Technically, genderfluid is more a descriptor of the rate of change of gender than of gender when you think about it :p

So really, the answer to that is an ever changing subset of people ^.^

Absolutely never.

I don’t think you understand anarchism.

We need i2p or veilid torrents ASAP, to protect uploaders and downloaders. One of the main reasons people don’t seed is the threat of lawsuits.

The politicians that I hate would like me dead or completely mentally subjugated/repressed (I’m trans, autistic, and part of some other groups, also not exactly rolling in cash 😄 ^.). If I found out one of my friends supported someone like that they would cease being a friend, to put it mildly.

Most of my friends are also trans or have other reasons that fascists would treat them similarly to how they would me, so it’s extremely unlikely they would support those types :)

It might be because I live in the UK.

The internet I use is permanently stuck in “use phone carrier as backup” mode and we don’t have ipv6 because of that.

Data for me also seems stuck in ipv4.

Yes, somewhat. The problem is places still suck at adopting it, especially phone carriers, and most people are primarily connected via their phones and a lot of people even use that infrastructure as a replacement for broadband as well.

VeilID might be something you find interesting. It’s designed to solve exactly this problem by enabling most nodes to NATsmash with help for p2p stuff, and also provides a general and very strong privacy framework including torlike routing ^.

It was only unveiled at defcon this year though so the team behind it (Cult Of The Dead Cow) are trying to put docs in place ;p

Its completely written in rust, easily embeddable, has good content locality and is probably the cleanest, most performant, and most easily integrated into projects architecture for stuff like this that I’ve seen, as a programmer who’s into this space and familiar with things like i2p, tor, etc. I really hope this one takes off, and the quality of it means I really think it could (at least once they throw the docs together ;p)

You might find this interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP4b3pw94s0

It’s a blackhat talk that talks about vulns in proxies and reverse proxies ^., as well as much of their weird behaviour.

The absolute contempt for human life and dignity in this comment :/

Exactly. Poland itself is pretty damn far-right, and while they might be helping Ukraine and Ukrainians, this doesn’t mean their government is not borderline fascist. Someone else below (@[email protected]) provided this link documenting some severe human rights abuses against lots of migrants (some of these are also from the Belarus side too, it’s not just Poland).

Any situation in which a state denies access to people watching for such abuses - like this - is one that sends immediate and severe warning signs to me. Combined with the other stuff going on around LGBT+ free zones, well, it’s worrying imo >.<

Some of this stuff is even worse than what I’ve heard of the US/Mexico border, though it’s all pretty horrific.

Why is it that liberals only source is wikipedia??? Please read other things.

Not a lib, and my source is wikipedia because it has it’s own sources as well and provides a decent summary.

Says the person whose entire fucking understanding of the matter was gained from wikipedia 5 seconds before making this comment. Jesus fucking christ.

Yeah because you’re from hexbear and I don’t trust you to engage in good faith or not immediately jump to the worst possible interpretation of something I said or missed (like you have done with the trans clinic thing), or do the whole thing where you assume only you are right and people can’t reasonably disagree on something, or always pivot to “but the us/uk did…” and act as if the inevitable and only correct conclusion to any debate or discussion is that the US and “West” (which is itself a messy concept) is worse in every aspect of every single thing than anywhere else in every possible action. And I, you know, can read the information and compare it with the uk/us pretty quickly, without listing every single tiny factor that went into my consideration.

Frankly, the behaviour of hexbear users has made me always check the accounts of people with square-brackets pronouns before engaging unless I’m in a community on an instance that has defederated. I should not feel this way when pronoun tags are a trans supportive thing and would usually make me feel more comfortable when talking with people. But blegh.

I will probably block after this because all engaging with 95% of hexbear users does is cause me irrational amounts of stress every fucking time because of the constant goddamn micro-nitpick and aggression on every fucking thing, constant assumptions of superiority and assuming they are always completely correct in ever single debate or discussion, it’s like they can’t even conceive of being wrong on something. Honestly this is just a vent at this point lol, not even something you specifically have done since you’re nowhere near the worst I’ve come across from hexbear.

Engaging just makes me feel the need to analyse every single thing I say to see if it will set the hexbear folks off on a tangent or completely dismiss you and do the weird misdirection and whataboutism and such. It makes me afraid to ever engage with hexbears in any manner, or overanalyse every tiny thing I say in case they use it to deliberately evade my main point like I was forced to do when younger in very hostile situations as an autistic person to avoid unpredictably angry people, and just like then it brings very little practical success because all my effort is spent trying to find any tiny way what I said might be interpreted in the worst possible way and there’s always some excuse anyway.

