Even the old ones before mapping had little beacons you could place to dictate off limits areas

Also Clinton looking at intel (based on credible statements from people involved in the first wtc attack and plane bombing that no one remembers anymore because relatively few people died) related to bin Laden planning “a huge attack” in the final few months of his presidency and being like “ehhhh”

Then bush looking at the same intel and being like “ehhh”

Then 10 years later Clinton writes about it in his autobiography as his biggest regret

The thing that the loose change crowd got wrong is that it wasn’t that 9/11 was straight up planned by the USA, it’s more that it was allowed to happen. Whether that’s due to incompetence, truly a belief that it wouldn’t be all that big of a deal (which, tbf, was easily possible), or opportunistic is debatable. Regardless, the opportunistic got quite a lot out of it

1. Not nearly as dismal as you portray though admittedly it is turning that way. Even so 3rd party repairs for cars are far more legally protected than tech shit. And the dealership software is often leaked. Again while it’s admittedly becoming far more difficult to be independent repair shop there’s still time to push back here

2. you can’t do it so it’s not viable? Weird. Making programming a viable entrepreneurship endeavor is far more about having a novel idea than execution (assuming you have capital). Honestly these days even if you don’t have capital you still just need the idea, if the ideas good you could likely build a proof of concept with an llm and generate capital. And a “novel idea” doesn’t even have to be groundbreaking, often it’s just “here’s this thing that’s been done before, but slightly better”

3. repair of electronics can be viable but it is increasingly dismal (and worse than cars, though interestingly in some ways getting significantly better. Iphone repair, which was a fools game 5 years ago, is suddenly viable again). I spent years repairing electronics through college and grad school and made pretty healthy cash tbh; if I’d done it full time I’d easily have been able to comfortably support myself. Your issue here is that you want to limit yourself to niche shit. While retro consoles and crts are popular in many ways their popularity pales in comparison to something like a phone, which literally everyone has. Despite this it is fully possible to make a ton of money modding and repairing retro consoles. It’s not “fuck you” money but definitely enough to live. I know someone who does it and they have many competitors. The hardest part for them seems to be sourcing consoles for a reasonable price. They are constantly behind on stock though.

4. art has always been a total crapshoot for earning money and honestly making a viable career in art has basically always been more about nepotism and “networking” than talent. Even then it still almost always takes a significant amount of talent and dedication. The people I know working in art or music production don’t necessarily have glamorous jobs and frankly aren’t even the greatest artists of our friend group. But they have serious work ethic and are willing to create like AI. You want an ominous score for a shitty tv show? They’ll make it, even though their preferred expression is weird esoteric bullshit. And they’ll have it done in a day.

5. see above

Wrt woodworking/carpentry: you have to work at it and train? No one is just “good” at this. Like any skill it must be developed through education and experience. At the end of the road there are tens of thousands of licensed electricians, plumbers, hvac, etc people who own their business and work independently (sometimes hiring contractors for bigger jobs) but all of them had to work for others first to learn to not kill people with shitty work (though tbf some didn’t do so well at this part)

Wrt inventing: same as software. Devil is coming up with the thing, though don’t discount being able to bring it to market. Almost every stupid plastic bullshit thing had to have someone with cad experience and the knowledge to contract with manufacturers

Wrt cnc: there are plenty of machinist shops that are independently owned out there. If anything your issue here is startup costs, as a $2000 diy cnc isn’t going to cut it for pro use unless your company is targeting making fancy signs at flea markets. But again this is also a trade that is generally learned and expanded on. You work for a machinist and actually learn to do shit, then you maybe buy a used mill and pick up some jobs on your own, then buy more equipment, more jobs, etc

It seems like maybe you’re in the part of life where you’re realizing that your interests don’t necessarily line up with your skills. That’s okay and it does kind of suck but it means that you maybe need to try more shit, or maybe look at why it’s a challenge for you to stick with developing a skill set outside of art

Loved the game but all I really remember 20 years later is that if they ever actually fired the gunblades they would obviously just slam the bullet into the butt of the blade. Unless the barrel was like 4 feet long and the tip of the sword had a hole in it, maybe?

