There’s self-hosted LLMs, (e.g. Ollama), but for the purposes of this conversation, yeah - they’re centrally hosted, compute intensive software services.

Unlike regular piracy, accessing “their” product hosted on their servers using their power and compute is pretty clearly theft. Morally correct theft that I wholeheartedly support, but theft nonetheless.

The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.

And is that OK?

I’m going to jump in on this one and say yes - it’s mostly fine.

I look at these things through the lens of the harm they do and the benefits they deliver - consequentialism and act utilitarianism.

The benefits are artistic, comedic and political.

The “harm” is that Putin and or Trump might feel bad, maaaaaaybe enough that they’d kill themselves. All that gets put back up under benefits as far as I’m concerned - they’re both extremely powerful monsters that have done and will continue to do incredible harm.

The real harm is that such works risk normalising this treatment of regular folk, which is genuinely harmful. I think that’s unlikely, but it’s impossible to rule out.

Similarly, the dissemination of the kinds of AI fakes under discussion is a negative because they do serious,measurable harm.

Is this the most terminally online possible way of saying “gender is a social construct and I’m a gender abolitionist”?

Hey now - Texas has the state guard too - do you think the entire weight of the Pentagon, it’s carrier strike groups, and multiple branches of well-funded modern military is any match for ~1,600 good ol’ boys?

We need time get comfortable trusting games companies that have the track record they do not to fuck customers that have trusted they’ll continue to provide access to their games rather than arbitrarily removing them, adding game-ruining monetisation, fucking with subscription prices gating access to their libraries and generally acting like shady arseholes?

Suuure - sign me up.

Ah - wonderful!

I’ve not heard a remotely defensible explanation for the ongoing genocidal land grab, but I do wonder what could conceivably justify it.

Why?

I think they can be useful thought exercises to tease out people’s priorities and values.

The number of times people that have denied the literal dictionary definition of gender when I place it in front of them… with linked sources… from multiple dictionaries… often ones those people chose themselves…

Education about the definition of these words is important, but it does nothing to combat the mainstream conservative position that “the dictionary is wrong and woke because… idk - the Jews want them transes to rape babies or something.” The only way to combat that entrenched, willful ignorance is with a big rock.

If there were aliens, there’s zero chance Trump could resist bragging that he knows all about them.

Work like it’s a crippling addiction - it’s not as though crackheads have miserable lives, their bodies literally falling apart as their minds figuratively do the same, until they either muster the incredible willpower to endure the intense suffering required to drop the habit, enduring lifelong consequences, or die an early death.

As far as red flags go…

Vetting of the app downloads should fall on the app stores.

Vetting of the platform usage should fall on the platform owners.

The app isn’t the problem any more than a web browser is - it’s a dumb front-end for the platform. The platform is the problem.

From a consequential standpoint, with the work he’s done to stop action on climate change, kill socialised healthcare, undermine democracy, sow division and hate, and generally protect the interests of a handful of billionaires over the species, Murdoch might literally be worse than Hitler.

The blood on his hands from his campaign of climate denial alone is immeasurable. There’s not a punishment in existence that would be proportionate, but he’ll never face consequences.

Dunno about you, but I’m hungry.

One of many, sadly. With the strong trend toward wealth consolidation they’re not going to slow down any time soon.

After Musk disabled Starlink to aid Russia, a hostile state in their efforts to invade a sovereign democracy, it should have been clear to everyone that Musk poses a very real security threat, and Starlink should have been seized and nationalised.

I’ll remind you that the GOP not only exists, but is the party of choice for a little under half of voters - MTG, DeSantis, Trump, Boebert…

Yeah - it speaks to his long-term lack of principles and integrity, but that’s not on you as a teenager. I’m just glad you grew from it, acknowledged when you were wrong, and grew from it - that’s no easy thing to do.

It’s understandable - back in the day, he had some reasonable points and an academic veneer. If course, what he was saying tended to have a strong bias, and didn’t stand up to scrutiny, but it’s hard to fault a 16 year old looking for guidance for falling for it. Hindsight is 20 20 - particularly when the negative tendencies ratcheted up rapidly over time.

Since his Russian benzo coma (remember, kids - clean your room and don’t criticise others or systemic issues unless your life is perfect… pay no attention to my crippling addiction as I peddle that advice), things took a hard turn. I honestly think he suffered non-trivial brain damage. He’s far more erratic, bursts into tears at the drop of a hat (while trying to sell “traditional” masculinity, his takes have lost their academic veneer and are self-evidently stupid. There’s a reason he may be stripped of his accreditation.

TL;DR: Peterson went from being a pseudo-intellectual preacher to a lolcow, and (to me) the benzo coma seems to have been the catalyst for that shift.

I hope people demanded an eye-watering raise, citing the inequity in remuneration between the workers and C-suite.

Oh - you don’t care about equity after all? Why do we need to come back again?