I like me some tech discussion and freedom.

Thank the sky above for the 1st and 2nd amendments.

Reality is best seen as absurd.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • You can’t sell EV’s because:

    1: too expensive to buy new 2: if you live anywhere that’s not a big city, or you have a garage, there is basically no electric chargers for you.

    The city I live in (~30k people) has 6 chargers total. None of them are superchargers. Wait times are already a sticking point in the best case, nevermind what the wait times would be if everyone where I’m at had an electric car tomorrow. The whole downtown would maybe gridlock just because of people waiting.

    For comparison, there are probably 2-300 gas pumps around the city. 5 gas stations within 5 minutes of where I am, all with at least 8 pumps, all well used. People are not going to get EV’s unless there is an infrastructure that is equivalent to gas around where they live.

    And that infrastructure is not gonna be fun to get going.

    The average person living in the city can’t really use them with street parking, can’t always guarantee a spot after all, and installing a personal one for yourself all but requires a personal garage, which locks out the people who live in poorer housing.

    Lots of people in my city and I suspect many others live in trailer parks with low/fixed incomes, having just a simple driveway. Where are they gonna get the thousand or two to install a Level 2 charging station? My mom and dad certainly don’t have the money.

    Expecting the EV companies to make the infrastructure with the money they get just from selling EV’s is gonna turn into one gigantic chicken-and-egg problem. The government is going to have to do it, and anyone who’s not living along an interstate can see just how much benefit they are personally getting from it so far… (hint: none)



  • No duh, because not a single country has made any real attempt to lower their citizens’ emissions.

    It will take sacrifice from all of us to stop warming.

    Forget 1.5°C, honestly, forget 2°C as well, keeping it under 3°C is likely the best that we can hope for right now. You’re needing to throw out our gas-based car infrastructure, reduce our reliance on jets as much as possible, lower not just meat consumption but also almonds/alfalfa/etc., and that is just to get started.

    Really, I don’t see the average voter letting that happen. What’s going to happen is eventually, sometime 30-40 years from now, a heat wave is gonna thrash the Middle East, consistent 130°F days for a solid month, 100,000 people dead, and the very next year planes will be in the air, making clouds to block the sun.

    We are not ready to give up the things that the developed world will have to give up to truly back away from this coming apocalypse.


  • I don’t have any trust whatsoever for any company, or the government, to be the decider of what counts as “mis/disinformation”.

    Sometimes there are easy layups, like “the Holocaust did not happen” and “Vaccines have 5G chips inside them” which are obviously just wrong and I think most of us would agree not to have…

    But what about “The Holocaust was overblown and the jews should stop whining about it”? I and probably 99% of people would say that’s a stupid opinion, but is that “misinformation”? Should a company be allowed to ban you for saying it?

    How about things like the 13/52 statistic? Should that be removed? What about “42% of all transgenders commit suicide”? That’s used to attack that group a lot, should that be banned as well?

    And, to be honest with you, the Democratic Party is absolutely obsessed with using clinical terms like those mentioned to stifle all discussion and act like they are the only voice on the issue you’re allowed to believe. Republicans freak out about this for good reason.

    It’s always the Democratic side that gets conservative opinions that they think are bad (whether lies or otherwise), boot them off the platform, and then decide to trample all over their new platforms and get them killed off too. It’s never just “pRiVaTe CoMpAnY tHeY cAn dO WhAt ThEy WaNt MaKe YoUr oWn WeBsiTE”, it’s “you are not allowed to have a place to speak this idea that I think is bad for society anywhere on the internet”. I really, really do not want to embolden that sect more than they already are.



  • Copyright has always traditionally required there to be some sort of direct linkage to the source material, like “This has X character that I own in it” or “This is like X story I made, except Y and Z were changed”.

    Generative AI for the most part doesn’t do that. There is no line to draw from their pictures to the AI’s pictures. The lawsuit that maybe stabs these programs in the back would be a big artist claiming that they used the research LAION training set, knowingly, to create a product that copies their style exactly via their labeling of works with their name, and thus reducing their way to make money. Whether that has enough basis in law to work… debatable.

    But “This work it generated violated my copyright” is for sure not the way to get them.



  • Honestly, I have no real clue.

    Twitch isn’t quite completely impervious to adblockers, with proxy extensions allowing us to skip ads still for now, but YouTube could do the exact same thing tomorrow if they wished. uBlock Origin wouldn’t save you, SponsorBlock wouldn’t save you, the only thing that could be done would be a black screen whenever an ad pops up.

    Maybe YouTube doesn’t want to fall into the hole Twitch is in, with the proxy loophole, and they view fighting adblockers as a better choice than having to spend a massive amount of encoding expense to have the silver bullet in every country.