Yeah, that's what happens when the LLM they use to summarize these articles strips all nuance and comedy.
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Copyright is the only thing protecting us from getting absolutely fucked even harder by the rich than we already are, yes.
Do you want corps just stealing every new idea and product, cloning it, and muscling out the original inventor without paying them a dime? Because abolishing copyright entirely would be an excellent way to do that.
I'm utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the "I have XX decades of experience" types come from. They're also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I'm talking to them it's fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they're at risk of losing all their data, and that's usually enough to get them to shut up.
But god, some of the tickets I've seen from other employees...
In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:
- Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT
- Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.
In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and "please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren't debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there's a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won't call you to handhold you through this, I'd literally just be reading the steps in the article" is pure suffering.
Trump doesn't like the commission that normally hosted the debates because of the typical "concerns" over bias (read: they don't let Trump say whatever the fuck he wants and run roughshod over the entire thing). Biden doesn't like the commission because they did a shit job at moderating trump last cycle and didn't follow their own rules (especially regarding COVID, since they let Trump lie about getting tested and go on the debate while he was infection with the virus).
I'm pretty sure he was agreeing with you...?
The problem is that as far as I'm aware there's literally zero evidence of this doomsday scenario you're describing ever happening, despite publicity rights being a thing for over 50 years. Companies have zero interest in monetizing publicity rights to this extent because of the near-certain public backlash, and even if they did, courts have zero interest in enforcing publicity rights against random individuals to avoid inviting a flood of frivolous lawsuits. They're almost exclusively used by individuals to defend against businesses using their likeness without permission.
Holy fuck how do you not see the difference between "random nobody does an impression for free while hanging out with their pals" and "multi billion startup backed and funded by one of the richest companies on earth uses an impression as a key selling point for their new flagship product that they are charging access for and intend to profit from"
Yeah, and without Pence, it would've been Lindsay Graham acting as president pro tempare, and he would have gone along with the fake elector scheme as pretext to refuse to acknowledge electors from states Biden won, leaving him with less than 270 electors. Election stalemates, it goes to Congress in a one-vote-per-state contest, and Trump wins. That was the entire plan behind the coup--find a pretext to deny Biden 270 electors to throw it to the backup mechanism where Republicans outnumber Democrats.
I don't, because IIRC the plan was to take Pence out of the picture, have Graham assume the role of Senate president pro tempare in his place, and then Graham would use the fake electors as a justification to refuse to certify Biden's election. From there, it would get thrown to Congress, where each state's congressional delegation get a single collective vote to decide who becomes president. Republicans outnumber Democrats in enough state delegations to throw the election to Trump.
In other words, the timeline Pence dies is the one where the coup succeeds.
God, same. One of my little annoyances in life is that my internal voice is a goddamn motor mouth and I literally CANNOT stop it.
I can stare at a white wall and watch paint dry, and my monologue will start philosophizing about watching paint dry, where the phrase came from, why I'm doing it (to try and silence my internal voice), then go on a wiki walk about how trying not to think about something makes you think about it more and the classic example of telling someone "don't think about a brown bear" makes them think about bears, then I'll start thinking about bears and my monologue is suddenly halfway across the world.
Put me in a sensory deprivation tank, and my internal voice starts ruminating about how Daredevil uses these to sleep, then goes off about fight sequences, and then superhero comics, and whoops I'm halfway across the world.
Even when I'm paying attention and listening, my inner voice is still motoring away, it's just that it's mirroring what is being said to me instead of going on its own wiki walk halfway across the world (though sometimes someone will say something that makes my internal voice go "wait a second, that makes me think of..." and then I stop listening while I go on a wiki walk).
I have ADHD, in case it isn't obvious yet.
There's something primal about making something with your own hands that you just can't get with IT. Sure, you can deploy and maintain an app, but you can't reach out and touch it, smell it, or move it. You can't look at the fruits of your labor and see it as a complete work instead of a reminder that you need to fix this bug, and you have that feature request to triage, oh and you need to update this library to address that zero day vulnerability...
