The unicode standard has stated that U+2019 is the preferred character for apostrophes since at least the late 90s.

And it’s not like using a curved apostrophe in typesetting was novel even then.

as opposed to U+2019 being posthumously appropriated

U+0027 was also an ASCII character. The death of ASCII as a common format is the only one I can think of… what death are you referring to here?

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark

The Unicode character ’ (U+2019 right single quotation mark) is used for both a typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing) quotation mark.[1] This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as CP1252) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user’s typing.[2] There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe.[3]

In other words, U+2019 is the typographic apostrophe character. It’s also the right single quote character. There are people who think that the typographic apostrophe character should be something else (and having read their arguments, I agree), but in practice, it isn’t, and certainly wasn’t back in the 90s / early 2000s.

Can you elaborate on why this is mildly infuriating?

You probably just need Google One and Youtube Premium, which includes Youtube Music Premium.

Of course, if you don’t care about YouTube Premium, you could instead get a family subscription to a different music streaming service - Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music are all leagues better than Youtube Music, in my opinion.

I don’t personally recommend Google for anything, to be clear.

If their opinion is changing only for the worse because they’re being corrupted by their corporate benefactors, like Kamala, that’s worse than someone who doesn’t change their stance. If their stances started out the same, obviously the person who stubbornly stays the same would be preferable.

This isn’t a way Trump and Kamala differ, though, regardless of his statements on the matter, and Kamala started out with a very left-leaning voting record, so this shouldn’t really impact anyone’s choice of candidate.

In my state, defensive driving is optional (unless you get enough tickets/points that the course is mandated).

So, to be clear, my opinion was about what’s reasonable to do and was informed by our culture and laws. Your objection seems to be related to what should be legal, which is different and is more complicated, as the laws have to balance restricting and potentially damaging businesses with protecting people from discrimination.

From a legal perspective, IMO larger businesses should be held to much tighter standards than small businesses. I think it would be reasonable to legally require Google or Meta to have a reason to ban someone, to have to share that explanation, and to have to allow an appeal to be unbanned to be arbitrated by a third party, without “we can ban anyone for any reason” allowed as a defense.

We also see it being abused with the allowance of a few “good ones” from said protected class to avoid discrimination claims while still discriminating against the rest of said class.

Obviously this isn’t a reasonable thing for them to do.

If a business is discriminating against a protected class and only letting in a few “good ones,” then statistically it should be able to be shown that they ban far more people in that class than outside it.

I believe there should be reasons required to ban someone.

How do you manage that, practically speaking, in a capitalist society? If a business owner thinks someone is acting suspicious and is likely to steal or break something, but they can’t ban them until they have a “valid” reason, if that person then breaks or steals something, that business owner has been damaged by the government’s policy. Is the government going to make them whole? No, of course not.

Does the reason need to be disclosed to the person being banned, or just recorded for future reference? A lot of the time people get defensive and angry when told the truth about what they did that made other people not want to deal with them. If someone’s been leering at customers, smells terrible, is loud and disruptive, or is just plain acting weird, telling them as much when you tell them they have to leave probably isn’t going to help them feel better.

Not just because you own the place and don’t want them in your place as they make you/other customers uncomfortable.

Why do you think it’s okay for a business owner and their employees to be legally forced to deal with someone that makes them uncomfortable?

Do business owners just need to be able to articulate why someone discomforts them? Is someone judging whether a reason is good enough, or do you just need any reason, or is there a list of acceptable reasons? In the last case, what sorts of reasons are acceptable?

If a business can point to measurements they’ve taken showing that when Joe shows up, they lose money - either because their clients leave, don’t come back, or stop spending money - is that a good enough reason to ban Joe? What if this is just because their clients are all racist and Joe is black?

If a business bans Joe because of a particular reason and then Jim does the same thing, is the business forced to ban Jim?

But it’s still relevant as it’s the reason homeless people

The easy solution for this is to make being homeless a protected class. Homeless people need specific protections at a federal level, because they’re discriminated against by local and even state governments. That’s not the only class that needs this, either, to be clear.

That said, all of the times I’ve seen a homeless person banned from an establishment wasn’t because they were homeless, but because of some other reason. The one I remember clearest was a woman who had started talking to me and my girlfriend (at the time) while we were sitting at a table in a coffee shop. She asked us for money or food after just a couple minutes, then went to go and talk to someone else and after a few minutes was noticed by the staff and told to leave. When I asked about it, I gathered that she’d been banned because of multiple complaints from customers about her doing just that.

