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Liftoff is incompatible with the latest version of Lemmy

LLM/AI tools can massively decrease the cost of dubbing media into smaller languages, including the cost of creating audio descriptions for the visually impaired. I don’t know the extent to which these uses are actually being implemented at the moment, but yeah. It’s by all means possible, and in my eyes pretty cool. These uses would not replace real people, would not require unethical practices, but would still reduce the workload.

I’m kind of disappointed by the ways in which AI is being presented as a “terk er jerbs” thing in fields where it has no rightful place, the ways in which AI is presented as a “procedurally generated Netflix and chill with my robot girlfriend” hyperreal horrorshow, the ways in which AI is being used for scams. AI absolutely has its places in society, and helping with accessibility and localization is one of them.

Edit: Yes, and also writing closed captions, and arguably even using deepfakes to “dub” shows and movies into sign languages could be potential uses.

There’s also how chatbots can be used as language study buddies for those without the ability to talk to actual native speakers, although I haven’t had much success with this, personally.

😎 is pronounced as [bad to the bone riff]

She neon my genesis till i evangelion my hand

Based granddad

How exactly do I revoke my consent?

Honestly, it was very cathartic to write, so I appreciate your sympathy very much. Sometimes I just need to scream at the world, you know. So just reading my attestation is all the support you could give right now.

So I wish you the best as well. All animosity has dissipated. Take care of yourself and stay curious.

I know a closeted trans girl who is very clearly autistic, but who has not pursued an ASD diagnosis because she believes that she will not get treatment for her gender dysphoria if she also has an ASD diagnosis. And so she goes without any accommodations for her autism, just so that she has a better chance of getting treatment for her other major problem. Norway’s state trans health system refusing to treat autistic people is a known problem. According to Norwegian law, this type of discrimination is not supposed to happen, rather anyone who desires to transition should be allowed to transition. And yet it still happens that many Norwegians are denied that right to transition on grounds such as being autistic, and for this the health system responsible gets at most a sternly-worded letter from the government, as if reciting the law makes it a reality.

So this girl I know first pursued transitional healthcare in 2016, but is yet to actually receive any of that healthcare. Rather, the staff in the health system said that my friend needed to get out more, become more outgoing, and earn some money first. That’s what she told me they said. And so now my friend goes with me to this job skills course organized by some shoddy welfare contractor. Several other people who attend this course have gone on absolutely vitriolically transphobic tirades with us two present. And several times, my friend and I attempted to contact the staff organizing the course, to tell them that she was genuinely scared of these vitriolic transphobes, that they were traumatizing her and causing her immense distress. And the staff refused to take any action at every turn, always saying, “When you get a real job, you’ll have to be ready to deal with all kinds of people, even if you don’t agree with the things they say”.

What we could do about the staff’s refusal to take action was to file a complaint to the welfare administration, but it takes many weeks for these complaints to be processed, and this was an issue that needed to be resolved immediately. And who knows what the welfare administration would’ve actually done about the issue, probably the same “sternly-worded letter” nonsense as before, or at best transferring us to a different contractor, which would probably have the exact same issue of being too fond of cost-cutting to actually do anything about the actual Nazis in our midst… Thankfully, though, one of the transphobic reactionaries was kicked off the course when he threatened another participant with violence, another has become a no-show on most days, the third hasn’t brought up trans issues ever again after his first tirade. On top of this, another pro-trans participant has been attending more regularly, and she is principled enough to shut down transphobia even when the staff refuses to do the same. So the issue of transphobia at the job skills course seems to have died down somewhat.

I myself am taking this job skills course because I live in a home with a deeply transphobic relative, and I need to find a well-paying job that will allow me to move out and fund my transition. I already have an autism diagnosis, and I am also non-binary, which means that state healthcare is very unlikely to give me transitional medicine unless I wait and wait and wait and work myself to the bone trying to get them to actually respect their legal obligations. And other options for trans healthcare in Norway are getting thinned out, and state healthcare itself is getting gutted. Which means that I intend to fund my own transition entirely by myself, including by buying gray-market hormone therapy.

The last time I tried scraping together however little money I could for one measly pack of bicalutamide, it was seized by customs and destroyed. Customs even sent me a nice little letter about the dangers of buying medicine from foreign online pharmacies. I still keep that letter beside my bed.

