Look, I know ads are the mechanism for some sites. And I don’t normally “this site gave my phone cancer”.. but on IOS with blockers, everything except the text on the site can go fuck itself.
Been to the top of the Eiffel, it was a long enough set of elevator rides to flirt with and eventually date a French girl. So that probably wouldn’t have happened on stairs.
FWIW, on android with firefox + ublock origin it's clean from ads.
On iOS with firefox it's filled with ads; with firefox focus it's mostly clean but you get a dismissable "please disable adblocker" style prompt I didn't get on android. I don't know if there's a browser with a good adblocker allowed in iOS walled garden, but I'd be happy for suggestions
It is not at all dishonest to talk about their privatization.
It’s dishonest to hand wave it away while pretending that because there are government controls for construction and financing that it would go even better if it was more government or “more hybridized”. With no source, just opinion.
No one that has ever had to switch blue to red to green in toyko just cash, buying a new ticket at each stop only to go a couple miles, has ever forgotten how privatized Japans railways are.
I expected to see comments about how good it is, how most people love it, how it’s highly privatized, and of course about how to make it better with more government.
You misunderstand me... I'm not saying the privatization is a bad thing, handwaving it away, or saying lets throw government at it. I'm merely pointing out that in a 4,000 word essay trying to explain all the factors that let Japan have such a good railway system, there's a huge amount of emphasis on the privatization part, and zero mention of all the public sector subsidies that enable the entire system.
It's fine to talk about the efficiency of the private operators. No problem there. The dishonesty is in omitting any discussion of how the tracks that the whole system depends are built with heavy government support. Without that, one could be forgiven for reading that article and thinking "oh, just privatize it and you'll be as successful as Japan."
I think the take-away here should be more along the lines of what a working public-private partnership can look like and what roles each can play. I'd love to see a 4,000-word article that compares this model to the regional transit authority models we have in the US.
Did you miss this paragraph? They do talk about the subsidies from the national and prefectural governments.
> Carefully designed public subsidies also play a useful role. Although Japanese railways do not receive subsidies for day-to-day operations, they do receive government loans and grants for capital investments. These are typically tied to public priorities, such as disability access or earthquake-proofing, or to projects that have large spillovers that the railway company would be unable to internalize, like removing level crossings, or elevating at-grade railways or trams in order to reduce road congestion and accident risk. Generally, the local prefectural government will match the contribution of the national government. Larger new build projects are subject to lease back or debt-payment conditions that fare revenue is expected to pay back.
Unless this was added after the fact, I think this is mostly an issue of careful reading. To me, the article absolutely says that it's a hybridized system like you mention.
I wasn't talking about anything related to your opinions. I was pointing out that Fox had to claim "entertainment" in court for their opinion commentators long before MSNBC. Because you disingenuously implied that MSNBC was somehow the opinion news that had to admit in court their coverage included opinions.
In case you forgot you replied to "It worked for fox news [claiming opinion]" with "And MSNBC in court."
Since you clearly misread or purposely misconstrued my statement, let me rephrase:
"Thank Fox for paving the way for inserting ones opinion in news. Did you not know that Fox had to do it in court first?"
Ok, side topic… but that little bastard cheerfully told me out of no where that I have a mall of without a null check AND a free inside a conditional that might not get called.
It didn’t give me a line number or file. I had to go investigate. Finally found what it was talking about.
It was wrong. It took me about 20 minutes start to finish.
I thought it just emitted tongue-in-cheek comments, not serious analysis. And I use the past tense because I had it enable explicitly and a few days ago it disappeared by itself, didn't touch anything.
The buddies were Anthropics April fools day stunt. Buddies were removed from a newer version of Claude code. By default Claude code updates automatically.
Weird, and why didn’t those people show up to vote for Kamala? How did Biden get more votes than Obama, but Trump won the popular vote four years later?
> why didn’t those people show up to vote for Kamala?
Enthusiasm gap. And not during COVID. 2020 was an interesting time as you may recall.
> How did Biden get more votes than Obama, but Trump won the popular vote four years later?
You will be less likely to fall prey to grifters if you look past absolute numbers and realize that the voting age population tends to increase about 10 million every four years. And with turnout generally abysmal, under 60% most times, there is a lot of room for variation.
Do you feel that way about the second amendment too? Just curious if we’re picking and choosing what visitors can legally do. What if SCOTUS said that people means citizens and not visitors for guns, don’t you think that would apply to visa, immigrants, or visitors as well?
I think in the second amendment "the people" are quite clearly the citizens so they can secure their own "free" state. Where the first amendment is about limiting what the government can do so they can't make laws against free speech.
it doesn't. Read the first amendment carefully. People is only used in one specific part, the bulk is about limiting what the lawmakers can do. free speech has no reference to "people"
I'd say the difference with the deportations under Obama (aside from deporting more people while spending less money doing it) is that he followed the law when doing so
As a person who spent a couple of hours watching our local ICE facility today, I'd say the differences are purely aesthetic.
