I mean, I’m not sure why this conversation even needs to get this far. If I write an article about the history of Disney movies, and make it very clear the way I got all of those movies was to pirate them, this conversation is over pretty quick. OpenAI and most of the LLMs aren’t doing anything different. The Times isn’t Wikipedia, most of their stuff is behind a paywall with pretty clear terms of service and nothing entitles OpenAI to that content. OpenAI’s argument is “well, we’re pirating everything so it’s okay.” The output honestly seems irrelevant to me, they never should have had the content to begin with.

I still have more subs for these than I would like, but I generally download anything I actually want to watch anyway. Like, the fact that justwatch.com even exists is an indictment of the way this works.

This is a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of anything related to monopoly or anti-trust law. Maybe, maybe the iPhone, and even then it’s a stretch. edit: at least in the US.

Indeed. Gun control is actually extremely popular if you just look at polling.

I don’t disagree, but y’all don’t own nearly as many guns as Americans. I think you already highlighted why - in most civilized countries you have actually do some work to get a gun and have more legal responsibility than just “oops little Timmy got my gun again, that’s not your pacifier big guy I don’t know why he likes this thing so much let’s put that back over here on the nightstand.”

“There is simply nothing we can do! Far too busy stopping women getting a dead fetus removed from their body before it kills them! Oh hang on I have to take a call, someone is trying to make sure that kids get food. Not on my watch!”

• Republicans, shortly before explaining how they’re “pro-life.”

This tracks. I have recently gone back to running a Windows desktop machine for gaming, and now I have to actually shut it off because:

a) that fucking thing never stays asleep. Clean install with nothing other than Steam and a couple of games, sleep settings mean nothing. Just wakes up, stays awake forever.
b) Fortunately I have an enterprise license key so I don’t get as much random bullshit, but every update there is some new fucking thing I don’t want.

My machine is a desktop, but I can’t image how this works well on laptops.

Copilot is their AI thing (which I think is just a wrapper for ChatGPT.) As for why you need it, fuck if I know. Love MS just adding another key that’s going to piss me off when I’m in a game.

God. We already have to deal with them idolizing fucking Reagan. And yeah, as long as he is alive and not in office, the chances he goes to jail go up every day.

Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it.

Bold added for emphasis, Apple claims privacy as a feature and OS control of the mic to prevent this exact sort of thing. Not only would someone have found it, it would be a news cycle on the mainstream news, and basically just the wallpaper for any tech-centric website.

I mean, fucks sake, iFixIt alone would find mics in places they shouldn’t be and this would be a story.

Unfortunately, the truth is more boring, and basically pretty much every app/website most of us use are tracking us in some way unless you really seek prevention. They don’t need the mic.

“if I were a corporate shitbag, how would I implement my shitbaggery?”

In this case, it would be pretty hard. We have wiretap laws, which would mean you have to tell the user you’re doing this. Even though no one reads the ToS, someone does, and it would be news if someone was doing this.

Even then, it would be a hard enough problem that companies would think twice about it for a few reasons. Number one, processing 24/7 of all audio in your home is going to be rather difficult/expensive, so you’d have to go with something like keyword-triggers-processing the way that your phone listens for “hey google/siri” or Amazon listens for “Alexa.” It works kinda like game video sharing - they are always listening and recording for a short time frame* but they only send the data somewhere if they hear the trigger phrase. That’s not easy in itself, they’ve spent a ton of time getting the right algorithm so that it correctly hears the right trigger phrase and you don’t get a ton of false positives to varying degrees of success. And keeping in mind these are companies that are best suited to it, they still struggle sometimes with even that. The ad companies would have to listen for dozens/hundreds/thousands of triggers…

And then you get to the data retention policies. Google is an ad company, Apple is not. One of the reasons that Apple can tout privacy as a feature is simply that they don’t need the data, so they don’t collect nearly as much, and they save even less. They get the bonus of not dealing with law enforcement and all that.

So, assuming they solve that, solve some big issues with the laws of the land and physics, now we’re to the point where they have to think about network traffic. Which is going to be trivially easy for nerds to figure out and circumvent, so they would have to have their own ad-hoc network which comes with another 137 or so difficulties.

If it were, it would be pretty common knowledge and there would be several news cycles about it. I don’t doubt that they could bury it in the terms of service, but we have wiretap laws in enough places that are two-party consent that it would have had to come out by now. Not to mention nerds like me running pi-hole and monitoring their traffic, repair people who could easily regonize a mic in the device, etc.

Piracy is not even close to the reason any of the streamers are struggling, and even then I’d be surprised to see if Amazon was actually struggling. Piracy itself is a rounding error, and is more of a function of the shitty way that most of the streamers run their business.

There is a lot going on:

Lots of these streamers, and especially Amazon, keep green lighting projects with massive budgets but then forgetting to tell a good story or hire people who seem interested in making the show they’re making. Rings of Power and Wheel of Time have insane budgets for what are generously mediocre shows. I can’t even imagine the pitch meeting for WoT. “I want to take a massively beloved cornerstone of the fantasy genre that spans 14 gigantic books and a few novellas, turn it into a TV show with 8 ep seasons, make a ton of changes to the story and lore that is sure to piss off the audience that is most likely to generate word of mouth for us, and for the low, low price of like a billion dollars. You should trust me with this money because I worked on 2 seasons of the hit show (that was on the edge of cancellation basically it’s entire run) Agents of SHIELD and a streaming show on Netflix that was canceled after one season.” By pretty much any measure, this is an insane set of decisions.

