Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that ensures access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care, the latest victory for abortion rights supporters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year....
Important to note that this is not even the first time they’ve been called out by the FTC. They were already cited for this program not having sufficient consumer protections in 2010 and given a list of changes to implement, which they failed to do.
Bruh, no one in here is arguing about legality, we’re arguing about morality, and no one but corporate shills buy into “potential sales” having value.
You’re trying to argue against what people just fundamentally, intuitively understand; copyright is a legal construct (not a moral one) that is 99% bullshit.
You are trying to blur the line between the media/art/music/film, etc, and the reproductions of it.
Artists do deserve to be paid for their work, but artists do not deserve to maintain ownership over the already-sold assets, nor whatever happens to those assets afterwards (like copies made). If you want to say they should retain commercial rights for reproduction of it, sure, but resell of the originally-sold work (e.g. the mp3 file), and non-commercial reproductions from that sold work? Nah.
They didn’t put in labor towards that. To say they did expands “labor” far beyond any reasonable definition.
Just like Hitler before him, Trump is benefiting from the fact that journalism is an incremental, daily business. Every day, reporters have to find something new to write or broadcast. Trump keeps saying dangerous and crazy things, but that’s not new. He’s said it all before. His impeachments and the January 6 insurrection...
This month the Weibo account Weibo Finance, which has more than 1.5 million followers, issued an instruction against posting any comments “that bad-mouth the economy”. The post appears to have since been deleted. Bloomberg reported that several other finance influencers had been told by Weibo to “avoid crossing red...
Communism is a very doable system, the problem is that people have false expectations of it and what it should look like (largely thanks to Leninism).
Collaborative, democratic consensus, is the normal way that groups of people work. Coercion is not, but that is how majoritarian systems work, and it is how states work. People have been living under Western nation-state and administrative-state systems for so long, within defined borders that denote both behavior and identity, that it’s tough for people to take how things work on a micro scale (e.g. family or friend-group dynamics), and apply that thinking at larger scales. The common response is, “but someone will always try to take charge/ seize power”, and that is true, but before the time of the modern state, you could walk away.
Now the state itself has become a self-perpetuating threat to its own citizens (which you can’t leave without subsuming yourself to another state), and majoritarian democracy is just used to maintain the state through the illusion of choices that hold that threat at bay. “Don’t let ‘x’ get in power, because if they do they’ll hurt those of us that are ‘y’.” You can’t fuck off and make a community that doesn’t allow ‘x’, because a state will come along and destroy or seize it.
as we saw with computer chess, novelty can only be interesting for so long once there are no humans involved.
I think this is underestimating or even misunderstanding how entertainment works in our brains. The same game/movie/book produced once by humans, and once by computers, will not be enjoyed differently by our brains. No one watches the credits of a movie for that sweet dopamine hit of knowing it was made by real people.
With chess, the enjoyment isn’t watching the pieces move, it’s the strategy involved and even the rooting for a player. It’s a competitive activity. Movies/books/(most) games are not. It is just watching the pretty images on screen. The character running around the world, opening the loot box. The story in our head.
If the assertion is that computers will never be able to produce a video game or movie or book that a human would actually enjoy for any period, I think that is extremely naive; many thousands of people enjoyed Pong for years, and ChatGPT actually can write a working Pong clone right now. I would be surprised if it couldn’t write the kind of infinite-runner games that people still spend hours a day playing on their phones, with only a little debugging needed.
And this is just in the last 4 years, really. 20 years from now? Hoo boy, AI is going to be being used for a LOT of stuff that people do as jobs now (to our collective detriment).
But even if they stay up and running, the public perception of these “services” will likely change once social media is deprived of the last pretense that anything “social” is going on.
They will never let it get there. They will restrict AI use by third parties and users, in favor of their own AI content creation (or curated third party content), so they can keep strict control over how authentic their content feels. TikTok and Twitter don’t curate content themselves now (technically not true, they actually do curate the content quite heavily, via algorithms), because their whole model is letting others do it via “popularity” (via said algorithms). If the content that others produce is hurting their business, they’ll ban that content in favor of content they control.
a majority of the posting class is coming around to the idea that maybe this stuff is not great for us:
Are they?
TikTok is just TV again
TikTok is basically just broadcast TV now
I must have missed the part of the headline where they say that TV sucks. Most people still watch TV, even young people (they just don’t all do it on a TV).