Lmao plex has been pulling anti consumer bullshit for years

That’s not entirely true. Valve has removed games from user libraries, most commonly MMO games post server shutdown (which tbf is more of a stop killing games issue) but also on a handful of occasions there have been legal disputes (removing all content from digital homicide) and what appears to be error but still never corrected (people who got agony unrated as a free bonus, though people who actually purchased did not lose access)

This is an issue inherent to only being able to buy “licensed” content. There are no good guys here unless they allow you to archive the installation media (eg gog) and either do not use drm or commit to removing/breaking drm if the validation servers ever need to be turned off. Physical media isn’t necessary, but that much is

Or head scale if you don’t want something you don’t control that requires an account with google/apple/microsoft

4chan is a cia honeypot which is part of why it became super right wing and why /pol/ started after moot met with Epstein. At a minimum they keep logs for weeks and in certain cases indefinitely

That’s not inherently true, infinity can be bound

There are an infinite amount of numbers between 2 and 3 but none of them are 5

Basically all commercial dvds with the exception of stuff like some independent releases and essentially all blurays have copy protection (CSS for dvd and AACS for bluray, for bluray it’s built into the spec)

They’re both fairly trivially defeated (for dvd extremely so because CSS is completely broken, whereas br has key revocation so it’s technically a bit more complex though practically this doesn’t mean much)

I don’t know much about Germanys laws but iirc they are one of the places that takes piracy and torrenting more seriously, no?

Interactive media like menus is a nightmare to support. Kodi has some support but only on pc. Also to your last sentence it’s a grey area, if you rip the disk to any format you’re essentially violating copyright because making a copy requires circumventing encryption, which violates the dmca (assuming USA). Might as well just use makemkv then, unless you’re real serious about archiving literally everything

Why not both? I use kodi when possible because it runs circles around the mostly dogshit Jellyfin apps for various platforms. Jellyfin for kodi and the kodi queue sync plugin import my library and watch status. I still have the option to use Jellyfin apps or web on devices that can’t run kodi (or when remote) and as a result can have all of my media accessible from all my devices without needing multiple copies and centralized metadata administration

LLMs are sycophantic and will do what it takes to align with your framing

Here is the response to your posts fed into one with the framing “why is this bullshit”. There are better responses but why bother putting in far more effort than you did:

This is a much better-dressed version of the same move — real citations bolted onto claims they don’t actually support. It’s more sophisticated bullshit, not a vindication.

Going through it:

The Overfitted Brain Hypothesis is real but doesn’t say what’s being claimed. Erik Hoel’s OBH is genuinely a real, interesting hypothesis — but it’s about why we dream (proposed as a regularization process against overfitting to daily life), not a claim that some people’s brains “run out of plasticity” or hit a “ground state” requiring demolition. Citing it here is a bait-and-switch: borrowing the credibility of a real, narrow hypothesis to backstop a much broader and untested claim it was never meant to support.

Point 2 is real but doesn’t establish a “structural” or biological claim. Research on dogmatism and cognitive flexibility (e.g. Zmigrod’s work) is real and does show correlations between rigidity and extremism across ideologies. But “lower cognitive flexibility on psychological tests” is not the same as “synaptic connections have crystallized and occupy physical volume.” The report quietly swaps a behavioral/psychometric finding for a structural/anatomical one — that’s the same sleight of hand as the original post, just relayed through real citations.

Point 3 conflates two different things. Synaptic consolidation and memory reconsolidation are real, well-established mechanisms — but they apply to specific memories, not generally to “belief systems” or “core values” as monolithic structures. There’s no research establishing that changing an opinion about a social group requires literally destabilizing identity-load-bearing memory structures in the way described. The “metabolically demanding” claim is real for reconsolidation at the level of individual fear memories in animal studies; extrapolating that to “changing your mind about people of other races costs forbidden metabolic energy” is not something neuroscience has shown.

