He also liked it shaken because that waters the drink down more. Meaning he’d be able to sip it without getting as drunk.

But the sad reality is that Ian Fleming was likely just an alcoholic who wrote his own vices into his characters.

This is actually why I’d be in favor of AI generators creating a hash database of their generated images. If legalized, they should be required to maintain records of the images they have produced. So that if those images appear elsewhere, they can be verified as AI generated.

It would be a monumental effort to actually get the AI companies to agree to it willingly. But that’s why legislation exists.

The fact that you don’t need to actually supply any real CSAM to the training material is the reasoning being offered for supporting AI CSAM. It’s gross, but it’s also hard to argue with.

Yeah, this is basically the crux of the issue. When you get into the weeds and start looking at more than just surface-level “but it needs CSAM to make CSAM” misconception, arguments against it basically boil down to “but it’s icky.” Which… Yeah. It is. But should something being icky automatically make it illegal, even if there are no victims?

I hate to make the comparison (for a variety of reasons) but until fairly recently homosexuality was psychologically classed as a form of destructive/dangerous kink. Largely because straight people had the same “but it’s icky” response whenever it got brought up. And we have tried to move away from that as time has passed, because we have recognized that being gay is not just a kink, it’s not just a choice, and it’s not inherently dangerous or harmful.

To contrast that, pedophilia has remained stigmatized. Because even if it passed the first two “it’s not just a kink/choice” tests, it still failed the “it’s not harmful” test. Consuming CSAM was inherently harmful, and always had a victim. There was no ethical way to view CSAM. But now with AI, it can actually begin passing that third test as well.

I don’t know how I feel about it, myself. The idea of “ethically-sourced” CSAM doesn’t exactly sit right with me, but if it’s possible to make it in a truly victimless manner, then I find it hard to argue outright banning something just because I don’t like it.

This is really the biggest hurdle. To be clear, I’m not arguing that being an active pedo should be decriminalized. But it is worth examining whether we’re basing criminality purely off of the instinctual “but it’s icky” response that the public has when it gets discussed. And is that response enough of a justification for making/keeping it illegal? And if your answer to that was “yes”, what if it could help pedos avoid consuming real CSAM, and therefore reduce the number of future victims? If it could legitimately help reduce the number of victims but you still want to criminalize it, then you are not actually focused on reducing harm; You’re focused on feeling righteous instead. The biggest issue right now is that harm reduction is very hard to study, because it is such a taboo topic. Even finding subjects to self-report is difficult or impossible. So we’ll have no idea what kinds of impacts on CSAM consumption (positive or negative) AI will realistically have until after it is widely available.

If you’re ever confused about computers, just remember that they’re basically rocks that we ground up extremely finely and pressed really really flat. Then we etched those flattened rocks with runes that are invisible to the naked eye, using esoteric processes that require countless man hours and rigorous clean room ceremony from everyone involved. Finally, we charged those rune-etched rocks with lightning that we have extracted out of spinning magnets and copper, and refined into a reliable source of power. All so the rocks could do basic math really quickly.

The fact that computers work at all is just straight up wizardry.

If you already have a Plex instance running, Prologue is an app that turns it into an audiobook host as well. Plex doesn’t natively support audiobook metadata like chapters, but Prologue simply uses Plex’s remote access to reach the files.

All you do is throw the .m4b audiobook files into a music library on Plex, sign into your Plex account on Prologue, and Prologue handles all of the metadata for the audiobooks instead of using Plex’s built-in music player.

I mention this because I had massive issues trying to get ABS to work on my setup. It simply refused to read or write any data from my NAS. After a day or two of throwing myself at it to no avail, I found Prologue and haven’t looked back. I already had Plex running for some friends and family, so setting up the music library was as easy as dropping the audiobooks into a folder.

For anyone looking for a wonderful example of this, check out the RuneScape wiki. It’s hosted by a company that is partnered with the game maker, and is fully maintained by the community. It is the single most expansive and in-depth wiki I have ever seen. It is truly the gold standard for what a wiki should aspire to be.

