But to answer the question Europeans are asking - here in the US we have a strong executive directly elected president. Every country that has this system has this problem.

Even worse, we have an insurmountable 2/3rds requirement for removal in the senate, a body tied to state, not population. We've impeached and removed many politicians but never a president.

The Andrew Johnson impeachment pretty much proved that it's impossible. It's simply not analogous to what's possible in parliament.

If the goal is to fight fascist tyranny wherever it is - and it damn well should be - then you will be better equipped to fight it where you are than anywhere else. It doesn't seem like that's your goal if you just try to act better than people in other countries that ostensibly have a bigger problem.

The attitude shouldn't be "why haven't you deposed your dictator yet" but instead "how can I help you?"

At some point around when my older kid was 3 or 4 I stopped uploading photos containing my kids’ faces to social media on the grounds that a small child can’t meaningfully consent to their likeness being publicly viewable (even if I always made such posts friends-only) and just thinking about privacy in general.

I didn’t anticipate an epidemic of deepfake csam arising as yet another reason.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@oatmeal/117445997286647181

Rain said that they were okay with Anthropic using the idea and even copying it, just not the now obviously deliberate lack of attribution. The way these companies are running in marketing mode rather than following the norms of scientific conduct is a problem (also see the recent massive dump of math conjectures by OpenAI).

Here is their follow-up blog post:

https://sunshowers.io/posts/anthropic-mononoke/

You are able to revive one extinct species (can be plant or animal) but not anything that went extinct recently. Fossil organisms only. Which would you choose?

Honest question, not a rhetorical one - how many of the vulnerabilities and bugs that appeared in libs written in C that wouldn't have happened in Rust also wouldn't have happened in modern C++ (let's say, C++17 and later)?

Yes, a college campus can be a rape culture without there being any fraternities (just think about the very ancient problem of creepy professors), but this doesn't mean that fraternities aren't a factor. It would improve colleges considerably if fraternities stopped being a thing.

Also, as an aside, I never liked how the word "Greek" is used to refer to frats just because they use Greek letters.

I have not paid attention to the story about the lesbian bar and still don't really know what the story was, but apparently Jesse Singal was the one who first pushed it. He is basically Chaya Raichik, but gets taken more seriously by mainstream outlets. It's fucking always him.

to anyone who says that people who don't like being mansplained to, etc. "don't know how social media work", i invite you to read this essay on how public speech and comment "work" to silence women

"My aim here – and I acknowledge the irony of my being given the space to address the subject – is to take a long view, a very long view, on the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women

#Mastodon

really interesting dots being connected about control of public expression, venues, surveillance

https://prospect.org/2026/09/19/macklemore-ed-sheeran-palestine-israel-nfl-live-nation/

#GazaProtests #monopoly #uspol #Mackelmore #surveillance #NFL

RE: https://mastodon.social/@thomasjwebb/117298217032623176

These talking points accomplish nothing for the people who make them. Whether the society a person was kidnapped from practiced slavery doesn't matter, it's a red herring and special pleading for white America.

But in fact some people were kidnapped from tribes that didn't even practice it themselves. Case in point, most Igbo tribes did not practice slavery. If you don't know about Igbo Landing, brace yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_Landing

Turkey receives a lot of refugees and it's been a major destination for queers fleeing yet more conservative regimes. It's really bad for queers everywhere in the world for the religious right to get everything they want anywhere, but especially there.

Queers in Turkey have always done a good job at fighting and disobeying. I don't know what to do to help them. I wish Erdogan wasn't so invincible. How the hell is he even talking about running again in 2028.

One of the problems with the way techno-libertarians conceive of rights is there's a trickle-down theory at play. Whether a large firm has fair use rights or not has little bearing on whether or not I do.

And I certainly don't want to put resources of mine into helping a business that itself benefits tremendously from IP existing.

Thinking that something is "a step in the right direction" when there are multiple possible directions is slippery slope fallacy but optimistic.

I will be at #GamesCom in Köln/Cologne next week if any friends or colleagues want to meet up. I can also demo you a cool audio/music thing I've been working on if you want (and only if you want!) #AudioDev #GameDev

As another matter, at night, I'm interested in knowing about any #metal #goth #industrial or #neofolk (obviously must not be fash) shows in the area.

I sometimes think about the thin line between archaeology and grave-robbing and maybe one way to look at it is in terms of personal preference. So assuming you leave remains, when, if ever would you be okay with them being studied?

Working with musicians I can certifiably say that many are very resistant to using AI or wanting to host their own FOSS AI. Part of the propaganda the industry uses to push their tech on artists is to say well, you're already using AI.

There is a difference between Spleeter, an open source client-side stem splitter and using a cloud-based service to fill in tracks that might bite you in the ass, copyright-wise. See, e.g.:

https://aiwg.miraheze.org/wiki/Music:_Generative_%26_Adaptive

I might be biased as someone who's worked in ML in audio and music for over a decade, but I really don't like how anything that's vaguely music combined with the "AI" marketingese term is just lumped together. I primarily blame the companies behind AI for this, but some anti-AI people unwittingly play along.

Using spleeter to split stems isn't Suno. Grimes is a dumb jerk but giving fans a model of your voice is precisely the sort of thing I want to see more of and again, is not Suno.

This is unfortunately a very Santa Barbara story but I was morbidly curious if a certain old restaurant infamous for holding onto a racist name was still in business and the answer is yes, but they ~finally~ changed the name… in 2020, in response to the George Floyd protests.

Lots of vaguely hippie-coded people must have eaten there before they changed their name.

JKR bullying Amnesty International, which has stood up to literal dictators, is further proof of what I've been saying for years, which is that TERFs are basically like Scientologists. They will use their lawyers to scare people away from criticizing them.

So often "AI" is a red herring. Big companies can do things that ordinary people aren't allowed to do. That's the story. I can't break into another person's computer and say "whoops some software that I made did it without me telling it to."

Adding non-determinism adds plausible deniability but not much. It's been well-established over decades that you can get in deep shit for things you didn't intend your computer to do. But this doesn't apply if you have wads of money.