EldritchFemininity

The one thing I will say is that there does seem to be a generalized dislike for AI that has all the investors and upper management types nervous. Even by their own studies do people generally either not care about AI in their products or actively dislike it/find it intrusive. There was a study by a phone company from this past summer or fall that concluded that 80% of their users had no interest in AI or found that it actively made their experience worse, and there have been plenty of pretty damning reports about how useful it’s been in various industries (just look at Microslop). That is not conducive to convincing investors to fund your product and does not show a viable path to making a profit in the future.

We’ve seen similar things happening recently with car manufacturers walking back on their big touchscreens (with some help from regulation in civilized places that care about things like “pedestrian fatalities” - like Europe) due to consumer sentiment. They tried for nearly a decade to push bigger and bigger screens into cars and remove physical buttons, and now they’re moving in the other direction. Completely anecdotal evidence, but the last time I went to buy a car I told the salesman at the dealership that I wasn’t interested in cars newer than a certain year because that was when they increased the size of the screen and put them in a more obnoxious spot on the dashboard, and he said that he heard similar sentiments from practically everybody who came in looking to buy a car - everybody hated the bigger screens.

If you think about it, it is very wasteful for you to have that chocolate bar in your food pantry. So many wasted calories as most bodies can only burn a fraction of them before converting the rest into fat. Same can be said for pasta and many other foods. We even spend a full third of our lives asleep, consuming even less calories! Incredibly inefficient!

Maybe the solution is aerosolized calories that can be sprayed via plane over vast regions of the country instead of food so that calories are owned by the people on a local, regional, or national level?

Me, buying cellphone parts from another state to assemble myself like an 80% lower to avoid having to drink a Verification Can every time somebody calls me:

I think I just invented the concept of a “ghost phone”

A wise man once said, “The billionaires forget that unions were the compromise workers made to air their grievances compared to the previous method of dragging factory owners out into the street by their hair and beating them to death.”

Don’t worry, you’re not pissing in my Cheerios or anything, I just always end up in one of those “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!” rants whenever they pull the “ghost gun” nonsense.

It’s like how it’s illegal in Mass to own a suppressor unless you’re a cop or military, then you can buy as many as you want. Like…it reduces recoil a little and reduces the noise from permanent hearing loss to temporary hearing damage, it’s not gonna make a gun silent. Movie magic quiet is only possible with very particular sub-sonic rounds of a specific caliber. You want silent? You put a suppressor on an air rifle. Dead silent and completely legal to put a suppressor on in all 50 states because it’s not a gun, despite being just as dangerous at close ranges.

Edit: Also, these laws are often supported by firearms manufacturers because it benefits them to prevent people from being able to go elsewhere, like making aftermarket car parts illegal or forcing people to get their service done at a car dealership.

Personally, I’d consider it a declaration of war.

They have metal internal components just like almost every 3d printed gun does. There are some things that you just need metal for, like springs. The vast majority of 3d printed guns are actually guns purchased from a gun store and then modified with the equivalent of handmade after-market parts.

In order to be undetectable by metal detectors, you would have to keep the amount of metal in them to about that of a pair of glasses. So basically a firing pin and that’s about it. I think a break action firing chamber would probably set it off like a big belt buckle would, and no recoil or magazine springs mean that it would have to be a single shot weapon with a manual reload - some kind of break action. And no barrel liner or a metal barrel at all, nor metal bullet casings. A shotgun shell might be able to make it through because of their mostly plastic shell with a copper back about the size of a quarter, but that’s gonna be about it.

It’s really not the issue that politicians and the media make it out to be. It’s just fear mongering.

You beat me to it. I saw a post probably almost 20 years ago by a kid on Facebook talking about how he got banned from a Young Republicans Facebook group for giving this answer. His reasoning was: it’s a carpenter’s tool, not a weapon, and used to help people and improve the community. Kid actually read the Bible and got hate for it.

My reason for the bullet train and subway in particular is the nature of being on tracks as well as avoiding traffic (Windows bloat in my use of the concept).

Great for the average user because they don’t have to really understand any of the systems involved or anything, just pick a stop and off it goes, but if you try to go off the beaten path at all, you’ll probably find yourself having to work around the immutable nature pretty quickly. You can’t just go anywhere with it like you would a car.

There’s a program that I had installed that for some stupid reason doesn’t let you log out on the Linux version and it auto logins as well, so if you log into the wrong account like I did when I installed it, you have to delete the user data from it. In Bazzite, it turns out that you can’t just go into the folder and do it manually, you have to use a specific application that comes with Bazzite to delete user data from an application. A minor annoyance, but I did have to go off the rails a little to solve the issue compared to how I would’ve handled it on Windows.

