Yep. Traveling into the EU is far more pleasant than traveling into the USA, at least for me (Canadian).

One wrinkle is that if I ever travel to the USA (which I haven't done in a while and don't intend to do in future), I go through customs pre-clearance here in Canada. So if they start hassling me, I can just say "OK, I've changed my mind; I don't want to enter the USA." They can detain me for a bit, but ultimately they have to let me go, because I'm on Canadian soil.

I don't want a car with any sort of touch-screen. In fact, apart from the backup camera, I don't want a screen at all. When the car is not in reverse, the screen should either be blank or showing GPS navigation. That's it.

People like this witness are the heroes we need. I hope he has security, though. With this much at stake, I wouldn't put anything past Meta or its political buddies.

I had a Pinebook PRO and it was... meh. Way too slow and underpowered for modern web browsing. Also shipped with Manjaro, but I'm a Debian fan. I installed Armbian instead; PINE64 doesn't offer much in the way of hardware documentation and so I spent a fair bit of time getting Armbian to work. I had to munge the device tree files based on the ones in Manjaro. I ended up selling the laptop.

In retrospect, I probably should have hung on to it. I could probably sell it for more now!

Inflammation increases the risk of cancer, and sugar increases inflammation, so it's not too surprising.

It is an exaggeration to say "Disney got their ass handed to them." Disney settled that lawsuit and opinion was mixed as to who won. Even a lot of republicans thought DeSantis was being stupid.

Trump is about to learn: You don't fuck with Mickey Mouse.

Disney takes no prisoners once it gets into a legal battle.

In other news, Google is working on an AI model that can de-anonymize anonymized data sets.

Social media's current surveillance-capitalism business model is destructive and corrosive. It's genuinely harmful to society and needs to be completely destroyed.

I'd be fine with social media that (1) is forbidden from using ads to obtain revenue; (2) only shows content from people or groups you explicitly follow, and only in strictly reverse-chronological order; (3) makes it clear when you've seen content before so you know you've seen the rest of the timeline, and (4) is only allowed to use subscription fees to sustain itself.

Meta makes probably between $3 to $5/month per user. If users are not willing to pay that much for social media, then clearly its utility is vastly over-rated.

So nobody has a gambling addiction? They just fritter away all of their money, lose their houses and cars and possessions because they're fully in control?

This is true. I used to be on social media, and then about two years ago, I deleted my accounts.

I lost touch with a few hundred "friends".

But I've kept in better touch with my actual friends then before. We text, we email, we meet for lunch or coffee or whatever, and we socialize. And nobody feels compelled to take pictures to prove it actually happened.

So yes. Friend count down by 90%. Friend interaction quality up by 300%.

Nothing. That's the whole point. It's a void that does not need filling.

We managed to survive without social media before. We'll manage it again.

Your examples are physical objects, whose texts are widely-available in less-rare printings. If someone shreds a rare first-edition Lord of the Rings, they have not deprived society of the cultural heritage of the text.

I'm talking about a rare book whose contents are not available in other printings.

Honestly, the best outcome from my POV would be the bankrupting of Meta and the end of all of its products and services. Meta is a net negative for humanity.

Sadly, this is very unlikely to happen given the lobbying power of Meta and the reluctance of courts to impose a corporate death sentence.

First of all, a rare book is likely to be old and therefore out of copyright.

Secondly, there are non-destructive ways to scan books. And then if the book is out of copyright and has cultural value, Amazon can donate it to anyone who thinks it's worth preserving, or at least digitize it and give the results to the Internet Archive.

If the book is still in copyright, but LLM training is considered "fair use", then Amazon can still sell or give away the book after it has been scanned.