This is also very reminiscent of 21-year old organizer Fred Hampton, also assassinated after founding the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition and establishing an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. People rising over the culture war divisions and forming unity is a threat to the powerful. They've made this clear.
Most of the people I followed on TT are already on it lmao
Are these mostly political/left-leaning channels, or does this include more general or mainstream creators too?
Best hiring pitch I've seen yet.
Perhaps there's a better term, because "communities" already means something else here. Last thing we need is another Discord-calling-groups-'servers' mess.
"Homes" could be alright? or even "towns"?
Maybe I'm getting alright at in-code documentation because when my code breaks after months of me not looking at it, I can return and get up to speed in a few minutes.
(or maybe these people are working on much more advanced stuff)
I half-expected the German radical left-wing to keep rents low by shooting into the landlords with firearms.
'Pourable pizza crust' is a new one for me, I wonder which shapes would be fun. I suppose the stage of food technology at the time ended up forcing the food to be healthier, Max is dealing with ingredients I can name and buy rather than the cyanocobalamin and thiamine mononitrate in modern day rations pizza. Thanks for sharing!
Always cool to see the BPP social programs mentioned.
So, it turns out everyone could just talk with Chinese citizens this whole time
DPRK social media innovation when?
Let's start basic, we don't want anyone to get overwhelmed. How about the high-speed line in Morocco, Africa? (186km/115mi long HSR section at up to 320km/h / ~200mi/h)
It's cherrypicking, but apart from TV and cartoons who are likely to exaggerate, my impression of US school lunches is from Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, and Jamie looked like they were about to cry.
I say cherrypicking because it was considered one of the most obese towns in the USA, Huntington, West Virginia, but it's absolutely dystopic. Soylent Green would be a step up, nutritionally.
edit: I can't easily find the scene of the kids eating, but this two minute clip goes over Jamie's disappointment at the food products being served. "I'd never seen kids being given pizza of any kind for breakfast before." "Do you really recognise any of those ingredients?"
Trump promoting the best commie coffee
Soon we'll be routing our internet connections like flight paths to get around sanctions.
If the CIA agents in Havana don't get Cuban healthcare benefits, they should just quit.
Yes itβs somewhat sanitised, all social media is sanitised.
And it's all sanitized for good reason - the closest places to unsanitized, such as freespeechextremist, are literally just spambots, molesters, troll neo-nazis and people mechanically incapable of holding a conversation without bursting into nonsense screeds in all caps. Effectively, just the people no-one else wants to talk to.
As for the RedNote sanitizing, some of the ones I've seen newcomers getting tripped up on are rules which would make our local social media better. They seem aimed at countering grifters/influencers, sexualization for popularity (not being a prude, rather, there are plenty of other places for that content) and similar negative trends associated with TikTok.
Personally, I suspect the bigger problem for their platform will be handling the contrasting values of Western social media norms against their own.
Even sinophobic reactionaries have been pointing out for years that "[Douyin] Chinese TikTok is Wholesome, American TikTok is Corrupting our Youths!" with product influencers/grifters, rampant sexualization up to and including pornography, etc., albeit the reactionaries are interpreting the difference from a conspiratorial moral-panic viewpoint claiming it's weaponization by The Chinese Government to corrode Western society, rather than the difference being that the US TikTok is social media with liberalist freedoms combined with the capitalist pursuit of profit above society, and is in line with the content on Xitter, reddit and other familiar social media.
The point being, that people rise to the top of TikTok through sexual suggestion, flashing symbols of wealth and other normalized habits which I've heard are banned on Lil'RedBook (which sounds like a great decision!).
Now added to my comment :)
Now added to my comment :)
And if youβre a dictator, at that point you dont care for any left or right leaning valuesβ¦
But this just evidently isn't true. Take the fascist dictators like α΄uα΄lossnW and Hitler, who clearly believed in their ultranationalism, irredentism, anti-communism, anti-liberalism, militarism, etc. etc. until the days they died (α΄uα΄lossnW even created a last testament while captured shortly before death re-iterating all their beliefs despite their lost of dictatorship). Then take socialist-party dictators like Castro, Stalin and Mao, who, despite any and all critiques and shortcomings and hypocrisies and failures, intentionally took actions with measurable results to improve living conditions, health and literacy for the worker class as a whole, while limiting and even oppressing the owner class (bourgeoisie). If you already checked out that video in my last reply then we'd know 'left leaning values' can mean a heap of different things in different contexts, but I believe that these progressive and anti-capitalist efforts are solid examples to prove the point.
