barsoap

Get well soon, then.

You articulated a judgement. You did not articulate a distinction.

Also your insults aren't even creative: There's pathos there, yes, but it's derivative. Mere intensity does not art make.

Got you. You can't articulate it.

I understood you just fine. What you don't seem to understand is that art depends not on the medium but the creator. Where do you draw the line? If I throw a sculpt of mine not into SDXL but Cycles to render, does it suddenly become art? Or is it still not art because I'm not using a paintbrush, hell I'm not doing a single bit of shading? Do I need to work with actual clay? That clay also has an undo button (of sorts). Does only marble count? What's your standard? Can you articulate it?

The vast bulk of AI pictures out there are bland and uninspired because it's not artists who hit the generate button. It's as simple as that. There's also plenty of bland and uninspired oil on canvas out there -- not as large a proportion because the craft is not easy to pick up while staying completely artistically illiterate, but it's still there because artistic expression is not the only reason why people paint. And that's fine. And so is randos typing "big tiddies" into a prompt box and hitting generate. Noone claims that's art, but at the utmost that it looks nice.

Agree and disagree. You actually can get proper art out of those systems, also novelty, but it usually involves leading the AI onto a gradient you can't reach with mere text prompts. It's kinda like with riding horses: As a beginner, the horse will judge you an idiot and follow the horse in front of it and not your commands. You have to have both the intention and the skill to lead the horse onto an untrodden path.

Or, differently put: If a sketch can be art then so can a piece that the AI generated from it, one that was declared adequate by the sketch maker. "Here, machine", said the human, "I have done my part, I have infused these bits with life, now you do the boring stuff and polish it".

CityNerd is a great channel, but his mode graph leaves out sleepers: Of those 14 hours travelled, how many do you actually count as travel time? I'd say subtracting the time you spend leisurely sleeping and eating at the minimum, make that 10 hours, you might also save on hotel check-in and check-out, the additional travel to that hotel, and other small stuff. Four hours travel time are very competitive.

The schedule is more restricted but I doubt many people visit more than one far-away city in a day. HSR sleepers aren't also really a thing, at least I'm not aware of any it's all conventional rail but that doesn't mean that it's some utopian far-out concept. Over here in Europe sleepers aren't high-speed simply because they don't need to be. And/or because our train infrastructure actually sucks and you can't take a sleeper from Helsinki to Lissabon, quite comparable a route to NYC-LA.

One important thing is to make sure that those trains are actually nice: When the Austrians doubled down on sleeper trains they quickly found out that the more expensive tickets actually sold very well and with newer trains they basically got rid of the whole mid-range, it's either a decent compartment with shower and everything or a capsule. Business-class or hostel-class. People are willing to, and almost demand, to spend money on the ticket that they would otherwise spend on a hotel room for a night. Lean into that, make sure the bread rolls are crunchy and the coffee has a decent standard and people are going to flock to it. About all the staff having a Viennese accent of course doesn't hurt the ÖBB.

catastrophic to the global aviation industry

Oh no!

...I mean until planes run on hydrogen. The climate really wouldn't mind covid levels of global aviation for another decade or so.

OTOH the US is of course in a tough spot, they're reliant on aviation for domestic transport because they never bothered to invest in rail. And don't come and say "the US is too large": You can have a high-speed sleeper train from NYC to LA, 14 hours total travel time shouldn't be hard to achieve, eight of which you can spend sleeping in perfect comfort, ten if you're indulgent. Proper food. You can even take a shower. Leave in the evening, arrive in the morning, especially as a travelling businessman consider it a hotel on wheels. You can fit a bloody McDonalds in a train if you want.

under that definition.

First off: What definition are you referring to because I don't see any mentioned that would imply what you said.

Not coercive would be giving the user the option to not agree to the new terms, not coercive would be not taking the telly hostage when the user wants to use it.

If Roku did not want to coerce its users to acquiesce, why did they choose such a drastic act? Is there any reasonable other motive? In defence you might argue technical necessity or such, very likely a losing battle but you might drag out the proceedings. but even then there's still enough initial suspicion to start the case.

And, as said: It's certainly not the job of an ordinary citizen to figure all that out. That's the job of police and prosecutors.

You can click the “agree” button to get back full functionality.

Not without acquiescing to a thing I do not want. Not without the fear and uncertainty of whether a civil court would actually agree with that. Whether I can afford to go up against company lawyers in court. Not without being a legal expert.

As said: Remedy being available doesn't mean that an attempt to coerce was not made, and the attempt itself is punishable. What about "the attempt is punishable" do you not understand?

If heterosexual people could learn to enjoy homosexual stuff why shouldn’t homosexual people be able to learn to enjoy heterosexual stuff? In your words: they only have to put their mind to it.

