What made you think I thought the US isn’t authoritarian?

Authoritarian means the government deciding what people can do or say beyond preventing actual harm to others, or causing harm to their subjects to promote the government’s interest to the detriment of the people.

Overthrowing other governments is imperialism, not authoritarianism - I’d define thr latter as largely internal, exceptions being eg. Singapore’s laws applying to Singaporean citizens and residents even when they’re outside of Singapore.

Not wanting to lick the boots of either the government or corporations makes you a centrist?

That’s news to me

Authoritarian leftist things.

A lot of people on non ml/grad/hexbear instances are both anti-authoritarian and leftist, so they see hexbear as just as bad as capitalists in terms of being pro-opression

In the US? None, but the Libertarians probably come closest.

The US is built on imperialism so of course no party is anti-imperialist, being anti-government is as close as you can get.

Within Europe there are some parties that lean more anti-imperialist, generally green and liberal parties, but the traditional major conservative and leftist parties rarely are.

The USSR rivals the US, Japan and Germany for the most imperialist state in the past 100 years, so no, leftists are not anti-imperialist by default, that’s closer to liberals. Leftists are anti-capitalist by default.

Better known for his other work

Yeah, racism in europe is largely stereotypes directed at whole groups that are rooted in truth but grossly overblown, eg “black people just want to commit crime”, “arabs want to install sharia”, “east asians want to eat your dog”, “indians want to outgrow the native population” and other nonsense.

If you ask the huge majority of the people who are saying these things if they interact with people in these groups, they’ll say “yes, but they’re some of the good ones” not realising it’s only a tiny fraction who aren’t, but also accepting that race doesn’t automatically make you anything.

Comparing that to the US where (from what I’m aware of) there’s both “I refuse to even speak to members of xyz race because they’re subhuman” and “xyz race needs all the help they can get because they have such a tough time” it seems so hard for individuals to just live a normal life in the US?

European racism is casual compared to even everyday American racism, even considering the likes of AfD

Us politics isn’t about economics anyway, especially when you’ve got Republicans raising taxes sky high and restricting free trade. It’s about social and cultural issues more than ever these days.

Threats to the US

A lapdog isn’t a threat except to reputation, even if they’re not on your side. Same reason North Korea isn’t on the list of threats.

Even if they have influence, it’s not exactly domestic policy, otherwise you’d have to add the IRA to the list also.

I did some experimenting - I can’t sleep above 67 at most, 65 comfortably.

Anything above 68 is too hot generally indoors and I begin to lose the ability to focus.

I don’t have AC but my house is from the 1860s when people had fires running pretty much nonstop so is designed to keep cool, so even when it’s 80+ outdoors the indoor temperature rarely goes above 70

A lot of what we consider ‘artists’ weren’t really making art

I think that’s extrapolating too far… I think the overwhelming majority made art outside of their job, with with minorities making art for their job and a minority not making any art at all. It’s hard to create commissioned works without a strong skillset which overlaps significantly with that required for art, just that if they were just taking a commission without going above and beyond, that isn’t art.

I’m not convinced your take is different - drawing an accurate sketch of a hand isn’t art, telling AI to generate a hand isn’t art, it requires someone creative or expressing something to be art, regardless of the medium(s), including diffusion/noise removal models being a medium.

Nobody’s going to claim illustrator or inkscape “made” your graphic design, so why claim the same for AI - doing so just shows you don’t understand the medium or what goes into finetuning models, parameters, inpainting, step control of loras, block weights, noise removal level and regional prompting and all the other things that differentiate a piece of AI-generated art from AI slop (not to say that you have to use all of these for it to be art, just that once you do it probably passes the threshold for it to be art)?

the joke is 0300pm => 3pm = 15:00

You’re taking miltary time but putting it on a 12 hour clock, so you have to specify am or pm

Art isn’t about making something pretty, nor is it really about design, it’s about wanting to do or make something with no ulterior motive, or going beyond what you have to go make something inspiring (these are the same thing when you think about it).

Clip art, a lot of corporate design, a lot of architecture and more isn’t meant to be art, it’s meant to fulfill a purpose and maybe look pretty doing it. That’s not what art is.

Cameras largely killed off commissioned portrait because people don’t care about the process, they just want a picture of themselves, therefore the portrait wasn’t art, it was utility.

That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for a portrait to be art, nor that photography isn’t art, just that unskilled people were suddenly able to make what they were looking for to a “good enough” standard much more conveniently.

The same can be seen for so many things, including AI being used for clip art or supplementary images in articles. In the case of AI, if all you want is any picture that help support part of an article you’re writing, you didn’t want art in the first place. If you use AI to help you make a statement, or to match a vision you have in your head, or even do things like poke around at the internals to distort the output, then that is art.

If I’m driving, almost always, the exception being if it’s a highway off ramp I’ll indicate to go into the off ramp lane, then stop indicating as it should be clear.

If I’m cycling then very rarely, as the position in the lane or lane you’re in is far more noticeable than if you’re driving, so I’ll only stick my hand out to indicate if I have to merge into traffic to turn (eg a right turn from a single lane road, or to get into the turn lane to begin with)

The UK manufacturing sector for raw materials and basic products was on the way out anyway due to costs being so low in Asia, so it was more to be able to shut it down and save the government from needing to bail it out while also destroying labour unions while they were at it, hence why the advanced manufacturers (JCB, Rolls Royce, etc.) were largely unaffected

I’ve even seen van gogh paintings get wrongly labeled

That’s way less surprising than an indie artist’s art being wrongly labelled. It’s nothing about the quality, just that van gogh paintings are likely to be very overrepresented in the training dataset

Obviously UK consumer protection is different so they may not have the “feature” here, but cars get their milage recorded yearly (after the first 3 years) as part of roadworthiness testing, available online given the licence plate, so I can see I did 7041 miles in the last year.

Does the DMV not have something similar?

I think there’s something to be said for removing the power of their symbols by using them for other things, but of course some things are too far yes