Yeah, that was definitely the rationale. Satoshi added the message, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” to the first Bitcoin block. In the early days, most of the community were Tea Party, Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, “abolish the Fed” types. There was a lot of anti-Fed propaganda floating around at that time. There was a big overlap with gold-bugs and Bitcoiners, and Bitcoin’s “mining” decay curve was inspired by gold’s.

Yeah, I’ve been experimenting with YaCy, and discovered they have a PageRank-like algorithm, but it uses a lot of resources, so they don’t recommend using it and it’s turned off by default. Haven’t tried turning it on myself. Looks like the maintainer is focusing on YaCy Grid, meant for organizations, not general decentralized search.

General strike with clear, specific demands would work. Easier said than done, especially since most workers in the US aren’t already organized; but it would probably work. It would probably even work if all current major unions striked (a lot of union members are “conservative” though, so if it was seen as political rather than practical, it could break solidarity).

Pocket guns are harder to shoot accurately because of the short distance between the rear and front sights, and recoil is worse. But yeah, should be fine. I really like the compactness of my P938 (discontinued now). P365 is probably also good (higher cap).

The page uses canvas, and Librewolf blocks some canvas functionality by default for privacy reasons. You should see a little icon to the left of the url that you can click to allow the site to run correctly.

1. It’s always better to spend the money of others.
2. It doesn’t appear that bribing congresspeople is all that expensive. IIRC, it only took $60k to bribe that one congressperson who got caught.
3. Just the threat of financing primary challengers appears to be enough to control Republican congresspeople. He’s probably privately doing the same with some Dems too (offering not to finance challengers; he’s already said he will finance challengers to all Democrats).

For me. I think everything is physical, and there’s always a cause and effect. There is no magical non-physical consciousness. A combination of your genetics, experiences, and environment determine the “choices” you make/actions you take. Free will is an illusion, IMO.

Communism is a stateless, classless society, and more like a utopian end-goal to strive for. But, yeah, parties that label themselves communist tend to be of the authoritarian type. Failure of certain strategies and implementations doesn’t mean an entire ideology is bad. Democracy failed with Rome, and wasn’t implemented on a large scale again for ~1800 years; and I think most people consider democracy a pretty good system now.

Lol. This comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I still don’t know if it’s logically correct from a non-physicalist POV, but I did come to the conclusion that I lean toward eliminative materialism and illusionism. Now I don’t have to think about consciousness anymore because it’s just a trick our brains play on us (consciousness always seemed poorly defined to me anyways).

I guess when AI appears to be sufficiently human or animal-like in its cognitive abilities and emotions, I’ll start worrying about its suffering.

Global South basically just means underdeveloped/developing nations.

Capitalism results in the rich, mostly in developed countries, extracting resources for low prices and exploiting desperate workers for low wages in developing countries. The developing countries get little in return. Some of these countries have been able to muster some protectionism to mitigate so much transfer of wealth out if their country (such as China). Developed nations have purposely kept some developing nations destabilised to maximize exploitation.

I think the term fits fine. The surpluses go to the owners of the means of production (barring “state capitalism” I suppose). These surpluses are actually the true value of the workers’ labor that the owners take, which is why I think capitalism is immoral, but that’s not really related to my point. The system incentivizes the owners to maximize these surpluses, which means paying the workers as little as possible, and charging customers as much as possible. I.e. the system incentivizes greed.

Social democracies are absolutely better than unchecked capitalism, but it’s my opinion that they’ll never be able to stop from regressing (they have been, as I understand it). Because of the owners’ place in the hierarchy and outsized wealth and influence, they will always be able to push governments to their benefit, and then it just keeps snowballing as they gain more wealth and influence. Admittedly, very strong unions can counteract this, and were responsible for them becoming social democracies in the first place.

Great. Now we have barred-out LLMs.

Yeah, those were the problematic cases they highlighted. Image/video generation usually involves generating many permutations, perhaps adjusting prompts, and just keeping/editing the parts they want. The Trump video is likely made up of many edited clips from many different prompts, after discarding many more, not just one prompt. The song may be one prompt; haven’t played around with music generation myself.

OpenAI released much more impressive demo videos last year, and I think Sora is available to the public now. I don’t think most proprietary models/systems allow you to use public figures though, so it’s probably an open-source system.

I actually think it’s more targeted toward the Andrew Tate and Fresh and Fit follower types, and the propaganda does appear to be working on younger men, who are rapidly becoming more “conservative.” They’re extremely insecure in their masculinity, and think the subservience of women would be affirming.

Of course, it actually just hurts everyone, barring the people that benefit from keeping the working class divided.

If you’re running a lot of stuff on the same server, I agree with others that you’d want to use containers or VMs to avoid possible dependency hell. I prefer containers so I don’t have multiple OSs using RAM. I’ve never used Proxmox, but if I understand correctly, it’s an OS specifically built for running containers and VMs more easily, so I’m guessing that’d be a good choice. I personally just use Ubuntu LTS or Debian, Docker, and SSH to administer my servers, because that’s what I’m familiar with.

A cheap used Desktop PC off Craigslist or whatever should be fine. Desktops are more upgradable and configurable. You’d want to make sure the CPU and Mobo support however much RAM you’d want. Ext4 is fine if using a single disk; ZFS for multiple disks with redundancy. Preferably, a smallish SSD for the OS disk, but not required.

*arr stack for pirating: https://wiki.servarr.com/

Jellyfin for serving media. You may want something like the cheapest Intel Arc GPU for transcoding if you’re going to serve HDR video to low-spec devices.

Nextcloud for basic file sharing. NFS for high performance file sharing with Linux machines, if needed. Syncthing for syncing files if you need that.

Immich for something similar to Google Photos, if needed.

Also if they can’t afford that, surely they have state medical insurance

Ha! No, depending on the state, there are tons of barriers, means-testing, work requirements, mandated classes they might not be able to attend (due to childcare/lack of transportation), etc.

Even after the ACA, ER visits are still all the healthcare many people get.

TBF, I’d prefer a random felon over a random DA. Also, the people did elect many Democrat representatives, who are not doing their jobs in the eyes of most of the people who have elected them. And the answer to "how can we help,” is always donating to them to do so little, even when they were in power.

I was wondering this is well. Took me a while to find this discussion: https://woem.men/notes/9ozhpn3l2n5v0b6c

He claims he only created an account to “investigate” if they were talking about him.

Another worrying thing I accidentally stumbled on a while back was he was in the streamer “Destiny” chat. Hmm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgF92Wi8J7o (said he used to listen to Jordan Peterson in 2015 too).

Yeah, IDK what to think about him now. I still like his consumer advocacy though, I guess.

I recently went back to pirating and transferring music to my phone like it was an iPod, lol. VLC is a good player (and works with Android Auto), and Strawberry is good on Linux for listening and library management. The SoulSeek network has a lot of hard to find stuff in flac (I use the Nicotine+ client).