enkers

I didn’t even realize where we were until I read your comment.

Haha, yeah, that’s why I said it’s my diplomatic answer, as it doesn’t utterly reject a capitalist framework.

Here’s my mildly diplomatic answer that’d probably get tossed:

Piracy has become a plague on our society, but there’s a more sinister cause to it. The average labourer can hardly afford to pay the same fee to access culture that the wealthy person can, and this has caused a significant and justified uptick in piracy.

This situation can be averted by increasing minimum wages and supporting universal basic income. If everyone knew they could at least make ends meet, they’d have some left over to pay for the culture that mattered to them.

As a vegan, you’re absolutely right. A lot of people think the hard part is giving up meat or dairy or eggs, but it’s not. The hard part is dealing with the social implications. Explaining to your friends you aren’t willing to eat with them when they’re doing something you find thoroughly wrong. Having your mom disappointed you won’t eat her cooking.

You have to be willing, at least somewhat, to pay the cost of maintaining your convictions, and nobody ever tells you that when you start.

Social change is hard, and it takes time. But so many have already blazed a much harder path than I’ve had to endure, and every time someone else gets on board it makes it easier.

Doing the right thing is rarely the easiest thing.

Because the aggregated weighted result ranking provides a more useful page rank than any individual search engine, and if any search engine tries to (accidentally or otherwise) stuff specific results into the top ranks, it doesn’t matter. It’ll be deranked because no other engine displays those results highly. In a similar manner, it deranks targeted SEO attempts unless multiple platforms are targeted.

Don’t get me wrong, it still has its problems. For example, if the individual search engines all get a bit too samey, then it will as well.

What a strange mentality. When I pay for things I want, I’m generally happy to support the creator. If others can’t, why would I be upset if they get the product for free? It means more people can also enjoy the thing I like.

It’s such a crab bucket mentality, I couldn’t imagine living life being constantly bitter.

Yes you’re absolutely right. The problem of aggregators is that if all the aggregated searches go to shit, then so does it. Garbage in, garbage out.

I started finding DDG’s results just as bad as Google’s, so I switched to SearXNG and have been pretty happy with it so far.

Its open source so anyone can run an instance if they wish. I feel like this sort of model is much more resistant to enshitification.

Thanks for the advice! I’ve been out of the game a long time, so the quick refresher was super helpful.

I think my main reason when I looked into things a while back was that Intel had the better single core speeds, but I’m not married to the idea. I’ll mostly be gaming and dabbling with local LLMs.

But yeah, I also haven’t been a huge fan of Intel’s anti-consumer business practices. Maybe it’s time for an AMD system! Thanks!

Shit, that’s not great. As a consumer, is their any way to protect yourself if you’re in the market for a modern i9? Does the entire 12th gen lineup have issues?

I’m still using a 1st gen i7, and the lack of AVX is starting to become problematic, so I think it’s time…

I think the inverse problem is more troubling. If you accept that nothing has inherent value, then isn’t everything morally permissible? Maybe it is an emotional decision, or perhaps a leap of faith, but I find that idea so repugnant, I couldn’t believe it and continue functioning as a person.

I think in terms of consciousnes, Occam’s razor leads me to suspect that it’s tied to brain function, and when that ceases, so does it. Of course, once again, things like this are very hard to prove. I do think, though, that science and philosophy will eventually unravel it. (Incidentally, there’s actually a book by Dan Dennett I’ve been meaning to read about this topic which was suggesting we’re quite a bit closer to figuring it out than most people think.)

One of the problems with philosophy is that there’s never any smallest part, beyond perhaps Descartes’s “cogito, ergo sum”. You can reduce any argument more and more and they all start to not make sense and eventually crumble. You can pick at their semantic foundation or the thousands of years of preceding thought until they unravel, then that nice sweater is now just a bunch of fibres. If you refuse to view philosophical arguments as a whole, then there’s nothing there to view.

It’s like an actual sweater. Does it even exist in the first place? After all, it’s just a bunch of stuff arranged in a particular way, and it’s called a sweater because it has some sort of human utility and we decided to give it a name. You could go about your life and believe that sweaters don’t exist, and it’d be quite hard to prove you wrong.

Or you can accept that it’s a useful human construct, so they do. Maybe you could even go further, and believe there’s some idealised concept of sweaterness that exists in some meta-reality, which all sweaters share a property of.

I think this is essentially the realist viewpoint.

And you could be right, maybe all our current moral theories do run into contradictions, so perhaps they’re all wrong.

Heck, we’re running into similar problems in astrophysics. When we learn more about our universe, and things stop adding up. But that just means we go back to the drawing board and find a better model until they make sense.

Same for philosophy. When you reach a contradiction, you go back and come up with better ideas. It’s a process of slowly uncovering the truth.

I think it’s rather self evident, but I’ll share a logical outline which resonates with me. To be sussinct: Most sentient beings kinda like being alive. Where possible, it’s morally preferable to let them continue in that state.

It’s basically an application of the golden rule. You can get in to game theory or utilitarianism for more thorough arguments to show that killing is generally wrong, but it then still has to come back to life having value which is quite hard, if not impossible, to logically prove.

So then you need to refer back to philosophy to find arguments that life has intrinsic value. I personally prefer using Camus’ acceptance of the absurd as a basis for intrinsic value, but there are lots of other potential arguments that lead to the same conclusion.

Ultimately, though, it’s impossible to even prove that other beings simply exist (e.g. solipsism) or have experiences, but at some point we mostly all look at the evidence and accept that they do.

*sigh* After reading some of the other comments, I have to agree. I’m not sure whether to be relieved or even more discouraged. It’s a dreadfully boring dystopia.

However, in U.S. federal courts, updates to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 2015 have resulted in significant decline in spoliation sanctions.

Oof. Five bucks says this change was driven by concerted megacorp lobbying efforts.

The crazy part is the implication that the evidence destroyed was probably more damning than having a judge and jury assume anything reasonably suggested to have been implicated by those chats as true.

I don’t know the laws that well, but there is a distinction in Canadian law between uploading and downloading. I’m not entirely sure how applicable to torrenting that is, but I think there’s a reasonable argument that if you are the original uploader, you must have uploaded the content in it’s entirety, whereas that’s not necessarily true for anyone else downloading the torrent, and certainly not provably so.

I think that’s not necessarily true. There’s certainly some good reasons to have a distinction between the original uploader and all the rest of the additional seeders. It’s going to come down to local law.

An analogy is if you buy some illicit substance and split it up with a few friends who pay you their share. Whether or not your local authorities considers you an illegal drug dealer could be highly dependent on scale, profitability, frequency, clientele, etc. Those details could be the difference between a slap on the wrist and some hard time.

GReader was so good, now it’s just another ghost in Google’s graveyard. :( My guess is that they killed it because it was kinda in the same sphere as Google News.

Bastardized version of the name of a Sumerian god, referenced heavily in Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson.