Almost like deciding whether things are true based on vibes and what your social circle approves of does not work

Is this why the Spotify section on their torrent page says “Unavailable until further notice.”?

Wonder how many more states will follow suit

To me it entirely hinges on what kind of features. The Firefox local website translation feature is cool and useful. A chatbot reading my emails and giving me dialogue options, a program harvesting data on everything I do on my computer and sending it to a server, those kinds of things I do not want and will go out of my way to avoid. Normal rules of what makes software good or bad still apply.

Also, I did have landlords who would subtract from my rent the cost of hiring a repairman if I did the work myself. It was worth it to them to not hassle with flakey contractors

This isn’t quite what I meant though; the fact remains that willingness to do more things yourself will not by itself get you housing, you still have to pay. As I said, I’m not disputing that part of the cost of rent is for services a landlord provides, or disputing that these have value. Rather I am saying that there is a more substantial baseline component to the cost that has nothing to do with these services and has everything to do with control of property, and because of this the statement in the OP comic is broadly accurate.

It’s great if it is info you can immediately verify though, like whether it made up a function name or command line argument, or questions like “where are the files for _____ stored on my os”

Miss that’s illegal

The scariest aspects of SOMA apply to everyone regardless of scifi brain transfer/copy technology if you think about it. In the years immediately following the release of the game I followed discussions about it which largely converged on the comforting explanation that the idea of a transfer is a delusion, and continuity of consciousness must be always tied to the original body. But unless you somehow rule out the idea that it is an emergent property of the information being processed in our heads, there isn’t a lot of reason to think that would be the case. A copy of you with all your memories and brain patterns has equal claim as an original. But we don’t even have quite the same pattern as a moment ago, so maybe our own claims to continuity or self aren’t as strong as we rely on them being.

It calls into question basic intuitions about the nature of our existence that people have a very difficult time bringing themselves to question, something the game pretty brilliantly depicts with its robots that are deeply offended, hostile and defensive about the suggestion that they are robots.

and once you make amazing entertainment you have to market it worldwide, and the people who are best at marketing entertainment worldwide are big, significant entertainment enterprises with the balance sheet to actually support those launches, companies like us. So I feel more optimistic than ever that new technology is going to allow us to supercharge our business.

So the argument is basically that their company will not be overshadowed because they’re using AI too, and because the important part of making a successful game is advertising it.

Yes, I once lived in an apartment where the dryer would sometimes snag my clothes on the edge of the spinning part and they would get these spots at the point where they got caught that were stained black and stretched out or ripped.

Not your server, not your waifu

It seems like he’s trying to say that it’s ok that they are spying on everyone because they found a way to do it technically within the bounds of the 4th amendment, which would still be terrible but it seems unlikely even that is true.

The article seems to be saying they are optimistic about the future though:

Despite their lower wellbeing today, young adults express high expectations for their future life satisfaction. On a ten-point scale, they expect their life satisfaction to reach 8.06 in five years’ time, compared with a general average of 6.65.

“Young people’s optimism about the future is positive,” says Nora Hansson Bittár, “but the combination of low wellbeing today and very high expectations for the future brings to mind former Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander’s phrase about the ‘disappointment that follows rising expectations’. Overly high ambitions and ideals – likely reinforced by social media – may contribute to dissatisfaction with life in the present.”

Part of the payment is for services, but it doesn’t make sense overall to call it a service because the cost is only in small part determined by the value of upkeep etc. being handled, there is no option to do this yourself instead and not pay. The main thing driving the cost of housing is the supply of housing, the desirability of the location, and who owns it all.

Think about mobile homes; how well built a mobile home is, or how well it is maintained, ultimately doesn’t matter that much and it will still depreciate if it is located on rented land, because the real driver of housing value is the value of the legal right to live in that particular location, and that right is ultimately controlled by the owner of the lot. Same goes for any housing; what matters most is the land, being able to safely and legally sleep there, and the ability of the property owner to control who can do that.

That’s gotta be illegal

It’s not even good for piracy because of the shitty bandwidth limits for users that pop up halfway through downloading something and make you wait until tomorrow or pay.

I think it is reasonable to denounce the Roman Empire and its supporters for that reason, they don’t get a pass on that for having been “successful” or for being in the somewhat distant past.

By Ralph Nader

Oh hey it’s that guy

Is there a line though? I feel like owning human beings and treating them with tremendous cruelty cannot be excused regardless of cultural environment, because we have inborn intuitions that strongly tell us certain things are wrong that can be listened to, that cross cultural boundaries and time. Lots of other things that I wouldn’t excuse someone in my own culture for though, I would be more willing to excuse of someone in a different culture/time, because otherwise I’d be basically demanding that no other cultures exist.

Without good and authoritative backup sites for reddit posts it seems likely these would be edited out or deleted so there wouldn’t be much point in directly linking them. Though not like there’s anything proving they were real to begin with.