I've gotten to where I don't really care -what- the law is and believe that from an ethical standpoint if a person can have a house and a job and not cause trouble I don't care if they are from Honduras or Houston- any position other than that is just racism with extra steps.
And I am aware that probably sounds crazy to most folks here but at this point I don't care. The folks I organize with have been working since before Trump and will likely be working still when the Democrats put whatever stuff suit their leadership selects.
I would have a hard time arguing that after seeing Alex Pretti's public execution. I also think we can at least partially agree on who should be targeted (emphasis my own):
> Carefully calibrated revisions to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration enforcement priorities and practices [...] *[made] noncitizens with criminal records the top enforcement target* [0]
I consider there to be a gulf of difference between the murder of American citizens in-between detaining anyone caught speaking the wrong language, and Obama's DHS and immigration policy.
> any position other than that is just racism with extra steps
Here I'll politely disagree to agree; in the same way Uber and Lyft flooded the driver market and collapsed the price of a medallion, so to does open borders flood the market with workers, collapsing the worth of my labour.
You haven't been paying attention. And that's ok. Obama was destroying families, and killing peoples, he just did it out of sight with a charming smile.
You think people deported by him didn't die as a result? You think his massive expansion of drone violence didn't kill people living lives as rich and complex as Pretti's? You don't remember Obama deciding not to prosecute people for Abu Ghraib?
1. This has always been possible but the bar has been lowered to barely above typing “her, but nude!”. Opposed to a talented photoshop or pencil artist doing this previously. Is the issue scale?
2. Lots of things have been illegal and immoral without tools. Assault for example. We don’t really have to deal with those things on a large basis. The difference here is effectively thought crime until distribution takes place and then it’s just another form of assault right? We already have laws on bullying and assault, no?
Like I said… skipping ahead, let me guess, For The Children; we must block local models, AI except for The NYSE Chosen Ones, encryption, and must have digital ID to use everything. Tell me this article is in favor of anything else.
As soon as you figure out that everything you read at large outlets, esp those owned by Condé Nast is directly written to affect a stock price somewhere it becomes a little exhausting.
> Tell me this article is in favor of anything else.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the comment section is meant for others to educate you about what the article says, you're supposed to read the article yourself first, then comment.
Everything you've said might be true, but are you actually adding insights to the conversation here, when you admit to not even knowing what the article is trying to say in the first place?
The article has a beyond obvious take even from the headline that “ITS SO BAD, We Must Do Something (tm)”. I read the article first, show where my take is incorrect.
Most of us know what this is, and it’s choke full of the usually moral pleas wrapped up in a nice package of “don’t mind the side effects”.
> Like I said… skipping ahead, let me guess, For The Children; we must block local models, AI except for The NYSE Chosen Ones, encryption, and must have digital ID to use everything. Tell me this article is in favor of anything else.
Please quote the parts of the article where they mention banning/blocking local models, saying that any AI except "The Chosen One" is OK, anything about encryption or even anything about Digital IDs?
> Like I said… skipping ahead, let me guess, For The Children; we must block local models, AI except for The NYSE Chosen Ones, encryption, and must have digital ID to use everything. Tell me this article is in favor of anything else.
No, delisting online nudify apps will take care of 99% of this. There's no reason for them to exist.
While that might be the case for now, as the offender would need access to a PC with a NVIDIA GPU, that will not hold for long.
Once you can run decent image generation models on your phone, what shall we do? Prohibit apps that allow you to run custom models? Add a mandatory safety check?
It seems like a pointless exercise to me - better punish the actual crime rather than try to regulate the tech.
Prohibiting apps from shipping with models that can nudify people seems reasonable. Custom models that can do it will be banned from search results and major sites. Just like child porn, they'll exist online but be quite difficult to find.
There is significant societal value in preventing crimes rather than just punishing them.
The prevention here would require to take down existing models that are already widely distributed and mostly used lawfully.
And even if you outlawed the distribution of uncensored models, we face the next question when you can do the fine tuning directly on the phone and someone makes an accessible app.
Do we then prohibit apps that allow you to fine-tune a model, do we mandate safety scans of the images in the dataset?
Not many existing models will do it or do it well.
> when you can do the fine tuning directly on the phone
Well you'd need millions of on/off nude samples to start with, so I don't think that's likely. And that's assuming we get a billionfold increase in mobile CPU performance or a billionfold decrease in fine tuning compute requirements.
You're reaching for things that, if they happen, are a decade or more out. It's ok to solve today's problems today. Perfect is the enemy of good.
LoRA training for recent Flux 2 Klein or Z Image Turbo models can be done on a consumer GPU in a few hours, often using datasets with fewer than a hundred images.
How much quality that gets you I don't know - perhaps the versions people publish are trained with larger datasets.
I know that one popular anime finetune of SDXL cost $180k in compute on 8xH100 for two months.
Been to the top of the Eiffel, it was a long enough set of elevator rides to flirt with and eventually date a French girl. So that probably wouldn’t have happened on stairs.
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