This is great. This is how it always should have been.

Organization of any kind needs a Twitter page or subreddit? No, they need their own official, self-controlled Mastodon instance anyone can see and listen to and interact with, even without accounts on that specific instance. They need their own kbin or Lemmy instance to make and administer their community on and have control over, everyone can still participate even without signing up for accounts on that specific instance.

Weird, users can't access the site, so ad revenue goes down?? Nobody can blame Elon, that's literally impossible to predict. Maybe if he bans users from tweeting more than once a day it will get better?

I went through a Second Life land trading phase quite a few years back. Properties like this were very valuable to advertisers. Because of advertisers, it was possible to be a niche real estate mogul for weird useless little virtual properties like this that could earn you an actual meaningful real-world income. Second Life had (may still have, I've not been back in a while) its own advertising industry and multiple adtech networks. A despicable inevitability of having completely free content creation tools and also an economy that can trade with real money. People trying to sell their creations want people to pay in game currency to get their things, so they can extract the value to real money. They want people to know about their products, so they turn to people who will accept in game currency to blast awareness of their products everywhere. Those advertisers want land, which they need to buy. Probably from another player.

So, the first thing I thought of when I saw this plot was "BILLBOARDS!!!" and I hate it.

looking forward to some backwater shithole GOP-run state legislature to try and arrest her for election interference

My local store uses these but they lock up if you bring them out to the 2nd row of parking spaces out front. It's enough to get the cart to your car, then you go to return it and it's totally locked, so everyone just shoves them into the planters in a big pile of tipped over carts instead of physically lifting the whole thing and hefting it to the cart returns to return it. The store has signs everywhere now telling people not to throw carts into the planters, and the employees know the problem, and the city has evidently complained multiple times, but district management evidently refuses to believe it's got anything to do with the cart locks and I was told by an exasperated checker that they're apparently considering getting security guards to confront people and make them return carts?? lmaooo

do I have a case against either my institution, the professor who threw it out or OpenAI?

This all seems like such recent technology, I can not imagine this question being very answerable except via the long way: a courtroom. I suspect it would take someone trying in order to set precedent.

everybody on Earth will know

hahaha holy shit, he believes. he really believes his own shit. he really views "X" as being of planetary importance. he's actually living in his daydream, where Mars (by his hand) and Earth are networked (by him) and his "X" has somehow supplanted the Internet and spans between planets. his principal operating perspective is a delusion. wow. like, all the time.

HONK JESUS HONK

it never ceases to amaze me how stupid we all are as a civilization.

we're opting out of it, but nature will continue. this will be a very curious and fairly hospitable world full of interesting xenoarcheological mysteries... in the distant future, to a visiting spacefaring civilization.

Wow, I should think it should be some kind of regulatory concern that Reddit is artifically inflating traffic counts as they're approaching an IPO, no? For a company whose revenue comes from advertising and user impressions, lying about user traffic is lying about profitability.

Cops are well aware standing in front of a car gives them a free pass killing someone

This "technique" has been demonstrated enough that frankly, I think that any rational person would conclude that in any situation where a cop walks in front of your car, you're better off just gunning it before the cop has a chance to extrajudicially execute you first. If they walk in front of your car, it's clear they're just itching to murder you. The threat has been made, you should fear for your life. It's you or them.

I've always said that Starfleet is, first and foremost, a jobs program.

It gives purpose to people who can't find their own, in a time where your needs are provided-for by default, and seeking personal fulfillment is the purpose for most people's lives.

Drones would cut out the human driving a shuttle over to inspect an anomaly or object themselves, robbing them of a sense of accomplishment and achievement. Starfleet is about that stuff, so that's a no-go unless nobody wants to do it and it needs to be done anyway. We see that a lot, too. They do have probes and sensor stations and stuff, after all, usually in really boring and unfulfilling locations.

They have excessive, ridiculous redundancy. They have people doing jobs the ship computers could (and often, in times of need, DOES) perform very well on its own. There are several recorded instances of entire starships being successfully maintained for extended periods of time by a single individual (who does go insane due to isolation every time, because plot).

Developers were right to be in fear of Baldur's Gate 3 resetting expectations. This isn't close to all of the reason for this backlash, but for me it's a notable part.

