A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago "is lutris slop now" and noted an increasing amount of "LLM generated commits". To which the Lutris creator replied:

It's only slop if you don't know what you're doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn't able to do last year because of health issues / depression.

There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn't have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn't AI that laid off thousands of employees, it's deluded executives who don't understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.

I'm not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don't like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I'm not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.

Anyway, I was suspecting that this "issue" might come up so I've removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what's generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.

mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mshelton/116214301513839946

article: https://signal.org/bigbrother/district-of-columbia/

context: https://technologymagazine.com/cloud-and-cybersecurity/protonmail-under-fire-over-data-handover

Press photographers were reportedly barred from Pentagon press briefings after Pete Hegseth‘s staff became irked over unflattering photos of the defense secretary. The office of the notoriously vain Cabinet member — a former Fox News host who had a hair and makeup studio built in the Pentagon shortly after being confirmed — should probably have more important things on his mind, chiefly the war in Iran, and, perhaps, the elementary school there that the United States appears to have bombed.

According to a Wednesday report from The Washington Post, press pool photographers were banned from briefings on March 4 and March 10 after taking and publishing what sources described as “unflattering” images of Hegseth. The Post noted that the White House had declined to comment on the decision to exclude the photographers. The White House took exception, with Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly sharing an email reply to the publication with an off-topic quip over the newspaper’s recent layoff of more than 300 journalists, but no actual response to the Post’s question about the concern over Hegseth’s image.

The National Press Club responded on Wednesday, with President Mark Schoeff Jr. writing that the Pentagon’s decision “is deeply troubling and runs counter to the fundamental principles of transparency in a democratic society,” adding that “when the government decides which images the public is allowed to see, transparency is replaced by control.” PEN America also responded, calling the decision to bar photographers a “petty act of retaliation.”

Trump is now caught in the oldest trap of modern warfare – believing a swift, surgical military operation will yield quick, enduring political results. The Soviets did it in Afghanistan; the US in Iraq in 2003; Putin did it in Ukraine, and is still fighting. Whatever force a military fails or succeeds in applying at the start, the people it is attacking have greater commitment to defending their lands and homes.

The White House may have rushed into this, seizing the opportunity for a decapitation strike, provided by Israeli intelligence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has very different objectives regionally, and a long US involvement against Tehran suits his desire for an Iran in rolling collapse that is no longer a threat. But the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28 has caused as many problems as it has solved.

Continued discussion: https://github.com/lutris/lutris/discussions/6530

Free my boy !!

This is the most incompetent, incoherent war America has fought in the last 100 years. And that’s saying a lot. This administration has no idea what they are doing. There is no viable war plan. They change their goals and their aims every single day.

I have great sympathy for our soldiers and our military leaders. They are being given directions by a senile old man who is losing his mind. And so, it’s no surprise that this war is going horribly.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/65174189

Florida public schools will force students to take a Heritage Foundation-backed class on the “evils of communism.”

As President Donald Trump warns Iran against using mines to threaten oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy’s purpose-built minesweepers are sitting stateside thousands of miles away with no plans to put them to use while the war rages on. As gas prices in the U.S. continued to skyrocket, Trump on Tuesday took to Truth Social to demand that Tehran “immediately” remove any mines placed in the vital seaway and to do so “forthwith” lest the Iranian military suffer “consequences ... at a level never seen before.” That warning came after multiple news outlets reported Iran had begun mining the strait, a narrow waterway that is the only passage from the Persian Gulf into open ocean. He also threatened to use drone strikes to “permanently eliminate any boat or ship attempting to mine the Hormuz Strait” and boasted of having done so against 10 Iranian “inactive mine-laying boats” in a separate post several minutes later.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/politicaloptimism/p/1872331/democrats-block-bill-to-reopen-homeland-security-amid-27-day-shutdown

Senate Democrats on Thursday defeated a motion to proceed to a House-passed bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security and end the 27-day shutdown that has hampered the functions of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and other critical agencies.

excellent

The motion failed by a vote of 51 to 46. Centrist Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) was the only Democrat to vote with Republicans to advance the funding bill. It needed 60 votes to advance.

centrist my fucking asshole.

Denmark’s energy minister called on citizens to reduce their energy use amid the ongoing Middle East conflict.

Oil prices jumped to over $100 a barrel on Thursday, raising fears of rising inflation.

“If it is not strictly necessary to drive the car, then don’t do it,” the minister stressed to Danish citizens.