I only bring it up to make the point that not everybody is calling what Nvidia is doing ‘groundbreaking innovation’.

I mean, Nvidia is being sued by rightsholders in a class action lawsuit.

I hear the term ‘broken up’ a lot in media and discourse, but it’s never explained. In your eyes, what actually happens when a government ‘breaks up’ a corporation? I mean, what are the steps, objectives, and outcomes?

Not being adversarial, I’m just curious.

I take your anti-corporate point. However, I believe pro-doping would totally work if it was a gladiatorial bloodbath decathalon within the olympics itself. And if you get caught doping in the non-doping sports, you’re forced to compete in the decathalon with the juiced up killers. Jousting, Barenuckle boxing, Pride rules MMA, Hell in a Cell, no rules water polo, shit like that.

Before this is all over, MS will be charging users to extract their snapshots from a proprietary cloud-only one drive account. The recovery process will take about 3 hours, and involve scrolling through ai-authored help articles that don’t lay out clearly and methodically how to access the old snapshots. The comments on the help articles will begin with “Hello sir, can you confirm that you have followed the steps at this link?”. The link, before delivering you to an irrelevant solution, will shunt you to a landing page that forces you to log into your microsoft account before you can see the answer.

“We don’t understand. Why aren’t people simply searching for Taylor Swift”

The moral of the stone soup story is that greedy people can and should be tricked into sharing. Everything old is new again.

As soon as I learned that Crank wasn’t cinéma vérité, I couldn’t take Jason Statham seriously ever again.

For real!

I think this type of anthropocentrism extends to chess too actually. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’ve heard that chess AIs are finding success doing unintuitive things like pushing a and h file pawns in openings. If, 10 years ago, some chess grandmaster was doing the same thing and finding success, I imagine they would have been seen as creative, maybe even groundbreaking.

I think the average person under-rates the sophistication of AI. Maybe as a response to the AI hype. Maybe it’s because we’re scared of AI, and it’s comforting to believe that it’s operations are trivial. I see irrationality and anger cropping up in discussions of AI that I think stem from a fundamental fear of its transformative power.

Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn’t already in place

I don’t know about that. Say you take a few years to write a handful of poems, and it turns out people in your neighborhood really like them. You compile the poems into a book, and sell it for $5, and it sells well. Seeing this, your neighbor buys one, copies it, and starts selling it one neighborhood over for $2, and representing themself as the author. I would think most people in that situation would want to say, ‘hey, that’s not fair’. I don’t think that’s sick or rooted in greed, copyright can be a check on greed.

I think when companies that originally offered something unique and desirable get large enough, they necessarily lose touch with what made them indispensable. Dollar signs lead to a notion of growth that summons a many-tentacled cocaine-caked Moloch of feature creep, tech bandwagon hopping, information siloing, data harvesting, advertiser worshiping, and corporate evil that is, at best, indifferent to user experience, but more typically actively antagonistic to it.

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

True. And unfortunately certain privacy measures can make it easier to digitally fingerprint you as a user. Also my mind is still blown since I learned about canvas fingerprinting. EFF.org describes it as follows:

Canvas fingerprinting is invisible to the user. A tracker can create a “canvas” in your browser, and generate a complicated collage of shapes, colors, and text using JavaScript. Then, with the resulting collage, the tracker extracts data about exactly how each pixel on the canvas is rendered. Many variables will affect the final result. These include your operating system, graphics card, firmware version, graphics driver version, and installed fonts.

These settings are different from one computer to the next. But they tend to be consistent enough on a single machine to clearly identify a user.

Sounds like you’re on the right path, and I know you didn’t ask, but just wanted to chime in. I love cooking, and have both stainless and cast iron skillets. The circlejerk for cast iron is strong, but I have to say, it’s genuinely the best available non-stick pan once it’s seasoned properly. I can make a perfect omelette, sear scallops, steaks, sautee vegetables, & use it as a pan for oven roasting chickens and roasts. I use it for bread baking as well. They’re cheap (compared to clad cookware) and I’m not sure I could damage my pan even if I wanted to. They’re extremely sturdy, and hold heat very well. I clean mine with cold water and a stiff bristle brush, dry, lightly oil (when it looks like it needs it) & it’s ready to go.

Down side to cast iron pans is that they need some care in the initial seasoning stages, and it stinks up the house when you season them (do it outside on the bbq if you have one!). It’s a bit messy to keep them oiled. They’re heavy and not ergonomic. Can’t use them to simmer acidic sauces because that actually will soften and strip the seasoning, so I use my stainless for that. Get one, season it correctly, and you’ll never look back.

Would be curious to know your thoughts about fragmentation - I’m not an nfl guy but I follow hockey and mma, and I think there is a shared issue, where, a handful of communities will crop up across multiple instances, all essentially following the same subject matter and material. Seems to me this will make for smaller, less active conversations that are spread around, instead of having one canonical hub where fans can go and you can get a robust community and lots of people chiming in. What do you think? Is this actually an issue? If it is, is it just a side-effect of decentralization that fans will have to deal with?

Cheers, thanks for modding. I’ve never done it but I imagine it’s hard work.

better tools for moderation

Where have I heard that before?

I’d be curious to know your experience with that game. Me and some friends have been playing it and the grind is just insane, to the point that I can’t really enjoy it because progress feels so glacial. Whenever people speak positively about it I feel like I must be missing something.

Ahh, the internet blooms with summer children in July.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? What sort of views did you get shit for?