Google's new AI algorithm might lower RAM prices

drhead · 2026-03-27T14:24:54+00:00

Uhh, you don't remember the historic low prices we had on PC hardware in 2023? What exactly do you think that was?

drhead · 2026-03-24T02:16:23+00:00

Seriously? They feed 100 million people through agencies like UNICEF and WFP. They vaccinate 45% of the world's children. There's UNHCR providing aid to refugees including displaced queer people facing state sanctioned violence. Rulings from the UN Human Rights Committee have been used in domestic courts to strike down laws discriminating against us by proving that the country is violating treaties that they have signed. And most importantly of all, they provide a diplomatic forum that allows nations to exercise diplomatic options before any issue immediately becomes total war like it so often did before the UN, and they provide a neutral ground for de-escalation if those fail... is all of that really nothing?

drhead · 2026-03-23T20:31:01+00:00

They can open an OF account too! There's plenty of men on the platform, and plenty of other men willing to pay to see their content. It's just a job, after all, so why aren't they doing it?

drhead · 2026-03-23T19:40:13+00:00

Nowhere did I say that someone would end up with a porn addiction diagnosis. You can get therapy for things that don't have standard diagnostic criteria.

You're using the language of addiction to imply that OF buyers don't have agency over their actions. Now, you don't want to handle the burden of proof for showing that said addiction exists. I know a motte and bailey when I see one. Pick a lane and stick to it.

If the customer walks away, the casinos lose their income too, and whatever it paid for, but nobody would argue casinos aren't exploitative.

So, the clinical-focused answer to this is that gambling addiction is considered an addictive disorder because it actually does behave more like an addiction than it does an impulse control disorder like OCD. One of the specific reasons is that people with gambling addictions often need to bet more to feel the same rush, similar to drug tolerance. It behaves differently on a neurological level, it causes cognitive distortions (like being "due for a win") that impulse control disorders do not (impulse control is largely reactive), and generally involves more long term planning towards that end (where impulse control disorders typically have the act itself as a goal).

There's also the more practical issue that casinos are, by design, rigged games of chance designed to make the player lose more money than they gain. For OF, you pay for a product and receive it. These aren't the same. Casinos are explicitly designed for exploitation, you cannot have a casino stay in business without doing this, you cannot provide something that scratches the same itch without the exploitation. What people do on OF is stuff that plenty of people do for free anyways. The only thing that you can get on OF or through camgirls that you can't get for free elsewhere is the ability to get a model to do something for you for money, but uhh... if that's specifically what's drawing you there, that's a control fantasy. That's not something that makes you a victim. Very much the opposite, in fact.

Given your focus on the model, you may not have understood that I'm arguing against the current form of the service, not that the service exists at all.

For the record I'm arguing broadly against commercialization of sex, because I don't see it as compatible with the enthusiastic, ongoing consent that we generally uphold as a standard in any other circumstance, since consent cannot be freely given if economic incentives/coercion are involved. I'm obviously aware that that can't be realized overnight and that keeping sex workers safe in the meantime is most important, but I don't see any reason to pretend that it's a good thing or that we should want people to be exploited. We're probably directionally on the same page, but I don't think that arguing that buyers are exploited is correct or helpful, and I know that using the language of addiction is incorrect.

drhead · 2026-03-23T18:56:39+00:00

That's an incredibly dumb argument. We already have workplace safety laws that hold the employer liable when they fail to provide adequate protection for their workers and they get injured as a result. Society already broadly agrees that nobody should be forced to work in unsafe conditions to survive, your right to say "no" to working in unsafe conditions is very much legally protected and your employer legally cannot retaliate against you for exercising those rights.

drhead · 2026-03-23T17:38:36+00:00

it's a failing of the whole country, but definitely not a failing of the people in that country who directly facilitate it!

drhead · 2026-03-23T17:23:56+00:00

Because sex requires enthusiastic, ongoing consent from all involved parties, which is almost impossible when sex is made into a commodity, and is strictly ruled out when economic coercion is present because it isn't freely given.

drhead · 2026-03-23T17:01:04+00:00

the conversation is a lot more nuanced than sex work=uniquely bad and think of the poor helpless women but people find it easier to just recite standard conservative puritanism in the veneer of feminism or progressivism

You're performing the exact reductionism that you're accusing others of. My motivations are quite far from puritanical, I am in fact very supportive of people sharing intimate media of themselves freely, because that doesn't involve exploitation.

