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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Yup. AI should be used to automate all of the mundane day-to-day BS, leaving us free to practice art, or poetry, or literature, or study, or just do leisure activities. Because all of the mundane BS is automated, so we don’t need to worry about things like income or where our next meal comes from. But instead, we went down the dystopian capitalist timeline, where we’re automating all of the art so artists are forced to get mundane day-to-day BS jobs.


  • If you’re using Windows, the built in AV (Windows Defender) is actually pretty great. Maybe run Malware Bytes every now and then, (as in, install Malware Bytes, run it, then immediately uninstall it again). Between those two (and healthy browsing habits, like using an adblocker, not downloading random .exes, etc) will keep you protected. No AV in the world will be able to fully defend against bad browsing habits, so it all really comes down to that.

    But this is Lemmy, so you’re bound to get buried in “just switch to Linux cuz Windows is a virus” stuff. And while that may be true, it’s clearly not the answer to your question.



  • Yup. He’s “working” 7 days a week but only doing like an hour or two of actual productive (if it can even be called that…) work. This is how a lot of C-level executives use weasel words to make themselves seem important.

    They’ll show up to the office at 8AM, but they’ll say that they started “working” at 6AM because they woke up and had an idea while in the shower. Then they’ll play golf with their friends (“business associates”) in the morning and say they’re working. Then they’ll go to lunch with their affair partner (“potential client”) on their way back from golf, and say they’re working. Then they’ll sit in one meeting in the afternoon, where they don’t even do any actual work but do a lot of talking with a lot of buzzwords to sound important. And finally, they’ll leave the office early and talk online about what a hard worker they are for starting work at 6AM.

    The “I work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week” stuff is all just capitalistic “we deserve to get paid more because we work hard to run the companies” propaganda.


  • Because their entire argument thus far has basically been “but we’re a library.” But that completely misses the point that even libraries need to comply with licensing laws. Even with ebooks, they can’t just lend an unlimited number of copies. They have licensing agreements with the publishers, to be able to lend [x] copies of [y] book at a time.

    They purchase digital licenses to be able to lend those books, and they can only lend as many licenses as they own. Just like physical books. They need to use time-gated DRM to automatically revoke access whenever the rental time is up.

    And at first, that’s exactly what IA did. But they decided to disable that DRM, and just start lending unlimited copies to people instead, which flies in the face of established copyright law.






  • +1 for Anna’s Archive. It’s an amazing resource for students too, since they keep research papers and textbooks.

    And before someone gets up in arms about the research papers, the researchers don’t get paid by the journals for publishing with them. In fact, the researchers need to pay the journal to publish, and then the journal turns around and charges people to read it.

    If you ever need to get research for free, you can usually email the researchers directly and they’ll be happy to share it for free; They hate the journals too, (because like I said earlier, they have to pay the journal thousands of dollars,) but feel obligated to use them to publish.

    Even worse, that research and journal publishing was often funded by public funds and research grants. So the journal is paywalling research that taxpayers already paid for, and should be free to access.



  • Which is deceptive, at best. Steam doesn’t have pricing clauses for developers’ games. The devs are free to sell their games anywhere they want, at whatever prices they want. But Steam does have pricing clauses for Steam keys. Basically, what allows you to register a game to your Steam account.

    You can sell your game for whatever price you want, as long as it’s not the Steam version of the game. They don’t want you giving away Steam keys for cheaper than you can often buy them on Steam. And this makes sense; Steam has a vested interest in protecting their own game keys, and encouraging players to shop on a storefront that they know is reputable; Lots of steam key resellers are notoriously shady, for instance.

    Basically, the dev can go sell it cheaper on GoG, or Epic, or their own storefront if they want. As long as they’re not selling Steam keys, they’re fine. But players like having games registered to their Steam accounts, because it puts everything in one place. So devs may feel shoehorned into selling Steam keys (which would invoke that pricing clause) instead of selling a separate version that isn’t registered to Steam. But that doesn’t mean Steam is preventing publishers from selling elsewhere, or controlling the prices on those third party sites. It just means Steam has market pull, and publishers know the game will sell better if it’s offered as a Steam key.


    • red light and speed cameras are illegal in my state

    This doesn’t ban license plate reader cameras. My state also bans red light and speed cameras, but automatic license plate readers are 100% legal. I have seen the ALPL systems firsthand, and know they’re in use. You wouldn’t even notice them, because they’re mounted on traffic lights and power lines. It’s not like red light cameras, where they have a blatantly obvious giant camera box.

    My local municipality 100% uses ALPLs, and has referenced them in a number of arrests recently. They’re mostly used for Amber Alert situations, where police already have a description of what to look for. In these cases, the ALPL will basically allow them to track the car in real time, without even needing to follow the car. Because they simply get updates every time the car passes an intersection, so they can set up a stop ahead of where the person is traveling.