I mean, I’m not sure why this conversation even needs to get this far. If I write an article about the history of Disney movies, and make it very clear the way I got all of those movies was to pirate them, this conversation is over pretty quick. OpenAI and most of the LLMs aren’t doing anything different. The Times isn’t Wikipedia, most of their stuff is behind a paywall with pretty clear terms of service and nothing entitles OpenAI to that content. OpenAI’s argument is “well, we’re pirating everything so it’s okay.” The output honestly seems irrelevant to me, they never should have had the content to begin with.

I still have more subs for these than I would like, but I generally download anything I actually want to watch anyway. Like, the fact that justwatch.com even exists is an indictment of the way this works.

This is a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of anything related to monopoly or anti-trust law. Maybe, maybe the iPhone, and even then it’s a stretch. edit: at least in the US.

Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee were some of the few that were barred from holding office until like, the 70’s, when it was reversed posthumously. As with all things Trump, entertaining the question to begin with is pretty fucking stupid.

The only thing that I think is a little complicated these days is make sure that you’re not reliant on a particular Windows-only app. For the vast majority of common apps, you’re going to be fine, and it’s sounding more and more like even gaming on Linux is not only fine, but getting to the point of being the best way to do it. If you do have a particular app you rely on, I’d look into the various ways that you can get Windows apps running on Linux (which can be a little tricky, but usually not too bad.) But even like 10 years ago, I built a machine for an elderly family member, put probably some flavor of ubuntu on it, and I never had to troubleshoot that machine.

This tracks. I have recently gone back to running a Windows desktop machine for gaming, and now I have to actually shut it off because:

a) that fucking thing never stays asleep. Clean install with nothing other than Steam and a couple of games, sleep settings mean nothing. Just wakes up, stays awake forever.
b) Fortunately I have an enterprise license key so I don’t get as much random bullshit, but every update there is some new fucking thing I don’t want.

My machine is a desktop, but I can’t image how this works well on laptops.

Copilot is their AI thing (which I think is just a wrapper for ChatGPT.) As for why you need it, fuck if I know. Love MS just adding another key that’s going to piss me off when I’m in a game.

Treating Trump with any sort of legitimacy is how we got here. We have laws designed exactly for him. He shouldn’t go on the ballot. The right is only emboldened because they’re constantly getting away with fucking everything, skirting the lines of the law if not outright breaking them. We should entertain him being on the ballot like we’d entertain someone who’s 20 or wasn’t born in the country – it’s absurd.

Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it.

Bold added for emphasis, Apple claims privacy as a feature and OS control of the mic to prevent this exact sort of thing. Not only would someone have found it, it would be a news cycle on the mainstream news, and basically just the wallpaper for any tech-centric website.

I mean, fucks sake, iFixIt alone would find mics in places they shouldn’t be and this would be a story.

Unfortunately, the truth is more boring, and basically pretty much every app/website most of us use are tracking us in some way unless you really seek prevention. They don’t need the mic.

“if I were a corporate shitbag, how would I implement my shitbaggery?”

In this case, it would be pretty hard. We have wiretap laws, which would mean you have to tell the user you’re doing this. Even though no one reads the ToS, someone does, and it would be news if someone was doing this.

Even then, it would be a hard enough problem that companies would think twice about it for a few reasons. Number one, processing 24/7 of all audio in your home is going to be rather difficult/expensive, so you’d have to go with something like keyword-triggers-processing the way that your phone listens for “hey google/siri” or Amazon listens for “Alexa.” It works kinda like game video sharing - they are always listening and recording for a short time frame* but they only send the data somewhere if they hear the trigger phrase. That’s not easy in itself, they’ve spent a ton of time getting the right algorithm so that it correctly hears the right trigger phrase and you don’t get a ton of false positives to varying degrees of success. And keeping in mind these are companies that are best suited to it, they still struggle sometimes with even that. The ad companies would have to listen for dozens/hundreds/thousands of triggers…

And then you get to the data retention policies. Google is an ad company, Apple is not. One of the reasons that Apple can tout privacy as a feature is simply that they don’t need the data, so they don’t collect nearly as much, and they save even less. They get the bonus of not dealing with law enforcement and all that.

So, assuming they solve that, solve some big issues with the laws of the land and physics, now we’re to the point where they have to think about network traffic. Which is going to be trivially easy for nerds to figure out and circumvent, so they would have to have their own ad-hoc network which comes with another 137 or so difficulties.

If it were, it would be pretty common knowledge and there would be several news cycles about it. I don’t doubt that they could bury it in the terms of service, but we have wiretap laws in enough places that are two-party consent that it would have had to come out by now. Not to mention nerds like me running pi-hole and monitoring their traffic, repair people who could easily regonize a mic in the device, etc.

Piracy is not even close to the reason any of the streamers are struggling, and even then I’d be surprised to see if Amazon was actually struggling. Piracy itself is a rounding error, and is more of a function of the shitty way that most of the streamers run their business.

