I mean, given the problems the world currently faces, both are fairly optimistic. 50 years is a long time now. Nuclear treaties are expiring and the people in charge of the nuclear powers don’t seem the kind to decrease their nuclear armament, or make rational decisions regarding their use. A shifting climate could (not necessarily definitely will but certainly could) destroy our ability to feed ourselves at scale, creating a world where people are too concerned about food to worry about building robots or self-actualization. Clean water sources are becoming rarer and harder to access, so people might be too focused on fighting over water to worry too much about anything else. And the fun part is none of these are mutually exclusive. We could have a future where part of the world is a glowing crater, the equator is a sun blasted hell, and the Canadians and Siberians are the only survivors, fighting each other over what’s left of the bioaccumulating-poison-laden arctic fish as they shout their battlecries, words with a meaning no one remembers anymore; ‘SORRY!’ ‘BLYAT!’

All of them, and I haven’t even looked. If anyone is horrible, we all are horrible. My enjoyment of something they did does not change that.

My personal context turned that title into a joke. Just listened to a guy talking about the ‘AI kills junior jobs, so there won’t be a way to gather the experience that readies people for senior jobs,’ and the follow on was ‘when the older subject matter experts retire or die, they will take decades of experience and specialized knowledge with them, leaving no one with the skills needed to advance any field.’ Then I see that title.

Coming at this from a slightly different direction: what would be the issue with him taking literally any drug if he’s already in custody? Do they think there are ‘break out of jail’ pills? If he was literally just taking recreational drugs, wouldn’t that just give them an even clearer ‘probable cause’ to hold him? If they have no duty to enforce the law, they can’t be held responsible for letting it happen. If he takes cyanide and keels over, doesn’t that just do what the cops want and ‘take another criminal off the streets?’ They don’t care about his continued life or they’d be bringing in a doctor on first request. There is zero downside for the cops to just letting people take whatever they want.

There are ads on Lemmy? I’ve never seen one.

But, like so many things in this world, if you ask ‘why is this a thing?’ the answer is almost always ‘idiots exist.’ A handful of idiots DO click on ads and buy the products, download the malware, etc. It’s not much but the 30 real people lend legitimacy to the 970 ‘totally real people’ who ‘totally clicked on the ad but just didn’t buy anything’ according to the metrics, and it’s seemingly impossible to sell anything without paying rent to the marketers because it’s essentially analogous to nuclear arms; if no one had it, everyone would be happier, healthier, and safer, but if they have it and you don’t, you lose.

No love for LLMs from me but, flatly, no. Asking a question is soliciting a response. Their response is not the one you wanted, but it is solicited. It would be like you asking for a dick pic from someone, the penis of whom you were interested in seeing, and them responding with a generated image from one of the unfiltered image generators.
The intellectual equivalent to an unsolicited dick pic is probably spam advertising. A piece of media is being sent to someone who did not request it, by someone who does not care if the recipient does not want to receive it.

Ads need to be banned. They are inherently harmful, inherently deceptive, and only valuable in competition with other advertising. There is a direct line between the advertising model and the malignant politics that are destroying our world. Ban them all.

So, not so much ‘powers’ as technologies and strategies. ‘Powers’ in this space would suggest things like ‘power to arrest’ or ‘jurisdiction’ rather than the physical systems and strategies.

No. No more IP BS. Texas Chainsaw Massacre was what it was. A different format made by different people in different cultural context will have nothing but the name in common with the original. It’s just marketing to trick our monkey brains into thinking it will be good because it has the association with something good. Fuck nostalgia.

Antisemites don’t actually care about his religion. It’s racism. Jewish heritage means Jew, which to them means evil. No Jewish heritage but in their way means secret Jew, which to them means secretly evil.

That last sentence is worryingly close to conspiracy theory territory. There is no unified ‘They’ controlling what gets built in your town. Different places have different reasons for different things to be built. If you are seeing gas stations, it’s because someone with access to money, or pseudo-money in the form of debt, thinks they can make more money by building a gas station.
Chain A coming up directly across from Chain B might be one company trying to take over the area from the other. It could be Chain A management stupidly thinking 'we made $1,000,000 from our station at 5th and B, so if we open another at 6th and C it will also make $1,000,000. It could be upper management telling them to spin up more locations so they can go into next quarters investor meetings and say ‘Pay no attention to the debt on our balance sheet. Pay attention to the fact we just built 1000 new locations! We’re expanding! Please value our stock higher!’ It could even just be money laundering, criminals paying themselves $2 for every $1 of construction they do and then running the business pretending to sell gas for $8/gal. The one thing you can be assured of is, absolutely no one is sincerely saying ‘People need more banks and gas stations.’ The kind of person/organisation that spins up a dozen gas stations does not care what people/society need(s), only what they can do to convince people to give them more money.