China is expanding clinics for trans people. Notably for trans children, who it built its first clinic for in 2021 and has built a further 8 since.

True. This doesn’t change the other stuff I mentioned, and the UK also claims to be “improving” clinics for trans teens while doing the opposite, so forgive me for being a little skeptical of the persistency, especially since the hrt stuff is from 2022 and this is from 2021. It’s also only in a couple provinces. However, if it pans out, which it seems to from what you see, it’s a positive move, but again, it seems to be Shanxi and Beijing.

This was also explicitly mentioned in the wikipedia article and I did see it. But it was only a single province, compared to the entire government’s more negative actions >.<

The point here is that it is demonstrably obvious to trans people living in the US and UK that China is better to us than the US and the UK, one of which is currently performing a genocide against us and the other of which is transphobic on a near daily basis and is expected by the community here to follow in the US’ footsteps if it gets the chance.

China is pretty blegh actually.

They are actively making things worse w.r.t accessing HRT online, and require even more nonsense than the UK on changing legal ID, including shit like spousal approval, familial approval, and permission from various things like work, school, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_China

Access to hrt is also comparable to the uk by the looks of it. More importantly, the illegality of gay marriage combined with the massive approval process for id change means that trans people with different-gender partners can’t marry legally, and trans people with similar-gender partners are probably? in an unfortunate position here, though the page doesn’t include info on this >.<

The more sex-segregated components of various aspects of China also causes significant issues >.<

I’d say it’s worse in terms of being able to socially and medically transition, but there’s less overt hate. It’s more death-by-bureacracy and a need for even more extensive social approval to transition (I’m almost impressed that they managed a worse system than in the UK). The greater hold the Chinese Government has over their internet means accessing DIY HRT is likely much harder :/

People claiming China is much better on this than the US and the UK are wrong, they both have different issues. The UK in particular, most of the transphobia I experience is from institutions and media rather than “on the ground” (though this def. happens too), and the way the government is going with using us as a scapegoat is very concerning. But the - for now - lower amount of control over communications means I got started on DIY HRT pretty simply and pushed my way through the “official” system.

On a side note, stuff like this is one of the reasons opposing authoritarianism especially w.r.t communication is important, it makes it easier to do things the government has not approved of because the infrastructure is not in place to control communication and coordination as effectively.

The US is as always a clusterfuck because of it’s more federated nature, some of their states are trying to do genocide while others are acting as refuges and have things like informed consent HRT access and active protection against the more hostile states ^. - but fuck me if the dems aren’t spineless at opposing this stuff or (as can be seen in the op) sometimes support this.

Honestly most large states constantly try and censor the internet with stuff like this, though in the US/UK/Europe it has been a lot less successful at least. In this case it’s a more brazen attack on queer people, but this sort of stuff seems to happen every couple years. It’s very frustrating >.<

People definitely have some double standards though - maybe racism or the false idea that China is communist - but it doesn’t mean the Chinese govt is good on things, in my observation, just that people underestimate the things European countries, the UK, and US states do.

They may be better or worse and just because people often have double standards doesn’t make the Chinese government better (though it is often not worse in some respects, but the overall greater control of communication and computing infrastructure means it is harder to evade the subjugation or organise around it via tools like Tor, and the greater centralisation means that if the government decides to do something particularly awful it’s both harder for public dissent to occur and harder for regions to undermine efforts like that or even actively counter them :/).

Marxism-Leninism as a term was actually created by Stalin as a sort of post-hoc justification thing. It was not made by Lenin, but Stalin. This is linguistic weirdness/controversy, in that the name can serve to hide it’s origins from casual readers.

The other commenter has explained the more concrete thing with the fact that lots of them are tankies or proto-tankies ^.^

I’m actually pretty pro-AI (and in particular, pro-FOSS AI), so I’m pretty unhappy about this myself ;p

If nothing else, this kind of shit will mean that only the existing “Intellectual Property” holders will have access to using AI. It would entrench things even more >.<

In theory, existing forum software could implement activitypub and link with lemmy & kbin…

I hope to see fediverse SufficientVelocity and Spacebattles one day ^.^

lol you really think I just parrot the US state department. Honestly this is another thing with tankies, they seem to be incapable of conceiving of geopolitics more complex than “arm of the USA” or “not arm of the USA”.

The idea of only partial-alignment even among nominal allies, and complex conflicting geopolitical interests, and the idea of spectrums and complexity beyond “US=bad” “not US=good” is foreign to them, or even criticizing actions of organizations rather than just deciding XYZ organization is evil or good and retroactively justifying or opposing every action they take (let alone consider that an action could have mixed consequences or ethics, both positive or negative ;p).

