Elon certainly talks a good line, but his actions don’t really follow. Like, I agree with this, eliminating intellectual property would be great. I am sure that whatever actions he tries in regards to this won’t actually follow through and will instead somehow be twisted to benefit him at the cost of others.

That is absolutely not a free feature on Steam. Some publishers like Paradox leave old versions as ‘beta’ branches to allow us to reinstall them, but Steam as a whole is very against you playing anything but the latest version.

You cannot instruct Steam to not update a game. When you launch a game, Steam will update regardless, unless you have gone offline, or you launch it in a way that bypasses the Steam client. If you ever forget to go offline before launching a game, Steam will forcibly update it

Ai can combine two things. It can train on completely normal pictures of children, and it can train on completely normal adult porn, and then it can put those together.

This is the same reason it can do something like Godzilla with Sailor Moon’s hair, not because it trained on images of Godzilla with Sailor Moon’s hair, but because it can combine those two separate things.

There’s a good chance it wouldn’t stick depending on many factors, but it’s extremely expensive to fight in court, and courts have shown themselves to be very hit or miss with technological things. Especially when trying to apply rules that were not written with things like software in mind.

One problem is people can’t keep secrets. This involves too many people who would have to keep the secret. And when it comes out that it’s just a marketing ploy, some portion of the customers would be even more upset.

There certainly wouldn’t be any regrets (because you would not have time to do so before death).

Depends on what you mean by ringworld. The thing I think of is orders of magnitude more impossible than a Dyson sphere, which is already pretty impossible.

Since at least the 1970s and probably much earlier, any and all non-heterosexual people have been painted as pedophiles by right wing / conservatives.

Indeed, a lot of the pedophile panic these days is driven by those people, because it is one of the few things they can get everyone to hate, and that hate often shuts down nuance and reason, and while real pedophiles are a problem, they want to expand that unthinking hate, that knee jerk ‘burn the heretic’ reaction to more people.

This is the reason we now see people attacking even completely fictional media, because they’re trying as hard as possible to slippery slope it.

So she’s a midget stripper wearing 2 and a half foot heels?

It would mean that whatever the US might hope to gain from invading Canada would be dwarfed by what the US would lose in the conflict.

The problem is this is already the case. Nuclear weapons may make it even more lopsided, but the country is already losing more than it stands to gain from an invasion purely on the economic results.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot lately is that democracy is a process. It is a means by which we attempt to ensure a just and fair government for all. It’s not an end in itself; we don’t want democracy because democracy, at least not once people really think about it.

Which leads me to a saying. “The ends do not justify the means.” This is a commonly held statement. However, it also works the other way:

The means do not justify the ends.

That means it doesn’t matter if something was done by the rules, using the process, it doesn’t matter if we voted for it, it doesn’t matter what process was used to achieve it. If the ends are wrong, going “well, it’s what was decided democratically” isn’t an excuse.

If one person or a few people have a definition wrong, that’s a thing that can be corrected.

If the majority of people think that’s the definition, and it’s been that way for decades, then you have the definition wrong.

I like this template so much better than the Spider-Man one that people constantly use backwards.

It’s sad that in a country of over 300 million people, only one of us is both marginally competent enough to take successful action against these people, and not a chicken shit coward unwilling to put themselves on the line. And yeah, at least for now, I too am among the chicken shit cowards.

It’s deeper than that. It’s about defense of the Status Quo. No superhero looks around at the parts of society that we just accept without thinking about and says this needs to change.

That guy failed. It makes a big difference when they actually get killed.

If I understand correctly they have some kind of explanation where the sun works like a spotlight or something. But it also requires light to curve in weird ways to make any damn sense, soooo…

If it was me in their place, I’d try giving up as little as possible then seek some sort of binding defense agreement, whether NATO or something else. And if necessary do it in secrecy so Russia doesn’t hear about it until the agreement is fully in force.

Honestly I just think the US is simply not reliable, and with Ukraine seemingly relying heavily on the US, they need to be looking for the quickest exit strategy they can come up with at a moment of strength.

Hopefully, if Republicans prevent continued US support, other countries will still provide enough…I just fear it may not be, and that seems like a worse outcome for Ukraine’s people.

I hope they do, but this is why I’ve always thought Ukraine needed to be a little less hard-line on not giving up any territory. Because I figured it was only a matter of time before the Republicans (and other similar parties/groups in other countries) ratfucked the support away from them.

I don’t know if Russia was ever open to negotiating, but if they were, Ukraine may find themselves wishing they had negotiated at a high point, instead of their support being pulled out from under them.

Sadly, the US is simply not a reliable ally or source of support right now, and probably won’t be until getting the internal insanity under control. Until there are two parties actually willing to govern instead of one party trying to govern and the other acting like a deranged shit-flinging baboon, the US will be unreliable.

Is being vegan a moral thing? Most that I’ve heard say yes.

This means that regardless of outward harassing them about it, your mindset is one in which they are doing something immoral and do not care to change it. It is inseparable: the position that it is morally correct to be vegan is inseparable from the corollary that those who are not are less moral.

Knowing that your romantic partner judges you as a bad person does not really make for a positive relationship, I would say. I doubt I would be willing to date someone who holds that position.