I own two cats, and they both have bells. They haven’t killed any wildlife since then. Cats are not native animals in Europe, they are very much invasive and devastated local populations of birds and small mammals.

Trolling, intentionally obtuse, or just dumb? Because as we all know, cats never kill anything but pests. Native animals would never become endangered because of domesticated cats. At least put a bell on them or something so they don’t kill the wildlife.

You’re so very wrong about that. The chemicals used right now for lethal injection fail often, cause undue pain and distress, and often will paralyze you instead of killing you quickly while you slowly suffocate, unable to call for help. Nitrogen has no downsides. This isn’t a “techbro” solution. It’s a humane one. A guillotine was kinder to the one dying than the current method.

The current method prioritizes minimizing violence and maximizing comfort for spectators over being humane to the one dying. The only reason there is a paralytic in the chemical slurry is because the sleep and lethal chemicals sometimes fail spectacularly and the patient spasms painfully as they die. Their solution wasn’t to change the method to be more humane, it was to paralyze them so they don’t spasm. They’re still in pain. They’re still dying slowly. They’re still scared. But we don’t have to see it, so it’s okay.

Nitrogen euthanasia is safe and humane, killing entirely painlessly. For some reason the fact that it’s a gas, even an inert one, makes people crazy.

The laws are clearly outdated. Drugs for lethal injection frequently fail and cause much more pain and distress. Nitrogen has *no downsides." It’s like the fact that it’s a gas makes people crazy.

We have more than enough resources for more than the world’s population. The problem isn’t overpopulation, it’s manufactured scarcity. Telling people to just have less kids is victim blaming when capitalism requires letting some people starve to maintain the artificial value of products.

On the contrary, since growing my nails out my nails have been way more clean. There is an awkward period between no nails and long nails where stuff gets caught underneath, but once you grow them out (only two weeks or so), they’re perfectly clean because there’s just more space underneath and nowhere for gunk to get caught as the angle is wider.

(Classic guitar players have long nails)

The Barnsley Fern was constructed specifically to resemble the species of fern that it does. There are versions of it that have been modified to resemble other ferns. The fractal isn’t some secret mathematical code for why ferns look like they do, it’s more like a drawing of a fern. If someone made a fractal to look like another leaf, it would be just that, not an advancement into the secrets of botany.

The short answer: no. The two do not connect beyond the fact that ferns have a design reminiscent of a fractal, which is likely what inspired the fractal’s creation.

How “real” is it? It is a real set of functions, but if I design a set of functions to look like William Dafoe, it doesn’t mean I’ve cracked the matrix code into his genetics.

The premise of your previous comment was that regardless of the health effects (ie: if vegan cat food is healthy), the cats didn’t consent to it. That argument doesn’t make any sense. I don’t disagree that cats need proper nutrition, again, I feed my cat meat. I just think your argument based on consent is not well founded and there are better ways to argue your point without making a strange implication about ignoring consent. I don’t think forcing a cat to be vegan is okay, unless that diet is properly supplemented with all the nutrients the cat needs, which may or may not be possible. I don’t know. Again, I’m not arguing for cats to be fed vegan. I’m arguing against using consent as the angle against veganism, because that opens up a whole can of worms as to hypocrisy. I’m not vegan, and there are perfectly good reasons to be or not be vegan, but animal consent definitely isn’t an argument to be made against veganism unless you want to confront the issues with animals just as intelligent as cats, or more, being consumed as food.

I don’t have a dog in this race, but it seems to me the obvious answer to your consent dilemma is “no animal consents to being eaten.” I feed my cat a non-vegan diet, for the record. I’m just not pretending that the fish likes it or anything. If a perfectly healthy vegan diet is possible for a cat, which I’m honestly not clear on, then it’s definitely ethical to do so.

If you extrapolated the moral dilemma to the extreme, it would be like saying “it’s unethical to take the knife away from that serial murderer. He just wants to murder and he didn’t consent to stopping!” Obviously, that’s a ridiculous comparison, but so is making the consent argument. My point isn’t that feeding cats meat is wrong (again, I feed my cat meat), it’s that making a consent argument against veganism is silly.

