Snot Flickerman

Wow I didn’t know they had worldwide internet, atomic clocks, and network time protocol servers before the railways…

I mean sure it’s how clocks worked before the railways if you entirely ignore the technology involved!

Well, we’re also in the 21st century and this jump an hour twice a year shit makes no sense. We could make timekeeping worldwide way more insane by having it adjust “imperceptibly” over time to auto adjust times worldwide based on true solar noon at each individual clock location using GPS. So all clocks would now have GPS as well to be able to ping their location to get the appropriate time. This… would be insane. We’d have seconds that are longer than a second. LET’S DO IT.

How will they protect that content being trained for AI models on third party piracy sites where dumps of Patreon subscriber content get published without a paywall. On those sites, there’s no protection.

Like that’s the unfortunate part about a lot of this is a lot of people pay for Patreon access and then just pirate the content out. I’m not against piracy, but I do see the nature of the piracy sites being wide open with no controls or protections from AI scraping that even with Patreon doing this, many are likely to still have their art scraped.

I mean this is the Heritage Foundation with living politicians as well.

The Iran war seemed like it was purpose built for the oil companies to profit wildly?

Because Trump doesn’t give a single fuck about reality or anything he does impacting anyone else. He literally does not think about nor care about impacts to anyone but himself, period.

Add it to the pile.

“I don’t know if I look good in a bathing suit,” Trump pondered at one point. “I haven’t had a bathing suit in a long time. I’m too busy. It’d be nice.”

No one should ever let this festering pile of disease into any public body of water, if only for the likelihood of fecal contamination.

Just… ugh. How is everything about him the utterly worst it can be.

*sigh

*un7zips

*starts installing Brutal Legend

I’m humoring my mom with bratwurst and such for food, but we’re not doing much else. Despite being quite old, she’s not a Trumper and doesn’t understand how nobody in her age cohort remembers how trashy and awful he was in the 1980s.

Anyway, small trappings of a dead holiday, a small comfort and a reminder of what once was.

Always try to give yourself small comforts, even if they don’t make sense. Going forward those small comforts will likely come less and less due to our now degraded international relations.

People have forgotten because he turned out to be a sex pest…

But once upon a time Louis CK would get annoyed with piracy and sell copies of his new standup show at $5 with a no DRM copy of the file, just politely asking people to not pirate.

He made $5 million almost overnight which helped fund his foray into television with Louie which was on TV for five years.

This literally was the thing that took his career to the next level. Where he went from a comic with a pretty okay career to one with a massive career.

He used to do the same for other comedians, too. I bought a couple Todd Barry specials from his website the same way: $5, DRM-free media files.

I still have all those files backed up.

2024-2025: AI companies pour money and support into DJT leaving many of us perplexed given Silicon Valley’s history of being left-leaning.

Curtis Yarvin has been writing about his ideas since at least 2009, when I first heard of him and his “Dark Enlightement.” He’s the “philsophical” underpinning of Silicon Valley’s actual values and it was clear long, long before 2024.

He has the ear of people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and more.

From Wikipedia:

Yarvin’s ideas were influential among right-libertarians and paleolibertarians, and prominent investors like Thiel have echoed Yarvin’s project of seceding from the United States to establish tech-CEO dictatorships. Journalist Jason Wilson noted that Yarvin had “a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration”. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an informal adviser to Donald Trump, has spoken in approval of Yarvin. Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work. Vice-president JD Vance also praised Yarvin in 2021, and said, drawing from his 2012 “Retire All Government Employees” talk, that “what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Also a leak of info about Thiel’s secretive “Dialog” group included:

Elon Musk ($1.3 trillion)
Eric Schmidt ($40.1 billion)
Henry Kravis ($12.2 billion)
Marcos Galperin ($6.8 billion)
Mike Cannon-Brookes ($7.7 billion)
Scott Cook ($4.4 billion)
Barry Sternlicht ($3.1 billion)
Nicolas Berggruen ($2.9 billion)
John Arnold ($2.8 billion)
Joe Lonsdale ($2.8 billion)
Reid Hoffman ($2.7 billion)

Eric Schmidt from Google, Reid Hoffman of Netflix. The idea that Yarvin’s ideas don’t come up or aren’t obliquely pushed at these events seems deeply unlikely.

I just updated last night to 2.7.5 ha

You would think that’s what every parent would prefer…

Absolutely, that’s my point about them being widely abused.

Why get a PC when it won’t work in a year they said.

Interesting because my Steam digital purchases go back to 2007 and I can still play them all.

My first digital purchase was the Orange Box and my second purchase was Psychonauts.

I had purchased Half Life 2 as a physical copy and it still works, too.

Sure they’re all just licenses, but a lot of effort has been put into me being able to continue playing them, including on Linux.

Yes, Valve is a different story because they’re a private company, but 20 years of license when I could play on any computer I owned at any time I think is showing that digital licensing isn’t inherently evil as much as it is widely abused for control.

That was kind of my point?

That just because it’s “dangerous” for children doesn’t justify banning it wholesale. Sorry I wasn’t more clear.

Yet Microsoft allows people access to host a private server while also putting up scary warnings for kids telling them to stick to the “safe” realms servers or whatever (are they even still called Realms? fuck if I know). On the one hand, it’s good they haven’t removed it entirely, on the other hand, it seems like that may be their eventual long-term goal with how they treat the private server ecosystem.

I also think Discord and Roblox contributed to people not knowing what the fuck “server” actually means anymore.

So is Microsoft who owns Minecraft who definitely presents private servers as dangerous (which for children may very well be true).

Essentially suits who don’t and have never gamed making decisions on gaming. They have no idea what the players want and don’t actually care because caring costs money.

Like how Ford just had to hire back all their old greybeard engineers after the AI was not actually up to snuff (shocker).

Isn’t this enough proof that these chucklefucks are a drain on company resources and time and the FIRST thing to replace AI with is the bosses so workers can organize collectively while the AI helps them stay organized without the AI being in control.

I mean, I guess that would make too much sense.

Genuinely though, if the first thing they do with AI is outsource their own decision making, isn’t it just rock solid evidence that these people are useless at their fucking jobs to begin with? They aren’t even making the decisions anymore, the AI is. Let’s cut out the middleman, which is all a boss is now if AI is running the show. I mean, it’s what they did with all the junior developers, because they had forced the juniors into using AI and then asked themselves “why not cut out the middleman.” And they hadn’t even considered that maybe the cost of AI would outpace the cost of an employee. How the fuck are these short term thinking idiots in fucking charge anyway? A lot of bosses are just fucking charlatans.

EDIT: Clarified first sentence.