WesternInfidels

They didn’t include this in the release notes? What in the world is going on?

It depends which AI you ask, no? Ask AI made in a mostly white country, you’re going to get pictures of mostly white people. Ask AI made in a mostly Asian country, it’ll be mostly Asian people.

…it’s just what’s more common.

I think you’re misunderstanding the author’s objection here. The problem is exactly that the genAI will reflect “just what’s more common,” and that in doing so, it over-represents that which was already over-represented. It glosses over variety and difference, it reduces the past to a cartoon. It’s the next bit that’s important:

That makes “AI” perfect for creating the form of idealized, fictional “past” that fascists love to allude to (“make America great again“), a past that never existed but that needs to be saved or restored…

This is how the original 20th century Fascists did things, too. It’s not a hypothetically Fascist appeal, it’s a historically Fascist appeal.

They killed Pocket (they didn’t just remove it from FF) some time ago.

“In The Midst Of Unpopular, Catastrophic War Of Choice, Trump Allies Call For Draft” would perhaps not be a totally neutral headline but I feel like it would be more honest, more forthright.

“This allows us to integrate freeform electronics onto a broad range of substrates, including biopolymers and living biological tissue, all within a desktop-size printer without the needs of complex facilities or labor-intensive manual processes.”

Think of the conspiracy theories we got for the COVID vaccine. Now, think bigger.

Why weren’t they going after this 10 years ago? I think I’ve just gotten into the habit of “open in new tab” because I know there’s a good chance “back” won’t do what I want.

Frankly, here on PieFed, “back” to a feed isn’t very useful, because you’ll just land somewhere in the feed, not back to the place where you started. “Open in new tab” solves that as well, for certain very small values of “solves.”

They weren’t all so refined and classy, you know. That’s why we talk about the “Wisdom of the ain’t-gents.”

Maybe, maybe not.

The question I have is: How is this the best way for a non-profit to shape and steward the open web?

This is going to wind up granting AI agents a piecemeal, half-assed, legal-fiction version of “personhood,” like corporations have. The AIs will wind up with freedoms like: They can spend all the money they want, that’s “free speech.”

And the fleshy unfortunates among us still won’t have a right to a living wage, to medical care, etc.

…federal immigration officials attempted to use the tariff statute to unmask the president’s critics before, during the first Trump administration, and were reprimanded for doing so by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General in a 2017 report.

In its summons, ICE indicated the basis for its request was a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 . John Doe informed the court that they had nothing to do with the kind of activities at issue in the near-century-old statute, which governs boat show sales, wild animal imports, forfeited wines and spirits, and cross-border trade in other goods.

Anyone… anyone?

I have a Uni Kuru Toga mechanical pencil that I bought perhaps 20 years ago. For about $7. And it still works great.

Somehow, it’s still $7? How?

Sumatra PDF Reader is no-frills and distraction free. Even on my ancient PC, it’s fast as heck. I have rather rudely installed it on other people’s PCs, because their slow all-singing all-dancing PDF readers drove me up the wall.

RawTherapee converts “RAW” files from digital cameras to friendlier image formats, and pretty often RawTherapee’s edit is all I need. It’s feature packed, it can do film simulations, image de-noising, tone-mapping, and now it has the ability to do some local adjustments, too. I have several “RAW” converters, including a commercial one, but I keep coming back to RawTherapee as the mainstay, the most productive for me.

I’ve got foobar2000 set up as a pretty plain-looking, non-distracting music player. It’s got great library features, it has a wildly customizable interface, it’s got a plugin architecture to extend its abilities in many ways. It has stayed on my PC for years because of its quiet competence, always serving without demanding my time or attention.

I used to keep my password file and other confidential stuff inside a TrueCrypt virtual volume. Now I use the successor, VeraCrypt. Both have always worked flawlessly; in fact, TrueCrypt is way smaller and I’m not aware of any security issues with it, it’s just not actively developed anymore.

These are actually blog posts that list such things:

A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites (Updated 2026)

No Logins Required: Alternative Interfaces To YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram

There are a lot of problems with this, but a pretty telling one, I think, is: That’s not even what “vindication” means. The global-warming-denial position would be vindicated – proven, justified, confirmed – by years or decades worth of data showing that the environment isn’t heating up.

Demonstrating that you have the political power to change the rules in spite of the data is not vindication, it’s just gloating.

Any dictionary could straighten this out for him, if he were interested in expert opinions, in being correct. But they’re not. Flouting the definitions is part of the bully strategy: “My will is your reality, peasant.”

If “Vydia” can get access to this mechanism, it can’t be that hard, can it?

Given the current media, copyright, and business environment, why haven’t we seen this kind of reverse-piracy pursued as a deliberate business model? Buy some IP rights cheap from YouTube “content creators” who have given up, use your AI-powered robot to find vaguely similar stuff from creators who are still working, and copyright-claim it all?

It’s pretty evident there would be no downside.

Maybe small YouTubers should get together and create such a business, just to force the system to change. Make copyright claims against Paramount, CBS, etc. Make them barely plausible. Make thousands of them, from behind a rotating cast of shell companies. Make AI-powered, trust-the-claimant style copyright claims unworkable. Hey, it’s just the free market regulating itself.

No one becomes a billionaire by accident. People who have an insatiable urge to dominate are hugely over-represented in the Epstein class, through their own efforts.

internet bluetooth wife

My new punk band name

I had a visit with a PA who pantomimed the use of an inhaler she didn’t actually have on hand. The note-taking robot decided that was a “demonstration” with a billing code, and that it should be billed as $800.