That may not work the way you think it will, but that’s a spoiler for the second movie, IIRC.

Just get a carrot nose, you can be the snowman. His schtick is that he can’t wait for Summer, because he doesn’t realize he’ll melt.

(Yeah, that’s a spoiler, but if you haven’t seen the movie yet you don’t care)

I’m surprised Elon didn’t convince them to take the payments in Dogecoin…

Every defendant in the US is entitled to a presumption of innocence, and the Prosecution is obligated to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. So, a defense attorney can be seen as performing a valuable service, to keep Prosecutors in check, and make sure they are doing their jobs correctly.

But I do wonder sometimes if these defense attorneys ask their clients whether or not they did the thing, or if they expressly say “Don’t tell me whether or not you did it”…

See my edit, it’s Jacksonville Beach FL

Where is this?

Edit: Found it! Jacksonville Beach, FL

30.280765 N 81.393002 W

I found crypto earlier than some. (not everyone – if I had more I wouldnt have to work anymore, haha!)

IMHO, the main value proposition of crypto is permissionless peer-to-peer payments. If we both have crypto wallets, and you send me an address to make a payment to, I can send that without needing anyone’s approval first. I don’t need any bank to agree to have me as a customer first, or any government to approve why the transaction is taking place. All I need is a functioning payment network, and the original Bitcoin white paper solved how to provide that and preserve anonymity. (Really Pseudo-anonymity, but only the nerds and Monero shills care about the difference)

As an academic experiment regarding permissionless payments, it is a resounding success. But, it turns out, Governments have laws regarding who can pay who, and about scamming people, regardless of the medium. So, just because Bitcoin enables permissionless payments doesn’t mean you can pay whomever you want, or makes scams somehow permissible.

Furthermore, the rapid increase in crypto prices really doomed any chance at all for useful adoption. Because people don’t want to spend crypto anymore. They view it as a Store of Value, and who can blame them, given how it has risen from nothing to a > $2T market cap, even after the recent downturn? You used to be able to use crypto in regular transactions, but not anymore.

Normally, I am all for Techdirt’s takes. But I think this one is off the mark a bit, because I legitimately think that infinite scroll and auto play are insidious, and actually harmful enough to be treated as a dangerous design decision.

The whole point of Section 230 is that communications companies can’t be held responsible for harmful things that people transmit on their networks, because it’s the people transmitting those harmful things that are actually at fault. And that would be reasonable in the initial stages of the Internet, when people posted on bulletin boards (or even early social media) and the harmful content had a much smaller reach. People had to “opt in”, essentially, to be exposed to this content, and if they stumble on something they find objectionable they can easily change their focus

But the purpose of the infinite scroll and auto play is to get people hooked on content. The algorithms exist to maximize engagement, regardless of the value of that engagement. I think the comparison to cigarettes is particularly apt. They are looking to hook people into actively harmful behaviors, for profit. And the algorithms don’t really differentiate between good engagement and harmful engagement. Anything that attracts the users attention is fair game.

The author’s points regarding how these rulings can be abused are correct, but that doesn’t negate how fundamentally harmful these addictive practices are. It will be up to lawmakers to make sure that the laws are drafted in such a way that they can be applied equitably… (So maybe we’re screwed after all…)

“Scientific Community” is kind of a broad term. It is composed of a lot of smarty-pants types who are unlikely to take “no” for an answer, and will keep trying to fix the problem.

In the end, you may be right, and there’s no way to stop the runaway train, and all these folks will accomplish is getting our hopes raised while they earn their PhD’s and present papers in worldwide conferences they all burned jet fuel to get to.

But, what if you turn out to be wrong, and one of those poindexters actually figures out how to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere in an economical fashion, and they manage to stop the train? That person will be instantly famous, and the Nobel Prize might be the least of their accolades. They will be remembered as one of humanity’s greatest minds. If they happen to be British, they will be buried in that cathedral next to Newton and Darwin and Hawking, that’s how important it will be.

So, they will keep trying, because it’s as close as you can get in this life to immortality.

If there are some communities you simply can’t live without because they provide good links you are interested in just download an RSS reader. Reddit still allows RSS access, at least for now.

You won’t be able to post and interact with the content anymore, but let’s face it, Reddit is actively purging itself of humans, in favor of bots, for some reason. So the discussions are filled with slop and useless now. I’m glad I didn’t buy any stock.

I was a big fan of Stephenson since Snow Crash blew my mind as a teenager. Still am, I suppose. But he desperately needs an editor. I don’t think I finished any of his last books over the last 10 years or so. I’m not sure whether that his fault, though, or whether my attention span is trash now that I’m older.

Anathem was a masterpiece though. Probably in my Top 5 favorite sci-fi books.

Seems to me like ChatGPT isn’t even the main plot. This is a CEO who has bad ideas and doesn’t take “No” for an answer. In the before times, he would just fire people who don’t agree wih him until he has a staff who can’t think for themselves. But that takes time, so all the bot did is speed it all up.

I always thought that Joe Biden’s campaign slogan should have been “Make Politics Boring Again”

I would have voted for Pikachu

But you don’t understand! Some of those Charizards were shiny!

My #1 tip for stopping media addiction is to turn off notifications. There is simply nothing going on that requires your immediate attention. It can wait until you have time to check. Try it!

Honestly, I’m just surprised this is the first time someone has dared to put a phone SOC in a laptop chassis.

I’m probably missing something fundamental, but isn’t this just a Chromebook?

I’m kind of hoping the rest of the world wakes up and realizes that sending teams to the US to compete right now us just as bad as sending teams to Russia. The world should boycott it, and let the US claim its trophy after the Saudis field the only other team.

The article lists an insane revenue of $1.6B, yet the losses are only on the order of $42M in the last 3 months. Against that much revenue, it looks to me like they are managing the company at a slight loss on purpose. They probably could close that gap if they wanted to, but have some favorable tax implications or something by running that “slight” loss.

(And who knows, maybe this is part of the attempt to close that gap and show a profit before the founders cash out and it all gets sold to a Shittier company)