It has everything you could need to play the game, all the way down to automatic calculators (with built in character lookup functionality, using the game’s high score leaderboard system) to tell you things like how many of [x] resource you’ll need to get [y] experience, or what your estimated return on investment will be for turning [x] resource into [y] product.

The game has over 250 quests, (and not just basic fetch or kill quests like most MMO’s have) and the wiki has in-depth walkthroughs (including in-game screenshots) for every single one.

You can even open the wiki directly from the game. There’s a “Wiki” button on the chat box, so you can search the wiki directly via chat, and it opens in your desktop browser.

Hah yeah, Lemmy is a much smaller community than Reddit. I have started tagging users, and it’s surprising how often I see the same tags in the comments sections.

This is true in America. In the EU, Apple was recently forced to allow third-party browsers. But even in the EU, developing those third-party browsers will take time and money.

That’s largely because the companies want to grab all of your telemetry data, which they can’t do in a browser. Putting it in an app allows them to gather whatever info they want, instead of being siloed inside of a browser.

Yeah, people complain about roombas not giving a super deep clean… But they’re really not intended to do so. They’re meant to be a daily maintenance clean. They may not be great for when you dump an entire can of coffee grounds in your carpet… But they’re wonderful when you have a big dog with lots of fur that needs to be vacuumed every single day.

Yeah, life always seems to throw expensive problems at people all at the same time. I thought I had a pretty good nest egg saved up, and then boom… Car shit the bed, cat needed surgery, wife had a hospital stay, and a few other big life events. All while the economy is in the garbage, inflation is in the high double digits, the wife is out of work (due to the aforementioned hospital stay), and any hope of a social safety net was being dismantled right in front of me.

I didn’t even consciously realize how stressed I was about money, until I realized I had fallen back to pirating my PC games instead of just buying them. I hadn’t been a prolific pirate since my broke college student days… And then suddenly there I was again, browsing FG’s site for the latest repack, so I could install it in between shifts.

Yeah, you always have to account for the Wife Factor with things like this. Good luck convincing your wife to stop clicking on sponsored links on Google, especially when it’s what she’s searching for.

It’s not something Lemmy natively supports, but (a lot like Reddit Enhancement Suite) the various apps should allow you to do so. For instance, on Voyager, you can do it via the options menu on the user’s profile.

I got my badge of honor during the API purge, when I mass edited all of my old comments before deleting them. It’s a little more quiet here, but it honestly reminds me of the early Reddit days. If you tag users, you’ll start to see just how small of a community it actually is; I see my tags all over the place in nearly every comment section.

If you haven’t done so, consider looking into the various apps. Voyager (sometimes called Wefwef by the older users) is a sort of spiritual successor to Apollo. So if you’re an old Apollo user, you’ll likely feel right at home.

Coconut milk

Hey now, I also have a week of sick leave saved up. I’d just have to pretend to be sick (and provide a doctor’s note for my absence) for an entire week before retiring for a week.

Yeah, the best way to learn a new game is by doing it. Video games have stopped burying tutorials in booklets, because they realized players didn’t actually read anything. Instead, they use the game itself to teach you how to play, by presenting the relevant information as it becomes relevant.

You don’t need to read rules about a mechanic that starts 3/4 of the way through the game until you’re at the 3/4 mark. In video games, that usually manifests as a “congrats, you got a new ability. Here’s a quick three or four sentences on how it works” pop up. If that info is presented up front (like in a board game rulebook) then you’ll have forgotten how it works by the time it is relevant.

There’s a reason people say officers are class traitors. Policing has never been about protecting the public; It has always been about suppressing the masses and protecting the elite.

Voyager is basically a spiritual successor to Apollo. So if you miss that from the API purge, then give it a try.

Which is really only used in the americas. Europe/Asia doesn’t use it, except in specific circumstances where the child wouldn’t be eligible for citizenship elsewhere. But even that is only due to treaties set up to prevent stateless people. If the child would have citizenship elsewhere (like in America), the European/asian country would tell them to apply there instead.