And trust me, I tried voting, too. I voted Socialist Left, because I believed that of the parties that I liked “enough”, that Socialist Left were the most likely to get a substantial number of seats and join the governing coalition, without compromising my political interests too much. And indeed, 2021 was a pretty good election for Socialist Left. But they didn’t end up in the governing coalition, because they demanded that Labor have stronger commitments to fighting climate change. So the current minority government of Norway is between Labor and Center. Which means that even though I tried voting for a party with good LGBT+ policy proposals, nevertheless a number of major government positions in Norway are currently filled by people who have openly expressed transphobic views.

And indeed look at the news media. Hell, look at social media! Ain’t it just great to read a privately-owned newspaper, only to suddenly find oneself gazing at yet more transphobia? Even ostensibly publicly-owned news publications like NRK, they aren’t immune to transphobia, either. And social media, fediverse aside, has all these damned algorithms that keep showing me the most vitriolic shit. And this is the type of stuff that people form their opinions and worldviews from!

So I have “rights” under liberalism. The right to change my legal name and gender marker, the right to transitional healthcare, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right to control my body and have a say in the government… But time and time again, all practical experience shows that having rights on paper does not mean anything unless the system in place allows them to mean something. I still consider myself to be an anarchist, but I have a lot of respect for Marxist-Leninists. Both anarchism and Marxism-Leninism understand that liberal “democracies”, “rights”, and “freedoms” are practically speaking worthless. Liberal rights only truly apply to the bourgeoisie, because it was the bourgeoisie who came up with these rights, as they secured their class interests in the transition out of feudalism. Liberalism was a progressive force at that time: it is a progressive force still today only insofar as it sows the seeds of a better permanent replacement, and it is a regressive force insofar as it sows the seeds of a worse temporary replacement.

It is always grassroots LGBT+ activism that brings forth LGBT+ rights. Always. Do not ascribe to liberalism what was the work of some of the most wretched of the Earth, working tirelessly to build a better world despite liberalism.

As opposed to you reducing liberalism to everything you do like, of course. How’s that “sacred democracy and political agency” working out in practice? How are you enjoying your “individual liberty”?

liberalism, the ideology which is actually doing to most for LGBT rights.

Just so that you’re aware: liberalism here refers to the belief in market economies and the right to private property. There is a bit more to liberalism, naturally, but that’s the main point. So whenever you see Hexbears talk about “libs” or “liberals”, rather than applying whatever American definition or preconception of the word “liberalism” that you may have, instead think, “someone who supports the free market and private property”… And indeed, the liberal parties in Russia are right-wing and deeply conservative: “liberal” non est “progressive”. Decouple those terms in your mind. You can have liberal progressives and liberal conservatives alike if you’re not using “liberal” as a synonym of “progressive”, like Americans tend to do.

Furthermore, LGBT+ criticisms of capitalism have a history stretching back even before Stonewall. Harry Whyte’s letter to Stalin in 1934, which criticizes the regress of gay rights in the USSR while also analyzing the position of gays in capitalism at the time, stands out. Leslie Feinberg (1949-2014) is another important figure in the history of LGBT+ communism. You might find Feinberg’s Lavender and Red to be particularly interesting, as it lays out a history of the intersection of LGBT+ rights movements and leftism.

I can only assume it’s for reasons such as:

Language: there is a very large Russian/FSU diaspora in Germany, while there is only a very small Russian community in China; and LGBT+ Russians are more likely to be proficient in English than in Chinese. It then follows that integrating into society and accessing services would be easier in Germany than in China, since Germany has a high English proficiency, and a large enough Russian population for many services to be provided in that language, or for Russophones to be able to find community on the basis of shared first language. German itself, of course, is also more similar to English and Russian than it is to Chinese.

The state of LGBT+ rights: rights for LGBT+ people are better in Germany than in China. This is not to erase the strides that China has made in terms of LGBT+ rights, nor the difficulties that LGBT+ people face in Germany and the very real possibility of regression as right-wing sentiment grows in Germany; but it’s also just a fact that LGBT+ Hexbears obviously acknowledge, that it’s in many ways just easier to be LGBT+ in the core than in the periphery or semi-periphery. It sucks, but that’s the way it is, for now.

Ease of applying for asylum: becoming a refugee in China is more difficult than becoming a refugee in Germany. Last I checked, China does not officially grant asylum, and has all refugees living in the country processed by the UNHCR. Germany, on the other hand, does grant asylum. While it’s obviously a good thing that people can flee from dangerous situations and seek asylum in another country, and China really should grant official asylum to refugees; one should be aware that systemically, the imperial core’s policy towards refugees is a form of economic domination over the imperial periphery, meant to provide themselves with cheap labor and drain the capital of the periphery.

