𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

He doesn’t have enough money to be constitutionally protected.

It’s been surprisingly decent for audio issues for me. Often the scan for audio devices kickstarts some devices back into the land of the living.

Deepseek seems to have done a clever thing w.r.t. training data, by having the model train on data that was emitted by other LLMs (as far as I’ve heard). That means there is sort of “quality-pass”, filtering out a lot of the definitely bogus data. That probably leads to a smaller model, and thus less training hours.

Google engineers put out a paper on this technique recently as well.

P1Y is period notation. It means a Period of 1 Year. It actually makes decent sense tbh.

It’s missing the rest:

Resynthesizer is a Gimp plug-in for texture synthesis. Given a sample of a texture, it can create more of that texture. This has a surprising number of uses:

• Creating more of a texture (including creation of tileable textures)
• Removing objects from images (great for touching up photos)
• Creating themed images (such as the Resynthesizer logo above)

But as far as I know China isn’t taking down Obama-Tigger comparisons. So Chinese netizens are also sticking with the Xi-Pooh comparison (otherwise China wouldn’t bother taking it down anymore), which doesn’t seem to match with what you’re describing as likely intent, nor with who is making the comparisons.

You seem pretty convinced it’s mostly racist westerners using the meme, but do you have anything other than a gut feeling to back this up? Because the actions of the Chinese government seem to suggest it’s mostly a domestic problem to them. And for those Chinese users it seems to have taken off as a way to avoid the censors (which is now ineffective, and has morphed into a point of principle).

Hmm, could be. Although the meme did take off way more with Xi than it ever did with Obama. And other comparisons were made with Eeyore and Piglet, which iirc were mostly due to facial expressions and choice of clothing (it was a shorter lady wearing pink I believe).

But I hadn’t thought of that connection yet. I figured it was mostly physical resemblance (posture and size).

The blocking of Winnie the Pooh might seem like a bizarre move by the Chinese authorities but it is part of a struggle to restrict clever bloggers from getting around their country’s censorship.

First paragraph from your source. China blocks it to prevent bloggers in China from making the comparison (kinda hard for them to block it on Facebook as China does not have control there). That’s also where this meme started.

I’m also fairly certain that Pooh having yellow fur is mostly just coincidental (it’d be a bit surprising if Chinese citizens created a racist meme against another Chinese man). The offensiveness of the meme is much more related to Pooh being quite dim and just general fatshaming, not racism. That’s not to say you can’t use the meme in a racist way, just that the origins seemingly aren’t racist.

No candidate for the Cuban national assembly has ever lost an election though?

Cuba selects a candidate for each seat, and voters can either approve or disapprove them (requiring a new candidate to be chosen). But this has never happened in Cuban history.

They can’t, their party leader isn’t in government and there’s three other parties keeping them in check (one of those is particularly twitchy about this sort of stuff).

Besides, Dutch law does not provide many executive powers that can infringe upon freedom of speech. There’s not a whole lot they could do even if they tried.

That’s how English people pronounce it, because English lacks the “ch” sound in most dialects.

Greeks pronounce it as “chee”, where the “ch” is pronounced more like the Scottish “loch” or the X in “LaTeX”. It’s not pronounced with a hard ‘K’. Still doesn’t really work for the “shemale” joke though, but a but closer I suppose.

This is a massive cry from “behaves like humans”. This is “roleplays behaving like what humans wrote about what they think a rogue AI would behave like”, which is also not what you want for a product.

I don’t think “AI tries to deceive user that it is supposed to be helping and listening to” is anywhere close to “success”. That sounds like “total failure” to me.

The tests showed that ChatGPT o1 and GPT-4o will both try to deceive humans, indicating that AI scheming is a problem with all models. o1’s attempts at deception also outperformed Meta, Anthropic, and Google AI models.

Weird way of saying “our AI model is buggier than our competitor’s”.

And the cybertruck’s structure stopped anyone outside it from getting hurt…

The reason nobody outside was hurt was because there wasn’t really anyone around to get hurt. The video shows a pretty sizeable explosion that would’ve likely killed someone standing close by.

I don’t think the Cybertruck did any better than other cars in that respect. Not worse either btw.

Is public healthcare actually made illegal by the supreme court?

