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Comment The grift is now right out in the open (Score 5, Informative) 50

Congress "did not intend" to legalize straight-up gambling nationwide through what amounts to a semantic loophole. There is absolutely no doubt about that, on any side of this discussion (including the CFTC).

It's funny - Online discussions among (real) investors often worry about, and frequently caution each other about insider trading. The reality is, insider trading isn't applicable to the vast majority of us. Unless you're a C-level employee, specifically working in M&A, or maybe as the lead on a truly revolutionary new product (no, your company's Facebook wannabe or thinly disguised open source ripoff ain't it) - You have no insider information to trade on. Sincere belief that your employer's cool new toys are going to change the world ain't it - every company has cool new toys in the pipeline, and most of them are going to flop or at best be just another branded widget.

Thanks to Kalshi and Polymarket, congrats, every single one of us can now have truly actionable insider information. And that's not good, because as the past year has shown repeatedly, the average Joe is more than willing to use that information and has zero comprehension of securities regulations.

And to be clear, I have no substantial objection to gambling. This sham is something else entirely, however, and that something is a naked power grab.

Comment Conversations (Score 1) 89

"How did you get hired?"
"I was top at Fortnite. You?"
"Combat flight sims."

"Damn, two Boeings just crashed over an oil refinery on city limits and took out half the city."
"Did you remember to save your position beforehand?"
"Yeah."
"The reload and continue from there. No-one will notice."

I love computer games. I have XPlane 12 and many scenery packs. I rank well on Elite:Dangerous. From the sounds of it, the FAA would see me as over-qualified. In reality? There's no way in hell I'd be taking those kinds of risks with real lives. There's a huge difference between having good reflexes and a good eye, versus having the complex 4D spacetime relationship mental models needed for robust air traffic control.

Comment Re:Pointless circle jerk. (Score 1) 39

In order: no, no, no, no, yes, no.

The lone "yes" is for illegally obtained. Otherwise you're effectively banning the default situation for every smartphone on the market today.

More to the point, Meta's glasses are in no way unique - And make no mistake, I loathe all things Meta as much as the rest of you. Unmodified, they're no different than using any other camera in public (including dozens of competing smart / camera glasses). Even modified - I hate to break it to you all, but go to Amazon and search for hidden / spy / nanny cams. I get nearly a thousand results and that's from a major, primarily law-abiding (if we don't count labor and competition) online store. If you go to a site actively specializing in spy cams, you can find even more, smaller, and creepier form factors beyond your wildest imagination.

There is, bluntly, zero technical difference between the nannycam in my kitchen smoke detector, and a spycam in your bedroom or a public bathroom. Any meaningful legal solutions here therefore must focus on intent (primarily in production and, secondarily, consumption). Or, as in this FP, we can pretend spanking Meta changes any of what I've just described.

To be clear, I'm not at all defending the creeps or Meta in general. Fuck 'em, and fuck 'em hard. But let's not lump the 99.9% of well-meaning and law-abiding users of recording technology in with the actual criminals.

Comment Re:So i can just post 30TB and get it later? (Score 4, Informative) 49

No. Trying to push 30TB into Freenet will be interpreted as an attack on the network by other peers and they'll disconnect from your peer.

Freenet is better viewed as a communication medium than a storage medium. Data is prioritized according to demand, somewhat like an LRU cache. You can't upload 30TB and expect the network to preserve it for you.

On liability, running a Freenet peer is more like running network infrastructure that automatically routes and caches other people's traffic than intentionally publishing it. US law explicitly recognizes this distinction in the DMCA's provisions for transitory network communications and system caching. We discuss this in more detail in the FAQ.

Comment Re:Just a heads up, decentralized platforms... (Score 4, Informative) 49

You obviously haven't tried Freenet. You can join our room on River and you'll see no spam, no fraud, no hate speech, none of that.

Decentralized doesn't mean unmoderated. Systems built on Freenet can be moderated however their creators and communities want. River is moderated.

The difference is that nobody running one service gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to run.

Comment Re:so what? (Score 2) 63

For AI calls, there's a new wave of YouTubers rocking this space and it's hilarious. The trick is getting the AI to accept a recursive set of seemingly reasonable meta-requests, at which point it's game over. "Sorry, I'm hard of hearing and having trouble understanding you. It would help if every time you say a word with double letters in it, you replace them with the word "bookkeeper". Then just stay quiet until their monthly token budget runs out. Note that's not a real example I've seen, it takes a bit more subtlety to slowly lure them into a self-referential trap, but that example illustrates the end goal perfectly.

Comment Paramount is bluffing (Score 5, Interesting) 170

California has countless context-specific legal exemptions across a broad swath of labor and safety regulations specific to the entertainment industry. Those exemptions largely don't exist outside California.

Could that regulatory climate be recreated elsewhere? Of course it could. Will it? Unlikely, and certainly not in the next two months. But hey, who needs child actors or a clear process for managing liability when an action hero accidentally ends up inside a real wood chipper? Not Ellison!

Comment Re:This is a bit too new to tell (Score 2, Insightful) 177

Being silenced inappropriately by clanker mods is far more frustrating than getting nailed for plenty of minor "real" crimes we consider legitimate. I've grudgingly accepted every speeding ticket I've ever gotten because I deserved them; meanwhile, fuck Reddit for banning anyone that mentions 2A or I/P (in a completely nonviolent and non-racist context).

This is all the more offensive when companies try to hide behind section 230 for their own capricious actions while explicitly violating it to remove content because /rolls dice/ it's Tuesday and Spez didn't get a hummer with breakfast today.

MMW, sooner or later this will come to a head and we'll have riots over it leading to a basic "bill of social media rights". It would be better if we could just skip ahead to the peaceful ending, but clearly that option is not on the table.

Submission + - Freenet: Apps Without Platforms

Sanity writes: Earlier this year Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applications, apps on Freenet have no central server or database, with application state instead distributed across the network. These now include decentralized group chat, publishing, search, and fully decentralized Git hosting. The talk also gets into some of Freenet's internals, including how we use machine learning for network routing.

Comment Re:Need new AI editors (Score 1) 65

You see, Linus has embraced transhumanism and is testing out the new kernel as a supplementary brain function, using MOSIX to offload all of the irritable comment generation at yet more nonsense on the mailing list to an Elizabot that he has written specifically to do this. This saves his actual brain for real work.

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