Spam was never done with “burner phones” in the first place, it’s mostly done via VoIP through shady telecoms companies that can’t be bothered to validate their customers. Due to the age of the phone system it’s incredibly easy to spoof phone numbers because it’s essentially a trust system. Phone exchange A talks to exchange B and says phone number 123 is calling number 456. How does exchange B know that it’s actually 123 calling? They don’t at all, they just trust that exchange A is telling the truth. It’s really hard to get into the system, but once you’re there you essentially have unlimited power with virtually no safeguards in place.

Basically from a security perspective the phone system looks a lot like the 1980s internet, there is technically some security in place, but significantly less than there actually should be.

It is entirely possible and often is the case that all parties involved can be in the wrong, legally if not also morally. Ben really fucked up in a few places and ended up helping BAM out because of that. Had he been a little more cautious where things are currently would be a lot more straightforward with all the legal fallout aimed squarely at BAM. Instead there’s a not unlikely chance Ben could end up in serious financial and possibly even legal trouble. It’s not inconceivable that he could wind up facing some jail time and an even higher chance he could wind up with the kind of judgement against him that he’s not going to be able to crowd fund his way out of.

The only somewhat bright side is that it’s looking highly likely that Mansell will wind up getting his $100K and/or Legos back, even if literally everyone else winds up financially ruined.

Unfortunately the ones I see getting away with their crimes in this situation are as usual the dirty cops.

Pretty sure the average person dies at two hegseths over the limit.

Sure they do, it’s called money. Like all US politicians (and many in other countries as well) they vote as they’re paid to vote.

Priority one in any attempt to fix the US needs to be overturning citizens united. There’s an admittedly long list of other things that need to be done as well, but getting corporate money out of the equation is a significant force multiplier.

That’s how you know it’s probably a good idea.

Personally I’d go a step further and regulate algorithmic feeds in general. It’s pretty clear at this point that feeding people a steady drip of content picked to maximize “engagement” above all else has done incalculable damage.

Dude is officially the least popular president in American history.

Unfortunately that only means something if Republicans refuse to vote for him, and most Republicans I know would vote for literally anybody running as a Republican just to minimize any chance of a Democrat getting elected. About the only way I could see Republicans refusing to vote for the Republican candidate is if we were in some bizzaro world where the Republican candidate was a black queer woman and the Democrat was a white straight man (although I would happily pay thousands of dollars to witness the absolute knots all the racist Republican bigots would tie themselves into trying to square that circle).

It’s kind of weird that they’re trying to bucket a bunch of religions under a single moniker anyway. They’re all related sure, but if you’re going that route you might as well go all in and just make the category Abrahamic religions.

Fundamentally that has always been the problem with Christianity, none of them can agree on whether the others are “real Christians” or not, and half of them hate the other half. LDS is just the latest and kookiest of the lot (although I admit it’s exceptionally weird, only Scientology has it beat and that “religion” was literally thought up as a way to scam idiots).

I game almost every single day, and haven’t booted Windows in years. In the last 3 years I haven’t actually had any game I wanted to play not be able to run in Linux. I’ve had one that crashed non-stop, but judging by the thousands of complaints from Windows users about the same thing that wasn’t a Linux problem.

So yeah, gaming is no excuse, you can game just fine under Linux as long as the devs don’t intentionally block Linux like what happened with Destiny 2 (which Bungie just summarily executed so they can dump more cash into the trash fire that is Marathon, RIP Bungie I await the bankruptcy announcement).

Doesn’t even need that, the physics of it just doesn’t work. There’s basically no way to cool it and no way to power it. Anyone who thinks a space data center is a good idea has failed high school level physics.

Will it though? I could easily see Trump just writing off the deaths of any service members as a favor to his best buddy Putin or even ordering them to help Russia with the invasion. Best case scenario he just has the entire base stand down and sit on their asses while Russia does what it wants. He’s already indicated he doesn’t give a single flying fuck about NATO, and it’s not like he’s ever let little things like laws or treaties stop him before.

