The blender crew effing rocks, that's for sure. I sure hope Ton Roosendahl is enjoying his (part-time?) retirement!

I'm listed as a donator because I'm actually one of those rare few who bought a commercial license back when Blender still was closed source and was being sold as a commercial product by NaN. They went commercial for a year or so after blender was available as freeware. I paid 250 Euros and still have the color-printed receipt. I might frame it and hang it on the wall some day. :-)

>"12345" topping their list while "123456" dominates among everyone else.

Not a SINGLE system I use, and I use a LOT of systems, would allow such a stupid password. Granted, there are also tons of systems that go extreme in the other direction with requiring FAR too complex (which is also incredibly stupid). And the stupidest of all is password aging.

A reasonable password, coupled with rate limiting and lockouts, is very secure. It will not be broken by brute force on the "outside" of properly-configured systems.

So they fold corporation on paper, walk away from the loan and open up a new corporation that gets to use the facility.

Dude it's 2025, by now you should know how this game is played.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Let's see what that link provides:

"This category explores how manipulative groups regulate and dominate their members’ actions and behaviors through strict rules, rewards, and punishments, limiting individual autonomy."
Hijab, burka, yarmulke, baptism, circumcision, the wearing of 'mixed' clothing

Examining the tactics of manipulative organizations to control information flow through censorship and propaganda, restricting members’ access to outside perspectives.
- I give you the Church of Scientology

Focuses on psychological techniques used by such groups to shape beliefs and attitudes, suppressing critical thinking and promoting conformity.
- I give you the Mormon Church

Explores how manipulative organizations manipulate emotions, fostering dependency and loyalty through love-bombing, guilt, and fear-based indoctrination.
- "If you're bad you won't see your family in heaven" really hard to say that's anything other than fear-based coercion

I am by no means an expert on religion(s) but to say religion isn't a cult is to whitewash it into respectability. Hence, 'A large *popular* cult'

1. That's why I gave two sources, dummy.The second source is a detailed dataset and says in the FAQ: "Around 68% of UK households have access to off-street parking."

2. Who mentioned AI? i didn't. I said "rando YT". The notion that your paltry 24 hours in the UK plus watching some YT videos gives you insight into what off-street parking is like in the UK is completely absurd. You cannot seriously think this gives you any kind of meaningful insight. You might aw well pick out Templewood Avenue on Streetview and declare that every house in the UK has off-street parking, or Mabfield Road in Fallowfield and declare none does. I've lived here all my life, and I wouldn't presume ot guess what percentage of cars are parked off-street on the basis of what I've seen with my eyes, because there's 30m+ cars in the UK and 800,000 streets!

3. Once again, you fail at basic reading comprehension. "Will be able to" does not mean the same as "Will". It means "have the possibility". I say this because modern houses have electricity and houses with off-street parking have... off-street parking, and those are the only two pieces of infrastructure required for a household to able to provide home charging. You keep trying to make out this is really hard and really complicated, and it's not. 70% of cars are parked at houses with off-street parking. The owners of those houses could, if they choose, put in a home charger, and then those cars could be charged at home. It will cost the owners about £1000 and ... that's all there is to it. I'm not claiming that all households will do this, I'm saying it's not physically impossible for them to do it, whereas it is physically impossible to put in off-street charging at a house that doesn't have off-street parking (or doesn't have electricity, but that's basically zero houses).

Oh look! You're exactly the coward I said you were. Too much of a pathetic wimp to stand behind what you say and back it up.

The reason I can say "you people" with confidence, is because you're so utterly fucking predictable that you can indeed be grouped together, because you all do the same things and behave in the same stupid way. Thick as pig shit and weak to boot.

>"I just had trouble looking at a comment on one of my posts yesterday because I can't get through the Cloudflare bot detector."

I had the same problem yesterday and this morning. I could not open any direct links to postings. Period.

Ironic because I recently posted on Slashdot about how dangerous it is that all these sites are handing over their accessibility to a single huge company like Cloudflare, and complaining that Slashdot was throwing bot checks against me all the time in the last few weeks (which it had never done before).

>"Ban the collection of these types of information about individuals beyond what is necessary for performing a service -and ban keeping any collected data longer than is necessary for performing the specific service. No database = no database searches."

+100.

My issue is that I don't believe they will abide by any data collection retention limitations, use limitations, or other limitations; regardless of the rules/law. Especially if the three-letter agencies have a tie-in, they will do whatever they want. The only real way to prevent abuse is to not have those in use at all.

I really think this is a losing battle. People will almost always give up liberty and privacy for safety and convenience.

>"I just bought a new Ford Maverick for my business. It came with built in cellular data hardware -not optional. They say it is for diagnostics, updates, maps, and wifi-hotspot. It comes with the 1st year of data connectivity included. They want me to pay for additional years (no thanks!)"

^^ This
I bought a new Ariya earlier this year. All the hardware is already there. 3 years of service included, then you have to pay. You can opt out of data collection, and if you do, you lose half the "connected" features.

You're so close to getting it lol

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

I forget which town but one of them immediately removed all the cameras when somebody did a foi request.

You're not going to find out where the billionaires are going because like Steve Jobs used to do they hide their license plates.

But your shitty little Republican mayor who frequents the local gay bar doesn't have the resources to do that. A

I hope meta gave the judge a nice big fat tip. Tipping Judges were made legal by the US Supreme Court a year ago I think. Plus now, tips are tax free. Nice to be a Federal Judge in the US.