"forcing academics to pay "hundreds of dollars a month," said Duncan Allen, a research officer at Democracy Reporting International (DRI) in Germany."

Meanwhile, also in Germany: 'Inside the Dystopian World of Germany's Free Speech Crackdown':

"Thousands of Germans have been threatened with fines or prison sentences for social media posts, reports The Telegraph, calling the country's political speech laws "unusually stringent for an EU member state."

Hello Ms. Sarah Connor, if you ever read this, please make sure you are protected. We will need you. Signed, mankind.

I quit posting to social media in 2018, for two main reasons:
1. It is clear attention has become the new currency on the Internet. Everybody is so desperate for attention that they are willing to sacrifice anything to gain their 5 minutes of fame. No wonder why people are comparing it to work: it has become the livelihood of some.
2. I got tired of being the product. No wonder why a handful can earn more on social media than a blue collar job, but if you are willingly feeding the system and you still did not realize how much of your privacy and life you lost without any sort of compensation, I only feel sorry for you.

I still have accounts I use to read content, but not a single new post has been made for 8 years. It is leisure to me, and given no app is installed, there is much less for them to profit from me.

Either you continue to be a small company and do the work you love until you grow up to keep doing it as a small company, or you sell yourself to get access to new perks, including layoffs the moment you don't generate profits compatible with what the new owner expects. A sad reality of games not made for gamers but shareholders.

(Subject is also a quote from a WoW quest)

4:45pm eastern Maryland weather report: Mostly sunny, light breeze 100F / 38 C. Damp af.

1. Limit the number of data centers in the region.
2. Suspend any new data centers to be created in this region.
3. Proft.

We are in the age anyone can run their own models in house, and in doing so, memory chip prices will be forced to fall (not only because RAM makers are being sued) and hardware will be available for those outside the Datacenter sphere. With in house models, you have your own dataset, which is private, and so is your data. And those who don't use AI, aren't forced to cope with everything AI pushed down their throats, regardless of if they asked for or not.

Slop Raider 2027, most likely?

Don't get me wrong, I'll love to be proven wrong. Assuming I buy it and I buy on Steam so I can ask for a refund in a few hours after launching it and get disappointed by not be proven wrong.

I can reroute AI traffic back to the networks of OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and the likes, instead of these stupid, glorified bots ramming my hosted machines. I approve this record and hope every AI agent honors them.

NVidia retires the entire RTX family of cards, citing lack of interest on the consumer markets, thus focusing on their new pet project, AI.

Ahead of December's release of Avengers: Doomsday, Unpopular Opinions has unveiled "Infinity Wisdom," reports himself, which they describe as "a new theater skipping experience that will be certain to transform corporate greed night out into a realistic better investment for your future." (Though those claims appear to be estimates...)

of thousands of Meta associated being let go, replaced by their own avatars.

Except Google can still read, index and process your email messages as they are delivered to them. In reality, this is just taking competition away from reading from the wire. Everything else continues to be managed by Google.

... nevermind, Doc as "Documentary". English is hitting me hard today.

I can have a Doctor's on my signature? Heck, I came to this conclusion at least a year or so ago.

Regardless, that is why you should always run a transparent firewall with a deny all by default, and only let return traffic get in if you arenâ(TM)t hosting anything.
That, and accept if you play dumb games, expect to win dumb prizes.