I still don’t think it’s useful to look at total spend to each “party” vs the spread of spend from each source and what they are targeting.

Party represents what they are targeting, because party lines are how much of our legislation is defined. For example, low taxes on wealth is associated more with Republicans, and less restriction on abortion rights is associated with Democrats. Even if they may sometimes mix across party lines, they tend to have extremely strong correlations between party and policy, so donating to a given party is effectively donating for the policies they tend to represent.

The largest donors donate vastly more to Republicans than they do to democrats.

If you want individual policy, it lines up.

Big-tech PACs donated 2-to-1 toward Republicans and Republican-aligned ad and influence campaigns in favor of data center construction: https://www.industrialinfo.com/news/article/money-votes-and-data-centers-will-political-spending-overcome-rising-public-opposition-to-data-cente--359789

Billionaires have outspent on ads to fight a one-time billionaire’s tax in California 250-to-1 https://www.commondreams.org/news/wealth-tax-opponents-spending

Law enforcement PACs spend lots of money on Democrats… https://readsludge.com/2020/06/24/law-enforcement-pacs-give-millions-to-the-politicians-who-set-their-budgets/ …and Democrats shift to being more pro-police. https://truthout.org/articles/in-2024-platform-democrats-lurch-right-on-policing-and-immigration/

Again, it’s not that these issues don’t sometimes mix across party lines, the police spending is a good example of that, but generally speaking when a party receives donations, it’s because the donors believe they are supporting that party’s political positions.

I think the problem here is that you’re addressing an entirely different question.

The question of if someone should report someone who raped them is entirely separate from the potential chance for false allegations.

If someone is raped, they should report it. If someone isn’t raped but wants to make a false allegation, real cases of rape being reported won’t change that person’s decision to file a fake claim.

The entire point here is just “if you are raped, you should report it, even if that could ruin the rapist’s life in some way, because they raped you, so they deserve consequences”. It doesn’t make a judgement call on how we can combat false allegations.

As if the ONLY thing your memory could be used for is running AI models.

Hey buddy, we need this shit to use our BROWSERS or to play GAMES. I have a GPU in my computer that can run most new AI models when quantized at a speed that would be perfectly reasonable for any home user that doesn’t want it to literally replace every ounce of their thinking, and I bought that shit before ChatGPT was even a thing, because I wanted to play fucking video games.

I have a NAS with 16 gigs of RAM and a consumer-grade CPU that’s a few generations old, and it can still run models with zero GPU or AI accelerator if you give it a little time.

Is it going to be perfectly tuned, and run at the highest possible speed if you design a datacenter just for AI models? Of course it is. But do most people on this planet need that or give a fuck about it? Absolutely not.

Seconded on Tuta. I’m currently pretty locked into the Proton ecosystem, but I have a Tuta account as well, and it’s pretty usable if all you really care about is having an email that works. (haven’t used their calendar yet, so I can’t speak to it)

Definitely less feature-rich than Proton though. Worse spam filter, more basic UI, no auto-categorization of email by topic, etc.

To be clear for anyone who might not want to read the whole article but also doesn’t want to rely solely on the headline:

This isn’t some new surveillance system that was revealed, or even really unprecedented tactics. This was just a larger number of HSI agents assigned to tracking activists, infiltrating meetings and chats, etc than the number previously assigned to investigate suspected foreign influence on the “New Left” and anti-Vietnam War movement. (which had 42 officers at its peak, vs the Minnesota 15 case having 119)

Better than iPad kids. Not ideal obviously, but still far better.

iPads (and mobile devices/OS’s generally) are designed to be as simplistic and easily understood as possible. They abstract away complexity, have to make menus less cluttered and make buttons larger to accommodate how people use them, and the lower power processors also mean less functionality than desktop-based systems.

If you grow up using less shit, you’ll learn how to use less shit.

Maybe try Ente then?

Haven’t used it before myself, but I’ve heard good things, and it does have a memories feature, and it seems at least based on the examples on their website that it might generate something more than just “today x years ago”.

Unsure to what degree it works though, and unfortunately Ente is also a paid service (though it is privacy focused, and I believe it has a FOSS app too)

Seems like “Smart Memories” are on the roadmap for Immich though, so you might just have to wait a bit and can then switch once they’re there:

There aren’t really any other mature options out there for self hosted, or even just private Google Photos alternatives in my experience, so you’re kinda just stuck with Immich for the most feature-complete replacement, and Ente for a more “just works” private but not self-hosted one. Everything else is basically just a glorified file browser, but maybe with some smart searching or better media codec support.

Both Tuta and Proton have iOS apps of their own.

I don’t believe either can be used inside the native iPhone Mail app, since they use encryption schemes, which aren’t standard in any commonly used spec for mail apps, so no regularly available mail app can act as a frontend for Proton/Tuta, because no regularly available mail app “speaks” their encryption. (though on PC, Proton does have a Bridge application that can essentially perform the job of a translator in that case, but again, only for PC clients)

One thing to note on this is that after a week, Google told me that my account might be compromised, severed the link between Gmail and my Proton account, and forced me to log back in to my Google account on my computer.

