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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • My dad had a prosthetic leg, and he bristled at some of the polite or accepting ways that people would talk about disability in a way that stuck with me because he explained it. Basically a dislike of “handicapable” or the notion that you “make up for it” in other ways. To paraphrase: “getting my foot cut off in a car accident didn’t come with some perk that balanced things out”.

    I think a lot of the pushback you got came not from a place of rejecting that they could have a bias, but from the topic being broached as a confrontation of bias instead of an explanation of ignorance.
    People, like the poster above, who are being conscientious according to their understanding will get indignant or frustrated when that’s met with an unmatched response.

    Assuming positive intent colors implicit “positive abelism”, or other “positive -isms” that I’m personally less knowledgeable about, as unfamiliarity or ignorance rather than callousness or rudeness.
    In those cases, the person is very unlikely to disagree or pushback if informed about their blind spot. The key part in their head was “disabled people are just as important”, sitting right next to “good people chip in and contribute”. So they respond to “disabled people can’t always contribute” with “disabled people are important!” phrased as "disabled people can contribute!”.

    Addressing it as a bias against disabled people doesn’t fit because that part is correct. Need to address it at where the problem is: a misconception about the relationship between human worth, labor and utility.


  • You are correct that I was not describing capitalism.
    I was participating in the silly by creeping closer to full communism and still saying it’s something else.

    And I’m not sure why Benny would only get half and 2/3s respectively. They owned the truck, so they’re the one that did the moving. The others are just employees.


  • Honestly it’s both. Plenty of people with disabilities have plenty to offer. A lot actually don’t though, and they still deserve that helping hand.
    A family aquatintance has some mental and physical disabilities. They’re just not going to be able to help in any way that isn’t superficial. And that’s okay. Their worth isn’t defined by their utility.

    Attaching how worthwhile it is to help someone to their ability to provide a service inherently says the person who can’t isn’t worthy of help.

    We should be good to people because it’s the right thing to do, not out of the expectation of a future repayment. More pragmatically, we should help based on the assumption that the other person would, and that if everyone acted like that the world would be better.

    I think the other person read a bit much into it, but their base point isn’t wrong.


  • But see, it’s not fair if people just get what they need! You need to make sure people are paying for it!

    We can make it part of the system that each person gets help according to their needs, but each person also gives help according to their abilities. Yes yes. This is now definitely capitalism because it’s transactions.


  • The feeling sick part is your immune system. :) Most of the feelings we associate with getting sick are the immune response rather than the actual sickness.
    The tired feelings are your body telling you to stop moving because it’s busy, and also burning energy doing stuff. Joint pain is mostly various tissues getting puffy to make it easier for immune cells to move around. (For sickness. Crunchy ankle is different)

    The first two were staggered to maximize the immune response if I recall right, and they also had a bit more kick to them that we tapered down as we learned more about how it all worked.
    By the time the next round came about everyone had internalized the vaccine, been exposed and just kicked the living shit out of the virus a few times, and the virus mutated to be a bit weaker.


  • The traditional method would be to define the scope and intent of the law, and then defer the specifics of enforcement to an executive agency for nuanced application. That way the law conveys “no usage of information passed to a machine learning model for the purposes of generative content production, nor the output of any such system, should be considered fair use under copyright law unless the usage is non commercial and qualifies as fair use for academic or research purposes”. Then someone like the FCC would determine what qualifies as a machine learning model, and can flex to account for changes in technology.

    You basically just say what you mean very specifically. I don’t think it’s a problem for Google to download webpages and track how they connect and their words, because that’s how search engines work. So I’m okay with that. I’m okay with individuals downloading chunks of the public web to do normal things. I’m okay with people needing huge swaths of the text for research, as well as the images, even for specific research into generative AI of the type we’re talking about. No one is being harmed by someone at MIT incidentally creating farside comics.

    Harm or no harm, the disagreeable part to me is the commercial use of the model trained on inputs from people who didn’t want you to do that, sometimes without even having the most superficial justification to have the content in the first place.


  • I’m not sure that’s been extensively tested in courts. The document you referenced below appears to be as-yet not officially published, so I don’t believe it actually qualifies as an official position yet, but the bigger issue is that it’s untested in court.

    This thread is a response to an AI court case where the ruling was that training on copy written works is fair use.

    https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-judge-approves-15-billion-anthropic-copyright-settlement-with-authors-2025-09-25/

    Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a “central library” that would not necessarily be used for that purpose

    Regardless, you do make good points and I think we agree that the end state is “they shouldn’t be able to do that”. I have concerns that using existing standards that take copying too literally results in some unintended ambiguity, and situations where AI training is incidentally blocked, but so is stuff like “opening a news article on a computer”, which does the same things the copyright office report highlights as infringement.
    I think we’d be in a much more agreeable place if we just legally state that a commercial AI tools training isn’t fair use. That lets you have nuance like “search engine? It’s a statistical model, but not generative: allowed. AI agent? Statistical model that’s generating content as opposed to classification or ranking: not allowed”.


  • It definitely does have the meaning of making an analog signal discrete, and DVDs are digital in that sense.
    There’s also the sense of serializing or enumerating something into a format more flexible or amenable to computer manipulation. More briefly: to put it on a computer.