There is a lot going on:

Lots of these streamers, and especially Amazon, keep green lighting projects with massive budgets but then forgetting to tell a good story or hire people who seem interested in making the show they’re making. Rings of Power and Wheel of Time have insane budgets for what are generously mediocre shows. I can’t even imagine the pitch meeting for WoT. “I want to take a massively beloved cornerstone of the fantasy genre that spans 14 gigantic books and a few novellas, turn it into a TV show with 8 ep seasons, make a ton of changes to the story and lore that is sure to piss off the audience that is most likely to generate word of mouth for us, and for the low, low price of like a billion dollars. You should trust me with this money because I worked on 2 seasons of the hit show (that was on the edge of cancellation basically it’s entire run) Agents of SHIELD and a streaming show on Netflix that was canceled after one season.” By pretty much any measure, this is an insane set of decisions.

This is everywhere - The Witcher, Halo, Star Trek: Discovery (and most of Picard), Secret Invasion, Book of Boba Fett, just about every goddamn “blockbuster” Netflix attempts. It’s either they take a beloved IP and decide to do something entirely different and usually not even good-different (has anyone that worked on Halo even seen an xbox?) or they set up a project with a pitch like “Ryan Reynolds is a big star, Fast and the Furious is a big franchise, make a movie with Ryan and cars or whatever.” Insert meme of the guy getting thrown out of the window for asking “does it need a plot?”

The existence of half of these streamers in general belie the real issues. You can’t tell me that Paramount+ or Peacock should even exist. The whole premise of these goddamn things is “people want to watch 20-40 year old re-runs of Star Trek and Seinfeld, I bet we can charge $15 in perpetuity for that as long as we sprinkle in the occasional new show that makes a point to let our audience know we hate them for liking these shows.”

It’s just a massively, massively mismanaged business on basically every level. Ads is the latest in this fiasco. They should be either small, cheap networks that make a lot of small budget shows, or if they’re going to take some big swings they might want to have a proven strategy of any sort. Quite a lot of the shows that found massive success were made for basically the change you find in the couch cushions. A show like Friends probably cost about $7 for the first season, and didn’t balloon until later seasons when the cast was each making a decent amount and every other episode had a major guest star. Most sci-fi until very recently was extremely cheap. Carter: Sir, we’ve arrived on the planet, looks like the MALP was accurate. O’Neill: It’s really weird how most of the planets we visit look like the woods in Vancouver, BC. Even Game of Thrones which probably started this arms race of spending, didn’t start getting $20+ million budgets until it was a massive, massive hit (worth noting how that show tried to stick closely to the source and didn’t start to suck until they ran out of book) and even then that would be seen as “cheap” compared to a lot of these.

streaming has absolutely no future.

Streaming isn’t going anywhere, and if anything will likely continue to grow for as cable dies off. It’s just going to consolidate and get shittier (ads) as basically things move back to a model more cable-like. Piracy will probably ramp back to like levels for music in the early 2000’s, but it will remain a niche. Amazon specifically will see blowback for this, but it’s unlikely to move many off of Prime since it’s sort of a tertiary benefit to having a Prime membership, and even if it’s all you got for your Prime membership, it’s still one of the cheapest streaming services.

“I want you to know that I don’t like nazis. But I am fine platforming them and profiting from them. Now here is some bullshit about silencing ‘ideas.’”

Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that the president shouldn’t be immune even based on the text of the article itself, just with this US SC, I don’t trust that they are going logically interpret the article. There’s a podcast called Strict Scrutiny that covers the court with legal experts hosting, but in a fairly approachable manner, and basically this court is just pulling things out of their ass. They’re not even consistent in their own court, much less adhering to previous court doctrine.

I probably won’t ever forget New Zealand having football/soccer matches in a big-ass stadium like normal. Many other countries got back to normal way, way before we did.

I mean, Disney is run by adults, so I suspect they’re sitting over there watching Elon punch himself in the balls and laughing about it.

And, if Elon had a real board, this probably would have already happened. This is a perfect example of why. What problem has Disney caused Tesla that they could possibly articulate to a customer that would justify this move and not cost them good will if nothing else, and sales likely especially as this gets a ton of coverage? “Yes, I understand your frustration, and yes I can hear your kid screaming in the background about not being able to watch Frozen while you’re stuck charging. But you see, sir/madame, our CEO has a very, and I really have to make sure I state this correctly, but very tiny penis. It’s so small, just constantly peeing on his balls (which are also very small.) We here at Tesla let him compensate for this by making the product worse for you, our paying customers. Anyway, can I interest you in a CyberTruck? Please? We’ve only sold 3 and my family needs to eat.”

Pretty sure they can only be used when parked like when you’re charging. Even at a super charger, it’s going to take 20-30 minutes to get back on the road.

Right now, Haley is polling significantly behind DeSantis, who is already significantly behind Trump. I honestly thought it was more likely that she was angling for a cabinet position or something, but the Koch money injection is interesting. That said, even with money it’s a pretty uphill battle. Given that Trump is far and away the front runner, the number of old school republicans is pretty low. She’s running as if she’s in the general, where a more moderate approach would make a lot of sense (or maybe she’s just trying to dodge creating soundbites for Biden campaign ads which DeSantis seems to have no problem with) but in the Republican primary moderate isn’t going to get very far.

Even if she manages to clear the first hurdle and overtake DeSantis, she is kinda stuck with her finger’s crossed that Trump is for some reason ineligible to run because he’s such a clear favorite. It would be like going into a room of Swifties and trying to explain why you’re better than Taylor. Spoilers, it doesn’t matter, and the corpse you leave behind is going to look like something out of a horror show.