I reconnected to Proton and it did it again a couple weeks later. Not sure if it’s fixed. (or working as intended)

Gmail Forwarding is the old feature that just forwards mail, and that seems to work fine without ever kicking you off, it’s only Gmail Connection (which allows sending emails from your Proton mail and having them send from your Gmail address) that’s done it for me so far.

Proton if you want a clean UI, more fancy features, aliasing, etc.

Tuta if you want just a simple email, don’t care if the UI is a little chunky, and a slightly cheaper price.

100% Immich. Really good UI, and the kinds of quality of life features you don’t normally find in smaller open source apps (auto face tagging, map based on coordinates of photos, built-in non-destructive editor, memories, etc)

The memories feature is mostly just “here’s photos/videos you took on this date”, but it doesn’t compile any sort of custom album based on a theme or place or anything like that. Not hard to do so yourself by just going to the map view and zooming into any location though.

As for image searching it does have that, and I’ve found it to be shockingly reliable even when I run it on just a Raspberry Pi. (though it can take a while to give you the result of your search if you’re on lower-end hardware like that)

I would say if all you care about is having a nice looking, fully-featured, easy to use client, Proton is good, but if you really just need… an inbox with an email attached, then Tuta will be a little cheaper and just as private, just with less bells and whistles.

If you care about removing yourself from other services like calendars, cloud storage, password managers, etc, Proton is way better since it has the full suite.

For example, Proton supports auto-categorizing mail (e.g. newsletters, promotions, updates, transactions, etc), unlimited email aliases, a more modern UI, good integrations with Proton Drive and Proton Calendar if you decide to use those as well instead of Google Drive and Google Calendar, etc.

Tuta is more just an inbox that you can bother to sort as needed, comes with some aliases if you feel like it but probably not enough for every single online service you have, has a basic calendar, but doesn’t have any kind of integrated Drive access (is still in closed beta rn), and has a more… basic UI.

Where if you violate them a group of soldiers will come to your country and take you to the ICC?

The ICC doesn’t have its own “soldiers”, military, police force, etc. They rely entirely on the cooperation of other countries.

For example, if Benjamin Netanyahu had an arrest warrant, traveled to a country that works with the ICC, and the country chose to comply with the ICC’s orders, then they might arrest him with their local police force, then transfer him to an ICC-partnered detention facility either in that country or elsewhere.

But if he goes to a country that doesn’t care that he’s a genocidal warmonger, or simply doesn’t respect the authority of the ICC, the ICC just doesn’t really have the ability to do anything about that. (other than, say, getting other countries aligned with them to put some sort of pressure on that country, or by choosing not to assist that country with its own prosecutions or transfer of inmates if the ICC gets custody of them after they did a crime against that country at some point)

Not always a bad thing tbh. If you want a big variety of candy for the movie theater later (with permission to bring it inside definitely totally 100%), it’s way better than any store at getting you a wide selection.

Sometimes I’m willing to pay more per oz if it means getting a bigger variety, over a better price per oz of just one brand.

it is a real person, but GPTZero gives it a 100/100, and given she’s a proud “prompt engineer” I’m inclined to believe she doesn’t do all the writing without… “assistance”.

Exactly.

“Don’t you see how dangerous this is? It’s time to pause new development (all new competitors in the market) of AI models so we can align our models for… safety (user engagement)!”

The AI CEOs are experts at creating criti-hype.

“Our product is so dangerous that you need us to keep you safe from it”

“Our product is so capable it could outsmart every human being trying to stop it! Hey by the way, you want to replace your workers with our chatbot?”

I don’t think a lot of these AI CEOs even believe it themselves. They just know that getting everyone to scream “It’s so powerful it could kill us all (without us in control)” is great for making business deals with companies that want a highly capable “thinking” machine, or pitching their infinite potential future growth to investors.

I mean… there’s hacker groups out there, and there’s people who are opposed to the livestream, so obviously there’s some groups that’d want to shut it off.

The main issue is that the means of doing so are… pretty unlikely to exist or be possible to figure out how to exploit in time before it’s over.

Realistically, they’d have to find a way to shut off all internet connectivity via every possible method to wherever it’s being streamed from, which is pretty unlikely. (would require someone to physically dig underground and cut off any copper/fiber optic lines, then also find a way to illegally and without being fox hunted use a signal jammer that blocks every single cellular signal, and also take down any satellite-based internet dishes)

The alternative is if they can somehow, within the duration of the livestream, identify which device on all of the internet is streaming to whatever platform is hosting the stream (its IP wouldn’t be exposed to anyone other than the company hosting the stream), then also find vulnerabilities that would allow them into the device, or have the DDoS capacity to saturate the network that specific device is connected to (while also being able to do the same to every single possible backup device or network link that’s available)

So no, realistically, probably not.

And being willing to physically leave behind every single person you know and love that doesn’t want to move to the exact same area in the exact same different country as you!

Seems like the original was actually created with that exact image, at least according to KnowYourMeme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fight-like-youre-the-third-monkey-on-the-ramp-to-noahs-ark-and-brother-its-startin-to-rain

The original post is from 2026 though so that version could have very well been AI generated, but to me it gives off less AI generated vibes and more “some dude photobashing some art he found together”