I’d buy one if it came with every David Attenborough (or similar) nature documentary included. I don’t need 8k for games or movies or anything else but I’ll watch the shit out of whatever high budget nature documentaries are produced and put my nose against the screen to see the critter details.

I’ve seen a lot of bands doing that at their merch table. I think for most bands, it’s just a keepsake like buying a T-shirt or sticker or whatever after a show. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who prefer cassettes (or at least the Walkman aesthetic) but for the most part, it’s just a souvenir.

I’ve never been into tapes but I collect vinyl. Part of the fun is all the extras tossed in. It’s like buying a boxed set or special edition DVD/Blu-Ray. Tapes don’t really have the same space for fun stuff but Taylor Swift probably has the budget to do something “extra” and make it a whole thing people put on Instagram.

I don’t eat carbon-based foods. Exotic silicon lifeforms, fresh from Titan’s methane seas.

“A.I.” can’t fund itself right now and it doesn’t seem to have gotten much better in the last year or so.

It’s definitely going to put sci-fi authors who write about A.G.I. out of work or at least make them add 1,000 years to their timeline.

Toyota had small, fuel efficient cars and that’s what people wanted during the oil crisis.

Probably more like “Elon Musk tells some manager to tell an engineer to delete the posts and then gives hazy, contradictory instructions while in a K-hole.” It’s not like he does stuff besides raise money and be a mascot.

I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.

And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.

You can give your info to the registrar and then make it anonymous to whois domain.tld searches so it’s not public. Cloudflare is the registrar I use these days because it’s a one-stop shop and used the company address but, at least in the U.S., they need your info for both credit/debit card processing. (Processing fees are cheaper the more info they provide but usually any address with the same zip code is enough.)

If you have nefarious plans, I don’t have a good recommendation. But if it’s just about privacy, I don’t know if it’s really possible to be completely anonymous anyway. I guess you could use a gift card or something but at least in the U.S., if you own or buy a house, your address is public info already anyway. Shit, city hall will probably give you blueprints of any house.

I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites and apps can essentially put some boilerplate code in that’s easy to implement and all the sites/apps get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than giving your info to every “social media” site that comes along.

It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile and presumably would need to be part of every browser/app language but also at least some code for every back-end language to store the data.)

Even while embracing cryptocurrencies?

On the one hand, I’m against censorship. But on the other, every bit of content on Facebook and X should be removed and all their hardware run through industrial shredders. It’s quite the conundrum.

Every spy in my vicinity is going to be dancing to The Meters - Cissy Strut.

I know there’s rights issues and all but if they made a real BBC streaming service with their back catalog and every David Attenborough special in 4K, it’d be one thing but Americans are inundated with news and streaming services. I pay for my local newspaper’s digital site — mostly because if I don’t, who will? But even The NY Times has to have recipes and word games to keep people subscribed. Why would anyone pay more than a dollar a month or something for BBC News?

The U.S. seems like an odd place to trial this. It’s the most competitive media market in the world and we’re all already sick of being asked to pay for 40 different services. In conclusion:🏴‍☠️

It would harm the A.I. industry if Anthropic loses the next part of the trial on whether they pirated books — from what I’ve read, Anthropic and Meta are suspected of getting a lot off torrent sites and the like.

It’s possible they all did some piracy in their mad dash to find training material but Amazon and Google have bookstores and Google even has a book text search engine, Google Scholar, and probably everything else already in its data centers. So, not sure why they’d have to resort to piracy.

Somehow, the most reasonable account on Vichy Twitter is Grok because it’s hard to train an LLM using only data dumbasses wrote.

They have to fight this battle. Traffic was probably down 80% due to one cabinet member not knowing VPNs exist.

I guess he is actually back in charge of his companies.

I’ve always wondered if the world’s major governments all have their own secret, bespoke operating systems for highly sensitive situations. Like, not Windows, Linux, macOS, BSD, or anything even remotely known to the public. But then you see high-ranking admin officials using bootleg Signal on an off-the-shelf phone or whatever.

I’d assume the actual intelligence agencies are more sophisticated. I doubt they’re running some “hardened” version of Windows or Android or whatever. But maybe I’m being naive and they all are just working with vendors.

Putting Bill Gates’ dick in my mouth is far too high of a licensing fee. I’ll just play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe instead. But no judgment. You live your best life.