It's because /. Has gradually aged from a bunch of young radicals in favor of I intellectual freedom and copy left, to a bunch of aging reactionaries wanting to kick down at young people and defend the status quo. Same as it ever was.

On the NES and SNES you just had to undo like 4-6 screws and clean the contact pads with some rubbing alcohol. I never had one actually legit fail, just get crusty.

There are commercial services that you can subscribe to that include a license to play the music in public. You only need to be paying ASCAP, BMI etc directly if you are just playing from a Spotify playlist or MP3 server or something.

Copyright should last like 5 years. Then there would be plenty of public domain music to play.

If they ever do achieve AGI, which I very much doubt they will, making money off it will constitute slavery.

That's because we used to think that playing chess well required a sentient human-level intelligence. It turns out that no, you just need a good algorithm and a boatload of data. It's not that the goal posts for AI have moved, it's that our understanding of the problem domain has changed. Chess just isn't a good litmus test for general intelligence.

I don't think we really have a good scientific understanding of what constitutes "general intelligence", but we know it when we see it, and I think most people would agree that LLMs and "generative AI" ain't it.

Well, if the above post is correct that that the nuke plant has 25x the output of this storage site, then $17b should be enough to buy 25 storage sites with $4.5b left over to build solar farms to charge them with.

I did a significant number of psychedelics in my youth. That part of my life is pretty much over now thanks to kids and other responsibilities, but if were still into that stuff, handing my trip over to the care of an LLM chatbot sounds like a fucking nightmare.

I'm sure the authorization is buried somewhere deep in the Android EULA. Google's lawyers aren't stupid.

I just went to Settings > Apps > Gemini and clicked uninstall. I don't know if that uninstalls all the attendant services or just the UI though.

If a hospital goes from 100% funded to 88% funded it very well might 100% close. Also medicaid disproportionally funds care in small towns and rural communities, so the effect is not evenly distributed. People with limited mobility and ability to afford travel/relocation might see services they depend on to survive disappear.

Not everyone can afford $500 for an exterminator to come out, sometimes multiple times, if they have roaches, ants, termites, or wasps infesting their house.

I live in Boston and if you are in one of the unofficially designated "safe zones", mostly municipal baseball/soccer fields, then the cops and FD turn a blind eye to alcohol and fireworks ordinances on and around the 4th. I'm sure if it got out of hand they would shut it down, but I've seen folks set off some pretty serious ordinance without any incident. Mostly people just bring coolers and enjoy watching the 5 guys who decided to blow a couple month's rent on fireworks go to town.

Airplanes don't go to a lot of the places you might want to drive to in the US. You'd have to fly into the nearest airport, rent a car, and then drive to your destination. This would take much longer and cost more than driving there directly. Do I wish that we had a better rail network that went everywhere I would want to go, yes of course, but we don't, and won't in my lifetime.

How do you pay a kid $20 for mowing your lawn if he only has a pre-paid VISA card? I still keep at least $100 in cash in my wallet.