Trump vs Musk damages is a distinction without a difference. It’s like asking if either Hitler vs Himmler were more responsible for the Holocaust. At the end of the day they were the ones in power, they made the decisions, either had the power to stop, and they didn’t.

Its bad journalistic reporting.

Study “we tested if burned food contains carcinogens. We used bread as our test medium and found elevated carcinogens in the burnt bread compared to properly toasted and untoasted bread, leading to a slight increase in exposure to carcinogens and slightly increases the chance of cancer.”

The reporting and editorial: “BURNT BREAD CAUSES CANCER! MORE AFTER OUR SPONSOR FOR DEPRESSION MEDICINE!”

It can be all 3 simultaneously. It virtue signals to the phobes, it hurts foreigners and keeps Americans from being exposed to other cultures.

They scraped everything, how many AI apocalypse fanfics do you think exist on AO3 or Fanfiction.net? How many Hollywood movies and scripts featuring the AI apocalypse do you think have been scraped? How many novels and books google has scanned and put into their dataset?

It’s already there, they scraped everything with no forethought or filter.

I don’t think growing up to be OK with threats of horrific violence against children is healthy. Like… at all… like that’s some serial killer shit.

As far as TNG goes, a lot of the first contact stuff from S1 was a lot of already sufficiently advanced civilizations that are capable of at least local space travel and the Enterprise would openly announce like “Hey this is the Enterprise, we’re with the Federation, lets do diplomacy.” But whenever they interacted with less technologically advanced species they would usually do so much more covertly, wearing replicated disguises.

I’m an American so take what I say with a hefty grain of salt but in multi-party systems you have a wider array of political parties to align with that are typically distinct on various issues that sometimes overlap with other parties. Coalitions allow for flexibility in party choice despite some parties having policy preference overlaps and avoid devolving into a 2 party system.

Let’s borrow the major alignments of the political compass just for an example and assume that the parties ideally represent the stereotypes of the political compass, let’s say we have the LibLeft party, and AuthRight party each making up about 25% of the legislative body after elections (they almost never work together), and the AuthLeft and LibRight party making up about 20% each (they also almost never work together) and a true centrist party with 10% (they’ll work with anyone provided its not too extreme). In order to pass a bill, you need to collect an arbitrary majority of votes to pass a piece of legislation, let’s call it at 55% for our fictional parliamentary congress.

None of the parties alone have enough votes to pass legislation, they need to work with other parties to get legislation passed. So someone in LibRight (20%) has a bill they want passed they need help from other parties to make that happen. Rather than just guess what other parties want in a bill, the LibRight rep, might meet up with a Centrist (10%), a LibLeft (25%) and an AuthRight (25%l rep to try and write a bill that will satisfy each party, now you’ve formed a coalition. You work together to draft a bill that will include something each party wants. It won’t be easy because LibLeft and AuthRight rarely align on policy. Then you bring your bill to the floor to vote and if you crafted it well enough the combined votes of LibRight, LibLeft, AuthRight and Centrists will be enough to cross that 55% requirement to pass legislation by a wide margin, assuming the entire party will vote as a united bloc (if they don’t vote as a united bloc then the margin will be much closer but still likely reaching that 55%).

My sort of writer’s room motivation head canon is that the Prime Directive was a symbolic politically motivated response to the irresponsible “uplifting of primitive civilizations” by major world powers that resulted in cargo cults and widespread death from disease and nuclear weapons testing throughout the cold war, the manifest destiny to expand ever westward and drive native populations from their lands, the concerted effort to deprive native populations of their food by hunting the buffalo of the Great plains to extinction. It’s also unfair to leave Hyper advanced technology in the hands of civilizations incapable of maintaining and repairing that technology.

Think if you brought a modern cell phone back in time even just 50 years, would someone from that time period would have the tools, supporting technology or the skills to make any repairs to that phone? I’m highly doubtful they could and that’s ignoring that there are so many other interlinking technologies that that cell phone is reliant on to function.

Sure, let’s say they are controlled opposition. What do we do after we burn down the democratic party? What then? Because I do not like the prospect of what comes after a single party takes complete control.

There is a lot of talk about burning and destroying but nothing about what comes after and it’s the “What comes after” that has me most worried.

My point is that we need to have an organized political structure to get progressive people elected who will actually promote progressive policies. Saying “Burn Down the Dems” with literally no plan to put up opposition to Republicans is beyond short sighted strategically.

I appreciate the fervor, democratic leadership is a bunch of spinless cowards, but trying to tear down democrats without a competent actually progressive replacement political organization is handing power directly to Republicans to rule completely unopposed.

Given the reality of political parties in the US, I’d rather spinless corpses filling up space to slow Republicans down rather than letting Republicans take total control in the absence of any marginal opposition.

Unless you’re planning on running for office as a competently progressive candidate.

And these tools ended up aiding artists rather than replacing them and these tools still require human competency and creativity to use. I don’t type “make me picture of trump of trump as a sith lord” and some ugly collage of stolen artwork gets spit out without any human interaction or intention. Instead I have to actually make that or figure out how to make it work as a collage.

Honestly if you as tamman2000 uses AI, eh whatever, it’s out there, most likely you’re not some rich asshole ceo pushing this to replace workers. I’ll still be over like “hey there are a ton of great free programs out there with great communities around them and great learning resources.” And yeah using non-ai tools isn’t always easy, it takes time and practice to get decent, I still say that time spent learning how to make it is worth it.

That said, I have less of a problem with the concept of AI itself, at the end of the day it’s just some college level mathematical theory thats been aroind since the 60s and 70s. For me, the big problems with it, is the widespread pilfering of everything on the internet to train these models, it’s the huge energy expenditure to train the models and to generate with these models, it’s the owner class using AI to replace human beings and knowing full well the environment is being torn apart to support AI, it’s the shoving of AI into every little thing whether or not it even makes sense in the first place, it’s the acceleration of enshitification, it’s the absolute flood of AI generated spam everywhere online. My problem is not strictly with AI but basically capitalism ruining this and turning it into the most asinine profit extracting bs.

I don’t think less of OP, if I did, I wouldn’t be be giving suggestions for freely accessible digital art programs of all different kinds and not even limiting myself to just visual mediums.

All I want to do is offer words of encouragement to go and try some of these. They’re free programs, what’s the harm in encouraging someone to give them a try?

I wish to formally apologize for offering friendly advice on the internet, maybe I should have been even more of an apparent prick than I apparently was and told op to give up forever on their desire to be more creative and told op to eat shit and die.

It def takes some practice to get into these programs but many of them have really good tutorial series geared toward beginners. As far as my experience, in Blender you have the Donut Series put out by Blender Guru that takes you from “I’ve never even heard of blender” to “I’ve made a really good looking donut.” By the end of the series.

Give digital art programs a try. There’s plenty of free alternatives to the big subscription model vultures out there, there’s GIMP for image editing, Krita for drawing, Blender for 3D, DaVinci Resolve for video editing, Audacity and Pro Tools Free for sound recording and editing, you can even make modular synths using VCV Rack. And if you like rum and eye patches theres versions of the big players out there too.

I am absolutely shit at drawing, but professionally I make 3d animations, having drawing skills helps, but it’s not necessary to learn any one of these.

Bleach is Sodium Hypochloride. NaClO not HO

Valid point, personally we keep a mesh catch over ours to keep anything really big from getting down there and so we can control what goes down into it.