That's not what I meant by "reverse", I meant in in the learn to enjoy vs. learn to not enjoy sense.

androgen hormone levels of the mother during pregnancy.

That sets a baseline instinct, it's not the end-all be-all of sexual attraction. It sets an attraction, not a repulsion, and just as you don't need to be genetically attracted to carpentry, as long as you're not repulsed by it to a degree that can't be humanely overcome you can learn to enjoy it.

See, I’d say that’s the wrong question. At least to begin with. Is change possible? If the answer is no, there’s no point in asking why you would want that change.

But the answer to whether it's possible or not is not dependent on whether we want to use that possibility, or whether evangelicals could use it as an excuse to torture people.

I fear you’ve lost me again. I really don’t know what you’re trying to convey here.

Basically that it's not society's business who you choose (or not) to be attracted to, as long as it's all consensual. If you have a Yogi and they want to be aroused by eating spaghetti then that's their business.

The end result could be very distinct but the way to it is not a conscious process. You can consciously choose to try something new, but you can’t choose whether you like it or not.

Choosing whether we should like things or not is our largest degree of freedom. The ancient Stoics knew it, and modern psychology picked up on it (CBT is directly influenced by Epictetus). The capacity to do that is, for most people, buried under layers and layers of conditioning because learned helplessness is great if you want to rule people but that doesn't mean that it's not there.

And, of course, don't get me wrong, the capacity is not limitless, things like gender dysphoria are on a deeper level than the mechanisms of pursuit and avoidance. But if you agree that it's possible to learn to enjoy cleaning the bathroom for someone who really dreaded it before: What makes sucking dick so different that it becomes an impossibility?

Long arc back to the beginning: I doubt the measures described in the article have any meaningful impact.

Even if the impact is small, even if it's basically zero, it's still worth doing because there's no harm in it.

And I think that is complete nonsense. If it had any merit, the reverse would also be true and could be used as an argument for conversion therapy. I

The reverse isn't really true as repressing innate desire requires neurosis, while learning to enjoy something you don't instinctively enjoy very much doesn't. You can't go down the road of neurosis open-eyed and that "setting your mind to it" bit requires insight into your own mind so the two are at odds with each other. If it happens then that's ordinary repression, not a voluntary choice.

And even if it was true then conversion therapy would still be psychological torture: Nothing about conversion therapy is "setting one's mind to it", just like setting out to not dislike cleaning the toilet is not the same as someone flushing your head.

Or, differently put: Don't shove something down someone's throat that they don't already enjoy inhaling. SCNR.

And then of course there's the whole issue of why. Why change that stuff? Of course people might have individual reasons (which might be as simple as learning a psychological circus trick for the heck of it), but that doesn't mean that a social norm to have a particular sexuality (short of consent issues) makes any amount of ethical sense.

If I see foot fetish stuff it is an instant turnoff and has been for 30 years. My dislike of foot fetish stuff is certainly not due to lack of exposure.

You valued it negatively all those years and presumably never tried to do the opposite, it's no wonder you continue to dislike it. And why would you, there's no reason to.

All I'm saying is that the plasticity is there, not that it's particularly common that people use it.

I think it’s naive to assume that you could reliably prevent people from exploring their sexuality by keeping them (pre-)occupied with something else.

Nothing is 100% reliable, and the purely sexual can only be a part of the overall solution. Additional things include making affected recognise the impossibility of consent, the amount of damage their behaviour would cause, and if that alone doesn't convince them that they should gladly distract themselves there's some ways to get a bit of a handle on dark triad traits though TBH the bigger bully argument works most reliably: Criminalisation. OTOH it would be naive to only crack the whip of criminal law without offering people aid in how to avoid it.

Only a very, very small percentage of paedophiles are exclusive paedophiles. This is more like a bi person becoming more gay (or straight) by exposing themselves to more gay (or straight) porn. People can focus in on particular aspects of their sexuality or ignore others, and that's before fetishisation comes into play where the mind projects sexual meaning onto stuff that's not primitively (as in instinctively) sexual.

Yes. Even if you're a 110% straight dude, if you set your mind to it, with enough practice, you can learn to enjoy sucking dick, or at least having your dick sucked by a cute femboy. At the same time mere exposure to gay porn doesn't do the same and that's not a contradiction as your usual 110% straight dude has no interest whatsoever to setting their mind to learn how to enjoy sucking dick, there's neither inclination nor reason to, the porn is just going to go straight past them. 90% straight? Much more likely. Neither is going to lose their original attraction to women, though, the most you get is nothing happening on that front because they're occupied elsewhere. And that's exactly where we want the sexuality of paedophiles to be: Occupied elsewhere.

EDIT: I'll assume the downvotes come from people not realizing just how plastic our mind is and not random reactionaries. Not on my lemmy.