Nope. The COVID-19 vaccine didn't have anywhere near that level of serious events. If it did we'd have a public health catastrophe on our hands worse than COVID itself. But we don't.

Don't blindly repost shit when it doesn't even pass a red-face test.

China isn't communist.

Yes, I've seen multiple comments on Twitter about it by people who don't like the destruction. Sure you probably don't give a shit, heck most people don't. But pretending it's just one blogger alone in the world is just you being a gaslighting arse.

It's not a computer animated ad. Sure parts of it are augmented by CGI (specifically the balls caught on the edge of the press, but for the most part CGI is paired with traditional real footage in many advertisements like this because it is faster and cheaper to do than trying to animate something from scratch.

Honestly I'm not sure what to make of your comment. Are you insulting the advert because you think it looks fake, or are you praising the CGI industry in general because you can no longer tell real and fake apart anymore.

Hardly. Just because you don't care about instruments enough to make space for them in your house doesn't mean they take up space. I see people literally living in a small studio apartment who have more than one instrument laying around. Incidentally my guitar cost me 300EUR, the iPad Pro from the advert costs 1200EUR assuming it's the lower end model. Are you saying with a straight face you find the latter to be "more available"? Bullshit!

This outrage isn't manufactured. Just because you don't give a shit about something doesn't mean someone else needs to follow your mindset. You don't care? Fine, more power to you. If we want to talk about manufactured outrage, why did you even bother posting about something so meaningless to you that it could have been ignored?

The ad in question is quite generic in its marketing concepts, but it does actually hurt those of us who care about creative arts to see so many expensive things destroyed in the name of an advert for a shitty tablet. Sure no one gives a flying fuck about the tin of paint, but watching a piano get crushed just to make an advert made me feel shitty. Does it make you feel shitty? No? Congrats on not caring. I care. It's what makes you and I individuals.

Learning something does not make a work derived. AI doesn't just take and modify slightly it meshes together many sources to come up with an answer to the question. The models are getting so extensive that it's getting impossible to attribute the source for an answer. It's not a search engine.

I don't get a choice if someone I don't like reads it or not.

If you don't want your stuff used by someone or some thing, don't post. It's as simple as that. You can't claim property over your public posting, especially to a third party service that has their own ToS.

Again, that isn't true. The COVID lockdown protests were a great example of how things have softened in China. 30 years ago it would have been a violent crackdown, but instead they folded pretty quickly.

As for the US, I think it's a really dangerous time for it. You have Trump who is an actual crook, and openly talking about dismantling your democracy. The Democrats seem to be pretty useless, and can't even reliably beat that guy, let alone undo some of the damage he has already done. Women have lost basic rights, and so have LGBTQ people. Then you have the influence of Israel, and yet again violent crackdowns on student protestors, like nothing was learned from the 60s and 80s.

No matter what happens in November, it doesn't look like things will improve much, and it's all recent.

Which is not to say that a dominant China is preferable, merely that I'd prefer there were no dominant powers.

It does make sense to have semiconductors manufactured in Europe and the US and Japan. Like the mask thing though, we seem to be pretty terrible at strategic planning.

That's simply not true. The official position of the Taiwanese government is that it is the government of all of China, including the entire mainland.

They both claim each other in official documents. In practice, there is literally nothing in the posture of Taiwan in which they would even vaguely attempt it, unlike the other way around.

Within Taiwan, there is a political movement to reunify with the mainland, merging the two governments under the PRC system.

In any country of a nontrivial size there will be a political movement for almost anything. In practice about 7% of people want unification. So sure it's a "political movement" but not a very popular one. Oddly enough people living in democracies don't often want to voluntarily be ruled by a repressive, genocidal dictator.

The creative process has always changed by new technology that made it cheaper. For example a painter no longer has to source plants or minerals to make their own dyes to mix paint; they order the color they want on Amazon. But if that painter feels strongly about cheapening his/her art, they can still mix their own by sourcing their own ingredients.

Here's the thing: no one has to buy whatever is shiny and hype. No one. The outrage is that people feel something is taken away from them when someone else can do the same thing they did. Sounds like a them problem. People can still do whether art they want in the way they want. Don’t want to create music on an iPad and prefer to play piano? Go ahead.

Back in the day, I had to setup a network print server at home as there were multiple people and computers. I had a USB inkjet printer. I had to research about Linux, CUPS, SMB, drivers, etc. Now some printers come with Ethernet and Wi-Fi built in. For those that don’t, there are small network printer servers you can buy starting at $50. I could rage at how easy kids have it these days and scream for them to get off my lawn. Or I could appreciate I don’t have to do all of that again.