For anyone wondering:

Take a paper towel, grip both ends, gently place paper towel over the stinkbug and close both ends keeping the length taut (not putting any pressure or touching where the stinkbug is, just letting the U-shaped fold in the center where you are not touching enclose the stinkbug). Gently twist to seal exits while not squeezing the stinkbug.

You are now holding a paper towel with a non-activated stinkbug. Do what you will with that stinkbug.

That’s actually really heartwarming.

Ultimately it took ProPublica to pull back the curtain on a computed market where an algorithm was telling landlords how much to charge tenants for a majority of the market. And even then, I don’t think it’s stopped.

This is exactly my point. The ability for companies to gouge consumers is exacerbated by algorithms, sure. But they have power because the regulatory rules are either in their favor or not.

Even exposing it as you note didn’t change it. Likewise individual consumers don’t have the ability to change it. It’s a red herring and false solution to say “AI can fix it.”

I’m always up for a good AI dystopia article, but this is pretty poorly written, taking a very long time to say very little new or interesting. For this reason I wouldn’t be surprised if the author used AI assistance in writing it, which would certainly tell you something about the author’s objectivity. (It has a lot of earmarks of recent-model AI essay writing, like repeated use of the rule of threes, though I admit a human could have produced it. )

The thesis appears to be that AI can be an equalizer to put individuals on equal footing to corporate data processing tasks. But conversely that it may not be because viability, quality and reliability depends on who controls the model and whether it hallucinates in critical or non-critical ways. Thanks for the clarity, article.

None of this is new thought, but just another part of an inherently AI-normalizing line of thinking that AI is just another democratizing technological tool (but that could be used for evil - or good! - or evil!). The author addresses some of the AI flaws but ends almost where it began, with that flawed premise, which elides how unlike other tools, AI actually degrades our abilities to think and communicate once we start relying on it. The article doesn’t address that communication, meaning, thought, and reliability are degraded when either individual or corporate systems integrate AI.

Instead, the author would like you to think individuals can level a playing field by using AI against corporate algorithms. And sure, a person denied a medical claim by a health insurer low effort AI can now write a generic low effort appeal, but that appeal can just a efficiently continue to be denied by better funded AI. It’s a spurious and illusory benefit to the individual.

What truly matters and is unaffected by consumer AI use is power - political and corporate power. AI just floods the zone with more output, but the result of us all adopting AI will change nothing to the power imbalance in our system. The solution to low effort slop won’t be more low effort slop - we’d just be burying ourselves deeper in it.

There’s some similar work done with the Pretendo network for Nintendo systems, but my understanding is it’s just for server-hosted and multiplayer game features and not copyright authentication.

I think it’s inevitable that someone creates an online server that authenticates online games, the lawsuits will be swift and vicious. The best solutions will probably be to create a local network authentication method, but who knows if it’s even possible.

Honestly, this is the best time to snapshot it, because even with the slop already there, the exponential increase that’s about to happen will absolutely dwarf what’s there now.

I hope we get there. But even that would be a return to status quo.

The typical cycle is democrats come in, do crisis control, enact stable (if lacking ambition) policies and leadership, and at year four or eight, the voters have forgotten the crisis and… Promptly vote back in republicans, who spend the next years systematically dismantling all progress until we’re back in crisis. Repeat. Happening since at least 1992.

This is the correct list, having lived through it. BBS services in the mid-1980s were the start of Razor1911, Paradox and other distro and cracker groups. I’d edit 2 to include FTP which is what BBS evolved into with secret dropsites for new releases.

IRC is 2.5 on this list. You can group that alongside the pre-web internet services, like AOL which had slightly IRC-like chat rooms dedicated to serving warez and videos in the same way (requesting a list from a chatbot, and then requesting sequential files).

Some light history here, though like all warez-related scholarship, there’s a ton missing that you had to have seen to know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

https://archive.org/details/b904a8eb-9c98-4bb1-bf25-3cb9d075b157/

I don’t know if this meme is fully ironic, but kind of strange to think “torrenting” is considered the OG piracy method now.

Interesting. So you have *arr set to auto-download from certain lists and see it in Plex for the first time, as options? What kind of lists? How do you cull content you don’t end up liking so it doesn’t fill up your server?

What? Do you have a link? That’s a gut punch if so…

CD-R and CD-RW discs use different methods of data encoding, and were never advertised as having similar longevity.

I mean…sorry, but this is wrong. Mitsui CDRs for example are still being sold on retail sites advertising 100+ (and sometimes 300+) year longevity. Similar to bitrot, internet rot makes it hard to find advertisements from the 90s, but I am comfortable that was true then too and not limited to “gold” high quality discs like Mitsui.

Remember that CDs, CDRs, and so on were originally pitched as surviving 100 years. Turns out they last a highly variable amount of time but potentially as little as 2-3 years before they degrade, depending on the construction.

So I’ll just say, this is clearly a theoretical value.

Edit: Words.

JD: Why won’t they stop doing it? I specifically demanded it.

Very interesting. I followed BD circumvention on the doom9 forums from that link decades ago, but it looks like the VUK database method is more reliable now.

Is there some version of Handbrake or workaround for BD copy protection? This is the excerpt from the site, and matches my understanding that it isn’t a circumvention tool:

Supported Input Sources:

Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.

Yeah, but did you hear? Spez is a billionaire now! The last step of the business model! Great job everyone!

Yeah, this 100% only works (but I think does work) with a reliable physical chain of trust, since we’re not yet in an age where you can Mission Impossible mask social engineer trust face-to-face. Not a great plan if this isn’t a USB drive handed directly to them, though.

You could always package them with everything they need to watch, like VLC (which should be able to read most formats anyway). Not clear if they are all on Windows, but perhaps you could include the portable VLC version that doesn’t require an install and make an obvious-named VLC playlist file for them to open.

Oh, sure, if your horses are all in the same place.