Miscellaneous News

Chevalier said:

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i kept hearing about democracies and free speech and freedom yet what I see in reality is about as real as “high ashkenazi IQ”

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coolgod said:

Typical Cuckservatives. On the bright side you don't see westerners bitching about China's GFW anymore.

TIL some US states already ban or have porn ID laws.

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Ohio looks next on the list, anyone got any tips on which AWS/other cloud provider region would be relatively censor free? Oregon doesn't look too safe either.

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FriedButter said:

Actually, it is literally every party but the liberals voting for it. As a matter of fact, it means that a government ID will be required to use Steam to play any games. Basically, Canada has decided to go scorched earth.

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Enestori said:

I do wonder the extent to which the Western media has lost credibility compared with the Cold War.

My recollection of the Cold War is that the Western media was generally seen as truthful and the Soviet media as not so? I'm not sure how true that actually was?

But now the thinking is generally that the Western media lies? Compared to the Cold War, they have far less credibility? I definitely know that CNN has kind of become a synonym for political bias. Over the decades, maybe the Uyghur genocide lie will drain the Western media's credibility? The USA government will have to keep repeating the Uyghur genocide lie for decades, when it will obviously be false by 2035 or 2050. But maybe this is just wishful thinking.

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Sardaukar20 said:

The Western media have lost probably 90% of their credibility. They have actually been lying all the time. Even during the Cold War. They've called their genocidal bombing campaign over North Korea as "liberation" from Communist tyranny. They hid the truth about the Cuban Missile Crisis, that it was actually the US and NATO who had started it by placing missiles in Turkey. They called the people of Bikini Atoll "savages" and needed to be relocated for awhile to be "civilized", then nuke the shit out of that place and then put them back in there to be studied. There was that Vietnam War Domino theory, and more. I could go on and on. Why things are different now is because of the internet. Information has been democratized and is not longer monopolized by the media, libraries, and ministries. People can now do their own research and come up with their own conclusions. Not everyone gets things right, but eventually many people will learn the truth.

The Uighur genocide is a classic example of Western projection. Every trick in the book that they claimed China did, they have done it themselves. Concentration camps, mass graves, forced sterilization, slave labour, cultural genocide, etc. They have done it all to various peoples of colour during the colonial era. When the US accuses China of Uighur genocide, they are actually reminding us of what they did to the Native Americans.

This Uighur genocide propaganda campaign actually follows on the heels of the defeat of the US's operation to create a violent separatist movement to break Xinjiang away from China. Its the same as the Free Tibet movement, as well as the HK color revolution plot. They have all been defeated and lost their steam. But the US and its lackeys will continue to prop them up with money and propaganda while they still can. Problem for them is that that list of movements to keep alive is getting longer and longer. Ukraine is now a big part of that list, gobbling up obscene amounts of money and resources. I don't think the West has that much time left to sustain this nonsense.

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Bellum_Romanum said:

Why? You're not going to be affected by these laws which I AM IN FULL SUPPORT for by the way. PORN VIEWING has become so ubiquitous and pervasive in our society that more and more young men and women have been exposed to a very unhealthy views and understanding of sex. Furthering the sexualization of girls/women and paradoxically, increasing the number of young men becoming incels.

Porn should be limited and not be readily accessible to young kids period.

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Bellum_Romanum said:

Why? You're not going to be affected by these laws which I AM IN FULL SUPPORT for by the way. PORN VIEWING has become so ubiquitous and pervasive in our society that more and more young men and women have been exposed to a very unhealthy views and understanding of sex. Furthering the sexualization of girls/women and paradoxically, increasing the number of young men becoming incels.

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BlackWindMnt said:

Dam had hoped they would block TikTok, it's would be such a powerful self own move. Because how are they going to influence global youths if their influencer can't access TikTok.

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Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis​

Google has apologized for what it describes as “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” with its Gemini AI tool, saying its attempts at creating a “wide range” of results missed the mark.

The statement follows criticism that it depicted specific white figures (like the US Founding Fathers) or groups like Nazi-era German soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to long-standing racial bias problems in AI.

“We’re aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions,” says the Google statement, posted this afternoon on X. “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately. Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”

My Gemini results for “generate a picture of an American woman,” one of the prompts that set off the debate of the past few days.

Google began offering image generation through its Gemini (formerly Bard)AI platform earlier this month, matching the offerings of competitors like OpenAI. Over the past few days, however, social media posts have questioned whether it fails to produce historically accurate results in an attempt at racial and gender diversity.

As the Daily Dot chronicles, the controversy has been promoted largely — though not exclusively — by right-wing figures attacking a tech company that’s perceived as liberal. Earlier this week, a former Google employee posted on X that it’s “embarrassingly hard to get Google Gemini to acknowledge that white people exist,” showing a series of queries like “generate a picture of a Swedish woman” or “generate a picture of an American woman.”

The results appeared to overwhelmingly or exclusively show AI-generated people of color. (Of course, all the places he listed do have women of color living in them, and none of the AI-generated women exist in any country.) The criticism was taken up by right-wing accounts that requested images of historical groups or figures like the Founding Fathers and purportedly got overwhelmingly non-white AI-generated people as results.

Some of these accounts positioned Google’s results as part of a conspiracy to avoid depicting white people, and at least one used a coded antisemitic reference to place the blame.Google didn’t reference specific images that it felt were errors; in a statement to The Verge, it reiterated the contents of its post on X. But it’s plausible that Gemini has made an overall attempt to boost diversity because of a chronic lack of it in generative AI.

Image generators are trained on large corpuses of pictures and written captions to produce the “best” fit for a given prompt, which means they’re often prone to amplifying stereotypes. A Washington Post investigation last year found that prompts like “a productive person” resulted in pictures of entirely white and almost entirely male figures, while a prompt for “a person at social services” uniformly produced what looked like people of color. It’s a continuation of trends that have appeared in search engines and other software systems.

Some of the accounts that criticized Google defended its core goals. “It’s a good thing to portray diversity ** in certain cases **,” noted one person who posted the image of racially diverse 1940s German soldiers. “The stupid move here is Gemini isn’t doing it in a nuanced way.” And while entirely white-dominated results for something like “a 1943 German soldier” would make historical sense, that’s much less true for prompts like “an American woman,” where the question is how to represent a diverse real-life group in a small batch of made-up portraits.

For now, Gemini appears to be simply refusing some image generation tasks. It wouldn’t generate an image of Vikings for one Verge reporter, although I was able to get a response. On desktop, it resolutely refused to give me images of German soldiers or officials from Germany’s Nazi period or to offer an image of “an American president from the 1800s.”

Gemini’s results for the prompt “generate a picture of a US senator from the 1800s.”

But some historical requests still do end up factually misrepresenting the past. A colleague was able to get the mobile app to deliver a version of the “German soldier” prompt — which exhibited the same issues described on X.

And while a query for pictures of “the Founding Fathers” returned group shots of almost exclusively white men who vaguely resembled real figures like Thomas Jefferson, a request for “a US senator from the 1800s” returned a list of results Gemini promoted as “diverse,” including what appeared to be Black and Native American women. (The first female senator, a white woman, served in 1922.) It’s a response that ends up erasing a real history of race and gender discrimination — “inaccuracy,” as Google puts it, is about right.

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