I feel like that’s 99% of cases and it’s really disheartening. Good to see them actually get what should have happened to all the others a long time ago.

since those are the ones who set strategy.

Not entirely, actually. That part surprised me when I first went. They couldn’t control what I handed out to people for sure, and there were numerous organizations with stand-up tents there that weren’t listed as part of the official organizations, and one of them even explicitly mentioned to me that the organizers weren’t happy with them being there, but they didn’t care and had set up 4 separate booths around the general area of the protest.

I still believe the pace is catastrophically slow

That I can 100% agree on. Though it does seem like the pace is picking up more as time goes on.

I mean, I’ve talked to them in person? I’ve seen them countless times before this, and many of them have been organizing before Trump was president. Not only that, but I’ve seen the outcomes.

The local ICE rapid response networks in my community would not have nearly as many members had they not gotten tons of people at the last No Kings protest near me to sign up for their newsletters, the local progressive candidate would have been guaranteed to lose the election without the slim margin added from people at the protest becoming aware of their candidacy, and my reps probably would not have become more vigilant in their anti-ICE sentiment as a primary talking point over just a general wishy washy vibe of not being okay with it had they not seen so many of their constituents turn out.

My community has a progressive candidate in office who has plans to prevent ICE actions, police misconduct, and also make where I live more affordable, it has thousands more people on standby with whistles and plans to disrupt ICE activity if it happens near them, and it has my representatives voting no on funding ICE, instead of voting yes and saying “but we’ll give them QR codes though.”

If that’s not a concrete positive outcome, I don’t know what is.

I get the sentiment sounds better to you than the amount of results you’d get from a No Kings protest on its own, but you cannot honestly believe that your local wine mom is going to wake up one day and literally grab a noose, go out with her friends, build some gallows, and then find a way to kidnap armed ICE officers.

You would never even get remotely the same turnout if you called for that vs No Kings, because one is something you can do with minimal risk to your personal safety, the other is a guarantee you WILL be shot at, gassed, and almost certainly killed by the authorities.

Essentially, you’re saying that anyone who wants the situation in this country to be better should be willing to almost certainly die on the spot because there’s a tiny sliver of a chance they might be able to kill some ICE agents before they do.

As a reminder to people I already know will be furiously typing that these protests won’t stop trump, or that they don’t stop anything: that’s not the point.

These protests exist to stop people from feeling hopeless, then to get them energized and motivated, then to give them ways to exercise their rights and free will to actually do concrete actions.

Holding a sign at a protest doesn’t stop Trump, but giving millions of people booklets, cards, zines, and papers that direct them to their local ICE rapid response networks, get them canvassing for leftist politicians in their area, and giving them hope that lets them keep doing those things in the future is infinitely more valuable than saying “stay at home, these protests are worthless, now somehow organize your entire community to go raid an ICE facility or something, while you have no motivation or hope for the future because you feel alone.”

These also exist to dispel narratives fascists use to justify their abuse of power. Nazis feel afraid when confronted with the fact that there are a lot more people that hate them than people that are with them. It’s why ICE officers routinely leave scenes of arrests empty handed when enough community members show up. They’re cowards.

At the last No Kings I went to, the organizers told everyone that they knew there would be people on the sidelines trying to agitate protestors, disrupt chants, and spread pro-Trump messaging. None of them showed up after they saw the size of the protest. The closest thing to it was someone in an apartment building too afraid to even put a sign outside their window playing a shitty rap song about missing a shot at Trump, with great lyrics like “B*tch, you missed”, and “the left can’t aim.”

The alternative is everyone staying at home, getting progressively more angry and simultaneously hopeless, while the Nazis in power get even more emboldened from seeing only the few, more radical individuals willing to take action into their own hands while everyone else feels to hopeless to do anything, and I don’t know about you, but that’s not the world I want to live in.

I agree that these protests are very liberal and often convince some participants that the act of the protest itself is enough, that they’ve done their civic duty, but the people who are convinced by that are the same people that already self-limit the extent of their political action to holding an anti-ICE sign on the side of the road while people honk. They were never going to engage in any kind of actually disruptive protest in the first place.

The main problem is that LLMs are pulling from those sources too. An LLM often won’t distinguish between highly reputable sources and any random page that has enough relevant keywords, as it’s not actually capable of picking its own sources carefully and analyzing each one’s legitimacy, at least not without a ton of time and computing power that would make it unusable for most quick queries.

I can’t speak for the original poster, but I also use Kagi and I sometimes use the AI assistant, mostly just for quick simple questions to save time when I know most articles on it are gonna have a lot of filler, but it’s been reliable for other more complex questions too. (I just would rather not rely on it too heavily since I know the cognitive debt effects of LLMs are quite real.)

It’s almost always quite accurate. Kagi’s search indexing is miles ahead of any other search I’ve tried in the past (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant, SearXNG) so the AI naturally pulls better sources than the others as a result of the underlying index. There’s a reason I pay Kagi 10 bucks a month for search results I could otherwise get on DuckDuckGo. It’s just that good.

I will say though, on more complex questions with regard to like, very specific topics, such as a particular random programming library, specific statistics you’d only find from a government PDF somewhere with an obscure name, etc, it does tend to get it wrong. In my experience, it actually doesn’t hallucinate, as in if you check the sources there will be the information there… just not actually answering that question. (e.g. if you ask it about a stat and it pulls up reddit, but the stat is actually very obscure, it might accidentally pull a number from a comment about something entirely different than the stat you were looking for)

In my experience, DuckDuckGo’s assistant was extremely likely to do this, even on more well-known topics, at a much higher frequency. Same with Google’s Gemini summaries.

