I read some of Hancock’s earlier stuff like, 20+ years ago. There were some interesting theories about the possibility of civilizations more ancient than we were then aware of having actually existed.

In the time since, as I understand things, we’ve discovered “evidence” that points to civilizations of some kind 20,000+ years ago, which we didn’t seem to have much of back then, and some of which seems to disprove some of Hancock’s atlantis-type sophisticated lost ancient civilizations theories, but it was still a moderately compelling, engaging, and fascinating IDEA at the time even if the magnetic poles flipping opposite every 12,500 years was a little hard to swallow.

I’m not sure what he’s peddling now, but when he throws out ideas, he’s good at making them seem cool, so it could just be keanu is honestly fascinated by whatever concepts the dude is dishing out.

(The sphinx was originally a lion statue 100,000 years ago or whatever)

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

The BEHAVIOR of a very small subset of vegans unfortunately causes a small but ridiculously vocal subset of non-vegans to tar all vegans with the same brush.

Since volume equals truth for a not insignificant number of people in the Internet, far too many people don’t stop to separate behavior choices from professed beliefs and that’s how we get where we are now, I unfortunately.

The world would be a better place if people stopped automatically associating and assuming causation and instead treated bad behavior as just that.

Yeah, I actually MISS intros on shows that don’t have them. I forget when in the 2000’s or 2010’s they started that, but it aggravated me almost as much as the cutback from 20+ episodes a season to fewer.

I ALWAYS skip enterprise, I never skip the others.

I get that they were trying for something different, I can even appreciate using a folksy ballad that doesn’t have all is the “formality” of classical music the same way Starfleet of the time doesn’t have all the formality of later treks. I even personally find it to be a cool idea on paper, but for some reason it just didn’t land with me.

It’s jarring when it SHOULDN’T be. Even the closing credits get a "WhoOoAawhatthefuuuuOh."reaction out of me every time the music starts. Like, it takes until almost the fourth note on the credits before I go "oh yeah, they do this.

I still watch the credits, though.

The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

WTF were they thinking?

Huh.

Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.

I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.

Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.

Curated spaces where we can…interact with bots?

I mean we already have social media and most people don’t particularly like bots THERE, why would anyone want them impersonating people in MORE places?

Now, if someone fed a bot all of the manuals, faq’s, and support topics for an app like TREK: Total Interface and made it known it was a support chatbot, maybe I’d use THAT when I wanted help with the app because it’s complex enough that such a thing might be USEFUL, but otherwise? No.

AI bots should serve people, not the other way around.

For those wondering about the upswing here:

If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.

Hell’s supposedly about suffering so, I imagine if (given enough samples and enough time) someone were to finally “hear” the root of the formulaic nature of pop music for the first time, being forced to listen to endless pop music WOULD be torture…

Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.

I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.

I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)

I heard Jack O’Neill and Teal’c in my head on this one.

J: Well, tell him unless he cools it, I’m going to throw down!

T: Have you eaten something that does not agree with you, O’Neill?

J: What?

T: Is your digestive system experiencing discomfort?

Daniel Jackson: Yeeeah, this is probably my fault, I explained the euphemism “throwing up” to Teal’c last night after Sam’s bout in the infirmary and I’m guessing he thinks the reverse means

J: No!

J: I’m perfectly… Continent.

I think you mis-spelled “biased”.

:)

Safe deposit box?

Everyone who has one, I hope.

It’s called a Bitcoin “wallet”, too. If someone else is holding yours, it’s not your money.

But they’re almost all using it STUPIDLY, aren’t they?

How many people who purport to have Bitcoin actually hold their own private key?

My understanding is that the “re-imagining” is due to the timeline.

Vivec City in ESO is 700+ years before Vivec City in Morrowind, for example.

(strike)Frank from IT(/strike)the cleaning crew

I jest, but I’ve seen more facilities maintenance teams cause power issues than IT teams.

Elder scrolls online set a major expansion there.

95%+ of the content in the whole game can be done solo if you don’t like the second M in MMO.

It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks

That’s precisely the kind of access that a web browser should NEVER, EVER have.

If you think 2 stage download keylogger apps getting into app stores is bad, wait until it can be done with a banner ad. Or by viewing a comment on a post.