You can buy groceries from a mechanical grocer, but it’ll accuse you of shoplifting like three times while checking you out.

Crackle, and pop.

What about a MacBook is not optimal for retro gaming?

Beautiful screen, excellent battery life, GNU-centric OS, possibly ARM-based arch (depending on model)…

We should all be so lucky!

Black Mirror was a documentary.

Bigger drones, or just more drones.

Please don’t provide this stat without context. It just promotes cynicism and despair. Reality is complex, and our solutions are going to have to be complex.

Many of these vacant homes are nowhere near major homeless populations. But office buildings often are.

https://ggwash.org/view/73234/vacant-houses-wont-solve-our-housing-crisis

Edit: If you prefer videos, here’s a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xZXdXxYBGU

They published the ID numbers of those who they claim are dead. It will be possible to prove/disprove it in time. It’s not like they are throwing out a number without any backing.

What a way to make a livin

Original incident: https://ground.news/article/shot-fired-protesters-pepper-sprayed-outside-pro-israel-rally-in-chicago-suburbs

Update on charges: https://ground.news/article/no-charges-for-man-who-fired-gun-in-the-air-near-pro-palestinian-protesters-in-skokie-prosecutors

Might I recommend Ground News?

Can yall idiots just fact-check for a goddamn second? https://www.windowslatest.com/2023/10/16/no-windows-12-is-a-free-upgrade-and-wont-require-a-subscription/

Edit: Just type “windows 12 subscription” into your search bar. It’s fewer words than any of these comments!

Upvoting because this is a a true “no stupid questions” post.

So… I think you need to look into the social and cognitive nature of swear words. Vsauce has a pretty good primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7dQh8u4Hc

I think you also need to let go of the desire to be better than common culture, and/or the desire to engineer a better culture from an external perspective. People are gross and messy, imprecise and reckless. It’s what makes us interesting, motherfucker.

Human Rights Watch has a good report about free speech, protest, and journalism under Israeli military orders: Born Without Civil Rights

It also mentions where there is overlap between civil rights abuses from Israel and from the Palestinian Authority, although there is a separate report on the PA: Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent

I also recommend reading the three case studies under section VI. The first one is a doozy, and parts of it are mentioned in the summary below. The third one, a guy gets kicked around by Israel and then also the PA.

Relevant highlights from the summary:

The regulations empower authorities, among other things, to declare as an “unlawful association” groups that advocate for “bringing into hatred or contempt, or the exciting of disaffection against” authorities, and criminalize membership in or possession of material belonging to or affiliated, even indirectly, with these groups.

Military Order 101, which criminalizes participation in a gathering of more than ten people without a permit on an issue “that could be construed as political,” punishable by a sentence of up to ten years. It further prohibits publishing material “having a political significance” or displaying “flags or political symbols” without army approval.

Military Order 1651, which replaced 20 prior orders and imposes a 10-year sentence on anyone who “attempts, orally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area [the West Bank] in a manner which may harm public peace or public order” or “publishes words of praise, sympathy or support for a hostile organization, its actions or objectives,” which it defines as “incitement.” It further outlines vaguely worded “offenses against authorities” whose penalties include potential life imprisonment for an “act or omission which entails harm, damage, disturbance to the security of the Area or the security of the IDF” or entering an area in close “proximity” to property belonging to the army or state.

The Israeli army also regularly cites the broad definition of incitement in its military laws, defined to include “praise, sympathy or support for a hostile organization” and “attempts, orally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a manner which may harm public peace or public order,” to criminalize speech merely opposing its occupation.