Also those that think theyβre marxists or whatever, youβre even bigger idiot, enjoying your materialistic ps5 and 4090 dreaming of a communismβ¦ oh the irony
I don't have either of those, but I can't understand why there would be any irony or contradiction there, at all. Marxism isn't an anti-technology or anti-fun lifestyle or some religious glorification of poverty. At its core, it's an analysis of society which (long-story-short) concludes capitalism is an exploitative system and socialism is an alternative economic system where the worker class, as opposed to an owner class, control the tools and resources of production. There's far more depth than that, but how much time or money someone has doesn't (directly!) come into that analysis. The famous rallying cry in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) is "Workers of the World, Unite!", and those workers rich enough to afford luxuries are still workers with shared class interest with other workers. You don't need to be committing crimes against labor to reach that level, they're not buying factories, commissioning mega-yachts and flying to space.
And about anarchists, some people just want to see world burn⦠or profit in a lawless society
I'm talking about the political philosophy and movement, anarchism. Most of them want to abolish the concept of profit whatsoever, and they make up a major part of the environmental and social justice movements. There's plenty of critiques of their movement, but they really only want to burn down the state which exploits us.
Since you're bringing up instance stereotypes, I have to say I'm disappointed to see baseless conspiracy claims from a dbzer0 user. dbzer0 is usually decent.
And as we all know if someone says theyβre a certain way that makes it so!
Are you implying that this active community is somehow just an elaborate hoax? Why?
North Korea is a particularly tough topic to have objectivity on. On one hand, their isolation in itself means they're not a typical country by any interpretation, and not gonna lie I'd be surprised if even their supporters claimed it was perfectly normal. On the other hand, its portrayal in the media is highly propagandized, to the point where some defectors (e.g. Yeonmi Park) have made ridiculous claims like that citizens sometimes push a passenger train to work in power outages, and reputable news outlets simultaneously report that everyone must have the same haircut as Kimmy and that having that haircut is also illegal, or claiming multiple officials have been executed with an anti-aircraft gun but it turns out they're alive. It's hard to have a meaningful discussion when this is the information we're given to work with! While NK is often open for work and tourism (albeit stricter tourism than in most countries) and those tourists often enough share videos or write articles, they're enough to get a peak inside and learn that ok, it's not a literal cartoon place, they have a water park and rail with a nicer metro than my city and people's lives are much closer to normal than what we often hear, but there's only so much we can really learn from these foreigners' experiences.
Some of the big points that often get overlooked are:
- Their mindset, especially the skepticism and national security extremism didn't come from nowhere. A major cause of their lack of development are that the UN Command bombing 'destroyed nearly all of the country's cities and towns, including an estimated 85% of its buildings.' [wiki] and the US and later UN sanctioned them [wiki].
- The pervasive propaganda is VERY blunt by our standards. That said, their nationalism and idolization of political leaders is certainly not unique, even if the pictures and statues of their 'glorious leaders' everywhere are freakin' weird. For a comparison to a more familiar country: the US pledge of allegiance, idolization of the Founding Fathers and pervasive flag display are also unusual manifestations of ingrained nationalism, even if to a lesser degree than NKs patriotism.
- South Korea is also pretty far from normal. Their First Republic stage included their leader getting exempted from 8-year term limits and executing the opposition leader while arresting other members, and has repeatedly become a dictatorship up to the present Sixth Republic, where the current president just got impeached for establishing a dictatorship, making them the third SK president to be impeached so far (the second-previous president was being directed by a cult leader's daughter along with the 'Eight Goddesses' group of billionaires who were basically writing legislation themselves.)
But, at the end of the day, with all that context, I would never call North Korea normal or typical, just nowhere near as bizarre as the mass media portrayal from even reputable outlets. And I suppose that's why some (imo silly) people will overcompensate and try to say that they're just the same as other countries.
What are some unique communities which exist in the Fediverse?
Much of the Fediverse, especially the most popular communities, are continuations or clones of existing communities from twitter/reddit/etc., which makes sense given the history of these platforms as alternatives to those sites.
Are there any original communities which exist on the Fediverse with no similar community on the mainstream alternative service?
Which FOSS projects have enough funding that we should donate elsewhere?
There were some posts over the holiday season asking for projects to donate to, and for those who have the means to comfortably do so, this is an important gift to consider.
