Few years ago, people literally had to rob the bank for their own money here. Thing was, when you went to the bank and you asked for your money and they didn’t give it to you, they were technically breaking the law, and you brandishing a weapon to while asking for something that is legally yours is not a particular crime. The thought of threatening a bank employee whose job was to be a verbal punching bag for an evil financial system wasn’t appealing to many people, and most people didn’t have enough in there for it to be worth it, so it wasn’t as common as the media made it out to be.

A lot of “robbers” used obviously fake “weapons” and that did work - while also giving plausible deniability towards the law (“I didn’t really make a threat”) and for the employee (“I was being threatened and complied” without actually being in danger).

You’d think our sordid history with capitalism would instill a lesson or two in our society but vapid “entrepreneur” culture and socio-economic pick-me-ism are at an all time high here and every day I am drawn more to the mountain hermit life and this is not a joke.

I think I should have been more clear, this is exactly what I’m asking about. I’m somewhat surprised by the reaction this post got, this seems like a very normal thing to want to host.

Doesn’t help that some people here are replying as if I was asking to locally host the “trick” that is feeding a chatbot text and asking it whether it’s machine-generated. Ideally the software I think I’m looking for would be something that has a bank of LLM models and can kind of do some sort of statistical magic to see how likely a block of tokens is to be generated by them. Would probably need to have quantized models just to make it run at a reasonable speed. So it would, for example, feed the first x tokens in, take stock of how the probability table looks for the next token, compare it to the actual next token in the block, and so on.

Maybe this is already a thing and I just don’t know the jargon for it. I’m pretty sure I’m more informed about how these transformer algorithms work than the average user of them, but only just.

That’s a shame. Never had any of their household appliances so I wouldn’t know. I’m mostly thinking about power tools, auto parts, and like those laser distance things.

I hate paying 5x for a German-made Bosch spare part for my car when I’m tired of the AliExpress quality lottery but I have to admit it’s one of the few hardware manufacturers I still think pretty highly of. They make Dremels too, right? I imported one of those at an extortionate price and haven’t regretted a single penny, reminds me of how old durable tools were built to actually last.

When I was a kid and you picked up something with a (for example) Sony logo on it, you know you were holding something that was at least relatively well made. Nowadays pretty much every single company gives me marrow-sucking quality-be-damned vibes. And come to think of it Bosch was not one of the companies I saw that way.

Disgusting how they’re treating their workers (who I’m assuming are damn good at their job given how highly I think of Bosch’s stuff), but someone still needs to be doing that job.

I personally think cooking will have serious staying power.

I won’t count on this being particularly productive. Most people in Lebanon are glad to see the old regime finally out of power but I don’t see any optimism about this one.

I saw this news and I guess it’s good that privacy is being discussed somewhat soberly over there in the wake of this investment decision.

Personally I have recently been exiting out of the UK, a much more invasive country, so Switzerland for now does seem like an improvement for me. Norway is further out geographically and has less Mullvad servers, would seem like the less favorable option for me unless the proposed laws actually pass.

Frankly I’m scrambling after the UK’s ID thing.

Huh. I’m also “moving” soon. Any reason for Norway over Switzerland?

That model is over a terabyte, I don’t know why I thought it was lightweight. Not that any reporting on machine learning has been particularly good, but this isn’t what I expected at all.

What can even run it?

It’s as simple as getting the EU site and privacy policy when you connect from an EU IP. These systems are typically not as rigid as you might expect and the only friction might be around things like payment processing or things like that.

I get relatively uncensored internet access through UK/Ireland servers. This law and this type of law completely terrifies me.

As someone who VPNs into the EU specifically for the privacy laws, this is troubling. I do wonder what my next move should be. I’d hate to lose my Steam account in particular.

“But if they say an illegal sentence like “child murder is bad” then we deport them too.”

Know a few people who emigrated to Germany. They aren’t thrilled. One of my friends was basically snubbed by all of his coworkers for months until one of them told him on the side that people suspect they’d get in trouble if it turns out he’s a “Syrian Islamic Extremist” down the line. My guy isn’t Syrian or Muslim. His name is Joe. Not even Youssef. Joe. جو. Fucks sake

“Doctors in Racism” is the way he described the people of Germany. Which is incredible because we’re from Lebanon and “Doctors in Racism” should be our rightful title. Geopolitical events are happening as we speak and people are talking about US stuff and changes in the US since it is so influential on what happens here, and I’ve heard someone say something about “that slave Obama”. This fucking week. Come on now.

FWIW Germany looks like a nice option for me, but I can’t say I’ve been convinced that the good will fully outweigh the bad. If I’m going to be a second class citizen I might as well go to the US and get a shot at making a bit more money.

Boy have I got news for you.

Look up the Zizians.

(Ok they’re only a tangential offshoot of people who maybe really like the Basilisk thought experiment and mostly don’t believe it. But hey. It’s underway!)

I have to VPN into Europe a lot, because if I’m exiting out of somewhere, I’d like it to be somewhere with good privacy laws.

I hope this doesn’t fuck that up for the many others who do this.

Once every few months I remember that there’s virtually no chance my name and information aren’t in these databases, especially now that my country has gone through a recent war phase. Even if I didn’t sign up to Instagram and Facebook when I was a teenager, my family, friends, and whole neighborhood use unscrupulous online services that can be used to map out communities like that. I live far from the border with Palestine but let’s not pretend that makes a difference.

While I don’t think it does us any favors to front-load any plans for the future with “just send <group> to <place>”, it’s also good to point out that a chunk of them are originally from Libya in the first place.

Part of what drew me to the old site in ye olde 2013 was that it was the largest platform that wasn’t shitty about this specific subject.

Funny to see this is now the standard expectation for that place. Look how they massacred my boy

I swear that week has broken something and revealed so much pent up cruelty towards my part of the world from American shitheads specifically. Didn’t even know they’d care to remember where we are on a map.

And to think I’ve been eying the US as a possible new home not that long ago. Just so icky