Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

@matrix Was setting up a #Matrix Synapse server to play around with today of all days, only to find that joining a handful of rooms completely maxed out the CPU and RAM, mostly because it is downloading heaps of garbage from the matrix.org Synapse.

It looks like the @matrix flagship server is currently under attack by far-right trolls.

All of the larger rooms are currently flooding with pornspam and slurs.

That whole "defederate from every instance that federates with Threads" idea is dead-in-the-water at this point, right? I've heard this strategy come up several times since Meta announced planned ActivityPub support, and it has always sounded to me like community suicide.

Jones Soda now offers a mug with Jim Jones on it.

BUT...

You have to drink 25 cans of "Mary Jones" soda with 100mg THC each to be eligible.

“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.

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

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

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.

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.

Outside of a handful of one-off applications, and the necessity to understand how my employer's Windows software works, I haven't actually used Windows since Windows 7.

I've managed to lose all hands-on experience with currently supported Windows releases. Even Windows 8.1 is EOL, and I don't think I ever touched it.

Everything I have seen about Windows 11 has me thankful that I have purged that awful OS from my life.

Ten years later and I'm still baffled that KFC actually tried to run "I ate the bones" as a marketing slogan for boneless wings.