All the instructions I’ve seen online say those pepper spray cans are intended for use 6-12 feet away (depending on brand), and absolutely no closer than 4 feet to minimize risk of permanent eye damage (from pressure) and blowback. The fucker in the photo seems to be trying to cause blindness.

Looking at the DoJ Federal Prisons guidelines they seem to treat federal prisoners with more care and concern than free citizens (if you dare protest): https://www.bop.gov/policy/progstat/5576_004.pdf

Would be pretty pointless. They just stop trading under the damaged trading name, register a new name and are up and running tomorrow, slate wiped clean. I believe a similar practice is nicknamed ‘pheonixing’ in the West.

Does this not fly in the face of the First Amendment - why are conservatives not mad about this as well?

Those shot seem to have been protesting peacefully with no weapons or military protective gear on public lands, and then ICE walked into them and pulled a protester away, intentionally escalating conflict, then firing into a protesters face at about 2ft away.

Insane that there is still no general strike over ICE (and more).

Tbh I don’t think Microsoft’s fault-rate has actually gotten noticeably higher post-AI.

They were already putting out bad patches causing widespread issues with regularity for well over a decade. They slowly transitioned from “customer experience is key” under Ballmer to “move fast and break things” under Nadella.

I do love what Microsoft has been doing for Linux adoption though - more slop, please!

That’s a false dichotomy. Reasonable responses are framed as either “kid has low blood sugar so I’m packing him a banana”, or “sorry, we’ll beat him with jumper cables”. There’s like 50 reasonable responses between those extremes.

Do you think that if you were teaching a class and one of the students punched you in the face so hard that they broke your expensive prescription eyewear, that you would actually just dust yourself off and go, “oh dear, you poor thing - are you acting out due to low blood sugar? I can go get you a banana”.

You really think that’s a reasonable response for any human?

I chuckled.

I also feel like it wouldn’t have been hard to mirror-flip the baby video layer so they were sitting roughly over the US.

The issue around them is more being built on time, as they have tight contracts with the scalers that allow them to simply not pay their interval payments or even pull out of the contracts entirely if delivery dates are delayed.

They’re bespoke too - which is why they’re getting ‘AI datacenter’ builds instead of approaching existing datacenters. AI racks require up to a megawatt per rack. That’s insane. They have been custom designed and built by UPS and power companies.

https://blog.se.com/datacenter/2025/10/16/the-1-mw-ai-it-rack-is-coming-and-it-needs-800-vdc-power/

Yes, they could be pivoted away from AI to host ‘something else’, but it won’t help save the companies that built them get paid, because they’ll only be using a small fraction of their power delivery, and the $20,000 AI GPUs have pretty limited use-cases. It will be a massive oversupply issue causing all the datacenters hosting prices to have to drop drastically to get any businesses even into their tenancies. This will cause those hosting companies (which are up to their gills in loans) to go under - They’re the ones taking the big risks on AI. Not Meta/Google/MS/etc.

Nice job on the Lemmy shout-out, Reg. Every bit of publicity helps people move off the mainstream surveillance-capitalism dumpsterfires (and onto our nicer dumpsterfire).

One example is the AntiAI subreddit, but there is also a Lemmy instance devoted to it, called Awful.systems. (For those unfamiliar with it, Lemmy is a tool for creating news aggregator and discussion sites – think Reddit or the recently revived, but LLM-infested, Digg – based around the same ActivityPub protocols used by Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse.)

Cognitive bias affects all classes and education levels. But in my experience conservatives are the most flagrant, “the only moral abortion is my abortion” for example.

Asking for sources is always welcome with me.