Military prosecutors, for example, in early 2018 claimed in an indictment against activist Nariman Tamimi that she “attempted to influence public opinion in the Area in a manner that may harm public order and safety” and “called for violence” over a livestream she posted to her Facebook account of a confrontation between her then-16-year-old daughter Ahed and Israeli soldiers in her front yard in December 2017. Her indictment notes a series of charges under Military Order 1651 based primarily on the livestream, including “incitement,” noting that the video was “viewed by thousands of users, shared by dozens of users, received dozens of responses and many dozens of likes.” Human Rights Watch reviewed the video and case file, and nowhere in the video or case file does Nariman call for violence. Nariman told Human Rights Watch that she pled guilty to incitement and two other charges—"aiding assault of a soldier” and “interference with a soldier”— to avoid a longer sentence if convicted by a military justice system that, as human rights organizations have shown, fail to give Palestinians fair trials. Based on the plea deal, Nariman served eight months in jail.

Well, setting aside that there’s no law against being a total asshole, so like… We don’t have to make a bad behavior illegal in order to complain about it…

There’s the letter of the law, and there’s the intent. We start with a shared cultural attitude of how we should treat each other, and then we turn that into a quantifiable, objective rule that we can enforce through law.

We can try to make the law match our cultural attitudes as closely as possible, but there will always be gaps.

Now, I’ve got my own beef with how our IP and publicity laws work, and I’d like them to be more permissive in many ways. Much of IP law is exploitative, takes advantage of creators more than it protects them, and has lagged way behind where our social norms are these days.

But these ML companies aren’t interested in abiding by any social norms at all. Only paying lip service to current laws, which were written in a time before these “AI” services were even a possibility – skating by on technicalities, like a little brother poking the air 2 inches from your face and taunting “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!”

My complaint actually hinges on models not emitting an exact replica. That would be obvious infringement. In cases like DreamGF, they would be wide-open to lawsuits from very wealthy people whose primary asset is their right of publicity.

What these ML companies are doing is: They are identifying where the line of definite infringement lies, and aiming their business as close to that line as possible.

Yet another reason that we cannot allow ML companies to set a precedent that “it’s fine to use non-consensual training data, because the model only ‘learns’ from it and never reproduces an exact replica of any single input”.

Also, this was not surprising:

Dillon said that DreamGF has a team of between 20-25 developers, mostly in Bulgaria, and that they previously worked at an NFT company.

NeuraLink in 20 years

Internationalization. Don’t have to get icons translated (most of the time), and they always take the same amount of space.

And even if you, as a user, want to pay with your wallet instead of your privacy, there are awkward logistical hurdles, especially for smaller sites.

Entering your payment info all the time sucks. Platforms like Patreon lock you into specific tiers, which may not align with how much you actually intend to use the thing. Any direct payment at all still has the overhead of a payment processor, which will take a bigger percentage of smaller payments.

in 2022, advertising revenue amounted to close to 113 billion U.S. dollars whereas payments and other fees revenues amounted to around two billion U.S. dollars.

With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide.

113/3 = about $38 per user per year

14*12 = $168 per user per year

Which would be a mark-up (a Zuck-up?) of 342%.

You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month, and it’s those same highly-active users that contribute the most to the ad revenue.

Having no idea how those stats actually break down, we could take a wild guess and do a Pareto Principle 80/20.

Say the top 20% active users constitute 80% of the ad revenue, and those same top 20% all switch to the paid model:

(113*0.8)/(3*0.2) = about $151 per VIP user per year

…which is a lot closer to the $168. Zuck-up of about 11%.

80/20 is probably cutting them too much slack, but the real markup is probably closer to 11% than it is to 342%.

This is also not factoring the extra operational expense of supporting the new model.

—

Math part over, here’s my take:

This is good.

Ad-based models are toxic. We poisoned our culture, bulldozed our privacy, distorted the economy, gave unfathomable power to immature narcissistic opportunists, and underdeveloped public FOSS tech because we expected privately-owned services to be Free™ even though they could never be literally free.

This is a move towards unmasking these services and revealing the real economic gears whizzing around behind them.

The more people understand what their privacy and autonomy is worth to these companies, the more they might insist on keeping it — and maybe even seek out places where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.

—

Sources:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/