Or torrents. If piracy’s on the rise (again) as a replacement for streaming, you can sure as hell bet that it was already replacing sites like PornHub way before that.

I’m glad this effort finally has the support it needs, compared to six months ago when it was practically on life support.

Comment: The intent is to highlight the stupidity of the tariffs.

Your Reply: I don’t get it (as in, “I don’t get the intent… I don’t understand why tariffs are bad”)

Me: Explaining why tariffs are bad.

Your Reply: Nobody asked why tariffs are bad.

Me: <not sure if stupid, asshole, troll, or all three>

People dislike having to educate the same basic lessons over and over again, when it is very easy to search why tariffs are bad. It is not a community where people are going to spoonfeed you information that you didn’t even directly ask for.

The simple answer is because we live in a global economy and you can’t possible make everything that needs to be made in a single country. The more complex answer can be found by reading articles about it. Take this one, which was the first hit I found on a web search:

The trouble with tariffs, to be succinct, is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worsen inequality, diminish productivity and increase global tensions. Other than that, they’re fine.

Perhaps not the most related, but it is sort of funny for The Intercept to cover this when they led to Reality Winner going to jail because they didn’t follow basic journalistic protection of sources.

It’s absolutely related. I will never trust that name again because of what they did to Reality Winner. And Snowden. And many others. They have a shit track record, and should get out of the business of security reporting.

My question for the last 9+ months has been, “how long can a market willingly ignore reality?”

How long did we kick the foundations out of the US dollar when we got rid of the gold standard, and just let it float on speculation and feelings? What, 60-70 years now?

How long has the stock market existed on the whims of people’s feelings over cold hard statistics and long-term analysis?

Markets have been ignoring reality for many decades.

This article is basically just bemoaning that AAA develops for the lowest common denominator, which I can understand as a gripe, but it’s a very old gripe.

And an easy one to fix: Don’t fucking buy AAA games!

So, use and support open-source AI models.

Supreme Court: What’s precedent again?

all artists will benefit because of the precedent that it would set.

No, these protections exist to maintain profits of large corporations. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it “protects the little person”, but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.

Blame Melinda Tankard Reist. She started this whole mess.

It’s not really “your house connected to the Internet” as much as just connecting it together to a central hub. My lights dim and turn off at set times of the day using scenes, including a more dynamic sunrise/sunset time. If it’s stormy weather during the day, the front porch light comes on. I have a few colored lights that change colors with the seasons. Home Assistant brings down the garage door at night, if I forget. If the garage sensor is tripped, the garage light comes on. I have dumber motion sensors for locations where it makes sense, like pantries or closets.

I can control all of my interfaces from my phone. It can hook into local cameras, so that everything is centralized. HA can hook into any of the voice assistant systems, like Alexa. There are so many little conditions and automated switches I could create, based on either outside stimuli (like the weather) or internal sensors.

The Home Assistant community has a good reputation of routing around that kind of bullshit. There’s enough users that I predict a homegrown module will pop up in the next few months.

I love my Ratgdo garage door unit, routing around the bullshit proprietary LiftMaster APIs that want you to download some stupid phone app. No, fuck you. I hard-wire that shit into my garage door opener and get an API that works like a dream.

Sometimes, trying to integrate smart home devices can be a pain, but the Home Assistant core makes the integration much much easier. Please don’t like shit like this to detract from a future smart home project for your house. I would encourage you to just start it, if you’re wanting to get into it and willing to learn some things.

Leto II was a biological supercomputer in his own right, who spend thousands of years crafting humanity in the same manner as the Bene Gesserit, under the hand of a totalitarian government. The methods were different, but the path was just as delusional as the religions that his father abused for his own benefit.

So, he became a biological machine to treat people like machines. Sounds like nothing was learned.

That’s always been the case. Grifters grift, and they have been grifting for thousands of years.

You’re never going to find it 100%, but you can at least go back and blacklist who you have seen to be lying. Reputation is more important than ever. Far too many random strangers have been believing every word from other random strangers. This is why I don’t understand TikTok or other short-form video formats. Why would you take advice from some creator you’ve only seen once?

While there may be some truth to this, it completely ignores the cause of the BJ to begin with. It was in fact a rebellion by the people against those tools.

I think his point is that Dune is full of unreliable narrators, and history is written by the victors. Why do we take the Butlerian Jihad at face value? Because other rich elite houses retell the same story and enforce the same rules?

Or maybe the technology really did go too far, but the result was an massive, massive overcorrection that put humanity into another Dark Age.

I don’t think it can simply be repurposed for liberation, that’s a naive interpretation that ignores all of the actual ways in which the current implementations of AI work.

LLMs are a tool, and all tools can be repurposed or repossessed. Open source models and LLM tools are everywhere. Pretending that ChatGPT and other corporate models are the only ones out there are exactly what the corpofacists in power want you to believe.

By ignoring this technology and sticking our fingers in our ears, we are allowing them to reshape out the technology works, instead of molding it for our own purposes. It’s not going to go away, and thinking that is just as foolish as believing the Internet is a fad.

Are parts of it overhyped and overblown? Sure. Rich assholes have a knack for taking some concept and hyping it up to a million and under-delivering. But, the technology is still promising enough that it’s worth exploring where it can be beneficial, and it’s new enough that we can make sure we become a part of the design.

Disgusting AI-generated add for merch halfway through.

The negative preconceived notion bias is really not helping matters.

So if you cut out the the most divisive political accounts, you will not miss ANY actual news, but are likely to miss a huge pile of disinformation.

No, you just cut out the misinformation. If they are spreading vaccine misinformation on Facebook, fuck them. Cut them out. Never read a thing they put out again.

It’s not about divisiveness. It’s about critical thinking skills.

This is only solved with lawsuits, and even then, they will resist as hard as they did with Epic.

After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups.

This sounds like a call to be willfully ignorant of the serious political shit going down around them. That’s how you get the average idiot who doesn’t understand why voting for a guy like Trump is a bad idea.

You should be fucking angry and have more animosity towards other political groups, or you aren’t paying attention. Nazis should be called out.