If there's only a limited amount each of us is able to give, I assume there's no point giving it all to, for one example, The Linux Foundation, because a small personal donation is trivial next to the ~$15,000,000 USD they receive from sponsors dependent on them[1]. I understand that funding sources can be a major and profound source of bias[2] and ideally we would be, for example, helping to make Firefox independent of Google, but until we have more collective power, it's not worth letting smaller important projects struggle instead.
So, which important projects should we leave to the sponsors, and which really need our support?
Which is the best organized, best designed online community you've seen?
Most online communities have a low barrier of entry and effectively no user onboarding, and end up becoming chaotic messes where content is difficult to navigate. Obviously this is fine for more chatty communities, but is unfortunate in more serious and discussion-focused forums and for content archives. Even on Lemmy, there are communities where formatting rules are completely ignored[1]. This results from a combination of site design, moderation, and user respect for the community (three things notoriously bad on reddit-like sites, and well, most popular sites)
A couple of exceptions to the trend are forums which enforce a barrier of entry and quality control (unfortunately I can't recall any right now, but I would love to hear of some!) and some booru IBs. A booru site is an archive where users upload media without titles and tag it for easy searching. If a booru manages to enforce a decent quality of tagging (and there are mechanical ways to assist with this, such as tag aliases) then the site becomes a well-organized online content community.
Most boorus I've found allow NSFW content, so here are some work-safe examples:
- FindAfox (photos and videos of foxes)
- FIRST Robotics Competition Archive (unofficial)
- Safebooru (mostly anime drawings)
---
Note: feel welcome to list slow or 'dead' sites!
Patsy, it's been three days!!!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23370165
> > "The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." > > - Marx, German Ideology (1845)
Patsy, it's been three days!!!
> "The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."
- Marx, German Ideology (1845)
Some thoughts on Pony v7 deciding to use AuraFlow (PonyFlow)
Context: Pony Diffusion v6 is one of the most popular SD models, and the upcoming v7 has the potential for similar popularity. An interesting aspect is their controversial decision to use AuraFlow as a base model, rather than Flux or SD3 The creator of Pony Diffusion (AstraliteHeart) was interviewed on a Civit.ai stream two weeks ago where they discuss this further. I don't use Discord so if you have more visibility and insight into the details, I'd like to hear it.
--- As mentioned in the stream, as of Nov 2024, some of the big drawbacks with AuraFlow are the high VRAM usage (apparently 24GB VRAM to generate a 1024x1024 image) and the lack of tooling (afaik there are no ControlNets, or training scripts for making LoRas, and many generation UIs like A1111 don't even support it yet). These sound like big issues, although the stream host points out the recent release of Mochi:
> Mochi, the video model release two weeks ago, on release the developers said you're going to need three H100s [80GB each] to run this model. And now, two weeks later, you can run it on 12GB of VRAM. So I wouldn't be too worried about this,
There has been a long-standing claim that the missing tools will be built and optimized by the community once there is a decent community using AuraFlow and it's reassuring to have real examples of these rapid leaps in accessibility and efficiency to look at. And I believe the Pony project is one of the things which does have the real potential to bring in that rapid development activity.
Which brings to mind another side of the choice to use AuraFlow, which I would casually call an activist aspect. And I don't mean 'activist' in a melodramatic way, I mean it just as much as me saying 'You should help make Lemmy more active because reddit abuses its users' is activism: I believe one tool is better for our communities and therefore I choose to use my small influence to promote it. I'm also not saying 'activist' as a solid claim, accusation or glorification because AstraliteHeart's contextual reasons for choosing AuraFlow could effectively be 'I prefer their commerce-enabling license' or 'I think this base model is more effective for this one specific project', I honestly don't know, but on the other hand, I notice they praise Simo and their team for this open project. And whether or not it's intentional, Pony shines a big spotlight on their admirable work. Further than that, upon launch, Pony could even be the catalyst to enable AuraFlow to receive major community support and remain competitive with the venture capital-fueled Flux, SD and others.
If PonyFlow is deemed a groundbreaking finetune, with strong enough results to bring its huge audience from SDXL to AuraFlow, that's a powerful force and one big enough to bring technical development, just like the reddit API exodus brought a wave of devs into Lemmy development, resulting in important improvements in a relatively short time. When I say a powerful force, here are a few stats from civit.ai on the stream:
> 468,000 downloads, 160 million on-site generations > Out of the 3,500 LoRas that we train every 24 hours [...] the vast majority are Pony-based.
