One of my first exposures to the internet was in school, a teacher plugged a computer into a telephone, it made weird noises, then we waited five minutes to load a website with facts about frogs, I’m pretty sure he had to type in an ip address that was written down on paper. Later I printed out videogame walkthroughs at the library. It wasn’t until after Y2K that I really started using its more interactive features.

It basically means you need a VPN to torrent because if you rack up enough letters they might shut off your internet, but there’s a big distinction between those letters and a lawsuit, they are way closer to just a scare tactic. Their text suggests a lawsuit might be a followup possibility, but that isn’t really true.

One thing I think is worth mentioning (US specific), there was a period in the 2000s with a lot of prosecutions, but then industry groups switched tactics to pushing ISPs to do enforcement with mass copyright letters, and ceased actually bringing lawsuits against small pirates for the most part. People are normally more worried than they need to be.

I always watch subs, that thing they do in dubs where they say words in a weird cadence to lipsync better is really offputting to me.

To clarify, I’m not saying that this proves correctness of a particular economic theory, more that your (probably?) implied claim that pandemic money printing didn’t have a big negative impact on the value of the dollar is very much not self-evident given how things went.

IMO the big thing is just to broadly remove corporate influence and control. Almost everything that is wrong with the internet has roots in profit/power seeking megalomaniacs thinking up ways to make the technology we use serve their needs exclusively and manipulate everyone’s interactions to cater to that. Tech utopia would be everyone using systems that are designed for organic human interaction, organizing and information exchange, and the people who want to corrupt that being unable to do so.

It might not have fully collapsed (yet), but I think all the money printing had a lot to do with the subsequent relative price boom of various assets. For instance if you had bought gold and waited a few years it would have worked out pretty well. Inflation relative to stores of wealth has been a lot higher than inflation relative to consumer goods.

Going forward they should do it think it through,

mutes audio for the rest of the sentence

This is reality if you’re using an mp3 player instead of a phone

Don’t worry it looks like they intend to proactively restrict your right to ride a bike:

Focus solutions on expanding and maximizing roadway capacity for driving. This includes building new roadway capacity or applying operational strategies and technologies to maximize existing roadway capacity. You may also need to recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving.

No, I disabled that in the settings so I don’t see it

That’s true but you can mess up pretty bad if you don’t know what you’re doing and aren’t carefully following a recipe. One time I wanted a stir fry to be more filling, so I added flour, which apparently gives it a uniquely unpleasant slimy texture and is basically inedible. Never did that again but that kind of stuff can happen more often before you have much experience cooking. Even if you are following a recipe sometimes they can be ambiguous or give wrong measurements (especially for the amount of salt to use).

They expect companies will try to censor discussion of the topic and they are right

Are the specific suggestions made in the article “horrible UI design”? IMO it is good UI design to have a basic goal of people being able to use it without consulting with external resources, and not requiring them to know much more than is strictly necessary for the given task. The real fundamental problem is the marketshare of proprietary operating systems, not using them needs to be accessible, not a badge of computer literacy. The author is absolutely right that you should be able to format a disk and set up a network drive by just clicking through and selecting basic options about what you are trying to do.

All he’s really saying is that it is important for things to be easy for people to figure out how to do, and for that you need to be aware of what mental models they already have and design interfaces with the goal that the largest number of users can succeed in using the software. A better analogy might be that if you’re trying to run a political campaign, you should probably be speaking the language the majority of voters speak, and caring whether they understand you.

The examples the article gives seem like good ones. The starting point is a video of people new to linux trying to use software and failing to figure it out, acknowledging that as a problem to be solved. The proposed solutions are basically to have wizard guis that can walk users through the most common tasks for disk management and network drives. Usability matters and none of that should be very controversial.

Speaking only about the porn, I like drawings, and real images of real people usually make me uncomfortable for whatever reason. The quality and volume of the art has increased dramatically over the years, lots of furry nsfw artists are really, really good at what they do.

What makes it seem that way? Doesn’t read like AI to me, not a lot of vague fluff, consists of salient points and claims backed by links to relevant sources.

So if there is a tornado coming, should I run around opening windows?

I feel like this comic is bait

Here’s how I see it: the more you contribute to the economy, the more harm you are doing. Therefore the most ethical thing is to organize your life in a way that minimizes your participation, and spend more of your time and energy doing things unrelated to earning or spending money.