Plus, your brain is a muscle, too. When you've spent decades primarily thinking with your brain in one specific way, that muscle starts to get fatigued. Changing your routine becomes very alluring, and it lets you exercise new muscles, and challenge yourself to think in new ways.
That goes against his long and storied history of being in the tank for the Republican party. He convinced Bush Sr to pardon the few people who were convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal to execute a cover-up, he slow-walked and misrepresented the findings of Mueller's report on Russian interference, and he's always ascribed to the unitary executive theory. If his history and career is any indication, I suspect he talked about it because he legitimately thinks the president should be able to execute his political rivals (as long as they have an elephant pin on their lapel, naturally).
my company announced today that they were going to start a phased rollout where AI would provide first responses to tickets, with it initially being "reviewed" by humans with the eventual goal being it just sending responses unsupervised. The strength of my "OH HELL NO" derailed the entire meeting for a solid 15 minutes lmao
Did he really accomplish much, though? The only thing he did with his trifecta was passing Yet Another Tax Cut, with everything else either filibustered or voted down (ty Mr McCain). After 2018, his legislative agenda was DOA. He forced a shutdown over border wall spending, which failed. I can't think of anything else notable legislatively.
On the executive side, he managed to unwind some regulations (that were reinstated after Biden came in) and his FCC pick repealed net neutrality, but all of the super radical stuff he tried to do got tied up in the courts for most of his term and either struck down, reduced drastically in scope, or only took effect for a short while before he left office.
The biggest thing he did was packing the supreme court, but I would argue that's just as much due to McConnell, and any Republican president would have given us the same extremist court. All the stuff that's uniquely Trump, like the border wall or the Muslim ban, failed miserably.
One of my side projects at work is to record training presentations and I try to be so conscious about this--both trying to avoid the word salad slides, and also trying to make my lecture not just reading the slide word-for-word but actually explaining and expanding on the slide content (with my verbal lecture transcribed as a note in the slide and handed out for anybody who might be hard of hearing/doesn't want to sit through a 30-minute video)
Fuck that victim-blaming nonsense. The entire reason ad blockers were invented in the first place were because ads in the 90s and early 2000s were somehow even worse than they are now. You would click on a website, and pop-up ads would literally open new windows under your mouse cursor and immediately load an ad that opened another pop-up ad, and then another, and another, until you had 30 windows open and 29 of them were pop-up ads, all of them hoping to trick you into clicking on them to take you to a website laden with more and more pop-up ads. Banner ads would use bright, flashing, two-tone colors (that were likely seizure-inducing, so have fun epileptics!) to demand your attention while taking up most of your relatively tiny, low-resolution screen.
The worst offenders were the Flash-based ads. On top of all the other dirty tricks that regular ads did, they would do things like disguising themselves as games to trick you into clicking them. ("Punch the monkey and win a prize!" The prize was malware.) They would play sound and video--which were the equivalent of a jump scare back then, because of how rare audio/video was on the Internet in that day. They would exploit the poor security of Flash to try and download malware to your PC without you even interacting with them. And all this while hogging your limited dialup connection (or DSL if you were lucky), and dragging your PC to a crawl with horrible optimization. When Apple refused to support Flash on iOS way back in the day, it was a backdoor ad blocker because of how ubiquitous Flash was for advertising content at the time.
The point of all this is that advertisers have always abused the Internet, practically from day one. Firefox first became popular because it was the first browser to introduce a pop-up blocker, which was another backdoor ad blocker. Half the reason why Google became the company it did is because it started out as a deliberate break from the abuses of everyone else and gave a simple, clean interface with to-the-point, unobtrusive, text-based advertisements.
If advertisers and Google in particular had stuck to that bargain--clean, unobstrusive, simple advertisements that had no risk of malware and no interruption to user workflow, ad blockers would largely be a thing of the past. Instead, they decided to chase the profit dragon, and modern Google is no better than the very companies it originally replaced.
Why make a better UI when it'll probably introduce a slew of new bugs?