If PonyFlow can show those people it's worth crying out for, generation services like civit.ai would be crazy not to try and support it and there will be significant demand for other open-source tools like generators and trainers to support AuraFlow. So if Pony can bring those kinds of boosts to an open project, then I say good on them for it and I think that anyone wary of venture capitalist enshittification should support this push towards a more open tool.
--- edit: just found this
Socialists of the Fediverse, let's talk about efficient communication!
There is a well-known internet proverb, the bullshit assymetry principle:
> "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
Anyone who has been in a few software chatrooms, a political communities, or any hobby groups has probably seen the eternal fountain of people asking really obvious questions, all the time, forever. No amount of patience and free time would allow a community to give quality answers by hand to each and every one of them, and gradually the originally-helpful people answering get sick of dealing with this constantly, then newcomers will often get treated with annoyance and hostility for their ignorant laziness. That's one way how communities get a reputation for being 'toxic' or 'elitist'. I've occasionally seen this first hand even on Lemmy, and obviously telling people to go away until they've figured out the answer themselves isn't a useful way to build a mass movement.
This is a reason why efficient communication matters.
Efficient teaching isn't a new idea, so we have plenty of techniques to draw from. One of the most famous texts in the world is a pamphlet, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a way for the Communist League to share the idea of historical materialism to many thousands using a couple of dozen pages. Pamphlets and fliers are still used today at protests and rallies and for general promotion, and in the real world are often used as a resource when someone asks for a basic introduction to an ideology.
However, online, we have increased access to existing resources and linking people to information is easier than ever. I've seen some great examples of this on Lemmy with Dessalines often integrating pages of their FAQ/resources list into short to-the-point replies, and Cowbee linking their introductory reading list. So instead of burning out rewriting detailed replies to each and every beginner question from a propagandised liberal, or just banning/kicking people who don't even understand what they said wrong (propaganda is a hell of a drug), these users can pack a lot of information into their posts using effective links. Using existing resources counters the bullshit assymetry principle. There's a far lower risk of burnout and hostility when you can simply copy a bookmarked page, paste it, and write a short sentence to contextualize it. No 5 minute mini-essay in your reply to get the message across properly, finding sources each time, getting it nitpicked by trolls, and all that. Just link to an already-polished answer one click away!
There are many FAQ sites for different topics and ideological schools of thought (e.g. here's a well-designed anarchist FAQ I've been linked to years ago). There are also plenty of wikis, like ProleWiki and Leftypedia, which I think are seriously underused (I'm surprised Lemmygrad staff and users haven't built a culture of constantly linking common silly takes to their wiki's articles. What's the point of the wiki if it's not being used much by its host community?).
Notice that an FAQ is often able to link to specific common questions, and is very different from the classic "read this entire book" reply some of you may have seen before - unfortunately when a post says "how can value com from labor and not supply nd demand?", they're probably not in the mood to read Capital Vol. I-III to answer their question no matter how you ask them, but they might skim a wiki page on LTV and maybe then read further.
(Honestly, I think there's a missed opportunity for integrating information resources into ban messages and/or the global rules pages, because I guarantee more than half the people getting banned for sinophobia/xenophobia/orientalism sincerely don't think anything they said was racist or chauvanistic - it's often reiterating normal rhetoric and ""established facts"" in mass media; not a sign of reactionary attitude. The least we can do is give them a learning opportunity instead of simply pushing them further from the labour movement)
Video Captions/Subtitles: What do they do right and wrong? What are the best examples you've seen?
Films and TV shows and more often have subtitles, which are helpful for enjoying muted video, translation, people with hearing impairment, people struggling to understand accents, checking fast unclear dialogue and other reasons. They are important, and sometimes it's clear when they do something right or wrong.
Maybe we can't expect them all to be works of art, but there are certainly some easy wins even in the industrial media environment. What do you think?
What are some types of websites which are uncommon on the English-speaking web?
The English-speaking web has many different types of websites. For social media, there are link aggregators (Lemmy/Mbin/etc., reddit), microblog sites (Mastodon/Pleroma/etc., Xitter), forums like BBS boards, and more.
This post talks about Misskey and how it diverges from Western-made Fediverse culture. This reminded me of some other Japanese-style websites, such as textboards, chan imageboards and booru sites (booru imageboards are essentially a tag-based media archive, which similarly to chan boards have entered into the English-speaking internet but remain niche, mostly centered on art communities such as anime and furry fandoms).
What other styles of websites exist beyond the English-speaking internet? Does their design reflect a different culture? Are they better in some ways?
What do you think of sarcasm in online posts? Why do you think it's so common?
