It was recommended to me in the mid-00s by a guy in a Christian metal band! Despite this, I actually did read it. In fact, I drove to the Christian book store where he worked (because of course he worked at a place like that), and bought the book there. I met a lot of musicians back then and wasn't going to let a Christian scare me off.

It was a pretty good read and seemed reasonable while also "not the thing for me" because dammit, Jim, I'm a computer programmer, not a landlord. When this Christian metalhead told me that the money he spent on dog food (and lots of other things, but it was the dog food that really stood out) was accounted for as an expense by his LLC, I backed away slowly (because the Christian stuff wasn't bad enough?!).

In my defense, I gotta say he was a really good guitar player and his band had top-notch headbangable riffs (to go with their mostly stupid lyrics). IMHO at the time they were tied for first place as the best metal band in Albuquerque. I loved them and it probably mystified them that I kept showing up to their gigs.

Life is funny.

banks get bailed out by the taxpayer.

They're supposed to get "bailed out" by the interest they charge their other customers. I wish the taxpayers would, just once, insist on sticking to the former arrangement.

I was responding to the claim that "Not even the biggest sites in the industry could afford an editorial team capable of playing 50 games a day to find and write about those worth highlighting." Exactly what "write about" means isn't defined, but as I've demonstrated it is certainly possible to do better than "one-word games". With their numbers, after you've weeded out the trash, you're left with 2 games per day. It should certainly be possible for a competent team to play that many games for a few hours and write a short review.

If you had to play for a significant time to discover that it's "worthless," then the game isn't "absolute dross," so it doesn't matter for the purposes of their argument.

This:

Is completely in opposition to this:

If 48 of the games are "absolute dross", then a reviewer should be able to identify that fact within, say, ten minutes. Say you've got a staff of five people to review new games; that hardly seems unreasonable for a storefront the size of Steam, so each one would have to review ten games per day. Determining which games of the ten are total crapware should take no more than a couple hours, which leaves you six hours during the working day to give a fair shot to those that have some promise.

I'd be concerned about seeing VPNs as a "solution." If a 17-year-old in Montana uses a VPN whose endpoint is in New York and they access porn, they and the pornserver have still violated the law, haven't they? The VPN doesn't cause the violation to cease to exist. The VPN merely makes it hard for the pornserver to know.

If I were the kind of person who advocated for these new laws, I would set up a "sting" and show that pornserver violated the law, just like how you might send an underage person to try to buy booze from a convenience store.

Using a VPN is like using a fake ID for the booze. It might provide a "it's too hard" defense, but it also might not. You don't know until a judge or jury says "not guilty."

It's a lot more than a mere "marketing stunt" if he establishes a legal precedent that inventors can't use some kinds of optimization algorithms to sift through possible solutions.

It's kind of bizarre how they have convinced anyone to believe that this project will ultimately be successful. Apple is dead set against interoperability, and any time you find a hole in the methods they have to detect a non-official client, they'll be able to plug the hole in short order.

In the end all you're doing is helping them find and close the holes in their walled garden.

I hate to say this, but that sounds like an argument in favor of the plaintiffs against Internet Archive.

If a "typical library" uses DRMed books, then the only way to avoid violating DMCA (both when people read the books, and when the library trafficks in software which lets people read the books) is to get authorization from the copyright owners. So those libraries must be using licensing, rather than relying on the exemptions codified in copyright law or things like Fair Use in common law.

So you're really just calling attention to the fact that Internet Archive must be doing things very differently from typical libraries, blowing off licensing "deals" and instead relying on copyright. But if the works are DRMed, then they can't do that legally, thanks to DMCA. The whole point of DMCA is to nullify anything in copyright law which is in favor of the user rather than the copyright owner. If it didn't do that, then the pieces of shit who voted to enact DMCA would not have been paid. Bitrot and other disadvantages are the point.

The People need to repeal 1201. (Or even better, outlaw DRM, so that situations no longer exist where 1201 can be applied.) Barring that, then IA needs to get authorization from the copyright owners, before they can legally lend the books (and worse: trafficking in the software is going to require some authorization too, but that gets into some complexicated issues). They didn't do that, so they're going to lose.

I wonder if we could possibly manipulate Republicans to repeal 1201, on the basis that people who write books are four-eyed liberal academic LGBTQ-friendly elitist intellectuals -- exactly the kind of monsters that the government is supposed to be hurting. If we have to live through this ridiculous era, then we should at least try to get something from our American Khmer Rouge. DMCA IS A WOKE PLOT!!!!1

Anyone else notice how the holidays start earlier and earlier every year?

Any time someone calls or texts me to try to get me to vote a certain way, I make sure to let them know that it's their fault that I'm voting for the competition. The fit that some of these callers throw is some of the best entertainment of the political season.

financial down turn.

This doesn't look like a financial downturn. It looks like a technological advance which disrupted a now-semi-obsolete way of doing things. It's a financial upturn: the cost of doing "office-like things" just got cheaper, because it doesn't need offices (or as many offices) anymore. For every dollar that landlords or banks lose, someone else is saving more than a dollar by not paying for things they don't need, plus overhead. Getting work done got cheaper, and that's a net improvement for almost everyone.

in a few years when the economy recovers.

We got here due to the economy improving; there's nothing to recover from. A "recovery" which makes the buildings re-open as offices again, would likely be due to damage, e.g. EMPs destroying our communication networks.

They lock messages from non-Apple devices out of that with their point-blank refusal to support secure messages between Apple and non-Apple devices. It's incredibly disingenuous to pretend that Apple's motivations have anything to do with notifying the users about secured messaging.

The only "distinguishing feature" of iMessage is that it doesn't interoperate with other vendor's phones. Which is of course the point, because (despite your claim to the contrary) Apply absolutely loves and encourages petty behavior to drive more sales.

The green/blue bubble thing itself is stupid, but it absolutely is a big thing in some social circles (read: middle/high schoolers and adults that never matured past middle school).

While it's our responsibility as parents to teach our kids to not to let companies manipulate them like that for profit ... Apple's role in encouraging kids ostracizing other kids for not using Apple's products (in order to drive more sales) is more than a little sleazy.

Privacy is half the value of PGP. The other half is about authentication: knowing who sent the email. It's arguably useful (within the hypothesis that Facebook is useful) to know that an email which claims to come from Facebook, actually came from Facebook.

But wait .. about that privacy thing. I have no idea how a person decides to trust Facebook, but if we ass/u/me they do, then this allows Facebook and a person to communicate without others being able to read it. Lots of people choose (for whatever reason) to communicate with Facebook, but don't choose to communicate the same things with $RANDOM_OTHER_PARTY. Why not keep access controls fine-grained?

LLMs have zero original creation capability. If an AI is generating _____ then it was trained on real _____.

If you have seen 18-year-old people fuck, and then you're introduced to the idea that 17-year-old people exist, then I don't think it requires much originality to visualize 17-year-old people fucking.

You don't think today's software could be used to generate a video where the Muppet Babies do a shot-for-shot remake of Behind the Green Door, despite it never being trained on exactly that? Surely it hasn't already seen "Die Hard at Barbenheim's Los Alamos beach mansion" (performed by the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter) but I bet it could render it.