No, Citizens United is the effective legalization of public bribery, masked as “political donations”.

The problem is that you’re never going to get that grassroots movement built up. The healthcare companies rake in billions, they’ll happily spend that to ensure they can keep existing. And other billionaire corporations will join in too, because why risk a party willing to deal with healtcare companies getting power? What else will that party do that could harm their precious profits?

They’ll invest billions to primary candidates, buy media coverage, demonize their opponents or even fabricate fake negative PR. That grassroots movement would be stamped out, as you won’t be able to get enough votes. That’ll put a party like the GOP in charge and they will pass as many voter disenfranchisement laws, gerrymandering laws, etc… to ensure you need massive majorities to barely get 50% of the representation.

People are already pissed with the state of healthcare, so much so that they’re collectively cheering for the murder of a CEO. Yet no grassroots campaign is in sight. By the time the next election rolls around American voters will already have forgotten about that CEO and will be more concerned about inflation or migration or whatever-the-fuck the media has decided to focus on.

I think by the time you get enough Americans on board with a grassroots campaign powerful enough to actually make changes, you are at such a high level of public anger a violent revolution is nearly inevitable.

First-Past-The-Post system sucks but systematic change can happen. Its just… you guys elected Trump.

Systemic change is being made next to impossible due to the rampant legalised bribery and corruption at all levels of the political offices.

How would you even go about going against the corporate oligarchy? Your candidates will get primaried and out-funded, your party colleagues will get bribed to vote against tackling these issues, and that’s all assuming you could get close enough to having enough candidates for all races across the country, you get your messaging picked up by the media and you somehow poll so high that strategic voters won’t split the vote, actively putting the worst party in charge instead.

You’d somehow have to get elected, get enough supreme court justices pushed through and have them repeal Citizens United to even get started. That’s a tall order to ask from a political class that actively benefits from the current situation.

The name is a reference to Schenkman, but it did refer to the same character.

Piet’s origins are all over the place, and form a perfect cocktail of “it looks bad, but the explanation is fairly innocent”. There’s elements from chimney sweepers, traditional Venetian Moorish outfits, German Krampus, the practical element of having black makeup making a close relative hard to recognize for children, etc… that all combined without much of a clear decision-making process. It all happened very gradually and naturally within Dutch society.

Hopefully we’ll have this changed everywhere soon enough, though there are still some conservative areas that resist the change.

Yeh his origins are all over the place and combine in a pretty terrible way. Changing it is for the better.

Sinterklaas supposedly lives in Spain, and some origins suggest Piet is modelled off of Moorish slaves there. But the outfit doesn’t match; it’s based on traditional Moorish outfits as they wore in Venice, and those Moors were free. The bright colours are also reminiscent of the southern Dutch as well as the Venetian carnival.

Decades ago, Piet would announce himself with the clanking of chains. That makes people think of slavery, but they’re not chains as used to bind slaves. Rather, it appears to be coming from the German Krampus, which is more of a boogeyman that scares kids. Piet then changed to make him a friendly and non-scary alternative to Krampus.

Piet has always been described as a “knecht”, which some people interpret as “slave” but that’s a bad translation of the world. A knecht is just someone who helps with some task, and who does just get paid for it like with any other job. A farmhand for example could be a type of knecht, and they aren’t slaves either.

Combined together, it’s the perfect cocktail of “it looks terrible, but does seem coincidental”. Refusing to change it because of “tradition” when people who are uncomfortable kindly ask to do so, that does appear to be the most racist thing about him.

Dutch Wikipedia has the first references to blackness from soot pinned to an image from the 1870s:

“Zwarte Piet had in deze tijd nog niet zijn huidige naam; zo is hij op een centsprent uit 1870 afgebeeld als een schoorsteenveger met de naam Zwartjan.” https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet#:~:text=Zwarte Piet had in deze tijd nog niet zijn huidige naam%3B zo is hij op een centsprent uit 1870 afgebeeld als een schoorsteenveger met de naam Zwartjan.

Translates to: "Black Pete did not have his current name yet, he was depicted on an image from the 1870s as a chimney sweeper named “Black Jan” (Jan is a stereotypically Dutch name, one of the most common Dutch first names. Pete, or Piet in Dutch, is also a very common Dutch name).