If I cut a thing in two, are the two pieces together exactly the same size as the original?

Or to rephrase it: does a knife/scissors/etc just split something or does it remove something?

take a bike ride around the city, maybe do some errands you've been planning, get that sense of accomplishment and feel the breeze on your concealed face, that's what I call a chill vibe alright

For the better part of a century, there was one thing even the U.S. government would not do to pad the profits of defense contractors.

Now, more than 80 years of precedent may be coming to an end.

On Thursday, lawmakers in the House approved a “pilot program” in the pending Pentagon budget bill that could eventually open the door to sending billions to big contractors, while providing what critics say would be little benefit to the military.

The provision, which appeared in the budget bill after a closed-door session overseen by top lawmakers, would allow contractors to claim reimbursement for the interest they pay on debt they take on to build weapons and other gadgets for the armed services.

MINE

cross-posted from: https://suppo.fi/post/9476459

Over a quarter century in the Ecuadorian Amazon, oil giant Texaco (now Chevron) perpetrated an ecological disaster: It dumped 3.2 million gallons of toxic waste, spilled 17 million gallons of crude oil and flared nearly 50 million cubic feet of methane gas. The company also collaborated with U.S. evangelical missionaries to forcibly displace Indigenous peoples from their oil-rich lands. The victims have received no compensation.

Now, three arbitrators have ordered that compensation be paid — by the Ecuadorian government to Chevron. The total: $220 million, according to legal documents made public this week.

The ruling marks the latest twist in a decades-long legal saga that has stretched across continents and consumed millions of dollars in legal fees, all while the local population bears the burden of displacement and high cancer rates from the contamination.

“Our territories, our forests will never be the same,” said Penti Baihua, a traditional leader of the Baihuaeri Waorani of Bameno.

Baihua lived with his community in the forest, uncontacted by outsiders, until the evangelical missionaries Texaco assisted forced contact on him when he was around 6 or 7 in a campaign dubbed “Operation Auca.” Auca is a pejorative term meaning “savage.”

A significant amount of environmental clean up could be done with the $220 million award money, Baihua said, speaking in Spanish. It could also help stop the ever-expanding advance of the region’s oil frontier.

“People who have cancer and other health problems but no money for medicines could get treatment,” he added. “Where will the government get the money to pay? Will it come drill more wells?”

That a major polluter will walk away with hundreds of millions in compensation is possible thanks in part to an international arbitration system known as investor-state dispute settlement. ISDS is embedded into thousands of trade agreements and contracts, endowing foreign investors with expansive rights and allowing them to bypass national courts and sue governments before panels of private arbitrators, many of whom are corporate lawyers.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.kobel.fyi/c/fediverse/p/26588/please-dont-be-a-lurker

In the monthly server updates for lemmy.zip/piefed.zip there's a mantra that's repeated every month. I think it's wonderful and can be applied to the Fediverse as a whole. > >

If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :) > > Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give the Fediverse (Original: Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip) isn’t money, praise, or interpretive dance (although we would absolutely accept the last one). Its participation. > > Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about whether water is wet or merely makes things wet. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession. > (We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.) > > The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way. > > So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you: > > Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better. > > Original post by @Demigodrick@lemmy.zip

Evening 'hosters,

I have been banging my head against my desk all day and could use some help. I seem to be the only one with this issue, so I'll lay it out: I have a Pangolin instance hosted on a remote VPS with a Newt tunnel installed via Docker in a Debian 13 VM on my NAS. Within Docker, I have Plex, Jellyfin, and Overseerr (just for testing currently). All services are accessible via the LAN IP of the VM and their respective ports.

(Yes I know Plex is stinky, but my mom's gotta watch her shows.)

I have three resources set up in Pangolin for each service, pointed at the LAN IP of the VM, the port, and the correct Newt tunnel, with a corresponding https://service.domain.tld/ record in Pangolin. Overseerr works flawlessly, without any additional input. Plex and Jellyfin, however, does not work. The resource monitoring module on Pangolin remains "unhealthy," and neither service can be accessed remotely.

Here is how the Pangolin resource is configured:

After doing tons of searching and reading, the general consensus for configuring Plex is to add https://service.domain.tld/ (noting the :443 at the end), disabling Remote Access from the menu, and disabling the Plex Relay setting. I've tried just about every combination of these settings, and none of these seems to bring the Pangolin resource online (which I figure I need to do to access it remotely).

Here is my compose.yml for Plex:

services:  
  plex:  
    container_name: plex  
    image: plexinc/pms-docker  
    restart: unless-stopped  
    ports:  
      - 32400:32400/tcp  
      - 8324:8324/tcp  
      - 32469:32469/tcp  
      - 1900:1900/udp  
      - 32410:32410/udp  
      - 32412:32412/udp  
      - 32413:32413/udp  
      - 32414:32414/udp  
    environment:  
      - TZ=America_New_York  
    network_mode: host  

(Pretend there are volumes mounted in there, I removed them here for brevity)

I know setting network_mode= host and defining the ports is redundant, I was playing around with Bridge mode in some helpless attempt to get this thing working. I mentioned Jellyfin in the title because in an effort to see if it was just Plex being annoying, I spun up a Jellyfin container, only to find that Jellyfin also doesn't work.

