Thanks for the feedback, that’s super interesting to me. I’m glad to hear they’ve come down in price more recently, for sure!

The psychological value of some acts of forgiveness (not all, and forgiveness is not the same as trust).

Oh snap I am really sorry to intrude but I have a question for someone like yourself who is an avid PC user and is also blind.

How do you feel about the prohibitive cost of braille terminals? I am not blind but I remember seeing the film Sneakers when I was young and the blind hacker Whistler using a braille terminal. As an adult I looked into them and was shocked that some cost more than a mid-range laptop. Are they even that useful or is this a relic that I recall but has been superseded by more useful assistive technologies?

Honestly, for real, a lot of low-power PCs are really useful once they have crap like Windows off of them and a lightweight Linux distro on them.

Not meaning this in defense of Tiktok, but…

If Tiktok doesn’t push this kind of social divisiveness in their own country, it’s because they regulated it in their home country. They’re simply exploiting the fact that the US has basically zero regulations in place, so they’re allowed to promote socially destructive content. Why wouldn’t they? It’s not like what they’re doing is materially different than what Xitter, Meta/Facebook, Reddit, and so on do. Honestly, it’s already happening at Bluesky because we have no rules and rely almost exclusively on site moderators enforcing social decorum rules. If Tiktok in China is “better” it’s because the government there forces it to be, like maybe we ought to consider doing maybe.

The US government just doesn’t like it when it’s not their guys propagandizing and dividing the populace. They want to enjoy the fruits of that, not a foreign actor. The mask is truly off, they really do think their own poverty-striken citizens are the enemy. The government speaks out of both sides of its mouth about backdoors in encryption, with one part of the FBI saying you need to use encrypted services to safely communicate, and another part saying we need backdoors in encryption even though Salt Typhoon literally saw hackers exploit US telecom backdoors that which the hackers still persist in exploiting.

Trapped in this fucking anxious flesh-prison.

Matter sucks, we should all be made of pure energy.

What, I thought Scully was the reserved, introverted, bookish one?

The only reason Mulder doesn’t get pegged as an extrovert is because he can hardly hold together real human relationships because aliens.

This but it’s just me staring in the mirror saying “Bloody Mary” three times.

This is better if you read the “me” parts in the voice of Tom Servo (as pictured), and the alien parts in the voice of Dr. Forrester.

I know just who he can call!

Steve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg#Religious_beliefs_and_other_interests

Born and raised in a Reform Jewish household, Zuckerberg later identified himself as an atheist. However, he said in 2016 that, “I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_humanoid

The reptilian conspiracy theory alleges that shape-shifting reptilian aliens control Earth.

Belief in reptilians sometimes references anti-Semitic texts. For example, the perpetrator of the 2020 Nashville bombing was influenced by the writings of David Icke, who in turn referenced 1903 anti-Semitic fabricated text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Welcome to being a luddite.

It’s not actually about hating the progression of technology, it’s realizing that your labor has been leveraged against you. You will not bear any of the true fruits, because your bosses will use the fruits of your labor to purchase the AI to replace you.

It’s because the labor market is fucked and developers needed unions 20 years ago instead of thinking because they were “rockstars” and “made the big bucks” that they didn’t need anybody else.

We wouldn’t have to ask these kind of questions if the fruits of our labor were being equitably distributed.

Basically in the scenario described, this is what’s happening to developers:

GIMP can be good, but it’s work-flow is almost entirely different, so it’s a learning curve. It doesn’t help that it looks more like Photoshop these days, so people can think it has similar workflow and then quickly be flummoxed as to how to do something that was simple in Photoshop.

He’s actually cutting off his own legs and soon he’ll be dancing on pegs.

Security Vendors (ie antivirus companies) don’t really care that an individual crack may or may not be dangerous on its own, but things like cracks often do display the kind of behavior viruses do, like modifying registries and verification files. While they make these things free for us to use, they’re technically doing things on the system the user isn’t supposed to do (because it impacts security/integrity).

Game cracks have been a long-used avenue for propagating viruses, so to serve their customers better, they probably err on the side of just assuming that they’re all potentially at risk. It’s a little over-the-top, but I can see the reasoning.

Finally, lot of antivirus companies are exactly that: companies. They exist to make a profit and they’re working with people who sell software by marking pirated copies of their software as malware, which in the view of the people who sell software: they are malware. So often the way they make money dictates what they treat as legitimate versus not legitimate. Especially in the US, where the government does a lot of work to support private companies in enforcing copyright.

In other words, it’s a crap shoot. I’d say if the virus signature only mentions it being a game crack it’s possibly safe, because if it actually contains a virus payload, I would think it would identify that one, too. It wouldn’t take a more serious virus and dump it under the “game crack” without more explanation, or at least I hope they don’t approach it that way.

Right, but the entire technical function of how bittorrent works is that it works better the more people are seeding and leeching, the “swarm.” By definition, this application is for a small group of people sharing files, which in my view limits its applicability compared to other, more direct options.

Why do I need a swam if I have so few peers that it’s going to be limited to my upload speed anyway? May as well just send it directly. Does that make sense?

When I say “overkill” that’s what I mean, it’s a technical approach that’s unsuited for what it’s aimed at because by the nature of how bittorrent works, the whole point is to speed up transfer speeds by distributing transfer among the swarm. When the swarm is three people that doesn’t actually happen (or not to the extent that it matters) and you may as well send the file directly to each recipient. (Further, direct transfer options have more options for data-in-transit encryption)

Perhaps it makes more sense if you’re doing really large files, but even then you’re still limited by the small swarm.

I’m dead.