Another reason right to repair is needed

Being paid is a kind of attention/validation. The things he’s selling are “branding” stuff that feed into his cult of personality. It’s probably more of a narcissist thing than a money thing.

Those went up in price after the initial sale afaik

I thought this article had some interesting insight into how living in Israel can distort someone’s perspective on these issues.

Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.

If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

What about just a blackmailer assuming anyone booting an OS from a public computer has something to hide? And then they have write access and there’s no defense, and it doesn’t have to be everywhere because people seeking privacy this way will have to be picking new locations each time. An attack like that wouldn’t have to be targeted at a particular person.

Isn’t it risky plugging usb drives into untrusted machines?

Ok but that’s different than free will as in, the premise of a society in which a person is able to choose their path in life

IIRC it spammed websites with traffic, didn’t conceal your IP at all, and some people got arrested for using it to make some websites go down for a very brief period. Basically a way to use people who didn’t know what they were doing as cannon fodder

Could you elaborate? Does HOA mean something different in other countries?

Home owner’s association; when you buy a house and it is part of a HOA, you have to sign a contract to join the HOA as a requirement of buying, which means you have to pay dues and abide by the rules of the organization, and you have to require the next buyer to also join in order to sell your house.

this will force us humans to go actually outside, make friends, form deep social relationship, and build lasting, resilient communities

There is no chance it goes that way, how is talking to people outside even an option for someone used to just being on the internet? Even if the content gets worse, the basic mechanisms to keep people scrolling still function, while the physical and social infrastructure necessary for in person community building is nonexistent.

I doubt the school administrators who would be buying this thing or the people trying to make money off it have really thought that far ahead or care whether or not it does that, but it would definitely be one of its main effects.

IMO for some people arguing is a form of intimacy

Can’t track mouse movements on mobile though

Obligatory LLMs see tokens not letters

Here’s what the US copyright office says about when AI art is or isn’t copyrightable:

In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of “mechanical reproduction” or instead of an author’s “own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form.” 24 The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work.25 This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry.

So if an image looks like AI and you decide to just take it, legally that could be a risky proposition if you don’t know the artist’s workflow and the situation doesn’t exactly match up with settled case law. Afaik most of the market is for custom images, so in practice most of the time it’s not going to be a situation of just putting in a prompt and handing over the result but rather a multi step process and a hybrid of different techniques, which could weigh more towards generated content or more towards traditional drawing or image manipulation. The reason to pay someone for that instead of just using AI yourself would be the same as the reason for paying for non-AI art; they have the skills to get better results than you easily can on your own. The reason an artist might use AI is that it improves quality and/or reduces the amount of work.

I don’t understand this attitude. If an argument is good, why wouldn’t it be valuable or matter? I think it would benefit people a lot if everyone put more thought and consideration into their arguments, especially in the direction of conveying some original thought that isn’t just a remix of the same tired propaganda style rhetoric everyone’s heard a million times before. “Winning” doesn’t matter, but collaboratively thinking about things with other people matters, and a good way to do that is through argument.

I mean yeah that’s half the reason to play games on PC

Can anyone recommend any cool mods/projects built on top of Minetest?

Seems like with a lack of effective enforcement it could make things worse in some ways, since it would give a competitive advantage to the marketers corrupt enough to willingly break the law and try to get away with it. Also if there’s a situation where this kind of fraud is basically required to be competitive, it could allow authorities to selectively go after people for illegitimate reasons with this as a pretext.