Maybe it's just a reddit/Threadiverse thing, maybe it's stronger in political communities, but I constantly see sarcasm everywhere online, far more than anywhere else. Scroll down and you'll even see it here.
Funnily enough, in a vacuum, one might expect online forums to avoid it more, since written text can mask tone and make sarcasm unintentionally ambiguous, to the point where it's common to see people adding </s> tags to clarify. It's not rare to see arguments started when people don't recognise non-literal language.
Is it merely a habit being repeated? Is it a widespread coping mechanism for frustration? Is it simply the lowest form of wit, a simple and popular way to make fun? Is it an effective way to normalise unpopular views with the plausible deniability of just making jokes?
What are some tools for organizing Stable Diffusion-generated images?
The megathread mentions Diffusion Toolkit, although this is a Windows-only tool.
There is also Breadboard, however I consider this abandoned and lacks some features like rating/scoring.
*My hacky tool and why I want something better*
I've been using a hacky Python script to interpret prompts and other PNG Info metadata as tags and inserting them into a booru-like software which lets me search and sort by any of those tags (including a prompt keyword, seed, steps, my own rating scores). This tool was useful in a lot of ways when using tag style prompting, but as I move towards natural language prompts with newer models, a tag-based media software will make it harder to search and to compare prompts between images. Also, my hack was hacky and somewhat manual to use, images wouldn't automatically be imported when generated.
Β
So I'd like to start using a purpose-made tool instead, but I'm struggling to find any other options. I'd rather know if a good tool exists before I start rebuilding my duct-tape conveyor belt.
Question about upcoming trends and hardware requirements
I want to buy a new GPU mainly for SD. The machine-learning space is moving quickly so I want to avoid buying a brand new card and then a fresh model or tool comes out and puts my card back behind the times. On the other hand, I also want to avoid needlessly spending extra thousands of dollars pretending I can get a 'future-proof' card.
I'm currently interested in SD and training LoRas (etc.). From what I've heard, the general advice is just to go for maximum VRAM.
- Is there any extra advice I should know about?
- Is NVIDIA vs. AMD a critical decision for SD performance?
---
I'm a hobbyist, so a couple of seconds difference in generation or a few extra hours for training isn't going to ruin my day.
Some example prices in my region, to give a sense of scale:
- 16GB AMD: $350
- 16GB NV: $450
- 24GB AMD: $900
- 24GB NV: $2000
edit: prices are for new, haven't explored pros and cons of used GPUs
Suggestions for a graphics workflow to add stylized dialogue to digital drawings?
Speech bubbles and other text can transform an image wildly, even just captioning existing images then sharing them is common practice.
Unfortunately, some artists just aren't skilled at it. I've even seen highly skilled, emotive drawings with an MS Word plain-white speech bubble and Times New Roman text hacked over it by the creator, crushing the work's atmosphere. Matching the work's style is important.
I would like a tool or workflow that lets me quickly add and adjust a stylized speech bubble to an artwork. I haven't really explored any templating/prefab/preset options in, say, Krita or GIMP or Inkscape, or any comic-making tool, so if there's a dynamic way to do this rather than me poorly copy-pasting-stretching a raster or manually drawing every time, I'd love to know. I really just want to avoid it taking more than a couple of minutes to add a nice-looking dialogue. Ideally: select a style, type in the text, and place it on the image.
Some random examples of different forms text can take. ! ! !
Any advice for generating reproducible images across devices?
At the end of the day, my hardware is not appropriate for SD, it works only through hacks like tiling in A1111. And while that's fine for my hobby experimenting, I would like other people, or even myself once I finally upgrade my desktop, to be able to recreate my images in better quality, as closely as possible (or even try and create variations).
I already make sure to keep the "PNG info" metadata which lists most parameters, so I assume the main variable left is the RNG source. Are any of the options hardware-independent? If not, are there any extensions which can create a hardware-independed random number source?
Socialists who have lived in different countries: what differences did you notice in their labour movement?
Every place has its different environment, whether it be the level of organisation, reputation of socialism, dominant values of society, history and experiences, conflicts and crises. Because of these dynamics, I'd expect to see stark differences in what the movement looks like around the world. An obvious example familiar to most here is seeing the widespread and militant union mobilisations in France's retirement age protests.
Which countries do you have experience in, and how are their labour movements different?
The title is intentionally vague by saying 'labour movement', so you're welcome to talk about workplace attitudes, unions, socialist organisations, legislation and more.