That sounds like yet another reason not to use AirTags, since they now give location access to the authorities...

No, I do not want the solution to this problem to be adding AirTags to the government panopticon.

RIMR··on Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr
Blame copyright laws.

Any all-in-one solution is going to be considered illegal at face value if it is obviously designed to circumvent copyright.

But if you split all the pieces of the solution up into separate pieces of software that can't do much illegal by themselves, you can always claim plausible deniability as the maintainer.

After all, you aren't going to be downloading torrents with Sonarr, you aren't going to be looking up information about shows with Jackett, and you aren't going to be automating your downloads with qBittorrent. If you link them all together with APIs, though, they do everything automatically.

As for the issue demonstrated here, it's just a long-standing problem in Sonarr and Radarr that even when it detects that a torrent is bad, it just sits there holding onto a virus until you override it with a working torrent, instead of just dumping the bad data and trying again.

RIMR··on An Israeli firm is sending zero-click spyware through online ads
This isn't a good answer for why a major cybersecurity story that largely throws the idea of doing business with any Israeli company ever into jeopardy (any company could be a state malware operation in disguise) to the 5th page when it was upvoted as much as it was.

I know HN's algorithm is weird, but this story deserves to stick to the front page for more than the couple of hours the last thread lasted. I don't agree with the algorithm automatically deplatforming controversial topics.

RIMR··on Amsterdam police confiscates server left-wing ISP A/I at American request
>Every other “cide” denotes the commission of the crime

No, it doesn't; it's a Latin suffix meaning "to kill". While we may have codified the word "homicide" into law, this doesn't redefine the word to mean anything other than "one person killing another".

Genocide means killing focused on an ethnic group. Israel has plainly stated that this is their goal with Palestinians. This is a genocide in every way that matters.

RIMR··on Amsterdam police confiscates server left-wing ISP A/I at American request
>I have failed to notice anything about Israel

Then you linked to a state.gov document that lists numerous anti-Israel and pro-Palestine activist groups used as justification for a terrorist designation.

Did you even bother to read this document, or did you just CTRL+F "Israel" and miss all the times Palestine was mentioned?

RIMR··on Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy
It is not "perfectly reasonable" to hire convicted child molesters on the sex offender registry to work with children. This isn't extrajudicial punishment; this is pretty basic harm reduction.
RIMR··on Phloem: Git history grown like a slime mold
I won't lie, I can tell that every single one of those tracks was a one-prompt Suno generation, and I hate every one of them.
RIMR··on Do dentists know what they're doing?
Dentists always show up in weird statistics lists. Most frequent profession among Scientologists. The leading profession among adult suicide victims. I have always questioned whether they are the best medical professionals. This article helps to answer that question.
RIMR··on Amsterdam police confiscates server left-wing ISP A/I at American request
This is a neo-nazi maxim. It sounds reasonable until you realize that the people who say this are hoping you'll arrive at an antisemitic answer. Yes, criticizing "jews" broadly is going to get you a negative reaction. No, that does not mean that "jews rule over you". You're not going to get a great response saying the n-word either, but that doesn't mean Black people are your oppressors.

Same kind of drivel as "there's nothing wrong with defending your own people", until you realize that "your own people" = "the racial majority" and "defending" = "defending against other races". Take a moment to think about what you're saying and why people say it. These aren't universal truths; it only takes a moment to find a counterexample that should prove to you that these aren't worthy of being guiding beliefs.

Anyone living by these kinds of figures of speech isn't a critical thinker, which is pretty much why they exist. Authoritarians benefit when you don't think too hard about how things work.

RIMR··on Amsterdam police confiscates server left-wing ISP A/I at American request
It shouldn't revolve around Zionism, but more and more it's clear that if you oppose Israeli military offensives as a Westerner, the powers that be will brand you a terrorist and respond as if you were a threat.

A/I is not a terrorist organization, and they only got branded as such when operatives started taking direct action in response to the Genocide that Israel is committing presently. The cited "terrorist" actions so far have been spray-painting military property with anti-genocide messages: Criminal vandalism, sure. But absolutely not terrorism!

RIMR··on Show HN: Spotatui, a Spotify TUI/GUI without web API rate limits
Also, you can control it remotely using something lightweight like SSH. VNC is not a great experience most of the time.

Though I usually prefer a webui.

RIMR··on Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy
You're not really helping answer the core question here: Why must subjective "weirdness" be censored? Who cares if it's "weird"? People are allowed to be weird, regardless of your personal feelings about it.

When we normalize corporations deciding in what ways we are allowed to be "weird", we just accept corporations forcing us into conformity with whatever they happen to consider "normal", and so far these companies don't have a great track record of drawing that line.

RIMR··on Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy
The very same Disney that hired Brian Peck to work on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody immediately upon his release from prison after serving 16 months for sexually abusing Drake Bell while working on Drake & Josh at Nickelodeon.
RIMR··on US imposes sanctions on ICC hours after former judge wins Nobel Peace Prize
China and Russia aren't planning to perform public executions, like only Iran and Afghanistan currently do.
RIMR··on US imposes sanctions on ICC hours after former judge wins Nobel Peace Prize
True, but this does not mean that both acts were equal.

For example, voting is a political act, and so is voter suppression. We wouldn't argue that both are equal acts. One is liberating, and the other is oppressive.

RIMR··on Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours
"United24Media" is mostly just Ukrainian military propaganda. I wouldn't trust it given some of their other articles.

Here's a better source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...

RIMR··on Don't be fooled–LLMs don't reason
We can't even say what human reasoning is. Who could really say what isn't reasoning?
RIMR··on Climate is accumulating 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat per second
Weird thing to say to a comment that explicitly says this is about warming the oceans. The original calculation, assuming all the energy is dumped directly into the ocean would be: 87B / (60*60*24*365*4) = 689.69 years.

Funny thing about the atmosphere though is that it requires ~1300x less energy to heat up by 1 degree, so if you dump all that energy into the atmosphere, the temperature would go up by ~2 degrees per year.

The reality is that global warming warms up both the oceans and the atmosphere to varying degrees (and the earth's crust, to much lesser degree), with the ocean absorbing most of that. The atmosphere only absorbs about 23% of that, and a significant amount of the of the excesses radiate back into space.

But even with a conservative estimate that only 1% of this heat is being stored in the atmosphere, that would still lead to a global atmospheric temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius every 50 years. The worst-case scenarios estimate 2% of this heat is retained, dropping that down to 25 years.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that waiting 2.5M years isn't the answer. That's geological time scales anyway, Humans could have gone extinct and been replaced with new intelligent life in that kind of time. Whatever math you did to reach that figure, it's completely wrong.

RIMR··on America.gov
It's the nationaldesignstudio/rampart PII-removal model. Not weird at all to load that browser-side if your goal is to avoid PII hitting your endpoints.
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