They really are illegal in the USA. However, if you have acres of land with no neighbors to complain (and don't manage to set the countryside on fire in the process) and don't post the videos on the internet, law enforcement probably has more important things to to be concerned with. That still doesn't make it legal, just unlikely you'd get caught.

That would probably make a large, albeit brief, fireball worthy of Michael Bay. As an improvised incendiary weapon though, the idea generally is to have the fuel stick to the target and burn for a prolonged period. It's not hard to figure out which additive would accomplish that goal, but I'm speaking purely from the standpoint of this is just information that's freely available on the internet. I think the general idea is that if you've figured out how to make the kind of cocktail that is served up for serious cases of civil unrest, then you probably also have enough sense to know not to actually do it. Which is pretty much the same thing the chemists over on Reddit say about making meth.

Complaining about gerrymandering is like saying "Having a town full of arsonists isn't the problem - the problem is that we're giving too many of the arsonists packs of matches." Messing with how representation is allocated is like deciding who gets the packs of matches. But no matter how you hand them out, the real problem is that there are too many people willing to burn things down.

Gerrymandering only works when the party in power has supermajority support in the first place and can afford to dilute their totals a bit in order to still eek out a win in another district. It's exactly why Florida redrew their maps after this state took a hard turn to the right - the Republicans then had enough support to spread around and secure more seats. I wanted to get upset about it too, but again, it's a scheme entirely made feasible by the will of electorate itself, not some magical district lines.

To be entirely clear: The problem is that on election day, people drag their asses to the polls and make their mark next to the (R) candidate. Anything else is just trying to do mental gymnastics to rationalize why we're in the present situation.

The SCOTUS absolutely will side with the current administration and then it's game over, man. At least leaving things the way they are now leaves the door open for it to just be yet another in the long line of messes for the next administration to clean up. Cue obligatory assuming there is a next administration, ad nauseam.

I'd say it hinges on how accurate the instructions are. That was one of the problems with the old Anarchist's Cookbook (which made the rounds as a TXT file back in the BBS days) - you were more likely to blow yourself up in the process of following many of its plans.

The thing is, it's illegal to even try to build a Molotov cocktail, so there's not going to be too many people willing to detail the ins and outs of things like the proper fuel mix, how much to fill the bottle, length and material of the cloth fuse, etc.

What if I told you that a great many people have so much difficulty in social settings that they're unable to function in them unless they're partially intoxicated, and we mostly consider that condition to be normal?

Chatting with a bot is just beer goggles without the beer.

I've only found ChatGPT useful for goof-off shit like writing lyrics to meme songs, and proofreading my product reviews, since I sometimes have a tendency to leave out words.

Having a conversation with it, though, is a bit like your own private Reddit circlejerk. It really does tend to praise the heck out of anything you say, short of things like asking if it'd maybe be a good idea to Thanos snap half of humanity out of existence (and even then, it'd probably still try to rationalize why your idea isn't entirely without merit - just horribly unethical). But yeah, if you suggest something like an altered ending to the plot of a movie or TV show, oh boy, ChatGPT will start spouting things about how you should pitch your idea to Hollywood because it's absolutely brilliant. Personally, I say it's best to just take that as sarcasm.

Ultimately, it's harmless so long as you keep in mind that it's actually just another computerized time sink, like playing Halo in story mode.

^ and this right here is exactly why people talk to chatbots instead of other meatbags. ChatGPT isn't going to judge you or say you're the one who needs to change. It will listen to you at 2 AM, when a real person is likely to just go "Dude, I'm trying to sleep, the fuck you texting me for?"

Yes, it's probably not an emotionally healthy thing to have a conversation with a room full of GPUs. But have you offered a hand in friendship to any of these people who might be a bit on the socially awkward side of things? I'd venture a guess, probably not - so maybe don't entirely place the blame on the siren song of the LLM.

I've got some damn old Intel CPUs with "MALAY" stamped on them. Intel bailed on US manufacturing way before it became trendy to hate on offshoring. It's less Trump was right this time and more Trump is stating the obvious, in his usual ignorant blustery manner.

