Everything looks hypocritical when you invent positions out of whole cloth. I can't even fathom the Kardashian thing, you think opponents of pervert glasses love the Kardashian and love it when they wear pervert glasses? I mean, I can understand you inventing some position an "SJW" would have about a woman wearing one despite nobody ever saying that ever, but Kardashians?

Have you ever interacted with real people geekmux?

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.

Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.

Point me to the 'same grade' CPU equivalent of the M5 Pro and M6?

I mean, they literally show the use case for it on some of their the videos. It's not a general purpose one by any means, but this one is an actual Pro box, not a "I'm a consumer and just want the name Pro on my device" box.

The current use case is music production. Logic Pro. I have an Akai MPC Gen 2, with a touch screen for moving around the DAW and manipulating the virtual instruments. Logic Pro with the same level of interactivity would be fantastic, and no the iPad version doesn't cut it. I'm actually very interested in it for this specific reason.

Price? Well, I paid around £4k for my Intel 4Tb beast in 2019 to store all the sample-based instrument libraries I have. It's not a "let's buy this to look cool at the coffee shop" machine, although I'm sure some people will. I'm actually very interested in it for a serious step up in the way music production works.

You mean Lemmy?

I've tried it. It's OK but it needs more development.

They're facing a major problem, and it's partially of their own creation: there already is a wall between their content and the user searching for it. It's called Gemini. Would they be facing it if they boycotted AI early on rather than selling their user's content to Google et al? Probably not as bad. But they'd still be having problems.

Reddit's stock is down today after u/spez basically said "We're fucked" to the shareholders, pointing out there's been a dramatic reduction in web traffic, and that Gemini isn't sending them anything significant.

How enforcing logins will help is anyone's idea. But the website is dying at the moment, and it's not primarily because of Spez's utter incompetence, it's mostly because the open web is being shutdown by Big Tech in favor of slop generation. Reddit is the "Mostly open web", it relies upon the open web to exist. But the idea of posting questions and answers and discussions about specific technical things being viable as a "thing" is obsolete.

Look at Reddit today, look at r/all or r/popular, and it's primarily bot-created videos with stock sound tracks about nothing. It's a shell of its former self, and might only survive as a competitor to TikTok. And when was the last time anyone went to TikTok for anything more substantial than doomscrolling?

"I'll tell you the experience. It's pissing me off!"

I log in to read, but I regularly open threads by right-clicking and open in a different tab. Since I mostly use private browsing (Safari or Firefox) to stop advert tracking, this means that one tab is logged in but most of the ones I open to read later are not logged in. So now that pattern is dead? Then there's the "site:reddit.com" searches I do on topics that I just need an answer for rather than ever wanting to participate in. Again, same pattern - I use private browsing and I usually right click and open multiple tabs on several likely looking search results before then starting to read each tab to see if anything useful turned up. That pattern gone as well?

The summary touches on this next bit too - I'm wondering what will happen when I send a link to someone else, some of whom don't have and will likely never have Reddit accounts. Are they now simply unable to see it? Even Facebook isn't that harsh, and it's the perfect example too. I do not have nor will I ever have a Facebook account, but I'm sent the odd link now and again which I do open and look at without needing an account. A world where Facebook is more open than Reddit is just...odd.

I get their dilemma, but this seems a bit too far to me.

From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

How might that work? Every approach I've seen has a drawback:
- Write the app using "web app technologies"? You end up shipping with each application a redundant copy of most of Chrome. Your users can't afford that kind of storage bloat in this SSD shortage.
- Use native code that calls the facilities of the operating system that the hobbyist developer uses daily? "Sorry, my app doesn't support your OS yet."
- Use native code at all? "Sorry, my code signing certificate ran out; I recommend building from source code. Here's how:" followed by a script that downloads and installs 20 GB of build-time dependencies.

And end up with a lot fewer people installing your app because of SmartScreen Application Reputation (on Windows), Gatekeeper (on macOS), App Review (on iOS and Android), and other deliberate friction that operating system publishers have ostensibly put in the way of wide distribution of malware that can read and exfiltrate every document in your user profile/home directory. A domain name, an entry-level VPS, and a TLS certificate to operate a web application are a lot more affordable than the code signing certificates to sign ports of a native application to all major platforms.

And again, the SSD shortage. Web applications keep working even if evicted from disk cache for capacity reasons.

Years ago, I thought of three application categories that won't get Free replacements any time soon: video games, players for rented movies and TV shows, and individual income tax return preparation software.

I live in a US House district that FiftyPlusOne has marked as a "safe" seat for the incumbent member of the low-government-services party. How would I go about convincing the public that a municipal bulletin board system is anything other than a waste of tax money?

Under current law, mobile carriers have power to exclude those devices from their networks.

Reddit was like that once. But I've noticed lately the "front page" (be it r/popular or r/all) is dominated by "Let's show someone doing something cool and add a saccharine stock soundtrack to it" type videos.

I think it lost its soul when they did the API thing that lead to so many leaving. Moderation has seriously deteriorated as people interested in the subs they mod no longer mod them, real communities have mostly died out, and what's left is auto-moderated generic subs that bots post to dominating the site to the expense of everything else.

The recent news about forcing everyone to log in will probably not end the way u/spez thinks it will.