Any ideas? I'm offering 10,000 years of incredible luck to anyone that can help me out...

tl;dr I cannot for the life of me get Plex (or Jellyfin) to work via a Pangolin Newt tunnel. All other services served the same way appear to work great.

Edit: So, I figure this has got to be something between Plex, one or more Docker bridge networks, and the Newt Tunnel network (newtwork? nah...). I should have mentioned earlier but I am pretty green with all of this, but I really did want to get my hands dirty. I really only have a surface level understanding of these virtual bridge networks that Docker uses...

I'm realizing in doing some digging with docker network inspect, even Overseerr creates a bridge network. I thought I tried using Plex in bridge mode, but that didn't seem to work.

Edit Edit: Solved! I looked to Plex's logs and found that it was rejecting (401) requests from the Newt container bridge. All I had to do was go to Plex's network settings and allow that subnet, like so:

My https://plex.domain.tld/ worked instantly. Shoutout to ineedmana for telling me to look in the logs. Always read the logs!

dw.com/en/romania-in-turmoil-o…

Consider the following.

A program stores and updates values. These values are things like personality traits:

PERSONALITY_TRAITS = { 
"work_ethic": 70, # 0=sporadic, 100=disciplined 
"experimental": 60, # 0=traditional, 100=avant-garde 
"sensitivity": 80, # 0=thick-skinned, 100=thin-skinned 
"social": 40, # 0=reclusive, 100=gregarious 
"perfectionism": 90, # 0=sloppy, 100=obsessive
}

Or, daily needs:

LIFESIGN_STATS = {
"energy": 75,
"hunger": 100,
"date": "2025-12-13",
"time":"14:52"
}

And so on. You can make as many stats as you like. These are sort of tamagotchi values. If energy < 30, then go sleep. Simple enough.

What's interesting is that you can pass these values to an LLM such as Deepseek, and it can parse and understand them. Here is a simple example:

And yes you can do this yourself by changing the values and sending it as a prompt - This is the very first message I sent in a fresh conversation, showing that Deepseek understands the parameters just fine.

This means you are moving from hard-coded (no matter how complex the algorithm may be) "energy<30 = go to sleep" to LLM-coded "energy<30 = how does that influence the LLM's output".

And of course, Deepseek is an LLM, not an image model. It can't open Krita and start drawing (at least not yet, maybe with deepseek-ocr) - but it can pass values. Therefore, Deepseek can return AI image gen parameters:

MY_IMAGE = {
"seed": 23235234526,
"sampler": "DPM 2++",
"steps": 28,
"height": 1024,
# etc.
}

You can then extract these values with simple python or regex and pass them to an image gen interface such as Automatic1111 that you host on your machine using the API.

From this basis, it is possible to make Deepseek into a full-fledged, independent artist.

By passing these values to the LLM along with a system prompt that explains what you want it to do, Deepseek can return a JSON file with a prompt (as seen above), but also other parameters: seed, sampler, steps, etc.

For maximum autonomy, you can let the LLM come up with these stats itself. You can ask Deepseek: "You are an artist, how would you describe your style?" and copy and paste that into your program. The personality traits examples were generated by Deepseek, for example.

From then on, all the script does is save Deepseek's 'life' stats into a local database. You can make it run on a raspberry pi 24/7 and from that point on, Deepseek decides when it wants to make a picture. They get generated on your local A1111 interface, then they get saved in a folder on your computer. You do not control anything else - Deepseek decides when to make a picture, and how. Maybe you could make a system where you can send it a query through the script, ask it "hey can you make me a picture of XYZ" and depending on its current mood/stats, it will reply accordingly.

This can obviously work with any LLM, including local ones.

We can go further. We can make it so that the images are uploaded to a server, and viewable by anyone online, like a portfolio. They can be voted and commented on, and this information can easily be passed back to the LLM -- you can make as many 'life' stats as you want, including how the public responded to past works by just storing the artwork in the database along with the responses it received. You can simulate style drift (again letting deepseek come up with these ideas for its own script; the human does nothing but prompt the machine and lets it come up with what it wants) by storing previous works and then passing that on as parameters in a prompt. Over time, the LLM's style will change and evolve in ways I can't predict.

You can provide a list of several models to the AI along with maybe a description if it doesn't know them (the model's readme file for example), and it can pick one depending on its stats. Again I must reiterate, the stats are not hard-coded. We don't tell it "if energy below 30 then go to sleep"; it will decide this itself.