For example, I am still capable of criticising Ukraine’s actions (for example like using cluster bombs, even if last I saw Russia used them first I still am not in favour of them) and the propaganda they produce, or worrying about the effects of the significant debt on Ukrainians and their public services in the form of disaster capitalism, or also generally expressing my issue with States as a whole while still opposing brazen imperialism by Russia ^.^, or criticising the dehumanisation of Russian people in some of the conversations I’ve seen (especially the people who left Russia, when those are the people least likely to support the Russian Government’s actions and are often fleeing persecution themselves e.g. queer Russians).

I just don’t usually specifically say these things because in practise the conversations in which it comes up are already horrifically derailed by apologia for Russia’s actions and enlightened-centrism, so expressing the nuance is completely useless because the people I’m responding to just hate anything they associate with “the West” (which itself is not necessarily a fully coherent concept) and usually massively whitewash the shit going on in Russia, both about Ukraine and also other things <.<

“Gender updates” is the best term i’ve heard for transitioning in a while. I’m stealing it now, the bigots can’t have it. 󰱫

(also note for anyone reading: the term “tankie” refers to people who embrace authoritarianism and usually specific self-declared “socialist” states repressing civilians, often modern day states that don’t even pretend to be socialist like Russia, or the CCP, or North Korea/DPRK, or even just any nation considered “anti-West” regardless of their behaviour or internal political structure x.x

It started when parts of the Communist Party of Great Britain split off from the main party because the main party supported the USSR crushing (with tanks) Hungarian socialists trying to break off from the USSR, for a number of reasons - others were involved too, but the worker councils themselves were major parts of the uprising - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956 - there were attempts at worker council parlimentary democracy and such, as well as attempts for direct-democracy ^.^

The most recent Tankie Thing is supporting Russia for invading Ukraine, or doing weird enlightened-centrism on it because the USA gives support to Ukraine. More broadly, tankies generally seem to act as if any act by another country is always less bad than the USA, and that only the USA can be imperialist, or various variations on this concept >.<.

It should be noted that the right wing have started to some degree calling all leftists tankies and IMO anyone should reject this attempted co-option of the word because it allows people to falsely conflate leftism with tankie ideologies, even though they are often a small minority in IRL leftist activism, with more common groups being anarchists, democratic socialists, some Marxists (even some Marxist-Leninists, which itself is a controversial term tbh), various libertarian socialisms and communisms, and the odd further-left social democrat ^.^)

Be real. The cost of building means they’re always going to favour the wealthy. At best right now were running public copies of the older and smaller models. Local AI will always be running behind the state of the art big proprietary models, which will always be in the hands of the richest moguls and companies in the world.

Distribution of LoRA-style fine-tuning weights means that FOSS AI systems have a long term advantage because of compounding effects. ^.

That is, high-quality data provided for smaller models and very small “model finetuning” weights, which is more accessible to open groups, are sufficiently accessible and modular in their improvements to a given model that the FOSS community can take and run with it to compete effectively with proprietary groups from even a single leak.

Furthermore, smaller and more efficient models which can be run on lower end hardware also avoid the need to send off potentially sensitive data to AI companies and enable the kinds of FOSS compounding effect explained above.

This doesn’t just affect people who like privacy, but also companies with data privacy requirements ^. - as long as the medium models are “good enough” (which I think they are ;p), the compounding effects of LoRA tuning and better data privacy properties, and further developments which already exist in research papers towards much lower weight-count models and training mechanisms capable of greater weight efficiency to induce zero-shot learning, mean local AI can compete with proprietary stuff. It’s still early days but it is absolutely doable even today with fairly low-end hardware, and it can only get better for the reasons provided.

Furthermore, “intellectual property” and copyright stuff have an absolutely massive and arguably even more powerful set of industries behind them. Trying to strengthen IP stuff against AI means that AI will only be available to those controlling these existing IP resources and it’s unending stranglehold on technology and communication and people as a whole :/

AI I think is also forcing more and more people to look and reevaluate society’s relationship with work and labour. And frankly I think that this is super important, as it enables a greater chance of more radical liberation from the existing structures of not just capitalism and it’s hierarchies but the near-mandatoriness of work as a whole (though there has already been some stuff like this around the concepts of “bullshit jobs”).

I think people should use this as an opportunity to unionise and also try and push for cooperative and democratic control of orgs ^., and many other things that I CBA to list out ;3

I hope not. Not a big fan of propriety AI (local AI all the way, and I hope people leak all these models, both code and weights), but fuck copyright and fuck capitalism which makes automation seem like a bad thing when it shouldn’t be ;p nya