“Jurisdiction” is a legal concept and the way you’re using it makes no sense unless you’re referring to restraining orders or trespassing warnings being issued by courts/police from different towns or states.

I’m assuming you’re talking about private establishments that have the legal right to refuse service to anyone for almost any reason (exceptions being if doing so is discrimination against a protected class).

If so, then here’s my opinion: If you own or manage a shop, bar, club, gym, etc., it’s reasonable to ban someone because they aren’t the sort of person you want in your establishment. Maybe they make you or your other customers uncomfortable. Maybe they don’t want their place to get a reputation for being where Bad Egg Craig, whose antics sent some folks to the ER, hangs out. Maybe they share ban lists with the owners of other establishments, either because they’re friends or for purely business reasons (if your actions have cost the owner of one establishment money, it’s more likely you’ll do the same elsewhere), the same way insurance companies protect their interests by raising premiums.

What does the Hague Convention have to do with anything? Unless it’s being enforced by the same people it’s completely irrelevant.

Expecting everything for free with no ads is just greedy.

In this case you’re not paying to not have ads. You’ll still get ads; they just won’t be personalized.

Personalized ads are more valuable to advertisers, so it still makes sense for them to charge a bit for it, but it’s not something I’ve seen before.

I’m guessing they charge a decent amount more than the difference, though - and probably even more than they make from personalized ads per person. On that note, I really wish ad free subscriptions were closer to the revenue providers get from serving ads - if they were, I’d be more willing to pay for them than just running an adblocker all the time. YouTube Premium, for example, costs 14 USD monthly, but annual ad revenue per non premium user was 1.21 USD.

Synthetic media should be required to be watermarked at the source

Bit late for that (even in 2023). Best we could do now is something like public key cryptography, with cameras having secret keys that images are signed with. However:

• That would require people to purchase new cameras (though phones could likely do this without a new device, leveraging the secure enclaves to sign)
• Depending on the implementation of the signing, even applying filters to images, color grading, or cropping an image could make it stop matching. If you remove something from the background or make other overt changes, it’s definitely not going to match.
  • Adobe has a system for handling changes and attesting that no AI was used. Optimally other major photo editing tools will do something similar. However, I don’t think it’s feasible to securely sign such an attestation history locally, so all such images would need to be uploaded to be signed remotely.
• This won’t work for traditional art

For artists and photographers with old school cameras (“old school” meaning “doesn’t compute and sign a perceptual hash of the image”), something similar could still be done. Each such person can generate a public / private key pair for themselves and sign the images they’ve created manually. This depends on you trusting that specific artist, though, as opposed to trusting the manufacturer of the camera used.

This isn’t true or how it works, but there is a law being proposed that would sorta make it so: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/senates-no-fakes-act-hopes-to-make-unauthorized-digital-replicas-illegal/

(In the US), your likeness is protected under state laws and due to case law, rather than federal laws, and I don’t know of any such law that imposes a responsibility upon sites like Twitter to take down violations upon your report in the same way that the DMCA does. Rather, they allow you to sue the entity who used your likeness for damages in civil court. That isn’t very useful to Jane when her ex-boyfriend uploads revenge porn of her or to Kate when a random Twitter account deepfakes her face onto a nude.

However, if a picture you have copyright to (like a selfie) is used as an input into an AI, arguably you do have partial copyright to it, as the AI elements are not copyrighted and it could not have been created without your input. As such, I think it would be reasonable to issue a DMCA takedown request if someone posted a nonconsensual deepfake of you, on the grounds that you have a good faith belief that you do have copyright to it. However, if you didn’t take the picture used as an input yourself, you don’t have copyright to it and therefore don’t have partial copyright to the output, either. If it’s a deepfake face swap, then whoever owns copyright of the original scene image/video would also have partial copyright, and they could also issue a DMCA takedown request.

It’s like how they slapped ‘Smart’ on every tech product in the past decade. Even devices that are dumb as fuck are called ‘Smart’ devices.

I’m not a big fan of “Smart” as a marketing term, either, but “Automatable” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and “Connected” doesn’t really have the same appeal. That said, “smart” was used pretty consistently to refer to devices that could be controlled as part of a “smart home.” It wasn’t supposed to refer to a device that itself was intelligent, though.

