No. I think hollywood has always been subversive and run by foreign pedophiles. For example, look for the interview with Shirley Temple about what they tried doing to her as a _child_,

I think it has produced enough pro-American-MIC films every now and then to stay out of more government trouble.

You usually don't realize (at the time) that the media you watched as a child was subverting you (and your parents desires). And unless you revisit those films a generation later with a critical eye, you may not realize it ever.

But that's how the ratchet effect works. The newer media that is now visibly odious to me is only visibly odious to me because it is targeting the edge of an overton window that has continued moving since my own youth. The leading edge of socially allowable media subversion continues to advance until a historical reset event sets it back somewhat. Or, sometimes, when there is sufficient market rejection.

In the case of hollyweird, the concentration of power has significant drawbacks; destroying that concentration of power will probably be a net benefit. (to be clear, I think It will amplify other problems instead).

In general, I think evil seems to be more effective when it is centralized and powerful, with captured institutions, while maintaining the ability to operate openly, and has de-facto monopoly control over the domain in which it operates, and when most people do not understand what is being done to them.

If Trump had promised to destroy hollywood, I would have voted for him 10x harder.

(And i expect I would be disappointed because he wouldn't actually follow through with it)

Anyway, hopefully, AI gets the job done and finally kills that wretched industry. I look forward to further democratization of movie making.

(fwiw, my knee jerk reaction is to oppose the merger.)

The current generation of these smartglasses devices will fail and disappear.

Let me show my work:

1. women cannot use these smart glasses to take selfies.
2. therefore, women will not wear them.
3. therefore, the only people who wear them will be men
4. anything that men do but which women do not do is probably criminal, but certainly creepy, a red flag, or a cause of the ick
5. therefore, men will be shamed (or arrested) into not wearing them either

QED.

I don't think training a model with copyrighted data is any kind of gray zone at all.

Running inference against such a model _might_ be infringing.

But I don't see the legal argument that model training would be.

Think of model training as lossy data compression. You provide an input, it produces a compressed artifact, and it can no longer reproduce the original when you uncompress it. It can produce _something_. It cannot reproduce the original.

On slashdot, we all agree that format shifting copyrighted works should be allowed and unrestricted, right?

If there is applicable case law here about how lossy a "reproduction" can be before copyright has something to say about it, that would be relevant. Do you know of any?

I think you're repeating something that feels emotionally valid but in my experience, isn't factually (or legally) accurate.

I have found AI models to be frustratingly _obedient_ of copyright.

I'll be in a situation where I ask a specific question about what a document says, and the AI repeatedly says the work is copyrighted and it can't just tell me what it says _verbatim_, but it can answer specific questions for me in its own words (while telling me to check the original).

Two examples from my life are procedural questions about what Roberts Rules of Order would require in a given situation, and, what ASD STE-100 says about how to name/word things.

The applicable US law would appear to be USC 17 Sec 106 and 107, which on one hand limits derivative works, but on the other, allows fair use for purposes of teaching, scholarship, or research.

(USC references provided by AI, btw. Which I haven't read)

I used to agree with you, and then oddly enough, about 25-30 years ago, I came across this signature on another regular slashdot posters postings:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

(AI tells me the attribution is "The Red Lily", Anatole France, 1894)

I think the only Premium TVs left are the business TVs that give you meaningful mechanisms to not have intrusive "Smart" features.

Is there a meaningful difference between a Sony TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features, and a Wal-mart TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features?

I guess I am blessed to not be an audiophile and not have flawless supervision :)

FWIW, I have:
- a 20 yo 720p dumb 42" plasma
- a 20 yo 1080P dumb 50" plasma
- a 1yo 4k Samsung 65" TheFrame TV

That last one was a splurge I wanted because the "Art Mode" is just too beautiful, and at the time, Samsung really had the only coherent offering. (I guess there are now "off brand" ArtTV attempts from HiSense and others.. i have no experience with them.)

On the ArtTV, we watch youtube or DVDs or XBox on it a little of the time, and all that stuff looks fine to me on the 65" Samsung. But the TV is otherwise displaying pretty artwork almost all of the time, and whatever Samsung has done with the screen, dimming control, bezel, etc, really does work and really is lovely. And you don't need a service or an app to get the experience - just stick a USB full of public domain masterpieces into the TV.

