Spyke

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Trump Threatens Additional 50% China Tariff Over Retaliation

There is a Bloomberg opinion piece (https://archive.ph/JKT85) that stated argues that China is so-called trade wars proof. TLDR: almost no day-to-day goods are imported from the US. The imports from the US are mainly things like cars, phones, etc. That is, tariffs will have a very small effect on the lower and middle classes in China. Compare this to the situation in the US: China is the main source for cheap items at Walmart, Amazon, etc. Tariffs can absolutely devestate the lower classes in the US.

So, it seems that China can easily win the attrition war against the US.

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Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding

This is irrelevant because Meta should not be tried for this the same as a private individual would be.

The case for torrenting being illegal for private individuals is one or both of:

  1. Downloading in of itself is stealing.
  2. Uploading is giving unauthorized access to someone else who otherwise might have had a harder time finding it. Anything else, such as watching, reading, listening, learning, etc. is not illegal (or does not make sense to make illegal). The exception might be publishing. This is rare for private individuals (e.g. using pirated FL studio to make a commercial song).

For corporations, a lot change. Firstly, a corporation downloading a torrent is necessarily making unauthorized material available for some people of the company. It's like a group of 20 friends all downloaded and uploaded to each other. Secondly, they used this copyrighted material commercially (like playing pirated music in a public night club). Both should be illegal.

However, all of this is still a distraction. The real issue is using copyrighted materials to train commercial AI. Does Meta require permission from copyright holders to make AI based on their work? The law is grey on this, and desperately needs regulations.

Just my thoughts.

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GenAI website goes dark after explicit fakes exposed

Generated AI CP should be illegalized even if its creation did not technically harm anyone. The reason is, presumably it looks too close to real CP, so close that it: 1) normalizes consumption of CP, 2) grows a market for CP, and 3) Real CP could get off the hook by claiming it is AI.

While there are similar reasons to be against clearly not real CP (e.g. hentai), this type at least does not have problem #3. For example, there doesnt need to be an investigation into whether a picture is real or not.

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Trump Freaks Out After Tucker Carlson Implies He’s the Antichrist

God I cannot stand Carlson. He always has this "Im asking tough questions" vibe, pausing every 3 words. But his statements are always simultaneously the most ridiculous uninsightful shit ever.

"Theres a rumor that Trump didnt put his hand on the bible. Is it because that... (pause for 5 secs)... perhaps... (pause for 5 seconds)... sees himself as God?" (Pauses for 10 secs now as if he said something even remotely profound)

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Old treatment just dropped.

It is true, it seems, that Nicotine treats ADHD. There is at least one study that showed nicotine patches (18h and 24h ones) provide a mild to moderate relief for ADHD in people that do not use nicotine otherwise (e.g. nonsmokers). So, it doesn't just treat the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.

Cigarette smoke is known to contain a clinically significant amount of MAO inhibiters that are not nicotine. MAO inhibiters are regularly used to treat depression and anxiety, and theoretically could treat ADHD since MAOI's generally prevent breakdown of dopamine. There is some nuance here.*

  • For example, there are different types of MAO (monoamine oxidase - an enzyme that breaks down monoamines. Dopamine is an example of a monoamine), like MAO-A vs MAO-B, which break down different monoamines, and MAOI's (MAO Inhibitors) differ on whether they inhibit A, B or both. Furthermore, there are reversible vs irreversible MAOI.

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Storage, DoGE, and cognitive biases against tape

Keep in mind that tapes are still the most efficient storage medium, in terms of both cost and physical space used. What they lack is speed. These characteristics make them the perfect medium for archiving and backup.

To add: there's no way money can be saved by switching to another medium. Switching to HDDs, SSDs, etc will be many times more expensive, and switching to cloud would be much more expensive over the long run. It's unclear whether he wants to move existing data to other mediums (very expensive and stupid - the tapes are already there and have almost no upkeep) or just new data (slightly less stupid).

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Bluesky already doing enshittification

Even if it didn't go to bluesky.app first before the actual link, clicks on it can still be made to be tracked. It's trivial to do it much more discreetly.

It is definitely tracked, but I would guess that turning it into a bluesky link has other uses, not all nefarious, such as: link previews, caching, dealing with dead links.