My other hope is that when that time comes, real human-made art made for connecting with human audiences can be more readily recognized by society as the valuable thing it is on its own, not only when it is put to work in service to some marketer turning a profit for some CEO.
This is already recognized by society at large. The problem is that it’s not translating into legislation, and legislation is the only way to control corporations. Just look at the state of book publishing; ebook platforms are absolutely destroying the industry, largely unbeknownst to buyers (and unbeknownst by design, because corporations know that buyers would be upset if they knew).
The real question is whether society will come to realize that unending, corporate profit-seeking (which enriches one at the expense of others), and healthy societies (which are based on mutual cooperation), are mutually exclusive goals.
Cindy McCain, the American director of the U.N. World Food Program, became the most prominent international official so far to declare that trapped civilians in the most cut-off part of Gaza had gone over the brink into famine....
…on Tuesday, the former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was all over social media for a picture taken of her during a visit to Israel. In the picture, Haley – the one Republican who had been frequently lauded for her smarts on foreign policy – is seen squatting down in front of a row of Israeli artillery...
Israel largely shut off entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies after launching its assault on Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel — allowing only a trickle of aid trucks through two crossings in the south....
The US’s latest attempt to chill speech online, KOSA-a bill to effectively force everyone to identify themselves to online platforms-is picking up steam and looking like it will pass the Senate.
That part has (maybe-ish?) changed with these most recent amendments. Per the EFF:
The Bill’s Knowledge Standard Has Changed
The first change to the bill is that the knowledge standard has been tightened, so that websites and apps can only be held liable if they actually know there’s a young person using their service. The previous version of the bill regulated any online platform that was used by minors, or was “reasonably likely to be used” by a minor.
The previous version applied to a huge swath of the internet, since the view of what sites are “reasonably likely to be used” by a minor would be up to attorney generals. Other than sites that took big steps, like requiring age verification, almost any site could be “reasonably likely” to be used by a minor.
So in a best-case interpretation under the new text, a site whose ToS does not allow minors to use it would not be required to check everyone’s ages to verify no one is a minor, in order not to be liable if a minor accessed adult content on it. The problem is, the bill isn’t actually explicit about what qualifies as the site having knowledge of children using it means:
Requiring actual knowledge of minors is an improvement, but the protective effect is small. A site that was told, for instance, that a certain proportion of its users were minors—even if those minors were lying to get access—could be sued by the state. The site might be held liable even if there was one minor user they knew about, perhaps one they’d repeatedly kicked off.
The bill still effectively regulates the entire internet that isn’t age-gated. KOSA is fundamentally a censorship bill, so we’re concerned about its effects on any website or service—whether they’re meant to serve solely adults, solely kids, or both.
No site is going to want to be the ones that an AG tests out their new lawsuit hammer on, so it’s likely to end in 1 of 2 ways: either verifying the ages of all users of the platform, or prohibiting all user-generated content to prevent adult content being posted. Republicans are fine with either of those outcomes. The sad thing is the Democrats who either also are, or who don’t understand the impacts but are voting on it anyways.
It’s absolutely hilarious that Putin is still pretending he has any ability to counter NATO militarily outside of nukes.
Russia is estimated to have lost 87% of their pre-war soldiers and 60% of their pre-war armor.
The drafts already drove a massive exodus of their future workforce (estimated at 700k by Forbes Russia, which is around 0.5%, which is a LOT) to flee Russia.
Their ground force modernization (equipment, training, stockpiles, etc) is estimated to have been set back by 15 years (same cnn link above).
If Russia didn’t have nukes, they’d pose almost no threat to NATO. Well on their way to being another North Korea.
“This refusal [of a two-state solution], and the denial of the right to statehood to the Palestinian people, would indefinitely prolong a conflict that has become a major threat to global peace and security,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres says....
we need to reject Israel and do our best to wipe them off the face of the earth
We need to differentiate between Israel as an administrative-state/ country, and the literal Israeli people as individuals.
And “wipe them off the face of the earth” sounds like you’re talking about the latter.
If you are, please take that rhetoric elsewhere.
No colonial state has a right to exist, but there is a difference between calling for de-col and calling for ‘wiping [people] off the face of the earth’.