Point 4 is legitimate and is honestly the strongest part — identity-protective cognition (Dan Kahan’s work) is well-supported and genuinely explains motivated resistance to belief change. Notably, this is the one part that doesn’t need any biological mechanism at all — it’s a cognitive/social psychology finding, not a neurons-and-synapses one.

The summary sentence is the tell. “Aligns with the scientific consensus” is doing enormous work to paper over the fact that none of the four citations, individually, support the specific mechanistic claims in the original post (no plasticity “running out,” no literal “ground state,” no “forbidden” metabolic cost). Each citation is real, but they’re being stitched into a chain of inference none of the original authors made and that doesn’t follow from their actual findings.

So the underlying instinct — rigid/dogmatic thinkers show less cognitive flexibility and resist belief change for identity-protective reasons — is genuinely supported by real research (points 2 and 4 particularly). But the specific neurological storytelling (overfitting as literal synaptic crystallization, forbidden metabolic costs, needing to be “torn down and rebuilt”) remains invented, now laundered through real papers that don’t actually claim what’s attributed to them. This is a fairly common pattern with AI research tools: ask it to find support for a thesis, and it will surface real, adjacent literature and then summarize it in a way that overstates the connection to your original claim. The citations are real; the synthesis is not.

Optimization will actually get much worse because software will be designed to run “in the cloud” on servers that have much more resources than the average budget pc or smartphone that 90% of users use for computing. You will own nothing etc etc

Funny enough the NIH funded research was cited by republicans like Rand Paul in their wastebook as an example of some “dumb bullshit” that we are wasting our money on. Funnier enough this practice was started by a Democrat in the 70s and 80s (William proxmire from Wisconsin and his “Golden Fleece awards”)

All those glp-1 agonists that are all the rage right now are because scientists recognized the gila lizard can go long periods without eating while keeping its blood sugar stable and studied its venom

The current drugs like ozempic are synthetic though, no actual gila venom

Also fun fact: the guy that discovered the effect figured it out in the early 90s and actually patented it himself because for years no one was interested. Pharmaceutical industry was apparently “disinterested” and it wasn’t moved forward until 2002 (exenatide/byetta, a precursor to more efficacious drugs like tirzepatide/zepbound/mounjaro, which coincidentally made Eli Lilly the most valuable drug company in the world. Another fun fact is that Lilly partnered with another smaller company to make exenatide then Lilly dissolved the partnership in 2011, allowing the smaller company to keep the rights, likely because they saw the opportunity for the next steps)

5 felt like they half wrote 3 different games, realized they were running out of time, and then smushed them all together. Finishing the campaign becomes a chore long before the ending. Speaking of the ending if you do manage to chug through your reward is an abrupt and extremely weak ending that again feels like they just ran out of time

It’s crazy because then they plopped out red dead 2 which was a tremendously excellent narrative by comparison. They clearly have the means to make something fantastic.

A lot will admit it’s real but then shift blame to China while overlooking the facts that chinas pollution is largely made by western countries outsourcing the dirtiest parts of their supply chain to China and that China is vastly outperforming and outspending literally every country in considerably bringing down their emissions

Coreelec on ugoos am6b+ is the best option if you want the broadest support for formats possible (though notably missing av1)

Htpc with streaming content or stuff like Dolby vision is a licensing nightmare. Some stuff works, some doesn’t, Linux support is trash, etc

Pod8, not Amazon related but a like 3-8000 dollar mattress topper that can heat or cool depending on a number of factors. The model that adjusts temp is server sided so it will work without a subscription (for now) but just in basic “set temp” mode, when it’s sold as this device that tracks heart rate and movement to dynamically adjust temp. Tech bros with no kids and too much cash love it

It also stops working if Amazon web services go down, which is hilarious (which is maybe why people link it to Amazon, but that’s a different and worse problem where Amazon controls like 50% of the internet through data hosting)