    For some things it’s super obvious: a vinyl record has a groove you can see, and you digitize it by sampling the output of the wiggle: analog.
    The contents of an SD card are invisible and the only way to observe them is via a computer, where they’re already presented in a flexible format: not analog.

    Then you have fuzzy things: a printed picture that was taken with a digital camera. Grab a magnifying glass and you can see that it’s got blocks of quantized color, and isn’t continuous. You digitize the photo by shining light on it and capturing the bounce.
    Optical media is a disc with a groove in it that you read by shining a light on it to capture the bounce. Instead of a horizontal wiggle though it’s pits creating an interference pattern with a laser.
    It’s digital because it’s quantized information that it stores. It needs to be digitized to work with easily because the format is often read-only or write once. It’s analog because the pits themselves are continuous and the system spends surprising amount of nuance correcting errors from things like fingerprints and dust.

    Books are plainly analog, even though they’re composed almost entirely of discrete, quantized units of structured information. Sometimes even with a lookup table and index for faster search!

    Magnetic tape stores analog audio by varying the strength of a magnet with the audio signal. It stores digital information by only setting the magnet to specific strengths. Same for VHS or cable Internet.

    To make a long ramble short: digitize also means to stick it on a computer, owing to efforts to digitize things often being focused on items that aren’t continuous, like text.




  • Are you telling me you can’t burn DVDs?
    How do you think they even make DVDs? Do you think each one is unique or something?

    What good is copy protection if all you need to do is hook a tape recorder up to the DVD player?

    The system is stupid and ultimately futile. Is it really shocking that such a system produced a weirdly easy to bypass copy protection?

    It’s not an impervious technical hurdle, it’s a legal protection. You can legally do it by using software that has the license to do the decryption.


  • I agree with the conclusion, but that rationale is wrong. First, you can digitize a DVD. Second, it’s not a double standard. You can grab copies of random stuff and jam it in an AI model too.
    Our laws are written such that it’s making a copy outside of reasonable use that’s illegal, and AI training only makes a copy incidentally to what they’re doing and then it’s deleted. It’s the same standard that makes viewing a photo on an artists website legal.

    It’s not bullshit because they’re breaking the law, but because we need to refine the law to make it clear training an AI model isn’t a reasonable usage anymore than a public broadcast of a DVD is a reasonable use.
    Trying to shoehorn it into the existing laws will just create a nightmare of loopholes and complications.



  • There have been significant protests, but they have not been exactly massive

    4/5 of the largest protests in US history have happened since 2025 directly as a response to trumps shit.

    Several European countries have had bigger protests recently

    Which ones? How big?

    USA is so used to violence and abuse of minorities, they don’t even notice, and they think it’s normal

    Spoken like someone who’s never actually dealt with anything other than our news filtered through your news.

    I acknowledge that there are good Americans too, but they are not the ones in control, and they are the minority.

    Considering you’re in Europe, the world experts in imperialism, brutal ethnic suppression, you still wear fucking blackface, you don’t even see the issues with your treatment of migrants as a problem, and a fair number of the protests I found while trying to figure out which one you meant were “anti migrant”, I feel like that’s a bit of a rich sentiment.

    You do know that one of the most offensive policies trump has been pursuing is to rollback our citizenship rules to those that are the norm in Europe?


  • You had a director who actually liked the subject. It’s right there in the interview. Wasn’t a fan as a child, liked it as an adult.

    It sounds like you didn’t like the movie, so you’re saying it was because the director lacked something or the writers lacked something relating to “art”, instead of just saying you didn’t like the movie.

    All but the most niche movies are about making money. That’s what they are. People can make good movies, but they’re all still fundamentally about money. The entire star trek franchise exists to make money.
    The early movies were made as a cash grab to chase after Star wars money. You’ve got the movie director saying the series is boring and being selected because he can make it for cheaper.

    It’s fine to not like the movie, but acting like the movie can’t be good because those making it have financial incentives? C’mon.


  • Are you saying he’s not an actual director? What makes someone an “actual director”?
    Why do you think it was a marketing choice to pick him? He wasn’t exactly a major director at the time. He was far from unknown but he didn’t have a lot of movies.

    Which Star Trek to you is art and not content? I assume you mean made as a passion and not for commercial purposes?
    I feel like that’s just ignorant of how movies are actually made.

    Is it content because it’s popular and you don’t like it?



  • Most of the ones like that vent the heat primarily through an area that can be effectively cleaned and has significantly better airflow. So the back radiator is larger but it’s effectively never cleaned and the air exchange volume is the gap between the back of the fridge and the wall.
    Venting out the bottom allows exchange with the rest of the room, but does require more work to ensure the air actually flows. Additionally, you can clean the vent with a vacuum, and it’s a lot more likely that will actually happen than someone pulls the fridge forward and wipes the coils with a damp but not wet cloth.


  • You think I’m archiving?

    Friend, I’m wholly in this image, filled with shame, but honest enough to admit it.

    The linked sites? Those aren’t the subject of the meme, they’re some of the suppliers for my uncontrolled addiction to reading the first paragraph of something, thinking I might want to reference it later and then hitting download and never, ever returning.

    It does go in a folder which is never cleaned though, which remains entirely unorganized.