dmonitor

I'm sure it would be trivial to get it to say something incredibly racist, so that's probably a worthwhile disclaimer to put on the website

Copyright does discourage DRM. Even the most egregious DRM these days can be bypassed with minimal effort and is mostly just a nuisance. Take away government enforcement of copyright and how profitable your digital product is will be directly tied to how advanced you are in the DRM arms race.

Steam is the classic example of how this is effective. You compete with pirates by offering what they can't: a reliable, convenient service. DRM becomes more of a hindrance than a benefit in this situation.

Allowing pirates to offer reliable convenient pirate websites that are "so easy a normie can do it" would be a disaster for all the creative industries. You would need to radically change the rest of society to prevent a total collapse of people making money off art.

There's no reason FreeSteam can't also do that, though. There's no copyright, so just have an extension of the steamapp that changes it to point to your server when downloading games / checking ownership. Piracy stops being a service issue when pirates are allowed to make nice services.

People would use that service instead of Steam, publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc.

The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).

I put googly eyes on a camcorder and call it Bobby. Why can't Bobby watch a movie in the theater with me?

You need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.

the current strategy seems to be the equivalent of taking a chainsaw to someone's chest and calling it heart surgery. I don't know how to do a heart transplant, but I know the tools require some amount of subtlety.

reddit has been pushing itself as an "app" more than a website recently, and killed off a lot of third party apps in a move that drove off some longtime users. could just be a sign of a changing userbase, but I won't write off the idea that reddit is becoming more inhabited by bots.

Elon buying twitter and changing the algorithm to support him probably isn't included in this calculation

The "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality is exactly what won the current administration. People like the image of a strong man with his own opinions. Democrats have been retreating to the center on nearly every policy position, and it clearly isn't working.

You should interpret "not being able to posit your idea" as your idea losing so hard in the marketplace that people refuse to even consider it.

Their device should definitely have a big red light on top of it

DIN format radios are still around. My recent-ish corolla's infotainment display is just a well integrated double-DIN. I'm surprised this car doesn't as far as I can tell, have a DIN slot for one.

That's just hindsight being 20:20

> banning Twitter

This is just practical given you can't see tweet threads (and sometimes even tweets) without an account.

> against banning AI Art

I think you mean to say reddit is pro-banning AI art?

Anyway, banning AI art is absolutely good for curating quality posts. AI art is incredibly low-effort, easily spammable, and has legitimate morality concerns among artist communities (the kind that post high quality content). Same goes for obviously AI-written posts.

I agree content quality on the site has fallen drastically, but those are both measures to try and save it.

Not that term, but a Messiah that will establish / lead a powerful Jewish nation was

Luke 17:20-37 also seems to support the idea that Jesus was trying to tell people the kingdom was spiritual, not physical. The kingdom as a concept wasn't some novel idea, either. Jesus was claiming he was the fulfillment of the messianic prophecy in Judaism. He was reinterpreting the prophecy, though, as a spiritual rather than literal liberation.

Tangential, but you can interpret the anti-christ in christian belief to bring the alleged kingdom, as a sort of anti-fulfillment of the prophecy.

I can see the appeal of "colonizing mars as an extinction-proof backup plan", but I'm not convinced that it's a positive-EV play. Attempting to go to mars increases odds of our survival in case of earth going to shit by some amount, but it also increases the odds of earth going to shit due to the waste, energy expenditure, and missed opportunity cost of not solving pressing issues.

We also haven't specified if we're sending live humans to Mars. Just shuck someone onto the next rover we send over and call it a night.

Sending a live human, or group of humans, on a suicide mission in the name of bragging rights as a species would be really bleak. I doubt you'd get much political support for a Mars mission without a return plan, or at least a sustainability plan.

You basically can't give people numbers or statistics because invariably people will try to make that number as big as possible.

The nature of 4chan makes it more difficult to distinguish from just normal posting. There's not any kind of paper trail to look at and potentially ID the posters.

It's also somewhat expected on the site from a cultural standpoint? Having a recognizable posting pattern gives flavor to a system that is otherwise composed of completely interchangeable posters. Like /v/ has one guy that constantly makes threads that are designed to devolve as quickly as possible into posting images of anthropomorphic lizards. It's not much of a nuisance so much as it makes the place feel comprised of genuine people.

> These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.

Simultaneously one of the best and worst parts about the website was how much a single person could create influence. Some guy spamposting "30-year old boomer" memes eventually turned boomer and zoomer into mainstream terminology.

I remember a long time ago, a general that I would frequent attracted the attention of a lunatic who would frequently try to ruin threads by spam posting corrupted unloadable images until the bumpcap was reached. It made a successful thread with no incidents feel like a moment of success.

That's crazy. The whole "dank memes" thing and terms like based, boomer, wojak, and soy are all from channer culture. 4chan managed to brand gen Z as the "zoomer" generation. Its cultural pervasiveness is impossibly deep.

Wiktionary has a surprisingly robust list

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_4chan_slang

> Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix.

I haven't looked at their financials, but I wouldn't be surprised if their current subscription offerings targeting power users were enough to support the service.

the "ignore previous instructions" thing is a classic, but I imagine a few real people would just follow the instructions simply because it's funny. I wonder what a better benchmark would be, and think asking some obscure trivia might be better.

Like, how are you supposed to unbuckle your seatbelt in space station 13 anyway?

Not too difficult to realize what they mean is "please feel comfortable posting your most radical opinions and we'll signal boost the ones that help our agenda"

That's not it at all. I'm sure there's lots of sycophants out there, but a lot of people just don't find "he's stupid and it's random" a satisfying explanation for his actions, even if they disagree with them.

The cell providers also get really opinionated about how much / how often your IoT device talks to the cell towers when they seek to approve your device.

With homebrew, you can go all the way up to 1TB