Yes.

This. The only people who deserve the protections of a social contract are the parties who agree to it and are bound by it. Tolerance, safety, property, freedom; these are all social contracts that are under attack right now and those who would violate them of others do not deserve protection under them from the rest of us.

Trying to say someone on the left calling out or censuring a Nazi is like saying that someone can’t sue you because they signed an indemnity contract with your neighbor.

I got lucky, the company I work for lets me automate whatever I want in my roles and doesn’t pile on more because I did. I just get more time. I end up spending some of that time looking for other inefficiencies that I can clean up. We have struggled with gaining market share due to some blunders in marketing, so pay has not been what it should be, but aside from the financial issues it has always been a very rewarding environment to work in. I set my own projects for the most part, tell them when things will be done, and get to spend time with my family and infant son so I don’t miss his life. It really is how life should be. Luckily the marketing people finally listened to me, so things are quickly picking up financially.

That’s roughly 1.644 people/square mile. Estimated by subtracting the area of Russia and Antarctica from the world land area of Earth. I’m guessing that the area of Russia about covers all of the uninhabitable areas of the planet aside from Antarctica.

Ummm, 3DS is owned by Autodesk, so you may as well consider them the same thing for this conversation, and Arnold is a renderer (also owned by Autodesk) and not a DCC, so not really relevant unless you are specifically comparing Blender’s built-in render engines to it. The reason I am not is that there are lots of plugins for Blender which can output .ass files to be rendered by Arnold, so it can be utilized if you want to pay the subscription.

Blender is a DCC. Not one that I am super familiar with, I’m a Houdini guy myself, but honestly it is better in a lot of ways than the steaming piles of shit that Autodesk puts out. The question is not one of quality or feature at this point, but one of capital and market share where it counts. If they could figure out what is needed to get the likes of Disney or MPC on board, or even smaller (though arguably still very large/high profile) houses on-board, then they would be seeing much more investment.

Gonna call you out on this, at least partially. It was SideFX, a real threat of a proprietary vendor who has sizable market share in 3D/VFX, releasing an entirely perpetually free learning edition and a low cost indie license who put the screws on Autodesk. Blender contributed to the decision, but it was absolutely not the primary pressure source.

Source: I have a Masters Degree in VFX, have studied the industry for over 35 years, and have worked professionally in it for going on 15.

The idea of free speech? Seriously? The idea is that the individual is free of tyranny to express ideas and viewpoints that run counter to authority. It has never had the concept that you are free to say what you want where you want. That is why free speech demonstrations have to happen on PUBLIC property. The side walk, a park, outside a publicly accessible government office. The instant you cross the threshold into a private space, the owner’s free speech protections override yours. They have the right to moderate the speech that is expressed in THEIR space. Tyranny, by definition, can only be exerted by government or government-like entities. The owner of a private space does not have the authority or power to be tyrannical. That term may often be thrown around inappropriately, but when it comes to these conversations, we should always be cognizant of the actual realities and definitions of the terms.

Not to put together a strawman, but if it worked the way you are expressing there would be nothing stopping Burger King from hiring a bunch of people to go into McDonalds with signs and bullhorns to express that McD’s is shit and BK is better. If McD’s did not have the right to mediate the speech that occurred in their property, then they could not say or do anything. It is the same as if someone came in and started making racist remarks openly about patrons and employees. They have the right to remove this person. The same principal extends to online communities. If someone is exercising speech that the owner of the community space does not want spread on their platform, they have the right to remove that speech and the person exercising it.

My father pulled this gem out on me. I pointed out that fast food restaurants are open for breakfast and lunch, you know, while high schoolers are in, you know, school. And college students are in, you know, school. So by default adults who are not in school must fill 2/3 of the shifts. Surprising how fast he shut the fuck up when he realized that the job was, in fact, a real job that real adults with lives and children and rent were doing. He never said they were jobs for kids in my presence again.

People go out of habit. Honestly, that is usually why my family ends up getting any of them, but we have even broken those habits as prices keep going up. They have forgotten their place.

And don’t forget that Trump is allowed to order hits on people once he takes office.

That’s just it, we have a VERY long runway on “the end” so we can careen for a very long time.

I commiserate with my medical professionals literally every time I have to see them. The worst part is that it isn’t even the GED holder on the other end of the request. It is the actuarial table and risk analysis software they punch everything in to. Or an AI trained on the exact same tables and algorithms.

I have contemplated training an AI to look at medical records and score the standard of care given to patients. Would be nice to be able to weaponize the tech against them.

You know what has radicalized me the most? Getting a fucking math degree and understanding precicely how evil capitalism at large, but insurance companies in particular, is. To see the falsehoods they peddle because the consumers of their propaganda do not know what is being said. To see how they skirt and cheat every guard rail put in place to make sure that there is some level of ethics using statistics and a bit of other math bullshit. It is disgusting, egregious, and downright infuriating.

As I remember the sources we saw it in were in the reputable realm. I also think think many of these people voted for him to vote against Kamala (or against a woman) but didn’t actually think he would win because their vote didn’t matter.

Except that is not what is being found now. Actually, many people who voted for him didn’t actually know anything about his “bad news” because they didn’t watch the sources that were actually reporting on the truly bad stuff and now they are finding out and are regretting their decisions. In the days after the election Google reported a spike in searches related to “Changing your vote USA”.

They are paranoid about foreign actors having personal data, not domestic ones. That said, the whole TikTok thing is as much about stifling international competition as it is about data privacy and who is getting/using said data. Meta, Alphabet, and their ilk all harvest much more data than TikTok, and sell it to data brokers. There is absolutely nothing stopping the Chinese government from just buying the data they would obtain from the mandatory data sharing forced upon Chinese companies.

TikTok took market share from Meta and Alphabet, Suckerberg and whoever is the head letter at Alphabet called up the Congressmen they bought and started making a fuss, so their boys on the hill found excuses to ban it.

I am not sayinf some of the excuses do not have kernels of merit, but they are largely overshadowed by the anticompetitive effect that it has.

Just to expand and answer your larger question, the US government does not respect the privacy of the citizens. The anti-data-brokerage legislation we did manage to get through only occurred AFTER the harvested data was used against those in office, and even then it was made an opt-out legislation which requires us to contact each brokerage firm individually and request, in writing, that our data be purged and we not be tracked. That exempts all new firms from the restrictions and relies on the individual to A. Know how to find the firms and B. Be able to manage contacting each one of them. What this has done is invented an entirely new service industry for removing OUR information from these brokerage firms. So we have to pay for privacy, yet again, making it something really reserved for the rich.

If you look at the other laws, things like license law and such, you will find that the US government has quite truly conspired to make sure that corporations have carte blanch to do whatever they want with those who use their services.

If I wasn’t shit with UI Dev I would offer as this sounds like a great app, but alas.

Let’s be accurate here, private slavery companies.

It was published, hence the first word being “Post-publication”. I think the issue for the retraction is that if 4 or the reviewers were lying about their identies then the voracity of their assessments is strongly in question. As shitty as the modern peer review process is, its essence is vital for the progress of modern science.