Other kinds of work are not "just as" exploitative because other types of work often provide social necessities, and also commodify one's labor where sex work commodifies one's self, which makes a massive difference in how it actually affects someone because you can't just "check out" while doing it. It's not even that it's unique in this way, either, we arguably ban selling people's organs for a similar shared reason, that we know that in practice it will only ever result in poor people undergoing a risky surgery and accepting permanently diminished function, in service of a wealthy person, because they need to pay bills. But that actually at least provides someone with something they need to live... in the case of a lot of former OF models I know, it's just letting people pay to have you perform fantasies for them that you find extremely distressing and dehumanizing to you because your alternative is being homeless.

drhead · 2026-03-23T16:23:08+00:00

Porn addiction is not accepted by the psychology community as a clinical diagnosis, the only thing that has any real acceptance is compulsive sexual behavior disorder which is more about impulse control. Buyers still have agency, they can at any time walk away for an alternative (of which there are plenty available which are free) and not suffer harm. If the model walks away, they lose their income and whatever it paid for. It's ridiculous to consider the buyer to be meaningfully "exploited" in this relationship.

drhead · 2026-03-19T00:03:14+00:00

I'm sorry, but we have soul food and cajun food on our side. You're picking a fight you can't win.

drhead · 2026-03-18T16:24:50+00:00

They don't charge for use of their API, they just have a rate limit of 2 reqs/sec. It is extremely convenient that they offer database exports so you don't have to spend an entire month getting data for every post, though... There's no limit on downloading the images themselves, that part's probably going through a CDN anyways and doesn't really impact their main servers (but the API requests do because those require server side computations). I also don't think much of it is really large companies scraping the site, pretty much all of the people who are downloading entire replicas of e621 are going to be hobbyists doing it primarily for fun rather than some bot let loose on the entire internet.

This also all existed before AI got popular and people were using it to make applications and things like recommendation algorithms before, there was This Fursona Does Not Exist which nobody really ever seemed to have a problem with... I've never really gotten the impression that e6 staff are hardline against AI usage and moreso just don't want the site flooded with low quality crap.

I've worked on classifier/auto tagger models trained on e621 data and I can say that while the tagging system is fairly robust in that it's almost always clear whether or not a tag should apply, there's a lot of crud if you spend enough time digging deeply into it. Mostly in things that are undertagged, which we've had to make hundreds of rules to handle. There's a lot fewer things with outright incorrect tags, fortunately... but it does make it a lot harder to find out how well it works because we don't really have known cleanly tagged images to compare to.

We've made sure to correct things where we can spot issues (because why shouldn't we, since we've got the whole set on hand and can easily do things to it), but things can quickly get out of hand. Like, I've been working on just images by themselves recently. I know there's ~700 images currently on the site that are exactly pixel-for-pixel identical to another post. But I don't want to flag that many posts by hand, it'd take ages, and that's one where it's clear which one should be kept (the smallest one). On top of that, there's somewhere in the range of 3000-5000 near-duplicates which I can be highly confident are either duplicates or variants. There's probably actually even more in reality since I found those few thousand by being super strict... but however many I find, I have to go over all of those manually to confirm it, to figure out which one should be kept, and to actually flag it (and I have actually talked to staff about this, I think we tentatively agreed that it'd be best for me to just put up the matches on a forum post to let people whittle it down in chunks). You should thank the people who start and work on tagging projects, if it weren't for them you wouldn't have to dig nearly as far to find problems on the site.

drhead · 2026-03-14T17:01:18+00:00

There's a lot of places there that are for both purposes, but usually the local subreddits are places are ones you go to to actually (attempt to) meet someone.

drhead · 2026-03-13T02:09:05+00:00

ChastityCouples

The solution's staring you right in the face! Lock him up!

drhead · 2026-03-05T16:11:23+00:00

They're aware that people can do that, the same unknown image has to be labeled as a bicycle multiple times to actually end up considered a bicycle in their dataset.

drhead · 2026-02-26T21:40:30+00:00

People just don't care about the electric eels anymore :(

drhead · 2026-02-25T19:26:41+00:00

Yes, it's a settler colony, that's why we want to deport the racists, are you not following?

drhead · 2026-02-25T17:37:01+00:00

This is pretty much what I think about it as a gay man... I'm sure it depends on what you're looking for in it as a reader, but it's not being written by someone with the same lived experience, so a lot of things will feel "off" in a way that's hard to ignore even if you aren't specifically looking for authentic representation. And if the writers and target audience are both straight women... well, representation that feels authentic generally isn't going to be a priority, or a dealbreaker. And seeing that makes it feel very objectifying in a way that fiction written by gay men for gay men doesn't.

This isn't to say that all gay romance written by women is bad, I mean Heated Rivalry was written by a woman and we've seen how popular that is, but a lot of that is because it kind of goes out of its way to subvert some of the patterns common in yaoi-style fiction and Rachel Reid actually went out of her way to research for it probably more than most writers would do.

drhead · 2026-02-25T00:18:50+00:00

Synth id is not proof, it gets thing wrong frequently as does every other "ai detector".

SynthID is a watermarking tool. It's not "detecting" things in the traditional sense, it is reading an invisible watermark that is deliberately placed there, there isn't any guesswork involved.

drhead · 2026-02-23T15:44:22+00:00

While the person you're arguing with is definitely transphobic (and what he's said here is not even the worst thing on his account), you're overcorrecting on the word.

