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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure if the writer of this article is familiar with Dutch politics, but nothing unusual is happening. Unlike in the US, where one party wins am absolute majority, we have a system where you need to form a coalition. And this is obviously a whole political game, with parties kinda pretending they don’t want it just to have a better bargaining position. This formation process has taken months for as long as I can remember, and personally I don’t feel like it’s going particularly badly for them.

    I still think the coalition of PVV, NSC, VVD, BBB will happen in some way or another. But the other parties do want the PVV to make clear that some of it’s plans are just not going to happen. Wilders is aware of this, and suddenly seems a lot more reasonable than I’m used to (though obviously still far-right). Ideas like a Nexit or a full immigration stop are just not executable, so they’ll have to be toned down.



  • I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I can give some insight. Partially I do watch video content like YouTube or Formula 1, but on my PC instead of on the TV. The rest of my free time is just spent on other hobbies like gaming, programming, running, walking, going to music festivals, music production, etc. I always have so much that I want to do, and the TV just isn’t very enticing to me. I no longer have a cable subscription, and I usually don’t really have the patience to watch a series on Netflix or something, so I’m not subscribed to a streaming service either. I’d rather do something interactive like a game.



  • Baudet is definitely on the edge yeah. Obviously there somes a moment where you shouldn’t tolerate the intolerant and a democratic society shouldn’t protect the undemocratic in the name of democracy. Up until now I don’t think either of them has done enough to deserve that tho. Randomly calling for a politician to be killed, even as a joke, is in my opinion still bad taste. It’s not the way I’d want Dutch politics to go, even for those who I disagree with. Violence and hate only creates more violence and hate


  • This is not a joke that is very appropriate though. In the early 2000s a politician similar to Wilders was killed for his opinions. Another (even further) right-wing politician was assaulted twice in the past few months, and Wilders himself hasn’t been able to go anywhere without bodyguards in the past few years. We’re still a democracy, Wilders should be able to say things without getting constant death threats. Unlike the US, things are not yet as polarized here. To me it feels like the comedian made a very inappropriate “joke”, even if I also absolutely despise Wilders



  • Interesting fact: it’s actually not a link but the entire image encoded in base64. Base 64 is like base 10 (decimal, normal numbers) or base 2 (binary, ones and zeroes), but then using 64 different characters. So what the AI is trying to do here is literally generate a valid PNG image encoded in text, not just a link.

    EDIT: Additionally, it could technically be valid to have such a repeating value (assuming all the PNG info makes sense). The background could simply be a solid colour which leads to this pattern, or it could be dithered which might produce such a pattern. I’m not knowledgeable enough on PNG to know whether that makes sense tho. It’s probably just the AI being silly



  • Obviously this is a privacy community, and this ain’t great in that regard, but as someone who’s interested in AI this is absolutely fascinating. I’m now starting to wonder whether the model could theoretically encode the entire dataset in its weights. Surely some compression and generalization is taking place, otherwise it couldn’t generate all the amazing responses it does give to novel inputs, but apparently it can also just recite long chunks of the dataset. And also why would these specific inputs trigger such a response. Maybe there are issues in the training data (or process) that cause it to do this. Or maybe this is just a fundamental flaw of the model architecture? And maybe it’s even an expected thing. After all, we as humans also have the ability to recite pieces of “training data” if we seem them interesting enough.



  • I’m Dutch and afaik right-wing media doesn’t play a role. The reason is quite simple, it’s because the previous coalitions lead by the neoliberal VVD have consistently fucked everyone who isn’t rich (and even some who are). Especially the crises that they’ve caused have completely eroded trust in the previously big parties. Some of these issues I’ll lost below.

    In the northern province of Groningen houses started getting damaged die to earthquakes caused by government-funded natural gas extraction. The whole country got rich of of this for decades, but when the people of Groningen needed money to repair their homes they sometimes had to fight for years to get anything.

    The tax agency started incorrectly marking people as fraudsters for claiming certain benefits, which often put these people in debt for thousands of euros. This has ruined the life’s of hundreds of people, yet the government initially just ignored it. While these people lost everything they had, the government seemed to do everything it could to avoid paying or helping. At some point they did start paying and pretending to help, but for many victims this was simply too little to late.

    And then there’s plenty of other issues that erroded trust as well. Years of ignoring “the nitrogen problem” until it was too late and lead to all kinds of issues. The farmers (who are the biggest cause of this issue) suddenly become the target of the government, which they obviously didn’t like. This caused huge protests and the rapid growth of parties like the BBB and probably also the PVV. And there’s also a housing crisis, where buying houses is impossible.

    In short: the previous normal coalitions kept fucking up, until people seemingly had enough. There were other alternatives to the PVV, but apparently voting on a right -wing extremist who has all the ideas is easier than voting left-wing for many people here. I hope the damage stays limited, but this is truly a dark day for our country.


  • As a Dutchman, I’m kind of shocked. The battle seemed to be between the previous largest party VVD, the new NSC party and the labour/greens fusion. Then the PVV suddenly surged. Apparently a lot of people who weren’t sure yet ended up going with the PVV. Out of the 4 largest parties we have 3 that are right-wing and/or conservative. The PVV is far-right (though hard to place), the VVD is a neoliberal party, and the NSC is closer to the centre but also quite conservative. We’re entering dark days…