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Cake day: April 8th, 2026

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  • Japan surrendered not because of the bombs, but because the US and the Soviets were on their doorstep. It’s like when the SWAT team is outside your house and puts tear gas through the window.

    From my understanding, it was primarily the loss of all their forces and the widespread firebombing, with the increasing threat of Soviet invasion, and the nuclear bombs (to a lesser degree) just being the final nails in the coffin. That said, again, they had lost all their forces in battle already, so saying the war was won by bombing is also a stretch - its just that between the firebombing and the nukes, it was the closest to an example I could think of.



  • For transparency, I’m a second hand source, close to multiple people who lived across the region.

    Generally, the region is both extremely distrustful of government and outsiders, as well as being extremely prone to superstition and magic thinking. Obviously, there is the spectre of colonialism, but more recently than this, governments in the region are generally corrupt, violent and unstable on a scale westerners would find unbelievable. For example, (if I remeber right) Nigeria recently issued new bills but then much of the money “”“disappeared”“” before reaching banks and other organizations. The president claimed snakes ate the money. More relevant to this, with the inconsistent enforcement of laws, doctors are often unreliable or outright dangerous, such as giving sugar pills instead of medication. I have no idea of the authenticity of this (which is part of the problem), but from my own circle, there were stories of patients of the last ebola outbreak taken for quarentine, and then left unattended to or without food and water. Given all this, its not suprising that they wouldn’t trust outsiders taking people away.

    At the same time, there is an abundance of superstition and magical thinking. I’m not sure how much of this is cultural versus reglious versus trauma and oppression versus lack of education, but belief in conspiracies, witchcraft, demons/spirits, and other such stuff is widespread to the point where it make the American south look tame. This is fed into further by the same sorts of social media rumors and misinformation that have become popular globally, but with far more gulibility and far less ability to disprove them (due to lack of education, and lack of local resources).

    Taken together, you have basically the perfect cultural environment for this sort of anti-science movement.






  • Notably, this photo is listed as being in Russia, and the source is Moscow regional governor Andrei Vorobyov. The source isn’t a particularly reliable one, but I’m also not seeing any definitive evidence that the image isn’t real. Theres no weird alignment/disjointing of the bricks, no identifiable logical errors, and no watermarks. There are a bunch of elements that look weird, like how the bricks end on the second floor wall, whatever it is in the middle window, how the smoke curls very evenly around the roof piece, and the uniformity of the concrete rubble, but given the low resolution, none of this is clear enough to be definitive.

    I also notably tried to track down the original copy, but it was in a telegram channel, not anything easy to verify.


  • I’d put the distinction around the same place as the distiction is between copyright infringement and transformative work. At a certain point, the AI output becomes less of a “piece” of the work and more of an ingredient unrecognizably blended, with a similar amount of care to any other element. For example, if a Vending machine asset is generated by AI, its slop. Add flavour text to it, and its still slop. Replace all the contents with theme-approprate contents, and and clean up the topology, and it finally starts to become distinct enough to (potentially) not be slop. Basically, it needs to be distinct enough to have a unique, human author and/or no longer fill the original “”“role”“”.









  • PlzGibHugs@piefed.catoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    It feels like there has been some dropoff, particularly in higher-budget areas. Big studios seem to be taking fewer risks, and small creators have less money (and time by extention) to spend on art.

    That said, it also feels like discoverability has gotten far worse. Social media has become increasingly insular, more personalized, more algorighmic, and ultimately harder to explore. Its not like the old days, where you could find a new thing, even from a random person’s forum signature.