Sure, if you let it bother you. If you care about the memes that much, ignore the stuff you don’t like, if you can’t stand it, find one of many other communities. I don’t think it’s on them, regardless of poor branding, when there’s so many other instances. No one is forcing you to engage in the comments of posts you don’t like.

ml stands for Marxist-Leninist. When anyone is allowed to make their own instance, and instances or users can defederate or block what they don’t want to see, why can’t an instance be political? That’s like saying “no political communities!” Just block them and move on, just as they can do the same. You commented in the memes community of a communist instance and got annoyed that you got banned for being anti-communist. Plenty of instances out there, they don’t all need to cater to every person.

You can find that information easily. Steam reviews are by region.

It doesn’t really sound like you want the government to get out of people’s lives. Fair taxation, defending protected classes, and gun regulation are all very hands-on, and I agree that they’re all important. The real thing right wingers mean when they say “small government” is “no regulation for corporations or states” so they can be as authoritarian as they want locally and the rich don’t need to pay taxes. Banning gay marriage, controlling reproductive rights, and immigration control are not small government tasks, they’re just tasks they want the authority to mandate on a state level since they know they’ll never get the entire country on board.

What I wish more “centrists” would realize is that no one in the country, except anarchists, actually want small government, because they can’t enforce control over the things they don’t like without it. Rules for thee, not for me.

Okay but I enjoy realistic milsim games. You don’t have to play them. Weird take.

Plumber, carpenter, construction, woodcraft, metalworker, etc etc. There are plenty of good reasons to own a large vehicle. People who use a large vehicle for its intended purpose aren’t the problem, it’s the assholes driving them for fun that makes everyone else unsafe.

Do you think the first long truck sprang into existence in 2008? We’ve had super long trucks for specific use cases as long as we’ve had trucks. This is like one of the few times a person has a good reason to have a large vehicle, and is being safe and polite about it by staying out of the way and writing a polite note to explain. Large vehicles aren’t the problem, people owning large vehicles who don’t need them are the problem.

If you think that this:

Replace “machine” with “film crew”, “rerun” with “do another take”, and “tweak the prompt” with “provide notes”. If they’re giving notes to a computer or a person doesn’t really change the nature of their work, only the language they use to provide those notes.

is what a director does? You have no clue what you’re talking about. They’re far more involved in the creative process on every level than you understand.

Your question about who AI helps is a valid one. I agree that that’s what’s important about AI use. I use AI in my work, but not to replace human beings, but as a tool to make easy mock ups or test ideas. I find trying to replace human creativity in a way that replaces jobs or the human spark that makes art, art, abhorrent. AI art cannot exist without humans to train on, so humans cannot be fully replaced, but I hope to never see a day where AI takes the positions of well compensated artists leeching off the work of unpaid or underpaid humans.

I’m not suggesting that the director has full responsibility for the art. They are part of a team, and the creative style of a director heavily influences the finished product. You can tell who directed a movie just by watching it. There are very important creative decisions and directions that point the team of more specialized artists in the right direction.

This is not analogous to AI art. That would be like the director of a movie telling a team of interns to cut together clips of other movies as best they see fit, within a general outline of the script. A person using AI to generate art isn’t part of the creative process in the same way; they tell a machine what to do, and decide whether to rerun or tweak the prompt after seeing the result. This takes some small modicum of creativity, but it isn’t creating art. It’s fine for fun, or to use as a stand in tool, or to mock-up designs, but it will never have the creative direction of a human being, or stand on the same level with true masters, regardless of how well it can copy their style. It can’t understand the art.

Directing is an art form of its own. The cinematography, the pacing, the set design, acting, and so much more is all influenced by the director’s decisions. It would be like saying a conductor or a music producer isn’t an artist. Easy to say if you don’t have an understanding of the art form, but dead wrong. There are a ton of creative choices at all levels made by directors, and there’s a reason we’ve been using them in one way or another since we first started performance art. I’ve worked under and beside directors in the past, and I have only the utmost respect for what a good director can do for the art.

A bad director however… I might agree with you.

That certainly is an opinion