Unfortunately, yes.

Facebook v Power Ventures is probably the strongest anti-scraping ruling, because it held that a simple CAPTCHA is sufficient to qualify as “bypassing technical measures” so as to qualify as hacking under CFAA.

YouTube has a number of technical controls to prevent downloading, and it’s always been considered iffy to mass-download YT vids because all the downloader tools (usually) incorporate some kind of means to bypass their protection schemes.

I wasn’t meaning to direct that towards you, but rather at the content itself. I appreciate you posting it.

Tango was literally a Microsoft studio. They don’t have a platform tax on their own games.

Do these people think the mass layoffs in the broader IT sector are just a coincidence?

This is literally a paid “investigation” by a rival payment processor. It’s propaganda.

Honestly, this depends entirely on person and circumstance. There are people I’ve parted ways with as nigh-enemies that are now close friends after time and distance gave us perspective. Economics and life situations and all the stressors that come and go over time have a bigger effect on relationships than people give them credit for. “Exes are exes for a reason” only holds relevance if those reasons are unchanged.

I have the KZ ZS10 Pros, and they stay in my ear great. The KZ earplugs come with different connectors, and I got the standard 2-pin ones so I could choose the wires I want (I like braided cables).

I saw one gal — she had a 2-week-old and a 2-year-old and a dog in a crate and a suitcase. So she was just at the moment, you know, looking to get out of danger, get to someplace safe. And now we’re at the point where families are back and they’re starting to ask the question: ‘Well, what’s next? Will we go back?’

Or how about not taking your infant and toddler to live at a base designed to enable power projection for military incursions and strikes?

Instead of being bombed and killed, like you or your spouses are doing or assisting in doing to the children in Iran, you’re being given:

a spaghetti dinner

crisis counseling, financial and legal assistance, relocation support, educational resources, coordination for child and youth programs,

$1 million to roughly 2,000 sailors and their families

reimburse[ment] for living in hotel rooms

Am I supposed to feel bad for the invaders’ families not being able to live peacefully with cars and pets and houses a stone’s throw from the place they’re invading?

Damages for what? They’re not making money if it’s free. It’s fine if it’s copied, the only time there would be damages is if they’d lost money or access.

In FOSS, contributing in the open is the principle.

Yeah, the protocols that corporations and governments rely on were (mostly) not their own creations, and they cannot feasibly change the underlying TCP/IP stack itself, which has quite a lot of ‘grey space’ baked into it in terms of controlling traffic. Even China, whose government could much more realistically create another alternative model with a totally different protocols (a la DTNs) and mandate domestic equipment use them (enabling them to block the current suite of protocols), just haven’t even bothered attempting that route because of how huge a lift it would be.

The biggest danger is probably national boundary isolation, which countries have moved further and further towards. This is not actually all that rare, and countries have a lot more ability to control cross-border network traffic than people probably realize (most people probably envision something akin to The Great Firewall, but that is explicitly about still facilitating north/south traffic at-scale).

Totally discrete ‘mini internets’ via e.g. mesh networks or directional wireless P2P bridges is totally doable, but generally not a way to avoid government scrutiny as it’s very easy to detect. If we ever get to a point where you’re not subscribing to an ISP for internet, but to ‘Disney Network’, with just their services (and add-on bundles for other services!), it’ll be in conjunction with regulatory capture to help them ‘protect’ against pirate (as in, un-controlled by government, not as in copyrights) networks.

You are creating your cool streaming platform in your bedroom. Nobody is stopping you, but if you succeed, if you get the signal out, if you are being noticed, the large platform with loads of cash can incorporate your specific innovations simply by throwing compute and capital at the problem. They can generate a variation of your innovation every few days, eventually they will be able to absorb your uniqueness. It’s just cash, and they have more of it than you.

So the safest bet again is to stay silent, or at least under the radar. Best bet is to not disrupt - succeed at all … ?

Except that ‘success’ in this interpretation seems to assume money, which the big company will beat you at obtaining. Success can just be about a FOSS version of a tool being out there for anyone who wants it, and no company is going to pay the AI costs to build tools they immediate MIT-license (and even if they do, there are then TWO new pieces of FOSS software!), so they may be able to beat you in creating a commodified product, but they aren’t and won’t and arguably intrinsically can’t beat you in bettering someone’s life by having a tool they didn’t before, for free.

