A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

If you ever do decide to jump, I recommend PopOS. Based on Ubuntu, no snaps.

Chemistry. Cis-2-n-ene vs Trans-2-n-ene. First one is all carbons on the same side and the latter is carbons on opposite sides.

Parents are the best arbiter of children, except drag shows. Those the Government is best entity to dictate that, apparently.

I just can’t the double speak this group keeps defending.

The actual problem, binary labeling. If the category system is just "sexy" vs "non-sexy" you're going to piss off a ton of in-between. However, you want to do it, IDK. It can be sexy+1 to sexy+10 or mildly suggestive to NSFW. But Twitch needs to acknowledge there's a spectrum and ignoring that there is one is just going to piss people off.

Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated

— Elon Musk (Apr. 25, 2022 During the announcement Musk was buying Twitter)

I would think someone would point out the irony but I'm doubtful anyone could penetrate his fifteen astronomical unit thick ego. This man's money is the single reason anyone on this planet give him more than ten seconds of their lives.

Poor people aren't human and therefore don't deserve rights or help

Incorrect. Poor people are replaceable with other poor people and eventually with robots. The fact that poor people aren't doing anything today about any of this means that there will come a day where the 1% makes up around 50% of the still living global population.

When we invented the car, horses didn't go get better jobs we just started having fewer horses.

Capitalism does work in the voting with your wallet. However there's two things that tend to get in the way. Laziness and mergers. Either customers don't care and/or all your other opinions got bought out.

It was the absolute shamelessness with which that CEO disregarded safety, fired people who tried to make it safe, cut corners, lied to reporters about “partnering with Boeing” (they debunked it today), and on and on.

In unrelated news, Elon Musk looking for anyone wanting to go to Mars.

𝚄𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚘𝚍. 𝙷𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚊 𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚎 𝚍𝚊𝚢.

Um, sort of. Biden will plea guilty to two counts Federal misdemeanor of willful failure to pay income taxes (26 USC § 7203). Additionally, has entered into a pretrail diversion agreement on a felony charge of possession of a gun by a person who is addicted to illegal drugs. The agreement requires the defendant to comply with particular conditions set in the deal to avoid prosecution.

While none of this per se is from the "laptop", an investigation was opened up and these issues were discovered along the way. The original investigation was into any kind of money laundering scheme and thus it involved his taxes. Biden's lawyer indicated:

With the announcement of two agreements between my client, Hunter Biden, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.

So given that, that is pretty much the end of any kind of criminal investigation. Each count can offer a fine up to $25,000 and 1 year minus a day prison time. However, considering that he is pleading guilty it will be significantly less than that. In fact, I believe I read somewhere that the DOJ was recommending probation, fine, and paid back taxes which is pretty consistent with how post-1980s IRS deals with tax evasion.

I think Trump's response is classic however:

Wow! The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere "traffic ticket." Our system is BROKEN!

One... Hundreds of years? Really? Two. Yeah, funny thing when you cooperate with investigators and have a competent legal representation, they tend not to want to throw the book at you. Three. STOP NOT PAYING YOUR LAWYERS DIPSHIT!! It really runs the pool down of lawyers that represent on complex legal issues pro bono.

That last one I cannot stress enough. Proper legal representation is critical to not getting railroaded. If you've got a pretty toxic reputation where few if any lawyers will work with you, you better buckle up and say "choo choo".

This was a motion for preliminary injunction. Typically a prohibitive injunction is what is granted, that is a return back to status quo. However, the Judge indicated that the city is so likely to act in bad faith, there is no way to both protect the status quo and the plaintiffs' first amendment right. And so the court is ordering the city to grant the permit and allow them to hold their event on June 30th, which is a mandatory injunction as it forces the city to do something rather than return to status quo.

because of the plentiful evidence of the animus of the Defendants towards Plaintiffs' speech, relief granted Plaintiffs cannot assume there will be a fair review the application.

Having read the opinion by the Judge, this is a completely bonkers case. I won't go into detail y'all can read for yourself, but the city's entire case hinged on an ordinance passed in 2015 that has never been used before. And that the only use of the ordinance was this one time and no other time even though several violations of the ordinance occurred in the past. Only this group was subject to the ordinance. And then when the Judge asked "Why it be like that?" Holy fuck, you could not find a group tripping over it's feet faster than had the city council been an octopus born with "oops all left feet".

I just hope Utah Drag Stars fucking takes this city to the cleaners in the actual trial. I think it would have been cheaper for the city to just hand the drag stars a permit rather handing them a pretty fucking solid case.

Also, why is there this consistent pattern of people doing bad shit and then fucking ruining any hope for "maybe succeeding" in court by posting to the Internet shit that's just going to be entered into the record and destroy any kind of "plausible deniability"? Like, the city's argument only become pretextual when one of the members gets on the horn and indicates she specifically holds an idea of what the first amendment means that distinctly DOES NOT match the actual legal understanding of the first amendment. She could have said JACK SHIT and there might have been a remote possibility to take this into court without the injunction. It's like that scene from Shrek 2 "you HAVE the right to remain silent. What you lack, is the capacity!"

I get the case is still pending, but goddamn, it can't happen fast enough to stop the city from blowing their feet off with a goddamn hand canon.

I'm not comfortable with Google and other megacorps being the arbiters of truth

Understood. There's a couple of aspects that I'll present solely from devil's advocate.

1. If they leave the information up they can be found liable for that information should someone decide to file suit. Do they not have a right to protect themselves from such suits?
2. Are they the sole arbiters of truth? In strictly this action, are they acting in a manner that a majority of people wouldn't already agree with?