Here we all have for contrast suddenly an expansive, complete, player-respecting game that isn't trying to squeeze money out of you at every turn... it reminds me of old PC games, before the enshittification of the industry began, before the corporate rot set in. When I bought my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, it was complete. It was expansive. It was before micro-transactions were really a thing, so it was a finished product. BG3 makes me think of those games, but with modern technology. My gaze shifts back to the allegedly "modern" games we have now, to Overwatch 2, and it just feels cheap and disgusting. A minimum-viable pile of gameified gambling covered in greasy MBA penny-pincher fingerprints, shrouded by half-truths from marketers trying to puff it up to look like a complete experience. It is still possible to deliver the better experience. It's clearly just a matter of "want".

I feel like I've just come from a family-owned restaurant on the beach in Cabo and came back home to a McDonald's in a roadside casino, and I've just realized how genuinely shitty it all is.

I think I would actually rather just go outside or start a new hobby than touch "games" like this ever again.

this is a wake-up call to this industry and any other industry enjoying a glut of "free" (as in beer) proprietary tools owned entirely by private (or worse: public!) organizations.

this will always be the result. every single time. if you think you and your industry are immune to getting bait & switched, you are very wrong.

chaining your livelihood to a for-profit organization is begging to eventually be extorted in this manner. greed is inevitable.

Of course they are. Citizens can be conscripted.

Janeway is my favorite captain for sure. The others are all remarkable, because of course they are, but whenever I watch Voyager, I am reminded of how much more I like her over the others.

She had (and used) this great guile to serve her and her crew's needs. She didn't readily break her principles, but would intelligently question them when they didn't appear to align with the greater good or her responsibilities.

She was both flexible and reliable. I feel that some viewers saw that as unpredictability, but I don't think so. She actively did more to help her crew in every way than any other captain we've seen.

If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.

100%. Even as a power-user (understatement) who overwhelmingly prefers keyboard input to control things when I'm "gettin' stuff done", I will sometimes miss the general consideration level of Windows' input handling when it comes to mouse and especially touch. Mouse is pretty damn good these days on Linux, but touch...

Touch is abysmal. A ton of modern laptops have touchscreens, or are actually 2-in-1s that fold into tablets, etc, and the support is just barely there, if at all. I'm not talking about driver support - this is often fairly acceptable. My laptop's touch and pen interface worked right out of the box... technically. But KDE Plasma 5 with Wayland- an allegedly very modern desktop stack- is not pleasant when I fold into tablet mode.

The sole (seriously, I've looked) Wayland on-screen-keyboard, Maliit, is just terrible. No settings of any kind (there is a settings button! it is not wired to anything, it does nothing), no language options, no layout options (the default layout is abysmal and lacks any 'functional' keys like arrows, pgup/dn, home/end, delete, F keys, tab, etc), and most egregiously, it resists being manually summoned which is terrible because it does not summon itself at appropriate times. Firefox is invisible to it. KRunner is invisible to it. The application search bar is invisible to it. It will happily pop up when I tap into Konsole, but it's totally useless as it is completely devoid of vital keys. Touch on Wayland is absolutely pointless.

Of course, there is a diverse ecosystem of virtual keyboards and such on Xorg! However, Xorg performance across all applications is typically abysmal (below 1FPS) if the screen is rotated at all. This is evidently a well known issue that I doubt will ever be fixed.

In the spirit of Open Source Software, and knowing that simply complaining loudly has little benefit for anyone, I have at several times channeled my frustration towards developing a reasonable Wayland virtual keyboard, but it's a daunting project fraught with serious problems and I have little free-time, so it's barely left its infancy in my dev folder, and in the meanwhile I reluctantly just flip my keyboard back around on the couch with a sigh, briefly envious of my friend's extremely-touch-capable Windows 2-in-1.

Take me to the Internet.

No hun, it's not "another unfinished project", it's a failed branch prediction and I think we can all agree that the benefits of speculative execution far outweigh the occasional waste of effort.

I'm convinced this is a major great filter event for all intelligent species. "Can the natural consolidation of power and resources in the world be sufficiently counteracted to avoid massive cataclysmic population crashes?"