China does not need more communists: it’s not like it’s a bad thing to move to China by any means — there’s a lot of good that can be done there — but it’s also not a bad thing to move to the imperial core in order to fight the good fight “in the heart of the enemy”. That’s more people to do activism, more people to join and contribute to organizations, and so forth: if we want to build socialism around the whole world, obviously we’ll want to live around the whole world.

I dunno, these are just some of my thoughts on potential reasons why an LGBT+ Russian socialist might prefer to take refuge in Germany rather than China… Like, it could’ve also just been that Kaplya just stated the name of the first country Kaplya thought of, and the comment wasn’t meant to be read into to this extent, but either way it’s a good writing exercise.

My thread on Hexbear

https://hexbear.net/post/1232126

Here’s the thread I made on Hexbear.

https://hexbear.net/post/1232126

Four comments as of me writing this comment:

Putin really is a big fan of the Russian Empire. He’s even doing his own pogroms that will inevitably lead to a brain drain.

Russia is so fucked. People who identified as not-religious has been constantly falling from since 1991 from 60% to 20%. Orthodox Christianity from 30% to 70%. Russian youth (16-29 yo) are 75% religious (62% orthodox) https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/02/10/russians-return-to-religion-but-not-to-church/

Man, fuck Gorbachev for allowing the USSR to be dissolved by the west.

[an emoji titled “russia-cool”, depicting a burning Russian flag]

So yeah, if you’re looking for Hexbears criticizing Russia, then there you go.

Actual quotes from Hexbears that I got when discussing Russia with them:

“Those reactionary shitstains [the Russian government] has little to be proud of.”

“Russia is extremly Reactionary […] thats why Russia has a Real Problem with “White Supremacy” , [and] no problems with hunting down LGBTQ+ […]”

Now I don’t exactly see anybody on Hexbear presently discussing this particular bit of news about crackdowns on LGBT+, but I’ll go post about this news on Hexbear and see how the people there react. I have a feeling it’s going to be consistent with my previous experiences discussing Russia with Hexbears, which is also going to be the reaction that I’d expect from an instance that skews heavily LGBT+.

I mean, if your measure of modernity is just how good home computers were back then, rather than that any substantial number of people had home computers at all, then of course 1994 is going to seem non-modern.

I guess I have a skewed perception of how long ago 1994 was, though, because 1995 was when my parents first came into contact with each other from opposite sides of the globe, through the ol’ information superhighway. For me that makes 1994 seem incredibly recent, even if it was nearly 30 years ago and a lot has changed since then. The '90s were this whole decade of pop culture, technology, and political and social change whose shadow I grew up in, basically the beginning of what I would consider in most contexts to be the “modern day”. But if I had actually been alive and conscious at the time, then maybe I would be more practically aware of the differences between then and now, and hesitate to call it “modern”.

But modernity always is relative. If I were talking specifically about computers, then obviously even a computer from as recently as 2008 would really be stretching the definition of “modern”. But then in another context I might even say that something that happened in 1898 would’ve been “recent”, though I wouldn’t necessarily refer to that as “modern” per se.

Put another way, an apparent slim majority of the world’s population (but not of South Africa’s population) was alive when Nelson Mandela took office. Probably a lot of them were infants or small children at the time, but still: even for the people who weren’t alive at that time, or who were too young to really remember it personally, there are so many people who were very alive and very conscious at the time, that everyone’s bound to know a good few. My mom attended anti-apartheid protests when she was in college, for instance. Mandela himself was president until 1999, and only died in 2013, which it’s hard to believe was already ten years ago.

Calling Israel’s apartheid “modern” to me kind of implies that South Africa’s apartheid, whose transitional period ended in 1994, was somehow “ancient” or “old-fashioned”… Yeah, you can rest assured that apartheid/segregation always has been far too modern.

From Wikipedia:

“A bondage suit, also commonly called a gimp suit, is a form-fitting garment designed to cover the body completely […] A bondage suit is sometimes used in BDSM to objectify the wearer, or gimp, and reduce them to the status of a sexual toy, rather than a sexual partner.”

Of all the industries to profit from bored ape NFTs, I was not expecting white cane manufacturing to be one of them.

Let’s just say she’s polydactyl!