They changed the rules to target cosmopolitan gamer sock puppet accounts if I remember correctly.

Don’t beat yourself up for not having a plan. You’re not an aberration in society. The people who plan everything are just the loudest so we think that’s the norm. Sooner or later, out of necessity or love, you’ll hit upon an idea that you’ll pursue.

This seems right to me. It’s the lone gunman riding into the sunset at the end of a Western. The big action has concluded and the end is in sight.

It’s the Hollywood version of “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.” Which is a questionable phrase by today’s standards but shows how we come up with weird proverbs surrounding stuff ending.

Muse has been downloaded 9 million times in the U.S. and Canada since its launch on September 8, market intelligence company AppMagic, told Rest of World.

I don’t even want to know where they got this figure. Downloads are not the same as users. I would imagine a third is tech influencers and journalists who played with it for a hot minute, produced their piece on it, and uninstalled. The figure is immediately less impressive, isn’t it.

The question of “Western” values over local ones in developing countries is valid. While I would assume the models will be able to learn, I also think the users there will quickly realise that this stuff doesn’t work and stop using it. A similar thing will happen in areas of sketchy internet coverage. People will just not use this crap. And that the vegetable stall on the street market is going to implement an inventory system and publish an agent-friendly website so they can be part of this magnificent technology sounds very unlikely to me. Payment systems, okay. If you can do that on a phone connection. But this much complication? In the PRC in a big city maybe, Burkina Faso maybe not so much.

The agent apocalypse won’t be as bad, I don’t think. There will be plenty of stories of how the Meta agent rather than booking a 10:30am ordered a military drone strike on the nail salon by mistake or something.

The languages are a thing. Even in developed nations like Switzerland or Belgium there are challenges that the “American Intelligence” people have probably not thought about. Brussels is good example where dual infrastructure for Flemish and French speakers exist and really 2.1 language groups live separately and together at the same time. The .1 is all the EU and NATO foreigners in the city plus the odd Belgian German speaker. Booking an appointment at a doctor that doesn’t speak your language through your clever agent isn’t helpful.

There is an element of cat and mouse to this scam. I don’t think you providing a good example case is going to enable the assholes to do a better job. They would get there anyway and then we find other ways to make it harder for them. The benefits of reaching and teaching the clueless outweigh the danger of steepening the enemy in my opinion.

If it’s online it’s out in the open. Even if you make a website and exclude it from search engine indexes, there will be an LLM that doesn’t gaf. You could publish only a hard copy book or VHS tapes to reach the target audience. But then you limit your reach as well.

I read about some research (and it may have been funded by the socials, I don’t remember) that in a Coke/Pepsi blind test, users preferred algorithmic feeds. Most people do not think too much about what is happening behind the scenes and are happy to receive content they like. The unwashed masses are less concerned with things like privacy or moderation of content. I think there is a strong correlation between people who care about such things and their preference for chronological feeds. And we’re the minority.

An algorithmic feed will always be a better vessel to sell ads. Or in a more conspiratorial sense, to serve you “approved content.” So in the end, it boils down to money. Money prefers algorithms.

It’s precedent-ish. The first court in Munich did the hard work from scratch. The Aachen court copied and pasted their logic into their own ruling. There is a strong chance that for the time being other courts will come up with similar rulings under comparable case conditions. But Google may be waiting for a case where they are not quite as likely to lose if they appeal. Funny shit can still happen, especially if the highest federal court can be convinced to rule on a case like this. So it’s too early to tell if this precedent has more long lasting staying power.

Mullvad didn’t donate money. One of their founders donated some of his private money to this loonie party. Money that may have come in full but in all likelihood really only in part from the payments he received from Mullvad. But it wasn’t a company decision to give them money.

Now, Mullvad, the company, in my opinion reacted poorly to this. It’s not so much the donation but the company’s reaction to the affair that would’ve been enough for me to switch VPN providers. I wouldn’t hold them responsible for the decisions one of their leaders made in his private life. But this “all politics are okay for us” PR response was the wrong reaction for me.

The party is better described as a horseshoe party. They present a mix of politics that’s mostly very left leaning except for their views on immigration where they turned hard the other way. Calling them Nazis is using the term a bit inflationarily. The real Nazis in Sweden are the Sweden Democrats and they are already in parliament.

I started a rewatch of DS9 a couple of months ago and I’m a third done with S7. I saw Oceans 11 on DS9 earlier today. Didn’t even skip all the bad Ferengi episodes in the rewatch.

I suppose it was hard for the makers of Disco to square the circle of telling Star Trek stories in a post breaking bad streaming era. In TNG S1 they use the phaser as a visual effect maybe a dozen times, most of those in Conspiracy, because it cost too much. Now they can do whatever for a dime so they overlooked that we liked the character stuff they wrote to fill the hour so they wouldn’t blow most of the budget on SFX. I hope that in a future fourth wave Trek they fill the hollowness we feel.