Even the "closing the barn door after the horse has run off" adage seems more than a little lacking here. Intel pretty much figured that designed in the USA - manufactured elsewhere would continue to be a viable business model for the foreseeable future. Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

The other day on Reddit I saw someone post (and later deleted) that they were towing a 18' fiberglass boat with their Chevy Bolt. For context, the car does not have a tow rating. Gaming on a Chromebook is kind of like that. You can technically do it, but... it's not going to do it well, and you probably shouldn't.

Unless "gaming" means playing things like match-3 games and Minecraft with all the settings bottomed out. Which to bring back around to the car analogy, would be like me saying I found a practical way to haul around a "boat" with my Bolt by throwing an inflatable raft in the trunk.

Let's be honest, if the studios had their way, of course they'd prefer it to be illegal to summarize a film's plot.

It will unite Americans in a collective shrug.

The electorate sent the guy who orchestrated an insurrection back to The White House. Do you honestly think "may have hooked up with a 14-year-old" is even going to register with these folks? Hell, a few stories back there's that one about a family using an AI avatar of their dead kid to raise awareness about school shootings, because for some truly fucked up reason, just having your kid die in a school shooting wasn't awareness-raising enough.

Mark my words, the American public only cares about the Epstein files because they're a cliffhanger. After we know how the story ends, we'll move right on to the next thing to be outraged about for as long as the news cycle is willing to milk it.

See, even if your supply chains for car parts are all overseas, it still kind of makes sense to assemble the parts into completed cars here. Cars aren't exactly the most space-efficient things to ship (the passenger compartment is mostly air, and you can't really pack cars too tightly together or they'll get damaged).

i-Things on the other hand? You can cram a whole bunch of them into a shipping container. I'd venture a guess it's actually less efficient to ship over a bunch of iPhone parts for final assembly elsewhere, since you'll end up with copious amounts of packing material that ends up taking up more space than just shipping over completed products in the first place.

But hey, you've got your i-Parts on their way from China and now you've a domestic factory to assemble them - is that going to create a bunch of well-paying middle class jobs? Probably not. Most of the work will be automated, because earning middle class wages for assembling consumer products is just not a thing anymore, regardless of how much Trump squints through his rose-colored glasses.

A classic trick question comes to mind: "A plane crashes on the border of the United States and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors?"

Of course, the answer is that you don't bury the survivors, because they came through the ordeal just fine. Similarly, school shooting survivors just don't elicit the same sort of sympathy as victims. In right-wing circles, I've even heard of folks like David Hogg being referred to as "lucky". The end result is that sympathy gets reserved for the dead, the victims who can’t talk back (and even that is limited mostly to "thoughts and prayers").

The elephant in the room here though, is that we never should've gotten to the point where someone felt it was even necessary to create an AI avatar of a dead kid. A saner society would have all the motivation it needs for change from the real loss of life. My initial thought when reading the headline was "Wow, that's tacky and tasteless", but that feeling was quickly replaced with "what a dark timeline we're living in if having your kid die in a shooting still isn't enough to convince people that something is horribly broken with our society."

Here's a crazy idea: Don't make your political party's platform include rejecting evidence-based science.

Then, repositories of facts won't be deleting your content of interest!

That's pretty much been normal behavior for Wikipedia for awhile now. The "anybody can edit Wikipedia" era is long since over. It's more accurate to say you can edit Wikipedia if you want to put in the effort to become an established part of their "community". If you just want to drive-by edit articles, yeah, that will likely get reverted even if you're technically contributing something positive.

Yes, it certainly does disincentivize people from contributing to Wikipedia if they only want to do so casually, but I suppose the Wikipedia gods have figured the site has grown to the point where they see it as no longer necessary. I'm surprised they haven't just disabled anonymous editing completely, but seeing how every decision on that site has to go through an insane amount of bureaucracy, it kind of makes sense that they'd just have people reverting edits rather than changing something many might view as a traditional part of Wikipedia.
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