I always thought of AI as artificial consciousness, an unnatural and created-by-humans self-aware and self-thinking being.

Sounds like you’re thinking of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or that your understanding is based off sci fi as opposed to the academic discipline/field of research, which has been around since the 1950s.

And yes, marketing is often inaccurate… but almost every instance I’ve seen where they say they’re using AI, they were.

In fact stuff like ChatGPT would’ve made more sense to actually be called ‘Smart’ search engines instea of ‘AI’.

IMO “Smart” would be more misleading than “AI,” even if “Smart” didn’t have an existing, unrelated meaning. I do think we could use better words - AI is such a broad category that it doesn’t say much to call a product “AI-powered.” Stable Diffusion and Llama use completely different types of AI, for example. But people broadly recognize the term (even if they don’t understand it properly) and the same can’t be said for terms like “LLM.”

They might be technological achievements, but they’re not AI.

You’re illustrating the AI effect - “discounting of the behavior of an artificial-intelligence program as not “real” intelligence.” AI is used in a ton of different ways that you likely don’t ever think about or even notice.

I recommend reading over at least the introduction to the Artificial Intelligence article on Wikipedia before proclaiming that something that fits cleanly into the definition of AI isn’t AI.

Trademarks have to be enforced or they can be lost, so it makes sense to be overbroad about them. You say you could have fought it but that doesn’t mean you were legally in the right.

In this case, everything on their site is legal and above board.

Admittedly, Nintendo doesn’t care if what you’re doing is legal if it could cut into sales of current systems, games, or merchandise - they’ll issue takedowns regardless. That’s why videos of people demoing the MIG Switch got taken down for copyright infringement, for example. But given that every system this can extract games from already has its entire library available online in the form of pirated ROMs, getting it taken down won’t do anything for their bottom line.

In fact, Nintendo taking legal action against products like this would encourage piracy of their games. If a consumer wants a backup of their physical game cartridge library and the tools to create such backups are made unavailable or harder to access due to Nintendo’s actions, that consumer is likely to simply download the ROMs instead. That’s already piracy, and it’s only a few clicks more for the user to download ROMs for games they don’t own (and if you’re already legally a pirate, that line in the sand is awfully faint). And sites that host ROMs for the Gameboy Advance probably host ROMs for newer systems, too - including the ones that Nintendo actually cares about - so it’s in Nintendo’s best interest not to push those consumers in their direction.

Both numbers are based off market value, though

They don’t have support for any recent Nintendo systems (not even the DS) so they’ll probably be fine.

Why? Open source doesn’t mean “cheap” or “at cost.”

If you’re talking about tomatoes, the difference is the context, and it isn’t a choice between colloquial vs scientific taxonomy, but between culinary/nutritional vs botany/taxonomy (and). You can talk about either in a colloquial context or a formal context, though generally there isn’t much reason to talk about botany in a colloquial setting.

From a nutritional perspective, mushrooms are generally considered vegetables, too.

afaik vegetable is a purely colloquial term anyway.

I thought you were wrong but I looked it up and I appear to have been mistaken. It makes “tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables” sound nonsensical, as it implies that “vegetable” is a different taxonomical option, when really it’s just a word for objects with a particular collection of traits that are relevant in a different context. What we should he saying is “While tomatoes are not fruit in the food pyramid, taxonomically, they are.” Doesn’t really roll off the tongue, though. Maybe “Tomatoes are vegetables AND fruits!” would solve that?

Pluto is a planet, though. It’s officially considered a “dwarf” planet, and as “dwarf” is just an adjective, it’s still a planet (just like a short person is still a person). The other 8 new dwarf planets (Ceres, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, Gonggong, Quaoar, Orcus, and Sedna) are also all planets - so we have 17 planets total.

Seriously, though. By the same 3 criteria that Pluto isn’t a planet, Mercury isn’t (as it isn’t in hydrostatic equilibrium).

If you work for a nonprofit, you can be paid a salary; if you control a nonprofit, you can pay higher salaries to yourself and/or your friends.

I assume this was supposed to say “more noticeable,” not “less”:

but of course for example the difference between 21 and 30 FPS is less noticeable than the one between 231 and 240 FPS