Even so, the Samsung ecosystem is pretty annoying. I can have it show my images in ArtMode, but i cannot have the "real" experience you'd get with a subscription - with Art XML metadata and stuff (artist, date, etc). We don't always remember what a piece is or who painted it when it comes up..

Anyway, AFAIK, the only way to get TVs that aren't enshittified spyware is a business SKU, right?

In my house, we use Steam to play "windows-only" games on:
- Devuan with XFCE
- Devuan with Cinnamon
- Arch with hyprland
- bone stock Ubuntu 24
- ubuntu 25 laptop w/ second GPU

From my POV, there's not much need to port games to Linux. With the heroic efforts of Valve, most Windows games now just work. Win32, DX, D3D, and whatever else windows game devs have been using seems to have become the defacto reference gaming API on Linux.

Steam makes it work on every linux distro we've tried.

In writing this, it occurs to me: The F/OSS ecosystem does a very good job of re-implementing someone else's API/products (WINE, Proton, LibreOffice, etc)

The F/OSS ecosystem does a comparatively poor job at independently developing its own technology and then standardizing/universalizing those choices. E.g. the transition from X11 to Wayland; the systemd "situation(s)", desktop environments... gui greeters, audio muxers...

I think Valve has done the right thing. They made existing games work on Steam; they made Steam work on most linux distros.

Making everyone use a reference linux platform seems to be a total non-starter.

We already have a reference gaming platform: Windows 7 thru 10. And what we learned in 2025 is that Steam on nearly _any_ Linux often implements that windows reference gaming platform better than Windows 11 does.

At that point, wouldn't it be more efficient (in "useful motive power per dollar", taking into account both the reactor side and the truck side) to use the nuclear reactor to generate electricity, then use that electricity to charge batteries?

EV batteries ... just don't die that often.

If you're citing coal as the fossil fuel that solar+batteries must compete with, you clearly do not know what the fuck you are talking about.

Coal is nowhere near the cheapest fossil fuel. Natural gas is.

We can go further than that and probably say that if the world had transitioned away from fossil fuels earlier, Putin would never have been in a position to invade Ukraine (torching hundreds of billions of dollars of value and killing a vast number of people).

Petrostates tend to be pretty shitty.

We should count all of the extra military spending in the Middle East as a subsidy for oil, too.

The only reason anyone cares about various tinpot dictators is because they have oil -- and the reason the Middle East is so prone to tinpot dictators in the first place is *because* they have oil.

I am happy to pay taxes to build low-carbon infrastructure. Earlier this year my old car was totaled; I didn't buy an expensive new fully EV, but bought a relatively cheap used plug-in hybrid after calculating that it would let me drive 70% on electrons.

The EV community is well aware of, and quite grumpy about, the proliferation of high-end EV's in the US. Many more affordable electric vehicles exist elsewhere that are not sold in the US -- Chinese ones, yes, but also smaller models that are not sold in the US because Detroit and importers perceive (wrongly, in my opinion) that American buyers only want large expensive models. But the average purchase price of a new car in the US is to my mind ludicrously high -- around $47K. This is higher than a Model 3, for instance. So the most common EV option is actually cheaper than the average purchase price of a new car.

The cost of climate mitigation will necessarily be borne by people who won't benefit as much -- wealthy people (who tend to live in cooler climates) need to stop burning fossil fuels so that poorer people (who tend to live in warmer climates nearer the Equator) don't suffer so much from global heating. It is perfectly reasonable to expect the wealthy to pay the cost to stop injuring the poor. The impact of unmitigated climate change on the global poor is going to be staggeringly bad; there is no reasonable path that doesn't involve mitigating it.

I think your last assertion may be true when comparing the American wealthy to the middle class, but not true when comparing the middle class to the working poor. The wealthiest people don't have fixed working hours while the middle class is usually doing a 9-5. But the working poor (who more often work shifts that are not M-F 9-5) have access to off-peak times; they are not "getting home at 6pm, then drawing 3kW for their stove and another 3kW for their car" as much as the 9-5ers in the middle class.

Time-of-day pricing lowers the cost of generation for everyone by better aligning supply with demand, reducing the amount of power that has to come from (expensive and inefficient) peaker plants.

The bigger issue is the availability of charging infrastructure in places where poorer people live, like apartments. I live in an apartment and have to charge my PHEV at work, paying 50% more per kWh than I would pay at home (and that's without time-of-day adjustments).

And there are, in fact, security updates -- including a very recent one:

https://knowledgebase.frame.wo...