How I hate the lazy deflection and caping for Israel in your comments.
The Gaza Health Ministry is considered to be reliable for casualty reporting due to independent verification by groups that monitor the conflict like Human Rights Watch and the UN. They release specific casualty data including names, ages, and ID numbers.
The only argument that Israel or their allies have used against their released casualty numbers is that they’re run by Hamas (the Gaza government), but oddly those people, yourself included, never seem to dispute Israeli numbers for the same reason.
Watching the drama around kagi unfold and it has me wondering how much you take into consideration a creator’s view on things like homophobia, sexism, racism, etc. when deciding to use a product. I think most of us have a bar somewhere (I would imagine very few on this website would ever consider registering on an altright...
Honestly, there is so much art and so many services and tools out there, that I try to avoid sending money towards ones made by shitty people.
I loved HP as a kid, but I’m not going to support JKR’s dullard takes on trans people. It’s clear she knows literally nothing beyond what her transphobic friend and their wine club “LGB Alliance” of straight white women tell her, but she still feels the need to parrot it online in front of millions of people. And guess what? There are other books about magic out there.
In terms of my judgement criteria, it’s not some fixed system, but my 2 main considerations are:
How much does a bad person benefit financially from the product?
How much are bad people responsible for the creation of the product?
Generally-speaking, if either of those can be answered with “A lot”, I avoid it.
So for instance, in the case of Hogwarts: Legacy, while JKR wasn’t responsible for making the product almost at all, she publicly indicated that she was making a lot of money from it, so I did not purchase it.
Ditto for AWS; once I was able to afford a cheap refurb server, I shut down my AWS accounts and been self-hosting everything.
Navok noted that if a game costs $100 million to make over five years, it has to beat what the company could have returned investing a similar amount in the stock market over the same period. “For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline,” he explained.
This is why capitalism ruins everything. So it’s not even about making art that is profitable, it’s about beating out other investment opportunities that someone could have chosen, even if it meant the art didn’t get made.
That is so ass-backwards.
Investment should be about wanting to grow a company whose products you believe in, both to see returns when those products perform well, but also to enjoy the future products.
Someone whose attitude is “I don’t care about your products at all, I just care about cash ROI” will turn around and short your stock and disparage you, if they think it’ll net them more money. In other words, they won’t actually look out for the best interests of the company, and will always be looking out for opportunities to plunder the business for more profit.
And this is supposed to create a healthy market for goods? Please.
“The free market makes goods compete to see what customers prefer.” Apparently not.
Apparently it creates a situation where the products can be profitable and amazing and well-loved, but a bunch of wealthy assholes who don’t care about the products at all can decide the company isn’t up to their standards, and punish or kill it.
There was another post here on Beehaw about housing costs, where someone noted that “voting with your wallet” doesn’t work because wealthy people can “out-vote” you, on a level that even collectively you can’t compete with, and this really illustrates their point well.
Late edit:
I think it bears saying that under this model of ROI calculation, depending on how well other industries are doing, it is entirely possible that no video game could feasibly outperform the market for a given timeframe… so should the whole games industry just fucking shut down in that case?
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
Yeah, I can imagine the frustration of seeing people who don’t know anything about what happened during development blame you as a dev for something that may have been design decisions or budgetary or time constraints that you had no say in or control over.
“So sure, you can dislike parts of a game,” he concludes. “You can hate on a game entirely. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it’s somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad).”
“Chances are, unless you’ve made a game yourself, you don’t know who made certain decisions; who did specific work; how many people were actually available to do that work; any time challenges faced; or how often you had to overcome technology itself (this one is HUGE).”
This is a totally fair take. He explicitly says it’s fine to not like the game, but just don’t try to pretend you know what happened on the back end to make it the way it was, because you’re probably gonna misplace blame.
Hi there! Information security guy here. This is essentially a super quick Incident Response run-through of the basic tools I use for malicious process discovery on Windows hosts. I’m assuming this is your own personal machine, or you have permission to do this.
They are all included in the rollup installer, or you can grab them individually at those links. Don’t install everything, or at least don’t leave it all installed when you’re done. It includes a lot of tools for debugging, which you don’t want to leave lying around on your system.
Fire up Autoruns, and check under Logon and Scheduled Tasks tabs for any unusual entries. If you don’t know what something is, and the Publisher is listed as Microsoft, don’t mess with it. Any non-MS stuff in those 2 areas should be safe to disable without hurting your system.
