Posted this on the other thread - but excellent work! Thank you!

For those having issues with the aforementioned downvote trolls, @some_guy and @YourContentSucks kindly showed up to illustrate the problem. These two accounts are accompanied by a third, @cre0 -all the same user. If you’re pre-emptively looking to protect your users from downvote spam, keep these accounts out of your magazines - he likes to try to dox folks. This is his theme song.

@inkican - Agreed - Kbin will live or die based on its content. One thing that should be mentioned to those on the fence about contributing is how powerful Kbin is as a publishing platform in comparison to either Mastodon or Lemmy - this is one of the few places where you can post and get your content on both style of instances.

There are a couple of factors degrading contribution that could be alleviated by more stringent moderation - particularly the bot networks and downvote spammers. I’ve seen a couple of instances where folks have gotten bullied out of trying to run a forum, and Kbin’s flaws in blocking (a blocked user can still downvote your posts and message you), make ongoing harassment an issue for contributors. No one wants to submit something to have it shat upon.

The other factor is that a number of users set up magazines, grabbing popular names from Reddit, then did nothing to maintain them. I think removing or reassigning these ghost magazines to interested moderators would go a long way in improving the content quality here now that the dust has settled from the Reddit collapse.

From a moderator standpoint, if you’re looking to expand the reach of your magazine and get new subscribers (and thus, hopefully, more contributors), one thing I’ve found that helps expand the audience is using a Lemmy account to crosspost, as the cross-posting functionality is built into that architecture and provides a link back to the original. This both expands the range of the content, and draws subscribers from Lemmy that normally wouldn’t see you on Kbin to subscribe to your magazine. Mastodon is similar - a single supportive account there boosting magazine content expands your reach dramatically.

Side note: I run @13thFloor and wanted to say if you or your users ever feel like cross-posting our scifi content from there, or cross-posting your content to our magazine, feel free to do so - we fucking love scifi over here.

I’m not Indian, but coming across Gaddaar by Bloodywood gave me hope that the left hasn’t lost its voice over there. If you ever wanted hear Rage Against the Machine in Hindi, check these guys out.

Agreed. Spez’s support of The_Donald was the beginning of the end (although as he was a mod of jailbait before it was banned, it was clear that Trump wasn’t the genesis of Spez’s sickness), and now there’s nothing left of the communities that made it great. There’s hasn’t been anything rewarding about contributing there since about 2014.

Depends on the context, but generally it indicates a lack of critical thinking and a capacity to be easily swayed by sensational claims. Joe Rogan has no legitimacy as a journalist, and a checkered record when it comes to the veracity of what and who he presents on his show, which has shifted significantly rightward over the years, going from pot smoking and ancient aliens to diet supplements and anti-vaccine narratives. Generally, in the US, Joe Rogan fans are predominantly white, male, and right-wing with a libertarian bias.

The greatest challenge with AI is not how to make it, but how to make it better than us.

Looks like the non-profit founded by Higgins and Mehta is active in promoting this law on a worldwide scale, with ongoing legislative efforts in Spain, Finland, and Brazil. Here’s their action page to get involved and offer support.

I agree,
Snatch is a great movie,
one that should be freed
from the shackles of Amazonian tyranny.

It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, “The Creativity Machine” register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI’s the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What’s clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn’t work for them.

You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

The ruling is excellent, and I’m glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.

I’m not surprised. Antioch/Pittsburg is right at the line where the Bay Area starts turning into the Trump country of the Central Valley, and despite its reputation of being a bastion of liberal thought, Northern California has a really ugly undercurrent of “good ole boy” racism the further you go east and north.

They needed to post it on a site that can stay up for more than 24 hours at a time.

This is not going to stop porn. All it will do is criminalize the actors, producers, and viewers.

I’m reminded of the drug war, where they took a relatively harmless narcotic used disproportionally by minority populations at the time (Marijuana), and used it to criminalize and imprison large swaths of the population, especially within the black community.

