IIRC it spammed websites with traffic, didn’t conceal your IP at all, and some people got arrested for using it to make some websites go down for a very brief period. Basically a way to use people who didn’t know what they were doing as cannon fodder

Having an edgy opinion

I think people saying that stuff are serious about advocating for political violence. I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t make things worse. Violence is a core element of fascist ideology, there’s clear utility in using the attention it brings for recruiting, the trauma it inflicts for hazing, the experience for training. I remember when I saw a particular famous clip of a nazi speaking in public and being punched in the face by a masked assailant, I had never even heard his name before then, but after that clip was all over the internet that changed for a lot of people, and it definitely didn’t get him to shut up. Maybe there’s situations where people need to be defended, or there is need for someone acting as a bouncer, but I suspect in many cases it’s some combination of useful idiots giving them what they want, or extremists on the other side who share their goals of agitating for armed revolution giving them what they want.

Could you elaborate? Does HOA mean something different in other countries?

Home owner’s association; when you buy a house and it is part of a HOA, you have to sign a contract to join the HOA as a requirement of buying, which means you have to pay dues and abide by the rules of the organization, and you have to require the next buyer to also join in order to sell your house.

The detail that negative reviews warning of the danger kept getting removed or edited is really sinister

Nope definitely not why would I do that to myself

IMO for some people arguing is a form of intimacy

So your claim is that states specifically don’t have this authority, only the federal government? What’s your reason for thinking this?

edit: Here’s an example showing that they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair%2C_Inc.

There’s also laws like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Act

The businesses that the CCPA refers to do not need to be physically present in California. As long as the business is active in the state and meets the requirements, they are considered to be under the CCPA

A number of state based internet regulation laws have recently run into trouble in courts, but that’s because of First Amendment concerns, not questions over whether merely being accessible to state residents gives jurisdiction to enforce them, which afaik it does.

The difference between what the laws are trying to enforce is a different issue though. The point is a website can be prosecuted just for being accessible when what it offers is against local laws.

Pretty sure it doesn’t work that way. Look at what happened to Binance; not a US website, not technically allowing US customers, still successfully prosecuted by the US government for not doing enough to prevent people in the US from using it.

Because refried beans are as you mention no longer countable, I think “refried beans” should be taken all together as a singular compound noun rather than the word “beans” modified by an adjective. So then “too much refried beans” is the correct way to say it because it isn’t plural.

Can’t track mouse movements on mobile though

Obligatory LLMs see tokens not letters

Here’s what the US copyright office says about when AI art is or isn’t copyrightable:

In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of “mechanical reproduction” or instead of an author’s “own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form.” 24 The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work.25 This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry.

So if an image looks like AI and you decide to just take it, legally that could be a risky proposition if you don’t know the artist’s workflow and the situation doesn’t exactly match up with settled case law. Afaik most of the market is for custom images, so in practice most of the time it’s not going to be a situation of just putting in a prompt and handing over the result but rather a multi step process and a hybrid of different techniques, which could weigh more towards generated content or more towards traditional drawing or image manipulation. The reason to pay someone for that instead of just using AI yourself would be the same as the reason for paying for non-AI art; they have the skills to get better results than you easily can on your own. The reason an artist might use AI is that it improves quality and/or reduces the amount of work.

How different it is to self motivate and the way the environment in front of you chains together to determine what you do. I feel like the way people are trained to live by school and financial obligations is very limited and probably few people are really in control of their own lives in any meaningful way.

Overall, it isn’t yet. Reddit has more developed niche subs, more in-depth posts and comments, and enough content even if you filter out the low effort stuff. Where Lemmy is better is that it is decentralized and not run like a corporate dictatorship with zero respect for its users the way Reddit is.

Seems like with a lack of effective enforcement it could make things worse in some ways, since it would give a competitive advantage to the marketers corrupt enough to willingly break the law and try to get away with it. Also if there’s a situation where this kind of fraud is basically required to be competitive, it could allow authorities to selectively go after people for illegitimate reasons with this as a pretext.

Well probably, immigration and gender are both things that people have basically always had strong feelings about. Though I see your point; what if it’s more of a top-down phenomenon and wouldn’t be a big deal without the propaganda? But in that case the apparent anti-democratic message of the comic seems similar; the task of good politicians being to manipulate people in more responsible directions they actually believe in and not just lazily seek power appealing to whatever stupid ideas, which still seems to imply voters are not and should not actually be making any real decisions or in charge of anything.

Maybe it could also be thought of the other way around though; if ‘bones’ represents something actually pretty bad, then despite being ruled by a group naturally interested in doing the wrong thing, the right thing gets done anyway because of their incentives and lazy greed.

But the premise of the comic is that the politicians are themselves pressured by the voters to represent positions they think are insane (and are actually insane?) and hope won’t actually become law, yet they do become law because the conspiracy to pretend to do something while doing nothing fails. With direct democracy you would assume those same laws would pass for the same reasons, not a different outcome.