Process Explorer gives you a live view of the processes running on your system, basically a more advanced version of Task Manager. You can scroll through it for unusual processes, and you can even check stuff like rundll.exe processes to see the arguments used to launch it, which is SUPER useful.
Process Monitor is essentially a history/ log view of all processes on your system, starting from when the program is run. Think wireshark, but for processes. You can filter out known-good processes. You can search for strings. If the process is launching, executing, and terminating too quickly to catch in Task Manager or Process Explorer, it will still show up in Process Monitor.
TCPView is sort of like netstat, but with lots more info. You can use that to watch for unknown network connections, in case the thing you’re seeing is performing some kind of network beaconing.
Lastly, I would personally check for 3rd party driver software like printer software, Razer or other HID controllers, sound card software, etc. I’ve seen third party hardware controller software do weird stuff like this, because most of it is so badly written. I’d almost be more surprised if it turns out to be malware, than if it turns out some HP Printer software is doing an ink check every 10 minutes or something.
Democrats are meddling in Ohio’s Senate GOP primary at the 11th hour to boost Bernie Moreno, the candidate former President Donald Trump endorsed to face vulnerable Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown....
Yes, I actually do believe that many of the “moderate” Republicans are less ready and willing and downright excited to actually turn the government over to Trump, even if only because they know it doesn’t actually benefit them in any way to do so.
do you think he’d break with the party if asked? because i don’t.
You could easily have said this about Mike Pence, but, much as I hate him, he did break with Trump when it actually came time to do the insurrection. Do I know for sure that Dolan or LaRose would do less harm then Moreno? No. Do I know for sure that Moreno will happily strive to be more extreme and harmful than them? Yes.
3 separate precision strikes, at different points along the “convoy’s” route, including the final one made against a plain white jellybean car that was carrying wounded from the previous strikes. Either the IDF is killing aid workers intentionally to get the agencies to halt operations (most definitely), or they are killing Palestinians so indiscriminately that they can completely neglect, 3 separate times, to bother identifying who they are deploying precision munitions against (also very plausible). Important to note that both of those scenarios are war crimes.
The person you’re responding to is one of those people that thinks Steam is the DRM, because 1) it checks games against your account the first time you run them, and 2) they don’t provide offline installers like GOG.
The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.
What specifically are you envisioning? If this is just a general kind of, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall” supposition, I don’t think that really holds any water; it’s just a platitude. If anything, Steam being so ubiquitous could more easily make it’s eventual decline a catalyst for legislation to give software license ownership stronger consumer protections. The idea that we should either condemn it now or stop using it, before its decline, makes no sense to me. Is GOG better? Sure. Can it fully replace Steam? No. Is Steam better than Epic, Origin, UPlay? Absolutely. I’m just not sure what the real point of all this condemnation is when they’re by far trying, by and large, to treat consumers well. It’s just blaming Valve for not being totally and eternally immune to the effects of Capitalism.
the ‘one good company’
No one claims this. The only thing remotely close to that which people claim is that Valve is uniquely positioned to be one of the best digital games distribution platforms due to its private ownership insulating it against shareholder demands (which is by far the largest driver of enshittification), which is also true for GOG, but obviously Valve is still beating them out in capacity and capability currently.
there are plenty of examples to the contrary
Of course, it’s a company. But it’s still a billion times better than most of its competitors.
Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism
I’m glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn’t choose that, and they’re certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.
It really feels like this author is just saying, “they’re resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo ‘timebomb’!”.
“Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”
I believe Biden has been a mostly-decent president, apart from the whole providing-weapons-for-genocide thing, or the whole authorizing-fossil-fuel-extraction-on-federal-lands-after-expicitly-promising-not-to thing, or the whole campaigning-for-more-police thing, or the whole aggressive-deportations-of-assylum-seekers thing… Oh wait.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want Trump to win; but I’m becoming more certain he will, barring a criminal conviction. Biden is weak, and getting weaker, as a candidate.
And you already have the DNC preparing for it, too, putting out op-eds about how if Biden loses, it will have been the fault of RFK, or West, or Bernie, or literally whoever else they can pin it on.
