EDIT: Aaaaand it’s gone.

Sony are a bunch of fucking dumbasses.

Posts article on social media. How ironic!

Or torrents. If piracy’s on the rise (again) as a replacement for streaming, you can sure as hell bet that it was already replacing sites like PornHub way before that.

Many video games have funny moments, but Portal 2 remains on top as the most hilarious video game of all-time.

Half light is the biggest troll in the game, surpassing even Electrochemistry in how unhinged it is.

I’m glad this effort finally has the support it needs, compared to six months ago when it was practically on life support.

FLUX.1 and WAN were already miles beyond Stable Diffusion a year ago. While America has been pushing capitalistic goals with LLMs, China has been releasing banger model after banger model, all as open-source.

Downside is it’s China and comes with their own biases, both with image generation and politics within its text models. Fortunately, some of that can be re-trained back to normal, but the technology is moving so fast.

Comment: The intent is to highlight the stupidity of the tariffs.

Your Reply: I don’t get it (as in, “I don’t get the intent… I don’t understand why tariffs are bad”)

Me: Explaining why tariffs are bad.

Your Reply: Nobody asked why tariffs are bad.

Me: <not sure if stupid, asshole, troll, or all three>

People dislike having to educate the same basic lessons over and over again, when it is very easy to search why tariffs are bad. It is not a community where people are going to spoonfeed you information that you didn’t even directly ask for.

The simple answer is because we live in a global economy and you can’t possible make everything that needs to be made in a single country. The more complex answer can be found by reading articles about it. Take this one, which was the first hit I found on a web search:

The trouble with tariffs, to be succinct, is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worsen inequality, diminish productivity and increase global tensions. Other than that, they’re fine.

Perhaps not the most related, but it is sort of funny for The Intercept to cover this when they led to Reality Winner going to jail because they didn’t follow basic journalistic protection of sources.

It’s absolutely related. I will never trust that name again because of what they did to Reality Winner. And Snowden. And many others. They have a shit track record, and should get out of the business of security reporting.

My question for the last 9+ months has been, “how long can a market willingly ignore reality?”

How long did we kick the foundations out of the US dollar when we got rid of the gold standard, and just let it float on speculation and feelings? What, 60-70 years now?

How long has the stock market existed on the whims of people’s feelings over cold hard statistics and long-term analysis?

Markets have been ignoring reality for many decades.

This article is basically just bemoaning that AAA develops for the lowest common denominator, which I can understand as a gripe, but it’s a very old gripe.

And an easy one to fix: Don’t fucking buy AAA games!

So, use and support open-source AI models.

Supreme Court: What’s precedent again?

all artists will benefit because of the precedent that it would set.

No, these protections exist to maintain profits of large corporations. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it “protects the little person”, but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.

Blame Melinda Tankard Reist. She started this whole mess.

It’s not really “your house connected to the Internet” as much as just connecting it together to a central hub. My lights dim and turn off at set times of the day using scenes, including a more dynamic sunrise/sunset time. If it’s stormy weather during the day, the front porch light comes on. I have a few colored lights that change colors with the seasons. Home Assistant brings down the garage door at night, if I forget. If the garage sensor is tripped, the garage light comes on. I have dumber motion sensors for locations where it makes sense, like pantries or closets.

I can control all of my interfaces from my phone. It can hook into local cameras, so that everything is centralized. HA can hook into any of the voice assistant systems, like Alexa. There are so many little conditions and automated switches I could create, based on either outside stimuli (like the weather) or internal sensors.

The Home Assistant community has a good reputation of routing around that kind of bullshit. There’s enough users that I predict a homegrown module will pop up in the next few months.

I love my Ratgdo garage door unit, routing around the bullshit proprietary LiftMaster APIs that want you to download some stupid phone app. No, fuck you. I hard-wire that shit into my garage door opener and get an API that works like a dream.

Sometimes, trying to integrate smart home devices can be a pain, but the Home Assistant core makes the integration much much easier. Please don’t like shit like this to detract from a future smart home project for your house. I would encourage you to just start it, if you’re wanting to get into it and willing to learn some things.

Leto II was a biological supercomputer in his own right, who spend thousands of years crafting humanity in the same manner as the Bene Gesserit, under the hand of a totalitarian government. The methods were different, but the path was just as delusional as the religions that his father abused for his own benefit.

So, he became a biological machine to treat people like machines. Sounds like nothing was learned.