This sort of disclaimer needs to be beside every article concerning corporate fines. Fucking ridiculous.

Giving me flashbacks to the game Space Station 13. It was never “the clowns”, just “The Clown”. And it absolutely was a threat.

More often than not, the person who picked the singular clown role on the station (or who mugged the person who did and stole the costume), would be someone who was highly skilled with the game who wanted to get up to shenanigans.

I’ve watched a clown armed with nothing but two banana peels single handedly take out an entire security force, steal their gear, disappear while the station gets wrecked by a changeling, then pop back out and lure the changeling into a carefully built conveyor belt system that traps them in an inescapable loop of being knocked over forever, trapped, forced to listen to infinite bicycle horns and a farting robot made out of their own cut off butt.

The clown then used the opportunity to set the station’s black hole engine loose, destroyed the end of the hall to the escape shuttle, and lubed the floor. The survivors, rushing to escape, slip, and glide out into the void. More bicycle horn honks are the last sound they hear.

Honka honka honka honka honka honka…

Ah yes, the classic “you can only be upset about one thing at a time”!

If you’re upset I pissed on the floor instead of in the toilet while Biden is complicit with genocide you’re part of the problem!

Sorry boss, I can’t care about my job because of Palestine!

How dare you pull me over for going 80mph in a school zone, pig! Don’t you know what Israel is doing?

How could you possibly expect me to care about something so insignifIcant as wiping? Don’t you know that children are dying?

his wife is an executive at Disney

Wait. What? Holy shit, every good goddamn thing he’s ever released regarding copyright and intellectual property needs a big bold disclaimer about that in front then.

Fucker’s talking out both sides of his mouth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Taylor_(businesswoman)

In 2017, Disney acquired Makie Labs technology and personnel for an undisclosed figure.

In keeping with the strategic acquisition, Ms Taylor is now the Director, StudioLab at The Walt Disney Studios. In that role she is responsible for ensuring that Disney continues to invest in the intersection between online tech and content distribution.

I’m sorry, in non-executive speak, doesn’t that heavily imply that she at least oversees some work on DRM? Any content distribution method Disney touches with a 40-foot pole is going to have DRM methodology.

Motherfucker.

Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?

Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.

My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don’t like it or disagree.

I don’t respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I’ve hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.

And I don’t actually work on any of those requests until there’s a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn’t done, I’m sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.

That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it’s not always falling to you because you’re not jaded enough to say no.

I think this is a misunderstanding of how most of the AI that feed into workflows work. Most of them don’t dynamically re-train live based off how users are using them. At least not outside of the context of that user/chat instance.

Most likely what these and others are doing is to download pre-trained open source AI datasets thrn and run them locally so they aren’t restrained by any of the commercial AI’s limitations on what they will and won’t output to users. I highly doubt there’s enough material out there to truly train a new AI model on only explicitly racist material. This is just a bunch of assholes doing prompt engineering on open source models running locally.

You can also toggle it on precompiled binaries with the right tool (or a hex editor if you’re insane), which was my main use case. Lots of old games that never got 64-bit releases that benefit from having access to the extra RAM, especially if you’re modding them. It’s a great way to avoid out of memory crashes.

There must be a way to stop this feeling.

Been there. I’ll keep it short. The way is to get professional help. Therapy and/or medication.

Since you have no job, first step is to get on whatever low/no income insurance is available to you locally.

Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don’t truly believe that we’ll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You’re asking people who don’t care, who don’t use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.

The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.

As well as predatory/not, there’s also a trend with attention grabbing/not.

There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.

Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.

I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn’t have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).

Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there’s no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.

More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and “de-escalate” the obnoxiousness.

I’m pretty sure they’ve had almost this exact exchange in the Clone Wars show.

Do have any idea how massive the gap is between us and the true ruling class is? They aren’t landlords, they own the investment group that owns the holding company that employ the landlords.

So yeah, very intelligent to use your energy to attack people who are at worst, their incredibly disposable footsoldiers.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but if you want the split to be black and white like this yet you have the time, energy, and opportunity to complain about this sort of shit online… you probably aren’t one of the proletariat. You’re petit bourgeois.

What value does Jim-bob owning 5 homes and renting them out to make a living add to the tenants?

A place to live without having to handle maintenance/upkeep themselves, to be approved for a mortgage, save up for a downpayment, or to have to sell (and navigate all the mess of that process) when they need to move.

Admittedly, some of the above rely on you having a landlord that isn’t shit.

I know a few people who could afford to buy a rather nice home, who instead seek out short term lease rentals to live in, so they can travel more and not need to be tied down to a specific place.

Edit: Also, the maintenance costs passed to the renter are dispersed across time as well, so they aren’t having to foot the full cost of say, a new fridge suddenly. In multi-tenant situations, the costs are dispersed across all tenants, so a person needing a laundry machine replaced is somewhat subsidized by everyone else paying in who doesn’t, kind of like insurance.

… not really though.

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own. They uncapped that restriction, openly, and they admitted to it.

This is an incredibly open and shut case.

It’s stupid as hell, and that law needs to die, but there was no corporations doing people dirty here. This could have ended so, so much worse for IA.

This isn’t about right or wrong though. It’s explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.

They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.

If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say “Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won’t you little chickenshit.” then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.

Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.

Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I’m not holding my breath.

Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!

There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.

Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.

It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.

This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.

By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.

I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.

Like many people, I have aspirations of making games. One thing I’m planning on is some sort of charter or agreement (which I could hopefully automate somehow) that 5 years after the last update that the code would go open source. Some sort of attribution, no commercial use license or something.

Kang also effectively got defeated by Loki in a TV show too, where that instance of him should have been the strongest (as the one who conquered the multiverse and wove it into a single reality/sacred timeline).

To be fair, Kang essentially let himself be killed because he believes/d that he’s an inevitability of reality so in some sense immortal. But he still also lost. He was just taunting in death.

But now that the multiverse is back and being held together by Loki, all there should be left Kang-wise are the ones that weren’t powerful enough to conquer the whole multiverse, so how are they supposed to be as threatening?

And again, all of this content was only in a spinoff show rather than hinted at and weaved through the movies.

I have no idea who greenlit that idea, or where they go from here to make it feel impactful.

The caring clux clan!

Off the absolute top of my head there’s the redcap. Depending on the material it can be depicted as a gnome, goblin, or kobold with a jaunty looking red hat (generally long and pointy like a gnome hat or like Link’s hat in Legend of Zelda).

It keeps the hat red by dying and regularly re-dying it with its victims’ blood.

There’s also a number of depictions of pixies as essentially flying piranha.

But this sort of mythology isn’t some deep secret, it’s everywhere outside of the kid friendly/disney filtered stuff. I’m sure a simple search will net you tons of content.