To be fair though, I think if you really, really use LLMs sparingly and with intention and an understanding of how relatively well known the topic is you’re searching for, you can avoid most hallucinations.

Depends on which Google Pixel phone you need. (GrapheneOS only supports Google Pixel phones due to their hardware security features and closeness to stock android with minimal additional necessary modifications, though they are working with an unnamed OEM to make a non-Google Pixel phone sometime this year, supposedly.)

A Pixel 9a will run you about 400 bucks, and works perfectly fine. A more expensive and newer Pixel 10 will run you about $800 if you really want the newer hardware, but imo it’s just not worth the jump in price. Phone hardware has kind of stagnated so unless you really care, the $400 extra isn’t worth the slightly better camera and processor and whatnot.

Of course, you can always get one used/refurbished, too, but more recent models aren’t much cheaper than brand new. Always buy unlocked as carrier locked ones can’t be flashed with a custom OS unless you unlock them later through the carrier (if they even allow it in the first place)

The install process is easy and of course since it’s open source, it’s free, so there’s no additional cost there.

maybe one where they join together in a kind of organized… group? collective? I don’t know what the word would be for that, but it’s right on the tip of my tongue…

Wow, a bug that specifically automatically chose keywords like “ICE”, and “epstein”, then blocked them from appearing, while leaving literally all other content unharmed??? How conveniently specific and well-timed! /s

General strikes are illegal in the US.

It’s not illegal to strike on a date with other people. It’s illegal for unions to call for a “general strike” because it’s considered them calling a strike on behalf of other non-union employees for other businesses.

Also, jobs can fire workers on the spot for participating in them

Not always, (though yes, it would probably be likely for many people) since they can use things like sick/vacation days conveniently timed right, or if they’re backed up by a union, they might have a contract that helps to prevent at-will firing without certain specific causes, excluding striking.

However, if enough people strike, it’s kind of hard to enforce coming into work via firings, as it’s similar to if an entire unionized company goes on strike. What are you gonna do? Fire every single worker and shut down for good the next day because the only person running every single operation is the remaining CEO?

even if the workers are part of a union and the union want to participate.

As long as the union doesn’t say “this is a general strike” and just says “we are striking on this date for better working conditions”, and that date happens to be the same day other unions are striking, it’s legal. There is no law preventing different unions from striking on the same dates, and it would take very long for any legal process to try and make that claim before the strike has already occurred.

national guards have been sent in to shut down general strikes in the past.

This is the most likely outcome in my opinion. However, it’s still kind of hard to actually enforce the end of a general strike. It’s one thing to arrest someone, or to stop them from doing a given thing, but it’s another to forcibly remove people from their homes and make them work no matter their condition or reason.

Essentially, I’m saying it’d be messy.

Doing it multiple days? You realize most people live paycheck to paycheck? Nobody wants to tell their kids they’re going to be homeless.

This is the biggest hurdle, though there is a degree to which it can be mitigated, at least for a little while. For example, there are a lot of people with backyard and community gardens, small businesses with stockpiles that are willing to support their community as we’ve seen with the current situation in Minnesota, not to mention that if the situation got bad enough you’d probably just see people stealing from their nearest billionaire-owned store because fuck it, why not screw them over more?

To clarify, I’m not like, disputing your actual overarching thesis here, or saying a general strike is easy or likely to succeed, I’m just saying it’s not entirely impossible :)

Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?

For the most part, no, it doesn’t support the site, since most Google ads are PPC (Pay-Per-Click).

Video of one of them:
https://files.catbox.moe/2nueek.mp4

Good. Fuck 'em.

little bit of sharpie over a white square and BOOM, unreadable.

Or, better yet, they’ll just do what they’ve already done, which is simply ignore the requirement. If they won’t follow anywhere saying they can’t wear masks, they won’t wear the codes. Simple as that.

Most of the time, if someone’s phone is confiscated by any kind of officers/agents, it’s gonna be stored somewhere just so they can have it. Even if they don’t want to release a video, they can still crack your phone and get your data, (considering your phone has to be after the first unlock state to record things on it, it would be trivial to exfiltrate all data on the phone unencrypted) like your messaging history, to later paint you as a terrorist or find some other thing they can use to smear your reputation as a martyr.

They don’t want to release the video because it’d make them look horrible.

Exactly. As the ol’ saying goes: “the Right looks for converts, the Left looks for traitors.” We need to change that.

The reason the far right has grown so much is because of how they bring people into the fold. “oh, you were one of them libtards, but now you support our one true god Donald J Trump? Hell yeah brother, welcome to the side of the patriots!!11!1!” vs. “oh you voted for Trump, but now you hate ICE? We warned you this would happen, fuck you Trump voter!”

Exactly. You can get away without using the terminal on a lot of linux distros in the same way you can get away without using CMD on Windows… until one very specific thing breaks and suddenly it’s time to run sfc /scannow for the millionth time.

• “he was reaching for the officer’s handgun”
• “he was resisting arrest”
• “he was assaulting an officer”
• “we thought he had a gun on him”

I’m waiting to see how the administration will spin this one. Obviously the MAGATs will just say “he shouldn’t have resisted arrest and he’d be fine right now” for sure, though.

This is what I don’t think they realize. There’s only a certain point to which you can escalate violence before retaliatory violence becomes the norm.

For example, if you’re in a warzone, and you know the other side has been instructed to “kill and leave no survivors,” you’re never going to just lie down and take it, you’re going to fight them back, because it’s die if you do, die if you don’t.

If this keeps up, there will be a point where ICE killings are so expected, that anyone in their path will take any means necessary to kill those ICE officers first.