Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

“I saw this blasphemous statue and was outraged,” said Cassidy, a former US navy pilot who has previously run for Congress unsuccessfully in Mississippi. “My conscience is held captive to the word of God, not to bureaucratic decree. And so I acted.”

The Oath of Enlistment means nothing. It's nationalist theater.

A reminder that, despite the propaganda, veterans/troops are not the reason Americans have rights. If they are Republican, and many of them are, they are part of the fight to destroy the pillars of freedom this country was founded on until all that's left is a Christofacist Dictatorship.

Which is why military/police worship is such a popular Conservative aesthetic: They know who will carry out their will should they ever overthrow this nation.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/15/satanic-temple-vandalism-iowa-state-capitol

The best part about running my own single-user instance right now is that nobody will ever care if I federate with Threads or not, because it won't affect anyone but me. I can just stay out of the drama and do what I want.

I will probably federate just to follow some of my IRL friends and family, but I'll also probably put some limits on what hits my global feed because I don't want brands on my feed anywhere.

@cy I empathize with her heart condition, but I doubt that information was even available to the record label, nor is it a factor in this situation at all.

Regardless of that context, selling merchandise on Amazon is a for-profit endeavor, she was absolutely selling counterfeit merchandise.

They have, as of yesterday evening, dropped the judgement against her because of media pressure and the iffy details surrounding the lawsuit, which is good because this wasn't a fair judgement.

@cy I'm sure there are plenty of shortcomings to address, but I don't really care to make assumptions.

Going after for-profit counterfeiters is not very predatory, I don't see how suing someone for selling unlicensed merchandise meets the definition of extortion, and lawsuits often start with the maximum allowed damages until they can discover the actual scale of infringement.

The only major shortcoming I can actually see is that the defendant's right to a defense was unjustly forfeited.

@cy Agreed, but this isn't really one of those cases of extortion, such as when record labels send toothless threats of litigation unless you settle, just hoping to settle with people fearful of ligation.

This is a combination of two issues: artificially high damages with the expectation that the damages will be argued down in court, and a flimsy summons system that prevented the defendant from receiving a cease and desist or summons, and being unable to argue down the damages in court.

Someone actually submitted this potato-quality AI generated image to the US copyright office.

It was rejected, because c'mon now...

@realjosephknapp @GrantRVD How is that not about trade?

@yacc143 I'm tempted to proactively reach out to the Illinois court system to ask how to register my primary email address and learn what domains they email from so I can whitelist them.

Or, better yet, opt out of paperless communications.

Because this sounds like the beginning of a new type of litigious trolling that people are going to have to protect themselves from.

She really was doing some overt infringement with her merchandise, so it was legally justified to send her a cease and desist and follow up with litigation. It sounds like the record label was targeting a number of unauthorized merchants in one lawsuit.

But she never had a real chance to defend herself, and the judgement against her is not proportionate to the actual damages.

Email is not a realistic solution to process serving. Nobody would expect something this important to be paperless.

So apparently federal courts in Illinois consider email to be sufficient to serve someone notice of a lawsuit, including for our-of-state defendants. Now we have a case of a woman in Florida facing a default judgement for copyright infringement because she missed her summons.

Apparently it was in the junk mail of a lesser-used inbox.

Kinda scary to think that getting behind on your email could cost you $250k. I don't think it should work that way...

https://www.wfla.com/8-on-your-side/better-call-behnken/pinellas-woman-who-sold-luke-combs-themed-tumblers-owes-country-star-250000-judge-rules/

Imagine if we had this kind of pressure for presidents and CEOs to resign when they give bullshit lawyerspeak answers during congressional testimonies.

@realjosephknapp @GrantRVD There are no winners in a trade war.

It's honestly funny that his own fanboys convince him to sabotage his projects just by complaining that they aren't insulting enough.

This is going to be a hilarious arms race.

The next step is to get Grok to explain the right wing opinions Musk is going to force on it so that we can laugh at how little sense it's going to make.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-grok-ai-left-wing

Compelling #AIart shouldn't just emulate what humans can do, it should showcase the weird things that an #AI can do uniquely.

I've been having some fun pushing #StableDiffusion to its limits. I used a "time slider" LoRA model and had it animate its travel through time.

It took 18 hours, and about $5 in cloud costs to render.

Background Music is a sample of "
for you will burn your wings upon the sun" by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, slowed down 10x.

I was reviewing the status of some of the instances I've defederated from, and I found something very funny that I missed earlier this year from an instance that was especially awful.

Whoever would have guessed that cultivating a community of Gamer Gaters, Kiwi Farmers, and other petulant sociopaths would end up backfiring, lol.

Reap what you sow, idiot.