Need to bring back the concept of leper colonies and dump all these anti-vax and anti-pasteurization people in them. Quarantine them away until enough of them die off that the rest decide maybe this was all a really dumb idea.

That said his instincts (or rather prejudices) align most closely to the Republicans, mostly due to the Republicans spending every year since Nixon more closely aligning themselves with racists and Christian nationalists (aka Nazis).

Except for the slight problem that those 5 AI agents cost the same as 3 people so you could have skipped the agents, just hired 3 people and gotten 400% output instead of 120%. Yeah it takes longer to scale up and down, but exactly how volatile is your industry that demand is fluctuating that much month to month?

The crux of the case is whether Valve is applying that rule to non-Steam keys or not. Lawsuit says they are, Valve says they aren’t. If Valve is telling the truth, they’ve done nothing wrong. If Valve is lying however that is an anticompetitive practice that should be punished. We won’t really know until the trial concludes though.

Personally I think the most likely answer is that some junior support people at Valve misunderstood the policy and told some people the wrong thing. There’s a decent chance that when those accusations first surfaced a decade or so ago (yes this has been a thing for that long) Valve probably sent some internal memos to clarify what the rule actually covers and what it doesn’t and hopefully that was that.

It almost entirely comes down to porn preferences. Women tend to prefer pornographic stories while men tend to prefer pornographic images and videos. There’s a reason “romance” novels are one of the absolute largest genres for books and that their demographic skews heavily towards women. I would not at all be surprised to find a certain number of women using LLMs to generate erotic stories possibly featuring acquaintances or celebrities in them. Same impulse, different medium.

Primarily their review system which is hands down the best in the industry, as well as the laundry list of shady practices they’ve banned companies from employing. They’re not perfect by any means but they’re still head and shoulders above the competition. They’re also at least somewhat responsive to the community with them either implementing new policies to protect consumers when major scandals happen and even occasionally being proactive and banning bad practices when companies start talking about implementing them.

As for GOG they’re a bit of a mixed bag recently. They started carrying games with DRM at some point so they’re no longer the DRM free zone they once were, although the majority of their catalog is still DRM free. I believe they do warn you when a game has DRM though. On the plus side though they recently committed to improving their support for Linux which many people will be happy to see.

Multiple companies have tried to become the de facto games store and every last one of them has failed not because Steam uses its dominant position to crush them, but because not a single one of them has been willing to invest in the features, capabilities, and pro consumer policies that Steam has. Every single one of them thought that doing the bare minimum and then throwing cash at ads and publishers would be the path to victory. It wasn’t. Yeah, Steam may be effectively a monopoly, but it’s because nobody else really wants to compete with them at their level. The closest anyone has ever come is GOG.

It’s not a question of how good or bad the LLM is, it’s a question of watt hours and bandwidth. It takes a certain amount of electricity to run so your prices and profit margins are directly correlated with the price of electricity.

LLMs run out of data centers with cheap electricity and cheap bandwidth are going to be the cheapest ones on the market. For electricity this would typically be places with cheap renewables nearby like large hydroelectric plants. Bandwidth is a little trickier as there’s not as obvious an indicator of where bandwidth is cheap and plentiful but typically it’s going to be near major population centers. Putting those together there’s probably only a small handful of locations in the world where it’s economically viable to run these data centers.

Which is of course impossible, so what this bill is really about is stopping people from owning 3D printers.

So I guess they’re prepping for that hyper-inflation now. Can’t wait for a cup of coffee to cost $75 and a month’s rent to be $20,000. But hey, look on the bright side, I’m sure the stock market will look amazing breaking through all those all time records.

Speaking of, that would be an interesting exercise. They always talk about how various funds and stocks are up or down some percent over the previous day/week/year or whatever. It would be interesting to see that same data but adjusted for inflation. Like is the dow jones up 2% from last year or is it really down 0.5% due to inflation?