m000

I think that's only the excuse the car makers use for being lazy and not taking design risks.

Because homogeneity also extends to the interiors (which are not affected by regulations). And of course the offered colors, where we have almost full-circled back to "any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".

almost nothing is truly organic anymore, or at least you can’t tell if it is, and I suppose that’s what you’re getting at

Yes, but over time, even pre-Internet generations have learned to be skeptical of everything watched or read online. Children growing up in this environment will almost certainly adapt and learn to do the same.

So, at best, laws restricting Social Media are a nanny state overreach, and at worst dystopian Big-Brother-style narrative control.

We have witnessed a similar overreach in the distant past with printing-press regulation laws [1]. But at the time, they power structure was different so they could instate an outright ban without hiding behind "think of the children" or the Red Scare.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...

Culture has been rapidly regressing to a mean long before AI.

See e.g. modern cars. Until the mid 00s, you could tell different brands apart from far away. And you could perhaps also tell a few things about the owner from the color.

Or movies. The past 20+ years of high-budget film-making has been mostly rehashing franchises and remaking what has already been made.

AI is perhaps accelerating the trend and eliminating many opportunities to witness something original (e.g. a quirky amateur wedding video). But the trend had already begun.

God forbid an individual makes a profit from shorting. What would be left for hedge funds then? /s

I agree that the positive effects of Social Media is understated, and probably on purpose.

Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. A generation has already grown with full distrust on what they learn from traditional media.

With that picture, addressing the (undeniable) negative effects of Social Media is only the sales pitch for introducing new legislation. The true goal of the legislation however is not to "save the children", but rather to ensure that the next generations will be obedient and meek.

Win the war, lose the empire.

I think they can already sink any US ship that comes in range if they want to. And the US knows it too. But for different reasons, it's in neither's interest to go there.

Personal rule: Whatever you are asking (question or action), make it easy to spot. Place it either at the start or the end of its paragraph. Never ask >1 things in a paragraph, to make responding inline easier.

This is especially important in multi-recipient emails, where different people need to address different issues.

My boss taught me this.

And it shows. If you are not the boss, you can't just write something and expect the recipient to figure it out.

Governments have failed to patch much more important loopholes that directly affect them. E.g. loopholes for corporate tax avoidance. I doubt they will put any effort at all for fixing loopholes related to dodging game preservation obligations.

The best way to not have loopholes is to put some effort in not creating them in the first place, not patching them later.

I have no problem with Sony not offering DRM free versions of games that I can still download and play with the store. But if that goes away -> you must give me a path to local ownership.

I'm pretty sure that Sony and others would work their way around such legislation. E.g. spin-off shell "studios" that would be the legal game sellers, and when the time comes to sunset a batch of games, these "studios" would magically go bankrupt and cease to exist.

Then the onus would again put on the commuinity to break any encryption or otherwise reverse-engineer and preserve the games so they remain playable for legal owners. And the top-level companies would still be able to salvage and own the game franchise rights, so they would still be able to harass the game preservation community.

I don't think there's any workaround to stop this kind of cheating, other than mandating that (a) all DRM-protected or service-bound content needs to be submitted to an escrow organization (Library of Congress?) in a form that can be used to reproduce it locally, and (b) all submitted content is released to the public after X years.

This. Having survived dozens of mediterranean village summers without A/C, I am genuinely puzzled how it came to be considered a necessity. Is it "modern" construction methods that turned buildings into heat batteries? So, it became a necessity in the cities, and then spread everywhere because we became spoiled and our collective tolerance to heat dropped?

It is heavy handed on the wrong side. How about heavy-handed regulation of the Social Media platforms? Not content regulation, but operations regulation. I'm pretty sure bots and ai-spam can be both easily flagged and banned, something that would have a positive impact for minors and adults alike. But the platforms won't do it, because these drive engagement and keep their stock value up.

Also, including the mid-teens (15-16) into the regulation may have a generational negative effect. This is the age you start to get interested in the world and how it works. Social Media is the primary medium teens use to get this information, having eclipsed traditional media (magazines, tv shows, radio shows etc.) Banning Social Media for these ages leaves a gap in newer generations maturing to adults.

But maybe that's by design? I.e. make new generations indifferent to the world around them, and also prevent them from building resistance to (home) propaganda spread through Social Media.

If you're not white enough, it's a hack. You can get around this problem by attracting some VC funding and building your HQ in Silicon Valley. /s

I think this is all theatrics to avoid EU regulation. Subscriptions for Meta products have already been a thing in the EU for several months.