I dunno, my first thought for Bazzite after switching from Windows a couple of months ago was more like this:

And immutable distros in general would be like this:

Faster by far than getting stuck in Windows traffic and It Just Works™ to get you where you want to go, but it’s more difficult to go off the beaten path.

Didn’t they do this with an AI vending machine already and it started selling tungsten cubes at a massive loss?

Wrong, the purpose is to prevent people from not buying from a corporation - guns and otherwise. You can buy polymer guns right from the store.

Print the parts for a new printer on a cheap one, buy the hardware at a local hardware store or electronics store (or even strip the cheap one for most of the parts), and start printing in your favorite flavor of open source software. Or buy the printed pieces from someone or online and then buy and assemble the rest. That’s what they do with guns to circumvent some of the gun laws, because the not quite finished pieces are not legally considered a gun.

All this would do is make people buy printers the way that they buy guns, ironically. And it still won’t do anything about the so-called “ghost guns” anyway, because those are either legally bought guns with the serial number shaved off, or they’re garage guns like the one used to assassinate Shinzo Abe.

Except for the fact that this doesn’t put any pressure on anyone who wants a gun (those are still really easy to get in California, just not as easy as most other states). But those who benefit the most from this law are gun manufacturers, and not long after when this bill is extended to printing replacement parts for anything, all companies that charge inflated prices for repair parts or design their products to be unrepairable entirely.

What people who print “guns” are actually printing is gun furniture. Custom grips and the like, either for comfort/aesthetics or so they can take cheaper gun parts and use them to build a clone of a similar gun from a company that charges more. They still use legally purchased gun internals.

The gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was a Glock, legally purchased and one of the most ubiquitous pistols in the world, with a 3d printed grip on it. Every other part of that gun came from the manufacturer.

The gun used to kill Shinzo Abe, however, was made entirely out of simple materials readily available at any hardware store and is completely legal in all 50 states. Because a gun like that is considered a “garage gun” and those are legal under federal law because it’s essentially impossible to stop somebody from gluing together a pipe and a nail to strike the bullet with and fire it down the pipe barrel. But 3d printed gun parts don’t fall under the same regulations and those who stand to lose the most from people 3d printing are those who charge unreasonable prices.

You know who else would benefit from this law? Games Workshop, who sells many miniature figures for $40+ each, and a few for over one thousand dollars.

You’re laboring under the impression that consumer protection laws mean anything in the US. They don’t. Unless it’s something absolutely egregious, then maybe they might get a slap on the wrist. Maybe.

Another perfect example is my buddy who was looking at digital watches yesterday. The same watch was $100 more expensive on Amazon than at Walmart, and Prime prices are often higher than if you don’t have Prime. I’ve also had Amazon completely lie to me about an item being on sale, claiming that it was 50% off on a Prime day sale, and then when I went and checked it the day after it turned out that it had been more like $5 off than the several hundred they claimed the sale would’ve saved. They marked it up wildly just to pretend that it was on sale. And they’re not the only ones to have been caught doing that. Plenty of other places have been caught doing the same thing, but since they’re big companies, unless you can get a settlement from a class action suit, nobody cares.

These kinds of things are often A B testing to see what they can get away with - especially in countries like the US where consumer protection laws basically don’t matter. It’s kinda like when they raise subscription prices in one country but not another, but with showing some people in that country a certain amount of ads per watch time vs another group with a different amount of ads. They see how much they can get away with before people start complaining, and then what they can get away with before people start cancelling.

I watched a video just this morning talking about how YouTube has built-in systems for similar A B testing with video thumbnails to tell creators which gets more watch time. You give it 2 thumbnails and it randomizes which one people see, and then tracks click-through rates and watch time percentages before giving you a result of which one performs better.

One can only hope. I’m sure some people will happily sign up thinking that the leopards won’t eat their faces.

Funny, I remember Florida running into a similar issue a few years ago when DeSantis passed that law making it illegal for migrant workers/immigrants to drive or for US citizens to drive them.

Houses left to rot as workers fled the state and supply chains disrupted as freight trucks refused to enter the state and simply dumped their loads at the border.

I never did hear how that worked out for them, but I imagine they quietly walked back that law and pretended that it never happened.

My bet’s on Long COVID. It’s been connected to so many other random medical issues popping up (including diabetes, low sperm counts, and early onset Alzheimers IIRC) that it may as well be connected to ass cancer as well.

A plastic shell could be even worse, too. Using plastic and glass for shrapnel (I think ceramic as well?) is considered a war crime because they don’t show up on x-rays, which makes it very hard to find - practically impossible in the case of small glass shards.