Truly, you have led a blessed life.

I just meant that there’s so many excellent games, old and new, everywhere you look, that it is easy to just walk past ones that seemed like they have anything even remotely distasteful about them.

That other ant colony on the other side of the sidewalk looks pretty good!

At the rate that software was bloating over the years, I’m surprised humanity has produced enough RAM already to load the latest version.

Yeah, but it’s complicated like an ant colony–incredibly complex and nuanced, but tiny, inconsequential, and easy to ignore.

I got one whiff of that dumpster fire and thought, “You know what? I’m going to check out some of the near-infinite other entertainment options available to me in the Information Age and give that whole thing a miss.” I’m sure a significant portion of other people interested in the game came to a similar conclusion, which can’t be ideal for their sales goals.

That’s just really good emulation at work. Alt+tab crashes tons of games in Windows, too!

Or maybe if quantum stillbirth is real, he died in a miscarriage and this is one of his infinite idiot ghosts.

I think that most of these guys know what radioactive lightning rods they are, and are savvy enough to at least understand that if they leave the safety of their domestic propaganda apparatus, they’re on their own in an environment likely hostile to them.

This guy’s apparently limited understanding of his role and where his bread is buttered thought he could make the same ass of himself over there as he did back home without consequence, and he was mistaken.

Unfortunately, I think most of those you listed, while dumb in a lot of ways, are savvy enough to know to keep a low profile when they go into enemy territory, which is essentially any place with a population higher than a bus.

I mean, he does have those things. I think that there is a widespread crisis of understanding of what those freedoms actually entail. To distill it down philosophically, freedom of speech and expression mean that a person with those freedoms can say anything they want and express themselves in any way they like, so long as those actions don’t infringe on the freedoms of anyone else.

There are no main characters, so everyone gets the same rights (for the sake of discussion; I know there are a million caveats here). Any right that everyone gets has to have borders around each individual, or those rights are auto-trampled by everyone else, for everyone.

This guy will have 6 months to reflect and learn that nuance. Let’s see if he does!

Maybe so, but it sounds like it was on increasingly obscure platforms. Even if he has an army of degenerate worshippers, he surely gets less media exposure, his financial lifeblood, on platforms nobody’s heard of, and one would think his viewership would decline over time even without getting locked away for the safety of basically everyone around him.

If it is “from the Makers of Thunderbird”, then I think it stands to reason that at least someone on the Thunderbird project spent time on this that they could have spent on that.

These FOSS projects barely have enough resources to complete their primary charter most of the time, so it really grates to see them squander their most limited assets.

I have read summaries of emails and meetings that had the action items all sorts of wrong, sometimes completely inverted.

It seems to me that if an email or meeting is at all important, the stakes are too high to trust the summary, and if it is not important, neither is its summary.

Add on to that the fact that locally running LLMs are even more scatterbrained, I don’t see how this fills even the limited need you’re describing in any useful way.

So, they spent their limited available manpower on an unrequested feature, and to add insult to injury, the feature is unlikely to have effective practical uses. It might be capable of more limited scope text prediction like code auto-complete, but the field is already flooded with those. I think the Thunderbird users have far more use from improvements to Thunderbird than they do for other unrelated products.

Generally speaking for routers, if you can get it at Best Buy, it is of poor quality, and if you can’t, it requires more expertise to use than most people have.

The quality of the router is not the biggest problem, though. Many routers now phone home and require you to provision them through the company portal, which strongly indicates they’ve got a back door to your traffic if they want it, and if you read their ToS, they give themselves permission to use it.

I’m not suggesting they’re hacking you or doing identity theft, but they are looking over your shoulder for things they can learn about you to make money, and in the future, they could potentially make money by collecting government bounties, since they’ll know who millions of people are and where they live.

Its really, really big and populous, and also ethnically, culturally, and socially diverse. I think those combined factors lead to California passing more volume and variety of laws than any of the other American states.

Many of the laws they pass are regulation on business and consumer protection in excess of those provided by the federal government, but the socially progressive side of politics has its villains, too. Their villainy comes in the form of forced trading of freedom for security–outlawing activities that are dangerous to you, or banning objects and knowledge that have the potential to harm you or others even if they have other practical uses.

Its the main reason why it is risky to fight for the victory of one’s own political “team” without further consideration. It is easy for people interested in the public good to be overzealous in enforcement of public safety.

It’s hard to get broad agreement on where to draw that line. For example, I tend to lean in the “natural law” direction, where I think you should be allowed to have and do almost anything you want, so long as it doesn’t materially harm anyone else, even indirectly. Most other people, even on the left, find that relatively extreme and believe in more personal regulation in the name of increased public safety. For example, most Democrats support moderate to strict restrictions on personal firearm, chemical, and encryption ownership, rather than banning the illegal uses of those things themselves. It is more dangerous for people to be able to be able to get dangerous stuff, so it makes sense people would have a lot of differing opinions on where to settle between “Mad Max” and “Minority Report”.

I do think that some projects will fare better than others, particularly ones like you mentioned, where the team is robust and capable of handling the filtering of increased submissions from these new sources.

I believe we are going to end up having to see some new mechanism for project submissions to deal with the growing imbalance between submission volume and work hours available for review, as became necessary when viruses, malware, and spam first came into being. It has quickly become incredibly easy for anyone to make a PR, but not at all easier to review them, so something is going to have to give in the FOSS world.

It is their problem until the second they submit it, then it is the project’s problem. You can lay the blame for the bad actions wherever you want, but the reality is that the work of verifying the legality and validity of these submissions if being abdicated, crippling projects under increased workloads going through ever more submissions that amount to junk.

What is the solution for that? The fact that is the fault of the lazy submitter doesn’t clean up the mess they left.

Sure, but if they can be demonstrated to ever plagiarize without attribution, and the default user behavior is to pencil-whip the output, which it is, then it becomes statistically certain that users are unwittingly plagiarizing other works.

Its like using a tool that usually bakes cookies, but every once in a great while, it knocks over the building its in. It almost never does that, though.

There’s the rub. When establishing laws and guidelines, every term must be explicitly defined. Lack of specificity in these definitions is where bad-faith actors hide their misdeeds by technically obeying the letter of the law due to its vagueness, while flagrantly violating its spirit.

Its why today, in the USA, corporations are legally people when its convenient, and not when its not, and the expenditure of money is governments protected “free speech”.

But now, even the person submitting the license-breaching content may be unaware that they are doing that, so the problem is surely worse now that contributors can easily unwittingly be on the wrong side of the law.

I don’t remember having heard any practical solutions to the problem so far. They work best on real data, but they rapidly grew to the point where they are generating dramatically more artificial data than humans are generating real data, so they have hopelessly polluted their own well.

Its a very difficult problem to deal with no obvious solutions that are at all cheap, easy, or even feasible, so someone’s going to have a really, really smart idea for them to get over that hurdle. Add on to that the fact the types of AIs most impacted by his problem, the LLMs, are the ones that are currently the most heavily subsidized by venture capital. So, not only are they facing increasing technical hurdles, they are about to get increasingly expensive to operate at the same time as the seed funding is used up and they have to switch to a revenue-positive business model.