It is, but US anti-discrimination laws are bullshit and put so much weight on the accuser to basically need a smoking gun of a written email that specifically says “We are doing this to fire old people” for it to go anywhere.

I’m just here for Anamanaguchi

…because of course it is.

If you have a quality PC, I always promote emulation over hardware, just because modern PC hardware can do things like let you play old games at higher resolutions and framerates.

Also, if you want to use those Wavebirds on PC, you can use receiver for them in something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RSXRLUE

I like hacking the old systems, but I have more fun hacking them than actually continuing to game on them since using my PC and streaming the games to other screens is just more flexible for my needs.

Dolphin is really solidly built at this point, it’s one of the most well put together emulators there is, imho.

I’ve only been pirating Nintendo games since the Wii era. When they released the Wii and stopped providing support for the old consoles they were dead to me. Before that I was able to get my NES serviced for $35 at Nintendo of America in Redmond, Washington and that included new parts and my games all getting cleaned.

I did find a 3DS on the side of the freeway once, but I firmware hacked it and loaded up a 128gb SD card with about 60 pirated games.

Yet Nintendo games will still never go on sale and Nintendo will charge more for worse quality controllers than any other company in the business.

If you think blocking access to knowledge about sexuality, atheism, or drugs is actually protecting children and not about a controlling and unpopular law I don’t know what to tell you. Because it’s clearly not actually intended to protect children as much as it is to block inconvenient information to help indoctrinate children to be compliant and unquestioning.

No, they are censorship laws aimed at preventing young people from accessing certain types of information that specific groups don’t want young people learning about, such as their sexuality, concepts like atheism, and safety information regarding drugs.

Let’s be absolutely clear here: The explosion of people being comfortable coming out as some stripe of LGBTQ+ has everything to do with an open internet where youth were not restricted from finding out about information related to how they felt inside. Instead of being made to feel like strangers in their own skin, with a world telling them that people like them didn’t or shouldn’t exist, they instead found community and self-love through internet forums and information which allowed them to pursue full, healthy lives as adults.

This “protect the children” malarkey is one more way for the religious groups who oppose LGBTQ+ culture to “protect the children” by restricting access to this kind of information, reducing their ability to find it in their formative years, in the name of protecting them while actually stunting their personal growth.

It extends beyond sexuality as well, although that is the most obvious since many religions are deeply censorious regarding sex.

It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.

Further, when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, everything I knew about drugs was literally old wives tales meant to scare kids away from drugs, and then the internet came around and suddenly there was a boom of actual, verifiable scientific information about drugs so if you wanted to experiment with drugs, you knew what you were getting into. I once had a conversation with a girlfriend who was a bit older than me about her experiences with LSD as a teen, and she admitted that at the time she really didn’t understand on any scientific level what was happening or what the nature of hallucination was, she just knew she was having fun and seeing crazy shit.

This is a backdoor to restricting access to important information that youth need to have access to for making healthy decisions for themselves sexually, religiously, and in terms of what substances they put in their bodies.

The birth of the internet gave us a beautiful period where people could grow up with access to accurate, verifiable, worthwhile information that helped them navigate and understand the world they were growing up in and who they were within that world.

This kind of legislation intends to snuff out that openness and accessibility which led to increased openness and acceptance of LGBTQ+, atheism, and safe drug use (including the understanding that some illegal drugs like marijuana and LSD are probably safer than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco).

Actually, when being grilled by congress, Mark Zuckerberg proposed exactly this solution: OS level age verification.

It’s actually being pushed by social media companies to take the heat and responsibility off of them.

Even worse than my initial understanding of it. Of course. These people are fucking wild. They literally view the entire underclass of the world as completely disposable.

Also, important to remember the distinction here. This was all because the only aspect Anthropic was actually against was AI being allowed to make kill decisions. They are fine with the DOD using their AI tech, just not fine with AI making kill decisions. So it’s not like they were saying “no, you can’t use our tech at all.”. Anthropic AI is definitely still in use by the US government… Just not using it for AI to make decisions on who to kill.

I mean… imho that’s a distinction without a difference. Sure a human will have the final say, but they will be working from what the AI produced, which could be hallucinated and unless the human checks the output against the actual evidence, they will just sign off on a kill order from hallucinated AI “analysis.” In other words essentially the same result as having the AI make the kill order itself.

So, just remember to not treat Anthropic like heroes for doing the bare minimum.

Reminds me of my friend and I discussing this open source printer that you build and maintain yourself.

“I wonder how the NSA will install the unique invisible tracking dots into the firmware?”

EDIT: Oops forgot the link

Intel macs about to go for cheap (hopefully) and will be great for putting Linux on.

"Nevermind the man behind the curtain folks, because it’s a different man this time around!’

He’s a doctor of economics, he has a PhD. He’s not exactly a tech bro by any stretch.

The paper I linked is literally an example of him making something. Unless you somehow erroneously think that research papers aren’t entitled to copyright protection, which, surprise, you’re wrong.

This isn’t even worth replying to. Get your head out of your ass, man. Plenty of people who make things that are copyrightable promote shortening and amending copyright, including author Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the term “enshittification.”

I’ll quote Mark Hosler of the band Negativland, who made a shitload of art. Negativland was also instrumental in designing early Creative Commons licenses.

“If you really want to keep control of your art, keep it in your house, don’t share it with anyone, don’t share it with the world.”

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

The research has been done, and speaks for itself.

Copyright needs to be shorter for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones would be that if copyright was a reasonable length (15 to 30 years), this would all be a moot point and everyone could use books from within a recent timeframe for any kind of use, including AI training.

Further, this would make it feel a lot less hypocritical like piracy is okay for giant corporations and their products as long as they make oodles of money but piracy for regular people is still bad. I mean for fucks sake they put the guys from The Pirate Bay in prison for less, under the same argument: that they were profiting off of pirated works, just like AI companies are. Yet somehow it’s totes okay for OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, and Twitter, and they’re not being sent to prison over it. It really re-enforces the feeling that there’s two justice systems, one for the obscenely rich where as long as they make crazy profit they can do whatever the fuck they want, and one for the poor where they get fucked six ways to Sunday for doing on a small, individual level what giant corporations do at industrial scale.

The solution is to fix copyright and make more works public domain and then nobody is going to prison and nobody is getting a free pass over what’s considered illegal for others.

All of this is so on the nose except the updates bit.

Sorry, mate, but if you skip an update because you don’t feel like keeping up and it’s because there’s a massive security flaw that leaves your PC up to easy compromise, that’s genuinely a bad thing.

Yeah, most times updates are just new features but if you’re not paying attention you have no idea if it’s a feature update or a security update, do you?

If only you have physical access to your computers and they’re firewalled properly sure, maybe it’s safe enough, but the vast majority of people don’t have things firewalled properly at the very least.

I don’t know, that’s the only bit that seems a bit short-sighted to me, especially when it comes to more casual users.

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That’s amazing. I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!