I'm not sure I'd call buying up and burning other companies like furniture in a fireplace 'sustainable'.

Headline reads like the PM is annoyed that Russia botched the arson.

Yeah, that's the bit that gave me the bro-y vibe, honestly. That and Brave. Also like, not that it's necessarily a bad thing that I can see his muscle veins through his shirt, but that's often a component of that particular corner of Joe Rogan-NFT-Bitcoin-Tesla.

But yeah, that makes sense. It definitely feels very sudden and artificial, which makes me wary.

Why are y'all spamming this Rossman guy suddenly? I had never heard of him before two days ago, and now I've seen posts about him every single day.

Seems like a bro-y tech dude. He promotes Brave and references sexual assault when talking about the behavior of software vendors with their customers. Honestly he gives me kind of a shady vibe on top of that.

So like, why is Lemmy suddenly full of his fans? What's going on?

Honestly, I don't need the tools I use to change to become more mass-market focused. Nobody wants to eat a soup designed by consensus. I'd rather use something that suits me and have it continue to suit me than need everything to be the biggest most popular thing. Popularity seems to kind of ruin things.

Wasn't there somebody just the other day talking about Adobe's ever-growing bloated bullshit versus GIMP's sleek UI and consistent features? Oh. Right. It was me.

I think when people think of the danger of AI, they think of something like Skynet or the Matrix. It either hijacks technology or builds it itself and destroys everything.

But what seems much more likely, given what we've seen already, is corporations pushing AI that they know isn't really capable of what they say it is and everyone going along with it because of money and technological ignorance.

You can already see the warning signs. Cars that run pedestrians over, search engines that tell people to eat glue, customer support AI that have no idea what they're talking about, endless fake reviews and articles. It's already hurt people, but so far only on a small scale.

But the profitablity of pushing AI early, especially if you're just pumping and dumping a company for quarterly profits, is massive. The more that gets normalized, the greater the chance one of them gets put in charge of something important, or becomes a barrier to something important.

That's what's scary about it. It isn't AI itself, it's AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

So, just to make this clear.

The original goalpost was: "The US is exactly the same as Russia." This being in the context of an article talking about Russian librarians being imprisoned and active extreme suppression of the free exchange of ideas being organized by the Russian government.

There are certainly issues going on with libraries. John Oliver recently did an episode going over a lot of it. But the difference there is that these are largely organized by either fringe politicians or politicians in heavily right-wing states. I don't really see evidence of it at a Federal level, which is what would be the equivalent to what's going on in Russia. Even where some of this stuff is happening, it doesn't seem to yet be as extreme as the situation there.

Is it a similar and worrying pattern? Yes. Is it 'exactly the same thing'? Definitely not.

The US is extremely different from state to state, which can make getting anything done on a wide scale really chaotic, but it also means that we get to try new things and strike out on our own as a state if there's popular support. That's how we got marriage equality for queer folks, it's how we legalized marijuana in a lot of states, and it's what makes us able to do things like pass laws that protect people from other states' repressive laws. We can do things like provide a safe haven for people seeking abortions who live in states where it's illegal. There are states in the US that will literally take in trans folks as refugees from states with repressive laws. On the other hand, we have Florida, where there's actually a no travel advisory for trans people because they'll arrest us for trying to use a bathroom or having our gender on our driver's license.

And like, all this stuff you're saying is absolutely true. It is a huge mess of near unchecked capitalistic greed in a lot of cases.

But at this point we've moved the goal posts. Because they now seem to be "the US also has serious humanitarian problems". Which, that's true. But it doesn't mean the same thing as "the US is exactly the same as Russia."

We have our own set of problems.

Cool condescension, but I've been using Photoshop on and off since 2005, have occasionally used Illustrator, and used to spend an absurd amount of time with Flash. In addition to GIMP, I currently have Krita and Inkscape installed.

I literally prefer GIMP's UI. It doesn't have extra shit, it doesn't try to force me into a single window, and it goes really, really well with a multi-monitor setup. I don't care that it doesn't automatically edit non-destructively, because my workflow is adapted to it. Layers and folders are plenty.

No one piece of software is going to be the ideal solution for everyone. That's capitalistic exceptionalism infecting the rational analysis of what tool suits which user best. Photoshop may suit you better, but I'd take the sleek usefulness of GIMP over the bloat that accompanies all that extra stuff I don't need any day.

Why do I need an AI strapped to my tool for pixel art, pathing, and masking?

I absolutely love the UI. It's literally a major part of why I prefer it.

It literally isn't. Some states are pretty shit, but the US isn't forcing people into exile for building libraries. And some states are great places where people have rights and the legislature is actually willing to protect its population from authoritarian policies.

Those aren't gloves, they're just weirdly soft knuckle dusters.