I played the first GTA once a bit and GTA Chinatown on the PSP. The latter I remember being fun. The others I never really got. Watchdogs and the later FarCry installments are more my thing.

... activate it's basic brain functions when it comes to using and applying IT and just like everybody else has to build a digital culture. Until that happens, "big tech" will shoo them around, regardless wether an individual vendor is from the US, Europe or anywhere else. Simply giving every citizen using a computer and the internet an ICDL training and a hardware crypto chip and replacing E-Mail and DNS with modern distributed crypto services _not_ from the steam age of computing would solve about 80% of all security problems.The other 20% would be covered if deciders actually knew the difference between a client and a server.

Until that happens we'll continue to have the IT equivalent of African bushmen trying to build a highway bridge out of Kudzu and leaves and wondering with things cost such obscene amounts of money without delivering any real results and jepoardizing public safety. ... And enabling bored teenagers to defrost industrial fridges across entire countries.

I've been using Blender as my main 3D tool for 26 years now (even have an old official NaN licence) and it's so fun to watch Blender perpetually knock it out of the park when it comes to new features and overall improvement. Blender at this point has basically "won" the 3D spaceand there ain't no stopping it. Nice. I like it.

I've seen a lot of people use "illegal" as if it specifically meant a crime, not a tort. In most cases, copyright infringement is a tort, not a crime.

... dynamics is that to fully grasp how cunning and super-rational women can be when seducing a man you basically have to spend a considerable amount of your adult life exloring the sexual market place and studying women. But when you do that, you don't have the time to do a high-power career. Which makes super-performing billionaires exceptionally prone to getting trapped by women. See Jeff Bezos or this Nvidia guy for details.

If I were a large-scale back-room investor in these companies I'd make it mandatory that these men leave chosing their partners and intimacy companions entirely to a team of experts to save everyone involved any trouble. Men of this caliber have zero trouble getting a concubine (or a group of concubines) that are sweet to them, screw their brains out epic-style and bear their children.

If I were a billionaire I'd hire a concubine and be done with it. She'd've won the lottery and I would know exactly what to expect and be sound and safe if the lady choses to split. Not that I care, but I hope for Jeff Bezos sake that he has a prenup tripple-checked by an army of lawyers.

Sorry, but this isn't news. This is literally the exact warning scientists have been giving since the 1950ies of not earlier. If this is news to anyone making bigger decisions they need a spanking.

Do these IRC clients support persistent chat history, file drops, and link summary bots? Because those are among the major features that Discord, Slack, and the like offer compared to IRC. I'm aware that a set of protocol extensions collectively known as "IRCv3" exist, but what sub-64K clients support them? And what public servers offer them?

... layer is? Is it FOSS? Is it cross platform? Ditching a web layer for something native is a good idea, even better when Rust is the main PL, but I'd really like to know what stack exactly they're using and if it's running a FOSS cross platform GUI. Can someone enlighten me?

You are correct that 307 days of the year counts as "most of the time." My city of 200,000 doesn't run any public transit on Sundays or major holidays. Instead, bus drivers on all shifts are scheduled to be home with their respective families.

... desperately needed.

This tax of course is bullshit unless it's public infrastructure used for that traffic.

I personally suspect that such policies would advance the development and utilization of modern offline protocols and foster citizen driven thumb drive networks and similar workarounds which in turn would significantly improve everyone's mental health and quality of life.

Point in case: I've been using email for almost 30 years now. It was ancient back then and is basically unusable for any non-expert who doesn't have the advanced knowledge to spot spam and fishing. I totally get those normies that have zero interest in messing around with smartphones and the modern inet because they don't trust it. I wouldn't either.

My 2 cents.

As the price of DRAM, SSD storage, electric power, and data center real estate rise, what prevents LLM service providers from suddenly raising their rates such that it's no longer less expensive than hiring a human? Compare what happened when Broadcom jacked up the price of VMware.

And what prevents programmers whose copyrighted programs have been included in the LLMs' training set from suing LLM service providers for copyright infringement on grounds that the output of the LLM is substantially similar to their programs, and the LLM is not following the license? I remember that demonstration where an LLM had effectively memorized the reciprocal square root routine from the GPL source code of Quake III Arena and failed to include the "appropriate copyright notice" mandated by the GNU GPL. Even permissive licenses, such as Apache 2, MIT, 3BSD, and zlib, require preservation of the copyright notice in derivative works. Doe v. GitHub, pending in the Northern District of California.

In Slashdot's home country, both copyright and radio transmission are regulated at the federal level. So what's the plan for to peterww and tepples to start to change the laissez-mourir policies popular among conservative members of the U.S. Congress? See "antisocialist", "extreme capitalism", and "laissez-mourir" in RMS's glossary.

I wouldn't be so sure of that momentum. Several countries in the European Union have implemented age gating through an application that runs only on an iPhone or a certified Android phone. An iPhone runs proprietary iOS, published by foreign monopolist Apple Inc. A certified Android phone runs proprietary Google Play Services, published by foreign monopolist Google LLC. The EU talks out both sides, regulating foreign "gatekeepers" on one side (the Digital Markets Act and provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to very large online platforms) and requiring use of services provided by said "gatekeepers" (provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to "protection" of minors).

What ID do Brits use if they use public transport instead of a motor vehicle?

Last I checked a few years ago, the United Kingdom offered no domestic non-driver ID. It offers only a driving licence, which requires access to a motor vehicle and probably paying someone to let the learner practice driving in their vehicle for some number of hours, or a passport, which is valid for international travel but expensive. If this has changed, let me know.

... around and will still be when all the "commercial Social Media" nonsense has gone the way of the Dodo.

I see nothing wrong with forcing teens to get to know some IT basics and learn to run their own IRC node or webforum. It's the way better way to do things anyway.

Getting emotionally worked up about stuff happening on Wikipedia and with your contributions is a thing you should avoid. Wikipedia has parts and aspects that brink on the random, recognizably driven by ego, ignorance and some mild state of perpetual edit-war. I still occasionally contribute a litte but make a point of not caring to much about what happens with that info.

If there is a fact that I need to be out there in the public, I post it on my own website. Problem solved.

Other than that people shouldn't forget that the internet - Wikipedia or anything else - is a virtual Mad Max Fury Road where you best keep your head low and use a nice bouquet of throw-away spoof accounts to get around and do things. Especially in spaces run by entities or megacorps that are totally beyond your control. As I guess every IT expert here will agree.