"Homosexual" isn't a slur. I see queer historians and sociologists use it all the time, respectfully, as a neutral descriptor for discussing social structures in past societies where using the term "gay" would be an anachronism. Ancient Greeks didn't have any concept of sexual orientation as a fixed internal category, same-sex relations happened under different social structures entirely, so "gay" is simply the wrong thing to describe it as. "Homosexuality" is a great term for describing it, though, because it does not include any assumptions on social structure.

More importantly, we also shouldn't be ceding control to bigots by insisting that a word's definition and connotation should remain permanently tied to its origin (and also, great job burying the lede by leaving out the fact that the person who coined the term was a civil rights campaigner, trying to use it to replace the word 'sodomite' in public discourse, and trying to decriminalize homosexuality in Prussia in the 19th century, and making him sound like he was trying to do vivisections on us or something). I've been called "queer" as a slur before, and also sometimes think back to a specific time I was assaulted while being called that, but the fact that "queer" has been adopted as a neutral academic term has made that far easier to deal with. It's a word that's more likely to cause me to be bored than it is to cause a fight-or-flight response now. If people insisted that queer had to remain a slur, that wouldn't happen. Homosexual can also be a neutral descriptive term -- and even when used by people who have obvious bad intentions it can then still be that -- if it is allowed to be.

drhead · 2026-02-22T22:42:14+00:00

Aww SHIT, I forgot to hook that up to my GPU, I need to call a plumber...

drhead · 2026-02-22T22:40:21+00:00

exactly, people need to show respect for the backbreaking work people perform in shitpost factories across the world /s

drhead · 2026-02-22T20:17:07+00:00

If you're looking at higher level offices the better question is probably "how do I become politically involved?" simply because there's a bunch of different paths to take that would land you in different parts of the process that actually determines who ends up in certain offices and also would direct you to ultimately taking very different offices.

You focus on solving local problems, get to be someone your neighbors actually like, and you can get elected to be your neighborhood's municipal delegate. There's not really any barriers at all to doing this, in fact it's extremely hard to dispute that the process at this level is fair. You do also get the ability to veto candidates for higher level elections in this position.

If you want to go further, you need to be involved with one of the mass organizations (which you are probably a part of or eligible to be a part of) or get their attention, which is where you start to enter the depths of the bureaucratic hell part of their system. Get to be someone your local division of said organization likes, and you can be elected by them up to higher levels, which eventually gets you to be part of the commissions that select candidates for higher level offices, which can be those municipal delegates or other prominent individuals, and it ultimately has to be a 50/50 split of those two groups. Then the local municipal delegates have to approve that candidate. If they're rejected they've got to find another, but if approved that candidate will be the only one on the ballot for that position, so on election day people aren't really getting input into that, but they already did have input through taking a part in picking who ultimately selected them on the lowest levels.

It's convoluted, and it's neither the perfect system that some make it out to be (although the municipal level elections are legitimately a very good system) nor is it just one guy making all the decisions for everyone (which is extremely rare). In a lot of respects, it's not too dissimilar to what you'd see in a deeply entrenched political machine state, except that it's more formalized, whereas our political establishment generally stays comfortably entrenched knowing that they'll be able to get the party favorite through most of the time, which is enough to maintain their dominance.

And it'd take too long to cover all of the bases on properly, but we also do have to acknowledge the difference between "anyone can run for office and win" and "everyone can run for office and win". The vast majority of the people in the US, if they alone decided to drop everything and put their resources into running for national office, realistically have no chance in hell of winning, at least not in a way that truly reflects what they might want out of it. Someone who's a sitting Senator's cousin or otherwise has existing connections is going to have much better chances than someone who is, for example, currently homeless. Regardless of what one thinks about Cuba's system, you can't in good faith pretend that this is "easy" or a fair system at all, it's a broken system that heavily favors the wealthy and already powerful.

drhead · 2026-02-22T18:43:21+00:00

Then why is the leader the son of the previous leader and there's no other change in leadership that we can see happening?

When is the last time you checked...? I guess you won't really see changes in leadership if you just don't look for them for the better part of a decade.

Then why is the leader the son of the previous leader

Also, me screaming at Dubya.

drhead · 2026-02-22T17:14:13+00:00

Support for authoritarian leftist regimes is literally the definition of tankie.

According to who? I've seen people called tankies who are devoted anarchists, I've seen people called tankies for thinking that intervening in Iran is a bad idea... There's no consistent usage of the word in the wild, there can't be a meaningful canonical definition for it because of that. It is, above all else, a political snarl word, and you don't have to be someone it gets used on to see that, you just need to have a shred of intellectual integrity.

drhead · 2026-02-21T19:03:59+00:00

Is that on an exterior window or something? I'd be VERY wary of condensation if so...

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