I got a summons once while I was overseas on holiday. The deadline to return the form had passed by the time I got back. I sent in the reply envelope anyway explaining the situation.

That was like a decade ago, and I haven’t had the courts ask after me since.

Nah, that seems pretty unlikely.

That story she tells about wanting to be a boy is basically tailor-made to drum up sympathy for her while shooting down a carefully-constructed strawman that doesn’t actually resemble the real experiences of body dismorphia, but superficially appears as though it could.

Wait, what’s the drama? I’ve just installed Revanced on a new device in the past month and it seemed fine?

Says the guy who still has an Amazon account :/

I mean, I still have an Amazon account. I even used it, less than two weeks ago. But that was the first time I actually used it to buy anything for nearly a decade.

People shouldn’t hold themselves too strictly to any sort of puritanism. Avoid the worst options as much as you can, but when it becomes infeasible for you, make an exception. That’s much better than just always going with the bad option.

I thought it hypocritical to crucify YouTube and have a Spotify or Netflix or Hulu subscription

Revanced. Or YouTube with an ad blocker. While supporting creators by directly buying albums/merch.

But I don’t think it hypocritical, necessarily. People can inherently only care about so much. For a long time I stopped shopping at Coles and went to Woolworths instead, because I was pissed more at Coles than at Woolworths over a couple of specific things. Then more recently Woolworths did even more to piss me off, so now I mostly shop at Aldi. At no point in this was it not accurate to say that both Coles and Woolworths are horrible duopolists that screw over their suppliers. But one had at least not been so blatant about its gross hypercapitalism bullshit by marketing the idea of brand loyalty and consumerism explicitly to children. So while both were always bad, one seemed the slightly less bad option. Until it didn’t.

Sorry but I don’t trust that infographic. Over 50% in Australia? Try more like 15. If it got Australia so badly wrong, how accurate are other countries?

Big shock.

Walking more popular when walking convenient and comfortable. But seriously, stories about this are important, because councils clearly do need some imports to start doing better.

I’ve had two PCs over this time period. One came with a pirated copy of Windows (bought overseas) and I later installed a legit copy with my uni’s licence. The other I transferred that same licence across to after building the PC myself.

I wouldn’t have described it as a golden era. More like a constant, steady, quiet sense of improvement.

I’m talking about the whole period of like 2010 to about 2018.

A decade ago things were looking really positive for the future of Mac gaming. It felt like more and more games were coming out supporting it. I’m not sure if their transition away from Intel has hindered it, or if it’s something else, but it definitely seems to have stalled.

Plus, the move to Apple Silicon has killed the back-up option of Bootcamp. Or I assume it has, I’ve not been a Mac user since before the transition, when my ageing MBP died and I just found I didn’t need any laptop to replace it.

paying Microsoft for an operating system

To be fair, I haven’t paid Microsoft for my OS…ever. And it’s not even piracy.

I got a licence for free through my university when I was in uni. And Microsoft seemed happy to let me keep using it and even upgrading it. I started on Windows 8, upgraded for free to Windows 10. If my PC didn’t have a processor that seemingly arbitrarily they decided can’t run Windows 11, I could be on that today.

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Being anticompetitive is far from the only way a company can be shitty.

Steam had to be sued by the Australian government into following the law regarding refunds for faulty products.

They have always been at the forefront of shitty gambling mechanics in video games, with their random loot boxes and tradeable skins.

And until recently, the hyper-consumerist FOKO-inducing structure of Steam sales was pretty awful.

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I thought I heard that California had a law requiring cancelling be just as easy as signing up? Is that not the case? (Assuming the name of the gym is an indicator of the city it’s based in, and not the state or country.)

At the risk of sounding like an overly obsequious AI… You know what, you’re completely right. I’m honestly not sure what use case I was imagining when I wrote that last comment.

That is a reasonable exception to no-AI policies in research papers and newspaper articles, but not for Wikipedia. As a tertiary source, Wikipedia has a strict “no original research” policy. Using AI to provide examples of AI output would be original research, and should not be done.

Quoting AI output shared in primary and secondary sources should be allowed for that reason, though.

The content is CC licensed, but they are trying to block AI scraping because it overloads their servers. They have a paid API that uses a lot less compute for both Wikipedia and the AI, as well as being a revenue source for Wikipedia.

the user needs to be smart enough to do whatever they’re asking anyway

I’m gonna say that’s ideal but not quite necessary. What’s needed is that the user is capable of properly verifying the output. Which anyone who could do it themselves definitely can, but it can be done more broadly. It’s an easier skill to verify a result than it is to obtain that result. Think: how film critics don’t necessarily need to be filmmakers, or the P=NP question in computer science.