Spyke

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[Mega thread] - Biden ends bid for presidency

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As a non American I just can't comprehend how any of you even have to think about this.

On one hand, an old man, who, despite his age and stumbling over his words, has ran the country relatively successfully for the last four years.

On the other hand, another old man that was a global embarrassment, cosied up to Putin and Kim, spent most of his time golfing and shitting his pants, stole classified documents and likely sold state secrets, he is a sexual abuser, an actual criminal, clearly has corrupt justices on his side with crazy plans, chummy with epstein and took multiple trips to pedo Island, promoted racism at every opportunity, many of the people connected to him for his first term were imprisoned, refused to accept your democratic process, contributed in instigating a fucking coup attempt, and that's likely not even the half of it...

Like, how the fuck can ANY of you look at that and say "Yeah but Biden stumbles over his words so I'll just throw my vote away/vote for trump..."

I feel like I'm going insane just watching this shit unfold. It is all so bizarre.

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Reddit changed their minds, do a half step back - RIF can access Reddit but doesn't accept login

Nah. Absolutely fuck Reddit. I paid for RiF, I'm happy with my contribution. Used it for 12 years. Sadly removed it from my home screen this morning when I saw it was over.

I absolutely refuse to provide reddit traffic, even if it does now show content. If the reason it's showing content is really due to reddit backpedalling, then fuck them, because they're ONLY doing it now that it's affected them. A little late for that.

I'll return to reddit only if they reverse this API shit, and if spez gets the boot. Until then, I'm done.

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Noise-canceling robots to 'mute' loud conversations in cafe | What if we told you that we can actually silence a noisy table right next to us in a café?

I've always thought phase cancellation technology could potentially be crazy revolutionary. Seems these guys know what they're doing, but the real challenges come with high decibel levels if I remember right.

If you tried to phase cancel out the sound of a jet engine, it would work and you wouldn't hear it, but you could also have easily just burst your eardrums too, because the sound pressure level is still present, even if the actual sound is inaudible. It's a crazy phenomena.

Edit: the sound pressure level IS cancelled out by destructive wave interference, but if this is knocked even by a matter of milliseconds, the wave is doubled and that's not good for anyone.

Also, on retrospect, phenomena was poor word choice. It's physics.

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What does 'eat the rich' mean to you?

It means the social contract has been broken beyond repair. Wealth hording, inequality, the power balance, lobbying, mega-corporations, data harvesting to profit from us even further, working until death for pennies while other profit from our labour. We are slaves to a system that has the illusion of comfort and freedom, when in reality, a small subset of the population control it all and are actively clamping down on what little freedom and comfort we actually had.

The 2008 financial collapse lifted the curtain to most, and it became glaringly obvious just how transparent and artificial the entire concept of economy actually is.

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Crowd boos Rob Schneider off the stage when he started telling anti-trans & anti-vaxx jokes

Oh, look, another old comedian jumps on the bigot bandwagon. It's an incredibly transparent trend now for when they can't write the same material that got them there in the first place, or when they are no longer working with the person that wrote their material for them.

Take a few shots at trans people, purely for publicity, then use that sudden boost from the circle jerking media to secure yourself a Netflix special, where you can talk about how you've been cancelled for an hour and a half for a big payout.

It's just a marketing ploy for using peoples own outrage against them.

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When you first see what image-generating AIs can do, you feel bad for real artists; after playing around with it, you envy them.

Spot on here! I've only just been using stable Diffusion for a couple of weeks now to help me visualise characters and locations in my world building. It's such a great tool when you really have no artistic skill. But the limitations soon become apparent and a lot of problem solving goes into trying to regenerate the simplest things.

Can generate a near perfect image in a minute if the prompts are right and you get lucky. But the details take hours, where an artist would be able to simply visualise and draw it in.

I think the key is to develop basic skills to draw a really shit mockup of what you want, then img2img it from that... I'll get there, maybe.

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JK Rowling prefers two years in jail over using correct pronouns

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It's just one of the culture war angles propagated by the rich to keep everyone angry with each other while they reap up as much of the world's wealth as possible before any of the forthcoming disasters- whether that is climate crisis migration, the next financial crisis, AI unemployment crisis, further war, food and water shortages worldwide, etc...

The writing is on the wall, a majority of people can see it too if you ask them, but unfortunately people can't help but get sucked in anyway. Probably because it's a distraction from facing the uncertain future we all have.

OR, this is just a tinfoil hat getting the better of me. It feels like a logical conclusion, so maybe that's the fallacy I've fallen for.

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Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish

Firefox + ublock origin is the way forward.

However, as a teacher, my school IT system default browser is chrome, and adverts on YT videos when you're trying to teach a lesson can really suck all the momentum and attention from the class.

Chrome allows you to save javascript as a bookmark URL called bookmarklets. I'm not so clued up on java, but I found this code that zips through the adverts super quickly. Someone can probably improve on this;

javascript: var v = document.querySelector('video'); var t = 16; v.playbackRate = parseFloat(t)

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If they charge by the image, and there is any expectation that AI image-generators might produce garbage results, then AI providers are incentivized to make you pay for their experimentation

I'm still unsure why anyone would pay for AI image generation purely because of the trial and error it takes. I get that not everyone has a GPU that can do it, but I use stable diffusion through automatic 1111 and I'll likely be about 2-300 generations of text to image, image to image, some inpainting and editing, then some more image to image and upscaling before I get a representation of what's in my head down.

I love the process of it all, but paying for tokens would completely limit me. Is there a specific reason that people use paid models? Or is it just because a lot of people are limited by their gpu?