Been using Fast Draw for a minute now. I like the simplicity and the lack of even the desire for a search bar. The only problem I have is that it can’t handle a widget well, and can’t handle more than one widget at all.

Depends on your definition. The majority of internet traffic is already ‘bots.’ The big platforms seem very interested in creating AI chatbots that will give the illusion of community and friendship, or at least engagement. It’s unlikely the old ways will ever fully disappear. There are still a few BBSs out there after all, but it will likely asymptotically approach ‘dead’ from now on.

The length is part of the analogy. The whole genre is a waste of time. A ‘mystery box’ is to mystery as a shaggy dog story is to a joke, but at least there’s some absurdist humour in a shaggy dog story when you realize it’s an anti-joke. The mystery box is just pretending to have put in effort. It’s human made but with the same level of ‘intelligence’ as AI slop.

These shows are insulting to the audience at the end because the whole production is just the producers saying ‘it doesn’t matter if it makes sense. These idiots will eat the slop and love it anyway.’ The people who say ‘I don’t care. I liked it anyway,’ are the exact idiots the producers are mocking, but too stupid to know they’re being mocked.

Gotta also point out, if they were things he ‘wanted for years,’ he already knew about them, knew he wanted them, and would have bought them. The ads were of no value in that situation.

But the big thing I have to question in this is, does this person have anyone they care about? It’s not all about them. Do they want those they love to be tracked and manipulated based on the data? Would they be comfortable with a system that tracked their daughter’s menstrual cycle based on the data they collected? If so, would they still be okay with it if the companies used that data to push unhealthy options on her when she’s being hit with PMT and feels like shit? What if the ad space was bought by a group who wanted to push her into a religion? Or an abortion? Or a political position they disagree with?

And let’s say they don’t have any problem with the people who they know have access to it now. Do they think the people who have it now will be unwilling to sell it? Is there someone out there they wouldn’t be comfortable with having access to their data? Because basically anyone can buy info from a data broker. Would they like it if their porn history was shared with potential employers? Or their health history? Even if they don’t put in anything they aren’t comfortable sharing, do they think no one else might put in info they don’t want shared? What about just plain misinformation? Do they want the data on them to be available to employers after someone with a grudge has had a chance to order BDSM gear in their name and create a profile for them on a fetish site or twenty? How about someone with no grudge, just who taps into his wifi because he hasn’t updated his security firmware in a bit? And all that info would be delivered to anyone who asks and is willing to pay <$20. He’ll never be told, ‘you didn’t get the job/loan/invite because of what we found on you.’ It’ll just be a silent wall between them and the other things they want, just because they liked that one time the company, which didn’t actually care what he wants, convinced him to buy something he would have bought anyway and spent the rest of the time selling access to him and his information, benefitting him not at all.

Lipo.

Imagine a man walks up to you in a top hat and suit. He shows his gloved hands are empty. He removes his gloves. He shows his ungloved hands are empty. He shows up his cuffs. His cuffs are empty. He removes his jacket. He rolls up his sleeves. His forearms are now bare. There is no place to hide a gimmick up his sleeves now. He guides you to a table. He knocks on it to show it is solid and ungimmicked. He shows you underneath and has you knock as well, to show that it is ungimmicked. He gingerly, with two fingers, reaches into a pocket, carefully and slowly, to pull out a deck of cards. He places it on the table. He picks it back up and removes the plastic wrap in front of you to show it’s not a deck he could have done something to. He reaches into another pocket. He pulls out a coin. He taps it on the table to show it is a real coin. He let’s you look at it for a moment, just to make sure you know it’s real. He reaches into a pocket again, and pulls out another coin. He taps it again. He shows it to you again. He reaches into a pocket again, and pulls out a pencil, painted like a magic wand, classic black with white tips. He lets you examine it, to see it is real. He places it carefully parallel to the cards next to the table. He picks up the coin, holds it up to catch the light, and then piles all of it back into his pockets, says, ‘Shows canceled,’ and walks away. It was never a magic trick, just all the hallmarks of a magic trick to hold your attention for a while.

I started From but I didn’t get the sense that it was building anything. There is a style of writing for shows, like Lost, where once you understand it, you can’t watch them anymore. They are made to get you to ask questions but never actually pull anything together, curiosity edging. It’s a process of making it seem like they have a plan, where anything might be the foreshadowing key to understanding the rules for the world they’ve built. However, there is no world which has been built, and thus no foreshadowing, no key, no past context or future destination to constrain the moment. It’s just a sequence of events with no rules and no goal, milking attention out of you drip by drip, the signifiers of mystery with no mystery, jigsaw puzzle pieces from a hundred different puzzles.

Check out Andy Ward’s stuff. If people in precolumbian America could do it, you probably can.

There’s something of Daniel Weyman in the eyes/brows. Maybe a bit of Richard Kiel/Ron Perlman in the jaw. The sunken cheeks are less common in modern/wealthy-home-country men, though.