I expect our government to not participate in censorship. But I think we muddle a line between "government" and "corporation" when we attempt to hold companies to the same standard as the Government. Perhaps we are already too far in that government and megacorps are just so intertwine that it's all the same, IDK. I think that's a bit of a deeper topic than I'm willing to get into at the moment.

So that aside. The video is looking for hosting on a private company's server. I wouldn't want the Government to say "NO YOU MUST SHOW THAT VIDEO!!" to Google. We have to remember that the "free society" thing is a two way street. So I rather not have censorship in general (thus I completely understand your lack of comfort) and I expect no censorship from my government. But for private everyday people and up to megacorps, I expect them to be free to do what they so wish (but I wish for an open discussion rather removal of videos, but removal of video I still would say is a tool in Google's tool chest, but they should use it last, not first. But it isn't my company so my opinion matters next to zero in that regard). But I completely understand where you derive your statement from. I completely respect that point of view, but I disagree with it somewhat.

But in all honesty, that is simply my unsolicited opinion on this matter.

As for RFK Jr. the guy has about as much understanding of science and medicine as a rusted fire-hydrant. The amount of seriousness that should be given to that man on any of those two topics is indistinguishable from the absolute value of zero. But again, that is just my unsolicited opinion on that particular guy.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.

— George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

• P2P is the new hotness
• LAMP is the new hotness
• Ruby on Rails is the new hotness
• Big data is the new hotness
• Machine Learning is the new hotness
• Crypto is the new hotness
• AI is the net hotness

None of these died, none of them were the new hotness for very long. Oh by the by, our company is looking for anyone with fifteen years experience in ChatGPT (/s). But in all serious, there's always a very vocal group that's chasing the hype. No idea how big they truly are, but they sure do bang the gong the entire time.

Doublethink Reddit

to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again

ℍ𝕠𝕨 𝕓𝕠𝕦𝕥 𝕀 𝕕𝕠𝕟'𝕥 ᵃⁿʸʷᵃʸ?

There's a lot of points that he brings up that touch broader topics:

Landed Gentry

He's not wrong on the premise here. He's wrong with the solution and the why. A community should dictate their terms, if landed gentry is what the community wants, so be it. If the community wants democracy so be it. In the later, that democracy doesn't need a "company" to be the ultimate arbitrator of democracy, which is what he is pitching. That whole latter is just "corporate control with a democracy label slapped on it."

Profit

We all do need to remember that running something on the Internet is NOT cheap. Anything that gets popular becomes a quick target for "other nations" (US, Russia, China…) to start putting garbage into and eating bandwidth. Reddit has been running on the techbro funding which has recently ran dry. So this day was always coming. The free cash isn't there so the cracking of the whip begins.

This is going to happen with anything that isn't purely community ran. So all those other things like Bluesky that are being tossed, they'll have the same trouble eventually. Kbin and Lemmy are slightly different in that it is purely community ran. But we the community need to support our admins with cash to keep the server fans turning. Otherwise, even community ran projects can become coporate controlled.

3rd Party Apps

This is the biggest thing for me. We're either an open web or we're not. I was on the Internet back in the 1980s when it was very open. It is pros and cons for open vs closed. If Reddit doesn't want 3rd Party Apps, that makes them closed, that makes them less Democratic. There's nothing wrong with being closed, McDonald's likely doesn't want me eating my Taco Bell in their building. But the CEO keeps trying to say "Democracy" while actually just "trying to run a business". I don't go to the Costco to fill up on gas and think the other people there are my "community", they're folks from my community but the Costco doesn't make them my community. Reddit is a business where a community can go to, Reddit IS NOT the community itself.

perfectly willing to work with the folks who want to work with us

With all the leverage in Reddit's hands, which that's fine whatever, working with Reddit is going to be one of those sisyphean kinds of tasks. Pray they do not alter the terms futher.

the extent that they were profiting off of our API

And to me that's the tell. Every other word out of the guy's mouth is "profit". And that's fine, it is his site. But someone putting profit first is going to be hard pressed to focus on Democracy and community. And everyone should at least keep that in mind.

Ownership

And I think that's the ultimate thing for everyone else. In an open Internet, you the creator own your content. And everything Reddit is saying takes the ownership away from you. Running sites like Reddit, Kbin, Mastodon, and so on are non-zero costs. So I get the desire to make money "somewhere". And the CEO of Reddit honestly believes that "running ads" defers the costs that would have been otherwise passed on to the users and mods to pay in cash or work. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but a community should get to have say on it. A democracy also gets to vote on if this is their ship to wreck.

And that's the big underlying thing. The CEO tosses community/democracy and other words to make folks think "they're a part of this thing" but they are not. Or at least no more part of this thing in the same nature that someone walking into a local hospital is part of the medical community. And in all of those words, the CEO is indicating that he is taking all ownership from the users and presenting something that has the veneer of community and you having ownership of your content.

Live and let live

Some people want that which Reddit offers. So be it. I think I've had enough of it, but that's just me. But the Redditors that are staying ought to know the cart they've hitched their horse to. But ultimately, nothing but love for everyone. Reddit has stopped being a good fit for me and I've gone elsewhere, but everyone should just use what's a good fit/feel for them. Except Twitter. The people who enjoy Twitter are a breed of people that defies what I would consider "enjoyable company."

Sorry to bother, but quick question. If someone wants to write an application with COSMIC's look, uses libcosmic as opposed to iced?