Aloy’s physical scan model was Hannah Hoekstra, and her voice and mocap was Ashly Burch, according to the wiki.

That’s been true in Japan for a long time, for many things that saw boom-and-bust expansions. Theme parks are a really cool example of this, where Japan built a TON of regional theme parks in the 90s, only for them to become defunct and abandoned as tourist revenue dried up (or failed to materialize in the first place). Difference here is that while a defunct theme park is also less viable than a solar array, a golf course doesn’t require significant demo first.

As well as the dwindling subsidies, mega solar projects have faced increasing opposition from communities concerned about deforestation, landslides and changes to landscapes. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has also been vocal in her opposition to such developments.

…using all the land technically suitable for solar and wind could produce 14 times Japan’s annual electricity generation. The country has the space, but that isn’t translating into actual construction, he said.

Okay, both the headline and the article contents are wrong. There is, in fact, tons of space. The issue is not space, it’s cost and permits. “Japan Has No Appetite for Solar Farms Apart from Old Golf Courses” would be more accurate.

I consider someone anti-life that argues killing is basically okay if you think it’s okay. It’s a made up comic and not one of us really knows what the bad guy did.

The point of the comic is that many stories in comics and other media try to introduce a last-minute moral dilemma in which the good guy stopping a bad guy is made out to be as bad as the bad guy. Often it’s a lazy mechanism that doesn’t work from a writing standpoint because the reader/viewer has experienced the entire story solely from the protagonist’s POV, empathizing with and seeing the victims of the ‘bad guy’, and never the bad guy’s view, and suddenly asking them to empathize with the ‘bad guy’ at the last moment with this lazy argument doesn’t actually work. That’s what this comic is about.

But the reason this is likely resonating with more people right now outside of commentary on literary tropes, is that people are experiencing a world in which many governments have broken the social contract to execute justice fairly and protect their populaces, and sided with companies and wealth-holders in allowing them to harm said populace. Given that backdrop, and recent reactions by billionaires and CEOs (e.g. Flock’s CEO’s recent call for “compromise” in which he gets to keep surveilling people), this comic may feel for many people very personal.

I would argue that we badly need to find ways to prevent mass shooting instead of being okay with killing the shooter.

Sure, but that is dodging the question of whether you accept that killing someone may be necessary to prevent them harming others.

As for crime in general… The more civilized society is the one without the death penalty.

I agree 1000%, because a government can never be trusted to actually serve the interest of its constituents. It will always be pulled towards accumulating and protecting power. That’s the nature of Authority.

Ultimately, you can’t claim to believe in preserving life above all else if you refuse to stop something that is threatening life. The “pro-life” reaction to a Hitler is not to refuse to intervene in a Holocaust. You can personally choose not to take action, but you don’t get to dictate to others when and what the line is between pro- and anti-life actions.

You consider someone anti-life because they refuse to stand by idly while someone kills others?

Do you hold this view consistently, such that you consider police stopping a mass shooter to be “anti-life”?

Or do you pick and choose which murders are acceptable to intervene in?

Is it going to be called the Ministry of Truth? Or did they at least have the self awareness to come up with something less on-the-nose?

“My wife taps my shoulder, and I pay!”

ba-dum-tsss

I chuckled, but it was a despondent one.

We’re way beyond usage statistics. That’s for startups trying to get a Series A. OpenAI and Anthropic are playing at the Fortune-100 level already, influencing elected officials and making deals for government contracts. They’re not rolling up to the DoD with their MAU counts.

Fetterman’s chance to cure his conservatism!

As someone with no 3d printing experience, but a lot of firearm experience, I’m surprised that PLA holds up as a comp.

It’s one thing to have a printed frame of course, but comps are right past the barrel and get the worst of gas and heat (by design). Hell, I have a very heavy comp on my HK P2000, and it gets absolutely scorched.

Sadly, they exist irregardless of our little projects. Financially supporting them is one thing, and if your own ethics prevent you from using a weapon of the enemy, as it were, that’s fine, but abstention is not actually doing anything to oppose them.

The water consumption of any LLM compute time I’ve used is almost assuredly less than a single bath, and I’ve certainly skipped more baths in my life than I probably should have. :P

And more importantly, an hour of Netflix uses SIGNIFICANTLY more water than an hour of text LLM generation, so most people are not actually having the impacts on water consumption they likely think they are.

There’s another type, which is like me, who develop as a means to have a tool I need.

I wanted a better way to manage my cross-device libraries (desktop, laptop, NAS), and the multi-pane file managers didn’t work great for me, so instead I used Claude to build one that has native per-pane ssh support, streamed video and music preview clips, etc etc.

Capitalism is always gonna Capitalism, doesn’t matter what type of tools are at play.

As someone who works in security, you should be extremely skeptical of their stated reasons, or even the validity of the data.

There were a LOT of divorces following that leak, citing the hack as proof of infidelity, but the reality is that the leakers could have added people to the data explicitly to facilitate uneven divorce settlements (e.g. adding a woman to the site in order to give the husband a means to demand no split of assets).

As much as it would be great to imagine hacktivist crusaders going after cheaters, there was a lot of money moved on the back of that leak, and in fact one of the problems with Ashley Madison was that prior to the hack it was used to essentially extort non-users, because anyone could create a profile with any email, but if someone created a profile of you, you had to both verify yourself with your ID (which they saved), and pay them money to delete it (which the leak revealed they didn’t actually do anyways).

Most people aren’t aware, but Axon already does AI-assisted surveillance software too.

The first thing I did when I moved into my new place is disable all the Ring surveillance crap the previous tenants installed. Luckily I have no “smart” appliances to worry about.

Hey, a non-response deflective joke! I see you too went to middle school!

If they truly intended it to be a neutral question, then they used a particularly bad choice of phrasing.

Most people understand the CIA is a tool of imperialist violence/authority, but framing that as “how does it feel to x” is clearly a condemnation of the association being pointed out, which in this case would only matter if that association itself in some way taints the topic it was brought up in response to… I.e. the definition of feminism by Steinem.

You were not going to give me the benefit of the doubt, don’t expect anyone who is genuine to believe otherwise.

You’re free to be as cynical as you like.

“is ai” is very obviously a simplification, but is also the reality of where they have chosen to go.

It’s not a “simplification”. A simplification is still roughly the same meaning. “Coded with AI” and “Is AI” are unrelated statements, not more or less nuanced versions of each other, any more than “Bill is driving a racecar” and “Bill is a racecar” are.

Except GPL doesn’t say, “keep it free”, it says “keep it GPL”. Public domain is also free, but GPL’d code cannot be made that, except by the original “licenser”.

And while I can’t speak for other countries, the USA’s copyright regime, which is what would be relied upon to actually enforce the GPL in the US, is entirely built to serve business interests, which makes the GPL’s actual utility in enforcing “freeness” of software dubious at best.

GPL doesn’t give the original owner any power over others it just requires the code which was born free to stay free.

In the US at least, this is untrue; the only entity with legal standing to enforce (via lawsuit) the GPL on a piece of software is the creator(s). Obviously as GPL ‘flows’ through redistribution, that becomes more nuanced, but it’s always limited in standing of who “owns” the improperly-redistributed version. That is absolutely power that is unique to the ‘owner’ of the software.