This is everywhere - The Witcher, Halo, Star Trek: Discovery (and most of Picard), Secret Invasion, Book of Boba Fett, just about every goddamn “blockbuster” Netflix attempts. It’s either they take a beloved IP and decide to do something entirely different and usually not even good-different (has anyone that worked on Halo even seen an xbox?) or they set up a project with a pitch like “Ryan Reynolds is a big star, Fast and the Furious is a big franchise, make a movie with Ryan and cars or whatever.” Insert meme of the guy getting thrown out of the window for asking “does it need a plot?”

The existence of half of these streamers in general belie the real issues. You can’t tell me that Paramount+ or Peacock should even exist. The whole premise of these goddamn things is “people want to watch 20-40 year old re-runs of Star Trek and Seinfeld, I bet we can charge $15 in perpetuity for that as long as we sprinkle in the occasional new show that makes a point to let our audience know we hate them for liking these shows.”

It’s just a massively, massively mismanaged business on basically every level. Ads is the latest in this fiasco. They should be either small, cheap networks that make a lot of small budget shows, or if they’re going to take some big swings they might want to have a proven strategy of any sort. Quite a lot of the shows that found massive success were made for basically the change you find in the couch cushions. A show like Friends probably cost about $7 for the first season, and didn’t balloon until later seasons when the cast was each making a decent amount and every other episode had a major guest star. Most sci-fi until very recently was extremely cheap. Carter: Sir, we’ve arrived on the planet, looks like the MALP was accurate. O’Neill: It’s really weird how most of the planets we visit look like the woods in Vancouver, BC. Even Game of Thrones which probably started this arms race of spending, didn’t start getting $20+ million budgets until it was a massive, massive hit (worth noting how that show tried to stick closely to the source and didn’t start to suck until they ran out of book) and even then that would be seen as “cheap” compared to a lot of these.

streaming has absolutely no future.

Streaming isn’t going anywhere, and if anything will likely continue to grow for as cable dies off. It’s just going to consolidate and get shittier (ads) as basically things move back to a model more cable-like. Piracy will probably ramp back to like levels for music in the early 2000’s, but it will remain a niche. Amazon specifically will see blowback for this, but it’s unlikely to move many off of Prime since it’s sort of a tertiary benefit to having a Prime membership, and even if it’s all you got for your Prime membership, it’s still one of the cheapest streaming services.

Tangential, but I feel similarly and one of my bucket list items is a motorcycle trip across the country. At this point, do I just ride up to Canada, cross back over around New York? Or down to Tijuana, ride over until I hit ocean and swim around to Jersey? Serious question, should I pack mittens or water wings?

I mean, Disney is run by adults, so I suspect they’re sitting over there watching Elon punch himself in the balls and laughing about it.

And, if Elon had a real board, this probably would have already happened. This is a perfect example of why. What problem has Disney caused Tesla that they could possibly articulate to a customer that would justify this move and not cost them good will if nothing else, and sales likely especially as this gets a ton of coverage? “Yes, I understand your frustration, and yes I can hear your kid screaming in the background about not being able to watch Frozen while you’re stuck charging. But you see, sir/madame, our CEO has a very, and I really have to make sure I state this correctly, but very tiny penis. It’s so small, just constantly peeing on his balls (which are also very small.) We here at Tesla let him compensate for this by making the product worse for you, our paying customers. Anyway, can I interest you in a CyberTruck? Please? We’ve only sold 3 and my family needs to eat.”

Pretty sure they can only be used when parked like when you’re charging. Even at a super charger, it’s going to take 20-30 minutes to get back on the road.

So it’s felt like this to me basically since I became an adult. For one, I work in an industry where the holidays mean nothing. And two, now I have adult shit to do, so there isn’t a ton of time to just sit around baking and watching Christmas specials and what not. Also can’t really stand the consumerist side of things and while I do like giving gifts as a thing, I don’t like the idea of “just buy some shit” or “whoever gets the most presents wins.”

Now all that said, when I think back to what used to make the holidays special for me, I realized that was adults deliberately making the holidays special. And the shitty thing about being an adult (unless your SO is like, from the Clause family) is that you kind of have to do that for yourself, and you’re probably going to have to do boring adult shit to make that happen. Like, you might literally be putting something like “Bake cookies/Watch ‘The Grinch’” into your calendar. There is a lot of little things you can do as well - play some music, get some scented candles, stick a bowl of decorative pinecones out, etc.

I think this also helps a lot with other people, or in my case, my kids. I don’t have a ton of friends (I’m very much a person with a small circle, but all people i know I can call if i need help moving if that makes sense) but we do some small get togethers. With my kids, I try to do more of the things that make things feel special for them. Lights on the house I could take or leave (back to being lazy) but I do my best and I put them up, even though it was just a few days ago because that was the first day that wasn’t pouring where I was at home when it was light out. I make it a point to watch some Christmas movies (and let the kids come to a consensus on which) and bake some cookies or whatever. We usually go every year to that neighborhood where every house has cool lights, even if that is an hour drive away. Lots of little things like that.

Anyway, I feel like the holidays are very much a “fake it til you make it” scenario. I tend to think about it like “what do I remember that I liked about holidays” when I was a kid, and then force myself to do those things. What I’ve generally found is that there are definitely times I’ve regretted not doing anything like that, but I never regret when I forced myself to do something like this, and I rarely remember the “forced” part.

He used an unauthorized, insecure Samsung Galaxy S3 or something like that, actually.