We will again build and innovate in private, hide, not share knowledge, mistakes, ideas.

This is a sad reaction to capitalism capitalism-ing. You can’t beat the profit machine by trying to make your profit in the cracks it can’t see, you beat it by giving the thing it wants to profit off of away for free.

The vibrant public ecosystem that created all the innovation and moved it around the world will decline - the forums, the blogs, the “here’s how I built this” will move to local, private spaces.

I highly doubt this. I’ve seen no such shift in any tech space around me. If anything, I actually noticed that every Con I regularly attend has mentioned in their RFP emails that they are being flooded with proposed talks, so people should submit early before they fill up. If private spaces are also growing, that’s great!

I know this is ostensibly an article about Technology, but it’s also an article about Resistance and Praxis, and frankly I think a lot of people run to models of competitive resistance instead of exploring disarming or evasive resistance. You can’t beat Capitalism at commodifying something, but you can prevent Capitalism from commodifying something by removing the characteristics (like cost and scarcity and control) that make something a commodity.

Code is one of the few things that can actually be freely and un-limitedly distributed and re-distributed, which makes it uniquely resistant to commodification, but only if the person making the code is not themself trying to commodify it.

There’s a reason that Linux has only gained ground over time.

I don’t think that’s what the parents or kids want, but I do think that’ll be what happens, yes.

The general rule on this instance is to use the link headline, to avoid people editorializing them. A lot of times sites will have a different in-article headline (or even change it post-publication).

It’s funny because literally in Snow Crash there are guys who wear giant head-mounted camera/ antenna/ hacking rigs, that the MC says are weirdos for doing it. The Metaverse in Snow Crash is a ‘full dive’ thing you basically plug into like the Matrix, not a headset. How they went and reversed those roles, and tried to market tiny screens strapped to your head as a Metaverse, is beyond me.

The absolute hubristic ignorance of tech bros, man…

I use Claude extensively, almost exclusively Opus, and no, it doesn’t think. It is an extremely complex weighted graph of tokens. If you want to have a philosophical debate about the nature of human language and whether our own ability to speak happens through a similar process, we can certainly do that, but language is not the same as reasoning or thinking, and LLMs do not reason or think.

LLMs don’t ‘scheme’, ‘plot’, or ‘deceive’, they just string together words based on complex weighted graphs.

The fact that a so-called “AI Safety Institute” has to attempt to (actually) deceive people by falsely attributing intent or thought or awareness to LLMs is hilarious. As usual, it’s not the computers that are bad, it’s the people.

IMO the Zip disks, Jaz disks, and MiniDiscs were the last really satisfying physical media formats (UMD was also really cool, but somehow even more niche given it was PSP-specific).

There was something about them that just made you feel like a secret agent using them. Like a prop out of a James Bond movie where the villain keeps their plans.

CDs and DVDs had nothing on them.

The Democratic Party as an apparatus is made up in large part by a bunch of neoliberal fascist-appeasers. Progressive are still a (growing) minority in the party. Leftists are nearly non-existent in it.

Very cool way to conceptually structure agents.

The shitty vibe-coded desktop environment/ window manager I made over the past month has a movable taskbar.

Gambling systems always play into human psychology, and are always not in your favor.

So is poker not gambling? Mahjong? When it’s 4 people playing together (not at a casino, for instance), how can it always be you who has worse odds? That’s of course rhetorical; you actual have equal odds, barring cheating or simple skill differences.

And once you make “playing a game that you are likely to lose” as the litmus test for what is gambling, why would you play any competitive games? Half of a competitive bracket has to lose more than they won, by definition.

You are conflating gambling as it happens within controlled, predatory, capitalist institutions, with Gambling as a concept. Gambling is not immoral or harmful intrinsically, but gambling institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to Gambling, are. Institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to alcohol or cigarettes or hoarding or whatever, also are. But it doesn’t make alcohol as a chemical compound itself, immoral.

And just in case it needs to be stated, merely enjoying Gambling doesn’t equate to gambling addiction.

It does, but being Google they pulled the more granular controls like screen time settings into a dedicated app: Google Family Link