Here’s a deep dive from Ed Zitron into the whole AI/LLM industry that details the heavy investment from several key banks (Deutchebank being one), and the shrinking finance availability from traditional means (bank loans, hedge funds, managed funds). It’s long but it’s really worth a read if you have a spare hour or so.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

A glaring tell that I don’t recall him highlighting is that the hyperscalers have largely outsourced the risk of AI investment to others. META, Google, and Microsoft are making small bets on AI comparitively - they’re using cash assets they have as profits from other business models, which are still significant (measured in low billions) but dont require them to take loans or leverage themselves. This means they are playing it very cautiously, all the while they’re shoving AI into all their products to try to make it seem like they’re all-in and it’s ‘the next big thing’, which is helping their stock prices in the investor frenzy. Most of the investment capital required for the AI boom is going into hardware, datacenters and direct investment in the software development - and that’s mostly being avoided by the big guys. This allows them to minimize risk and still having a decent win if it takes off. Conversely If/when the bubble bursts they’ll still take a hit, but they’ll also still be making money via other streams so it’ll be a bump in the road for them - compared to what will happen to OpenAI, Athropic, Stability, the datacenters and their financiers.
https://archive.is/WwJRg (NYTimes article).

All this bullshit is for line go up. And its mostly working, so far.

However, the bankers heavily involved in financing AI datacenters have become nervous and started approaching insurance firms for coverage in case the projects fail… And the hedge funds have had low, 0 or negative ROI for the last ~4 years due to the prior failures of the Metaverse, NFTs, and now AI not paying off yet… So new funds are drying up on two fronts, and if they don’t magically become profitable in the next year then the line is gonna go down, hard.

Nice work, Satan. Big fan of your music btw 🤘

Oh yeah my bad, i meant rutorrent. The site is in Russian but easy enough to navigate as it uses the same forum template as a lot of sites, band names are all in original language so searching is simple enough. I sometimes use a translation browser extension to help.

The pre-smartphone years. Where we could just be bored, and let our boredom drive creative thought

Another perspective:

1. You can own your own music in many more formats than just vinyl.
2. CDs are still being made, and cheap. Second hand CD trade is huge, and they are always cheaper than vinyl to buy and ship. Digital ownership is even cheaper (eg Bandcamp), and the same or higher quality.
3. RuTracker has an enormous collection of FLAC well-seeded, as do other sites (but they require invites). Soulseek has an enormous collection and requires no account.

Regarding equipment just get some good speakers and an amp, you’ll need that regardless of what format you end up getting your music in.

Vinyl is often a trap. Expensive, fragile, degrades, difficult to resell unless you live in a big city (postage & packing), and the quality is ultra subjective and varies wildly between pressings. Just look up a couple of popular albums you know on Discogs or rateyourmusic and browse the comments see what they cost and how many people bring up complaints on pressings.

I’m all CD and FLAC and loving it. Bandcamp is my first port of call, then CD (new or second-hand), torrent if rare or OOP or unavailable anywhere I frequent.

Something else that may help - if you really think vinyl will sound better, enormous FLAC rips (2GB+) of popular high quality pressings in 192kHz/24-48bit rips are not uncommon on torrent and Slsk - vinyl enthusiasts often make a high quality digital capture of their purchases while the vinyl is new, so that they have a near-new copy in case their vinyl ever degrades with wear - or simply so they can use digital for convenience, but keep the analog hiss and increased frequency range of vinyl pressings. Best of both worlds.

(Edit: rutracker, not rutorrent)

“He’s not hurting the people he’s supposed to be hurting 😡”

Guarantee the lady that said that in 2019 voted for him again. Twice.

The Nobel Fell For It Again Prize would have just… so many contenders with red hats.

Thanks for the mental eyebleach

Yep, the “strapped the head of a whale he chainsawed off to the roof of his car to drive it home as a souvenir” guy.

I still cannot get over Kathleen Kennedy (his daughter) recounting her vivid memories of this from when she was six.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kathleen Kennedy recalls. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Sounds like a very fucked environment for a child to grow up in.

Its chin all the way down, baby.

The fries are vegan in Australia ever since they stopped cooking them in beef tallow - around early 2000s iirc.

However, their own website says they offer no menu options certified as vegan or vegetarian, due to cross-contamination being something they don’t wish to deal with.

Understandable as additional prep areas would be quite expensive, but also it’s a pretty weak copout when they could go to the effort of labelling their vegan/vegetarian items (with the asterisked proviso that they may have cross-contam)… I suspect it’s really to allow them to change up menu item suppliers to cheaper alternatives whenever they like, because they also do not bother to label any menu items with allergen info - and that’s very standard across even small cafes nowadays. To find allegen info you have to dig through a PDF that they update every few months.