Futurology Today

The ultimate weapon of mass distraction

I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming everyone to lower their expectations for the likely dumpster fire that is The Elder Scrolls VI.

I know its old hat nonsense of a complaint but whatever Bethesda used to be it stopped being that 20 years ago and we’re all just stuck thinking they’ll put out some new masterpiece when in reality all the talent they had back in the day has likely left for other jobs and they are now just a shitty company among countless other shitty companies putting profit over anything else and stifling anyone who might actually have good ideas on how to make good games (how unsurprising).

Reading too much into the language seems, at this point, to be less of a danger than reading too little into it.

This week, Israel released an appalling video featuring five female Israeli soldiers taken captive at Nahal Oz military base on October 7. Fearful and bloody, the women beg for their lives while Hamas fighters mill around and alternately threaten to kill them and compliment their appearance. The captors call the women “sabaya,” which Israel translated as “women who can get pregnant.” Almost immediately, others disputed the translation and said sabaya referred merely to “female captives” and included no reference to their fertility. “The Arabic word sabaya doesn’t have sexual connotations,” the Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian wrote in a post on X, taking exception to a Washington Post article that said that it did. She said the Israeli translation was “playing on racist and orientalist tropes about Arabs and Muslims.”

These are real women and victims of ongoing war crimes, so it does seem excessively lurid to suggest, without direct evidence, that they have been raped in captivity for the past several months. (“Eight months,” the Israelis noted, allowing readers to do the gestational math. “Think of what that means for these young women.”) But to assert that sabaya is devoid of sexual connotation reflects ignorance, at best. The word is well attested in classical sources and refers to female captives; the choice of a classical term over a modern one implies a fondness for classical modes of war, which codified sexual violence at scale. Just as concubine and comfort woman carry the befoulments of their historic use, sabaya is straightforwardly associated with what we moderns call rape. Anyone who uses sabaya in modern Gaza or Raqqah can be assumed to have specific and disgusting reasons to want to revive it.

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If you think about it, there are already tools that can do pretty convincing face swaps with few clicks and just from one low res photo at whatever angle. Long are gone the times you had to train the models for hours and had to have few hundred photos to just get "okay" fake. Once deepfake video creation becomes this simple, it is game over for porn industry.

Since why would anyone go into porn industry, when they can just use a tool to create lewd content of themselves if they are so inclined to make a living that way? And then it goes the other way around, why would anyone buy it if they can just homebrew it for free.

All in all, it is a good thing. Less exploitation of actual human beings and more power to "consumers". But then there have to be rigid laws against actuall AI porn dissemination, it should be illegal for anything else than private use unless actual consent to be used as source can be proven.

cross-posted from: https://monero.town/post/454010

Originally when I signed up for proton unlimited they advertised it as being a student discounted plan not a coupon… Now I go to renew my membership, and it's suddenly a coupon and not a plan anymore…. My account shows it as being a plan not a discount or coupon. It shows it as being a discounted plan. This is what is pushing me away from their service. Now going back to a free plan and using Mullvad VPN once again.

Middle east eye.net

I'm so fucking tired of Google. I want to pull the trigger and switch to a different Android distro but I won't have time until I get a break from school. Fuck Google.