And at some point, if all you’re doing is choosing the lesser-genocider, where any potential non-genociders are being actively sabotaged and removed from your options as a voter, you’re not in a democracy, you’re in a facade that makes you believe you have Representation, so you won’t repeat what happens when you don’t believe that.
And I’m not sure what you mean about Hillary wanting a word; she is the poster child for “not excited to vote for”, and what happens when you force that candidate through anyways.
Ohio voters enshrine abortion access in constitution in latest statewide win for reproductive rights (apnews.com)
Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that ensures access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care, the latest victory for abortion rights supporters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year....
US bans pharmacy Rite Aid from facial recognition use (techxplore.com)
Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests (medicalxpress.com)
Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (pluralistic.net)
The Media Still Doesn’t Grasp the Danger of Trump (theintercept.com)
Just like Hitler before him, Trump is benefiting from the fact that journalism is an incremental, daily business. Every day, reporters have to find something new to write or broadcast. Trump keeps saying dangerous and crazy things, but that’s not new. He’s said it all before. His impeachments and the January 6 insurrection...
China cracks down on negativity over economy in bid to boost confidence amid record high youth unemployment and struggling property sector (www.theguardian.com)
This month the Weibo account Weibo Finance, which has more than 1.5 million followers, issued an instruction against posting any comments “that bad-mouth the economy”. The post appears to have since been deleted. Bloomberg reported that several other finance influencers had been told by Weibo to “avoid crossing red...
How the coming flood of AI-generated content might actually free the soul of Internet (www.staygrounded.online)
Not paywalled, you can just click "No thanks" on the popup.
A senior UN official says northern Gaza is now in 'full-blown famine' (apnews.com)
Cindy McCain, the American director of the U.N. World Food Program, became the most prominent international official so far to declare that trapped civilians in the most cut-off part of Gaza had gone over the brink into famine....
Why is Nikki Haley scrawling genocidal messages on Israeli bombs? | Moustafa Bayoumi (www.theguardian.com)
…on Tuesday, the former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was all over social media for a picture taken of her during a visit to Israel. In the picture, Haley – the one Republican who had been frequently lauded for her smarts on foreign policy – is seen squatting down in front of a row of Israeli artillery...
After months of warnings that Israel’s siege is causing famine, children begin to die in Gaza (apnews.com)
Israel largely shut off entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies after launching its assault on Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel — allowing only a trickle of aid trucks through two crossings in the south....
Kids Online Safety Act gains enough supporters to pass the Senate (www.theverge.com)
The US’s latest attempt to chill speech online, KOSA-a bill to effectively force everyone to identify themselves to online platforms-is picking up steam and looking like it will pass the Senate.
Putin: Russia will concentrate more military units near Finland (yle.fi)
As a Finn I say this is fine. Every military resource that is tied down and not raping and destroying Ukraine is net positive.
Rejection of two-State solution by Israeli leadership 'unacceptable', says UN chief (news.un.org)
“This refusal [of a two-state solution], and the denial of the right to statehood to the Palestinian people, would indefinitely prolong a conflict that has become a major threat to global peace and security,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres says....
Gaza war's staggering toll reaches a grim milestone: 20,000 dead (apnews.com)
How much does a creator's worldview influence whether you use their tech or consume their media?
Watching the drama around kagi unfold and it has me wondering how much you take into consideration a creator’s view on things like homophobia, sexism, racism, etc. when deciding to use a product. I think most of us have a bar somewhere (I would imagine very few on this website would ever consider registering on an altright...
Former Square Enix exec on why Final Fantasy sales don’t meet expectations and chances of recouping insane AAA budgets | Game World Observer (gameworldobserver.com)
Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" (www.gamesradar.com)
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
A terminal window periodically flashes on my screen every few minutes. It goes away in one second. I have no idea what it is, nor how to stop it.
I’m running Windows 10....
Dems launch 11th-hour meddling operation in Ohio GOP Senate primary (www.politico.com)
Democrats are meddling in Ohio’s Senate GOP primary at the 11th hour to boost Bernie Moreno, the candidate former President Donald Trump endorsed to face vulnerable Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown....
Israeli attack that killed aid workers consistent with multiple precision strikes, analysis shows (www.cnn.com)
Steam is a ticking time bomb (www.spacebar.news)
Naomi Klein: If Biden Wants to Stop Trump, He Should Step Down (truthout.org)