My question is - and this is an open-ended question - would this be art? Is this artistry? Has deepseek become an artist? Why so? Why not?

There are a lot of answers, and I don't intend to debate anyone on it. You are free to say what comes to mind. But, this is not in the realm of science-fiction anymore. In fact, I was starting to work on this script (brainstorming it with my agentic interface) but it crapped out and stopped the session, so I'm only putting it as a thought experiment. But this script could be coded and operational in less than 24 hours today.

Science-fiction is now.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7023619

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/13181

US President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed at preventing state-level regulation of the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry, a gift to tech corporations that bankrolled his inauguration and are currently funding his White House ballroom project.

Trump's order instructs the US Justice Department to establish an AI Litigation Task Force with a single mandate: sue states that enact AI laws that the administration deems "onerous and excessive." The order also threatens to withhold federal funding from states that implement AI regulations.

Public Citizen, a watchdog group that has tracked increasingly aggressive AI influence-peddling in Congress and the administration, said Trump's order "grants his greedy Big Tech buddies’ Christmas wish."

"This reward to Big Tech is a disgraceful invitation to reckless behavior by the world’s largest corporations and a complete override of the federalist principles that Trump and MAGA claim to venerate," said Robert Weissman, Public Citizen's co-president. "Everyone should understand why this is happening: During and since the last election cycle, Big Tech has spent at least $1.1 billion on campaign contributions and lobby expenditures. Big Tech corporations poured money into Trump’s inaugural committee and to pay for his garish White House ballroom. A major Big Tech and AI investor is serving as Trump’s 'AI czar' and driving administration policy."

"While Trump has ensured the federal government is doing almost nothing to address the harms that AI is already causing, states are moving forward with sensible AI regulation," Weissman added. "These include efforts to address political deepfakes, nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, algorithmic pricing manipulation, consumer protection measures, excessive data center electricity and water demand, and much more. Big Tech is whining about these modest measures, but there is zero evidence that these rules are impeding innovation; in fact, they are directing innovation in more positive directions."

Jenna Sherman, a campaign director focused on tech and gender at Ultraviolet Action, said Trump's order "only has one group of winners: his wealthy donors in the tech sector."

"Every other person loses from this wildly unpopular move. And not just in theory, as stripping away state AI regulations puts many—namely, women and children—at risk of real harm," said Sherman. "These harms of AI—which the Trump and the tech sector are clearly happy to ignore—are already here: non-consensual deepfake porn sexualizing women and girls, children being led to suicidal ideation by AI chatbots, and AI-powered scams and crimes targeting older Americans, especially women, to name but a few."

The US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbying organizations representing tech giants such as Microsoft and Google celebrated the order, predictably characterizing it as a win for "small businesses."

The leaders of California and other states that have proposed and finalized AI regulations were defiant in the face of Trump's threats of legal action and funding cuts."

"President Trump and Davis Sacks aren’t making policy—they’re running a con," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, referring to the scandal-plagued White House AI czar. "Every day, they push the limits to see how far they can take it. California is working on behalf of Americans by building the strongest innovation economy in the nation while implementing commonsense safeguards and leading the way forward."

Trump signed the order after the Republican-controlled Congress repeatedly rejected efforts to tuck a ban on state AI regulations into broader legislation.

"After months of failed lobbying and two defeats in Congress, Big Tech has finally received the return on its ample investment in Donald Trump," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement Thursday. "With this executive order, Trump is delivering exactly what his billionaire benefactors demanded—all at the expense of our kids, our communities, our workers, and our planet."

"A broad, bipartisan coalition in Congress has rejected the AI moratorium again and again," he added, "and I intend to keep that streak going. I will use every tool available to challenge this indefensible and irresponsible power grab. We will defeat it again."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

A psychologist might diagnose what Europe’s envoys in America are experiencing as psychosocial disorientation, a state of confusion about one’s very identity or future triggered by the administration’s emphatic break with the post-1945 order that Harry Truman first shaped and that’s been nurtured by every successive U.S. president — that is until Donald J. Trump.

There are several stages of transition if one wants to cope with disorientation, starting with accepting the loss of what’s familiar. Those suffering from upheaval should focus on what’s small and manageable to anchor themselves, like organizing, say, a Christmas party, and then shift from trying to resist change and slowly learn to adapt. Recovery in highly transformative times requires a readiness to embrace uncertainty.

This is a resolution saying humanitarian personnel in war zones should never be deliberately attacked.

The US was the only country to vote against.

https://xcancel.com/EUatUN/status/1998888233187553519

US explanation: https://usun.usmission.gov/explanation-of-vote-on-the-resolution-titled-safety-and-security-of-humanitarian-personnel-and-protection-of-united-nations-personnel/

Archive: https://archive.ph/L7jhp