It’s no coincidence that most of the folks targeted by this effort are women and sex industry workers, which skew liberal by a large degree. Note I’m not just talking about prostitution or porn actors, but the entire sex industry, including toys and books.

The GOP is scared shitless of the rising power of women in modern society, and being able to criminalize and consequently attack the revenue stream of sex industry workers is a way to blunt it. There’s also an element of class warfare involved, as OnlyFans or similar sites are often the most economical way for a young woman to lift herself out of poverty if she has no other marketable skills.

That and many, many, many other things, but I decided to focus on the kids in cages for this particular argument so that I didn’t end up writing 20 pages.

Every time I come upon that dynamic in real life, it’s always turned out to be the wrong decision. The ends may justify the means, but the means defines the ends.

To be fair, I don’t actually believe there are good and bad people (we’re all a mix), and I agree with you that there are people who do good who are Trumpers (I’m a small town boy, so I grew up with a lot of them).

From a personal standpoint, the effect Trump had on California was significant and frightening, especially as a member of a mixed race family. It was real fun having to explain to my teenager why we were being followed by a Trump convoy on the freeway screaming the N word out the window. It fucking terrified both of us, as this had happened right after the bus got run off the road in Texas, and these guys clearly thought Trump had given the go ahead to go Mad Max on the libs.

From an economic standpoint, his immigration policies did real harm - my friends in the wine business had to leave grapes rotting on the vine because they were suddenly short workers (similar to what Florida is experiencing now). 70% + of international business on the west coast is with China, and he started a trade war that benefited no one, which really pissed off my techbro colleagues in e-commerce. The reason your taxes and mine went up this year is because of the package he passed while President, while permanently cutting taxes for the ultra-wealthy.

On top of that, the evil bastard put over 500,000 kids behind bars - many of whom are the extended family of my neighbors and co-workers, just trying to escape the cartel violence in Mexico.

So yes, there was a significant negative effect on California when Trump was elected. And while I can accept that people who support him are capable of good things, their support of him is definitely not one of them, and more than worthy of derision. Not murderous hate, however.

Good. This woman could have sickened not only her target, but anyone who came in contact with what she sent. While I share her politics, hate makes monsters of us all, and she crossed the line. While I don’t think the “there are good people on both sides” argument holds much water, actions like hers remind me that there are definitely bad people on both sides.

As a Californian, this could be a welcome respite in the middle of fire season if it dumps enough rain.

That being said, it’s not good. Rainfall this late is going to throw harvest all out of whack, particularly in wine country. I’m guessing there’s going to be a lot of Central Coast sweet wine on the market after this season -Botrytis cinerea thrives on a wet fall harvest. In 2017 (similar rainfall conditions) it was even found growing on Cabernet grapes, which are usually much more resistant to it than the white varietals.

Lmao - gotta say it’s creative. There are trolls on my ban list that could use a multi-century sentence.

Even the success they tout is an absolute fucking failure:

In response, EY announced a fund in February 2022 to reimburse up to $800 per year for commuting, pet care and dependent care costs for each of its 55,000-plus U.S. employees.

The fund, which is ongoing, had an immediate positive impact on employees’ in-office attendance, Giampietro adds. Since EY first rolled out this benefit in February 2022, EY has seen a 150% uptick in office attendance across the U.S.

“It didn’t take a complete rehaul of our return-to-office policies to make employees happy,” he says. “We just needed to listen to our people and understand what, specifically, was problematic for them, and offer resources to address that.”

They added a potential cost of $44 million a YEAR (55k * $800) to keep their employees in the office. So instead of just letting employees work from home, they increased their costs dramatically, didn’t solve the problems around RTO for their employees ($800 for childcare a year? And that’s supposed to cover commute costs as well? Gimme a break), and still have to pay rent or mortage on their office spaces.

And I bet every single one of their RTO “success” employees is looking for a WFH job.

JFC just admit it, CEOs. The workspace has changed, for the better, and it’s simply time to unload your empty commercial property. That’s the only smart business decision for a company trying to retain employees.