Yeah, I have been looking at the veritable content drought we’ll be entering since there is nothing in production any more. And in streaming TV stuff takes ages to get off the ground or even renewed. I read on the grapevine that letting all existing contracts expire is a way to kick Kurtzman out and after that there is a chance for a fresh start under new leadership. But that will take time until after Academy S2 goes online. So considering all this stuff going on behind the scenes, I’m okay with Muppets and Casablanca in space. Whatever! Better than nothing.

A prequel! What a novel idea.

This should be an org chart at the Star Trek office today when they look at show ideas: is it another prequel? Yes - don’t pursue this idea. No - Allamarain! Move along home.

Granted, they got lucky (initially) with SNW. But that needed a backdoor pilot through Disco to get launched.

If you get to that position and pet peeves are the first thing you’re thinking about you will have proven the Peter Principle correct. Again.

How would you know the baby was your deceased significant other? What have you sniffed this morning?

Are we moving towards an AI jihad? A jihaid, if you will.

Hormuz doesn’t fit in the Dune: Planet Earth narrative for me. We should stop using oil for the sake of the climate yet we don’t. We don’t have to go through that strait with so much trade. We just don’t want to take the detour and price increases. The Dune universe depends on the spice for navigation and I think there isn’t another source. We are still so dependent on oil out of habit and/or stupidity. The mullahs really aren’t the freemen. They are more of a side arm of the Harkonen clan that was provoked by the thoughtless action of the emperor’s real estate developer triggering their typical c@![ish behaviour.

I think there are more grey areas in the classification. Just take recreational weed use, which is as legal as smoking cigarettes in some regions but illegal in others. Where does the drug classification start? It’s not as clear to me as you seem to indicate.

Also, the content label doesn’t tell the proprietor of a cinema who can come and see a movie. Do they have to look up a combination of letters to see if a 14yo can go see It? How about something like Trainspotting where there is violence, foul language, and lots of hard drug use. A VLD rating doesn’t indicate anything. But for me the movie isn’t R because for all the pearl clutching it may cause for some people it’s a good promotional film to stay away from heroin.

You can run your system parallel to the existing one. And some of the streamers do that, I think. But for legal reasons, in the US as well as most of Europe, you cannot not give an age limit as well.

I stopped watching Marvel movies because I found the plots virtually nonexistent. And don’t get mad at me, dear reader, if you love them. That’s okay, I’m not taking that away from you. I’m just saying how I felt.

So I don’t know if I would sign on to your theory. I did enjoy a lot of the characters but it didn’t carry an ironman or Thor movie for me.

I would like a sequel of Hail Mary though.

These systems vary by country and you’ll find fault with most of them. They are more often than not rating systems that were introduced to appease a loud group in society, possibly the pious folks were one of those. Society’s natural inclination “to think of the children!” makes these rating systems more about age appropriateness than about clearly labelled content. I can see the logic in your approach to the subject. Logic probably wasn’t the driving force behind introducing labels such as “parental guidance” or “restricted.”

I think it might be easier as a committee to be compelled to come up with an age of people, for whom the content is appropriate, and not argue over labels until they’re blue in the face. Is vaping drug use? How much blood (if any) is required to be labelled violent? Etc. Can this committee agree with a majority vote that 12 year olds probably shouldn’t see this? That’s probably easier.

A fan on a boat would work. There are these fan boats people ride through the Everglades. There are propeller sea planes. The difference to a sailboat is the profile of the vessel under water. A sea plane has two or three smaller areas that are submerged. The everglade ones are just breaking the surface of the water and are very flat so they can glide over water and plants. A sailboat has a big, often deep profile under water, the whole length of the boat, possibly a keel underneath. And that’s moving through water, which is thicker than air. So you need possibly more than one propeller and the engine may need to give you more horsepower to move the boat through water with the force of the air above deck. That’s inefficient so boats tend to move their propellers under water.

A few container ships have a spinnaker sail they can deploy. If the wind is favourable they can reduce the engine output and save diesel. Just in case you’re wondering about the reverse situation.

In contrast, do you know any words that are near identical when written down between two “alphabetical” languages based on their spelling?

Yes.

Idiot (English) Idiot (m) Idiote (f, French) Idiot (m) Idiotin (f, German)

Time keeping developed as a local phenomenon. We are stuck with this dumb 24-hour clock. People don’t want to have to get up at 22:00 in Vanuatu to go to work when it should be 7:00 AM because it’s dawn outside. Time keeping stays local. Unless you live in the West of the PRC.

GMT has been rebranded UTC to remove the reference to Greenwich and whose acronym doesn’t stand for anything so not to annoy the French. NATO uses Zulu time, which is UTC, regardless of where they are on the planet.

We’d improve the situation if we all just agreed to get rid of daylight savings everywhere. If it wasn’t for that, the UTC +/- whatever would work much better. Alas, politics.