It went a bit like this:

- EU mandates that users should be given the option to opt out from non-essential cookies.

- Meta responds by implementing an ad-free subscription-based model in EU, which allows them to dodge regulation.

- EU of course sees through their scheme and prepares to sanction them.

- Meta rolls-out subscriptions worldwide, so that it becomes harder for EU to claim that subscriptions were specifically created for dodging EU regulation.

Wow! The inclusion of Lua bindings seems like a major step forward. This should make modding much more accessible.

Russia would conquer Eastern Europe and reestablish Eastern Block and USSR

This is BS regurgitated by people that can't let go of the cold war, because their self-importance is tied to the era.

Anyone with half-brain can see that USSR had the various CPs as means of establishing and maintaining control over other countries. Russia does not have any equivalent apparatus. Relying on military power alone, they can't reach much further than their backyard. And Putin is smart enough to understand this (unlike Trump).

Putin himself stated those goals

Says an article titled with "US Intelligence:", based on Russia's refusal to concede territory in a war they may not be outright winning, but they're definitely not losing.

This is grand coming from the current Greek government. It is an open secret in Greece that the ruling party has been funding and running an army of anonymous internet trolls called Omada Alithias (loose translation: Truth Strike Team) for more than 10 years.

Incidentally (?), on April 26 there was the first conviction for one their trolls, writing on X as GheorghyZhukov. The real identity of the troll was established on trial, and he was convicted for slander and defamation. So maybe the feel that they may soon lose control of the online narrative, so they hope to create a chilling effect for online criticism via banning anonymity?

So it is often the case that today, you can get something for cheaper than you ever could in the past (albeit not at a great quality), and if you are willing to pay higher prices (but often about the same as you would have paid in the past), you can still get good or even better quality.

But with the advent and advances of several decades, aren't you supposed to be able to get better quality for cheaper today?

Why would you be ok with that?

These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.

Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".

So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.

Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".

Domestic manufacturing is not coming back because there are no guarantees whatsoever that this ban is going to last. Nobody is going to shell out hundreds of millions to setup manufacturing for such a low-margin product when it is much cheaper and risk-free to just sidestep the ban.

Cool! How about Postgres on MOS tech 6502 8-bit microprocessor powered by Microsoft's 6502 BASIC?

You are right. My memory failed me there. I should have done a quick lookup for the pricing.

It's $120/year/account for multi-user setup, and $60/year/account for single-user.

Which is still dirt cheap if you use social media professionally. E.g. what would $360 buy you if you try to do self-hosting? Maybe a day of work from a devops engineer to get this deployed for you?

I agree. It's not like this project is disrupting an overpriced product/SaaS.

E.g. Buffer charges around $50 per year per social media account, which gives you an unlimited number of collaborating user accounts. And their single user plans are even cheaper.

I don't see how self-hosting would be a worthy investment of your time/effort in this case, unless you are in some grossly mismanaged organization where you have several devops engineers paid for doing literally nothing.

I have no idea what this means, and I don't think I'm alone. Make a video dammit.

Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.

This probably won't happen (at least in open) because there's a risk people will start asking for a cost/benefit analysis for everything. Laws that enable mass surveillance, immigration regulations, military spending, wars, political system.

Are there more tools like hexora?

Nuclear weapons gave us global stability (i.e. no WW3). Hypersonics, hopefully, will also give us regional stability.

Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production.

I seriously doubt such clauses still exist today. The entrenchment of the MIC in the US political structure is so deep and stretches for so long, that they have probably managed to avoid having such clauses by now. After all, that's their obligation to their shareholders.

Also, the more high-tech the weapon, the more complex and fragile are its supply chain logistcs. So, scaling up the production of high-tech weapons is much harder, especially in wartime.

Regarding these cluster munitions though, other than very densely populated areas, do they inflict much damage ? Are they more powerful than a grenade, say ?

Also not an expert, but I get the feeling that "cluster munitions" is pretty much an umbrella term.

Because of the CCM [1], we tend to associate the term with the "ligther" variants, which are used as anti-personnel weapons. These variants probably wouldn't be much more destructive than a few grenades.

But what Iran is currently using, appears to be missiles with 500-1000kg payload. This puts each submunition in the 50-100kg range. This should deliver a lot more of a punch than a grenade. Also, because of their weight, they probably wouldn't be covered by CCM, had Iran ratified it.

And, yes, it is unsettling geeking out on this stuff, that may actually be killing people as we write our comment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munition...