Hey you kids, get off my WLAN!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • I live in Japan, and of course there are formal ways to say everything, but in formal and polite situations, people actually try to avoid saying ‘you’ (anata, 貴方) as much as possible. Because even that can feel too personal. I only see it in writing that addresses the reader indirectly, like in surveys.

    If you do address or refer to them, you typically use their title/position (e.g., ‘sensei’ for doctors and teachers, ‘Mr. President’), or name and appropriate honorific (e.g., Tanaka-san).

    P.S., a lot of what might’ve been archaically formal and polite ways to say ‘you’ have become ironically rude and/or condescending. Like, ‘KISAMA!’ (貴様), kimi (君) (sovereign/lord), onushi (お主) (lord).



  • They don’t just mean ‘who’ individually. They’re in that group chat together because they don’t know who or how many of them feel similarly enough that they can reasonably challenge their command.

    Right now, the orders are deliberately vague enough, technically legal, and not blatantly unethical so that they can’t refuse it. They can’t disobey orders to guard federal property and go pick up trash from the streets because that’s not something you’ll likely win against in a UCMJ case, even if you know the real purpose of the orders is for Trump to make a show of force.

    Also, a lot is up to their officers, who are obligated to disobey illegal and unethical orders. They have to set the climate for the soldiers. It’s really hard for soldiers to speak up if they don’t feel like their leaders have their back.



  • As border tensions intensified, the sight of soldiers and journalists carrying heavy field gear underscored the harsh terrain and long deployments at the frontier. For those in such unpredictable conditions, reliable equipment becomes essential.

    Like the 5.11 Tactical Backpack, Rush 72 2.0, designed for military and field operations with multiple compartments for carrying essentials.

    The sudden shift to advertising gear in the middle of article caught me off guard, lmao









  • What I mean by adding something of our own is how art, in Cory Doctorow’s words, contain many acts of communicative intent. There are thousands of microdecisions a human makes when creating art. Whereas imagery generated only by the few words of a prompt to an LLM only contain that much communicative intent.

    I feel like that’s why AI art always has that AI look and feel to it. I can only sense a tiny fraction of the person’s intent, and maybe it’s because I know the rest is filled in by the AI, but that is the part that feels really hollow or soulless to me.

    Even in corporate art, I can at least sense what the artist was going for, based on corporate decisions to use clean, inoffensive designs for their branding and image. There’s a lot of communicative intent behind those designs.

    I recommend checking the blog post I referenced, because Cory Doctorow expresses these thoughts far more eloquently than I do.

    As for the latter argument, I wanted to highlight the fact that AI needs that level of resources and training data in order to produce art, whereas a human doesn’t, which shows you the power of creativity, human creativity. That’s why I think what AI does cannot be called ‘creativity.’ It cannot create. It does what we tell it to, without its own intent.