https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

Because of the way they our political system is set up, and the laws and regulations that surround political spending, money is everything to a party politician even if it isn’t.

As a politician, your party controls everything. They control what committees you sit on, whether or not the rest of the party will vote for something you work on, whether or not you will receive any financial assistance (or opposition) in your primary or general campaign.

What determines your status in the party? How much money you contribute to them via fundraisers. What’s a great, efficient way to raise funds for your party? Fucking over the population by catering to the rich.

That’s what I’m saying. This is why campaign finance laws and regulations need to change. It’s extremely difficult to do anything, even if you get elected, when you don’t have any power.

I know Google/Gemini gets used because it provides a lot for free. Also, more important than many people likely realize, “Google for Education” claims to adhere to all of the many privacy concerns and requirements that come into play when looking for solutions in a public school district.

Can you point me to a model, capable of writing useful code, where the 100% of the codebase used to train the model came from people who explicitly consented to their code being used to train a model? Or was it all scraped from anywhere any everywhere they could find it regardless of consent?

My comment is from the perspective of politicians, not the average person.

As i recall, the claim for the entire suite was that it was “clean-room”. No code stolen… unless you are concerned that the entire model is the result of stolen code… in which case we are in agreement.

Because everything is about money.

They only respect the consent of landholders.

They’d also get access to those sweet AI doctors.

I’ve never known that there were terms already in use - like “capitalist encirclement” and “siege socialism” - for these concepts I’d had. It is interesting to explore the need for what works in the environment we’re stuck in vs. what should theoretically be possible were our efforts not constantly being sabotaged and undermined in every possible way by forces vastly larger than our own.

I also hadn’t thought as much about the starting point for all of these movements in the global South - severely handicapped by their history of being exploited and suppressed by colonialism. Add to that the fact that those powers looking to sabotage socialist efforts are directly empowered by the cheap labor and precious resources they are extracting via that same colonialism.

Thanks for the link.

The older I get the more I realize that, with capitalists holding so much power all over the world, it’s extremely difficult for a socialist/communist state to exist without it being pushed to become an authoritarian state.

I can see how the absolute onslaught of pressure from those capitalist powers on all sides - propaganda, sanctions, trade wars, blockades, posturing, funding opposition parties, funding rebel groups, sabotage, proxy wars, etc. - could turn any well-intentioned leaders to paranoia and state violence.

That’s not to say existing and/or historic communist/socialist states have/had pure, innocent leaders, or that I blindly give any of them a pass. It’s just an extremely difficult environment in which to demonstrate the potential of such governments.

There are very few people I can convince to switch just because its too hard for them to switch apps depending on who you are talking to.

I rarely interact in chats with these folks and one friend that I’m closest to in that group had basically been acting a repeater for important messages. I didn’t want to, just months after finally having them stop using a group Facebook chat switch to group SMS that included me, bail on them again for an even less common method of communication and make him do that again.

I’ll bring it up in person in a month or two. One of them literally works for Google - not a massive fanboy but prone to occasional defensiveness - so I’m not super hopeful it’ll happen anytime soon.

I thought that might have been the setting that did it. Unfortunately, a prompt to change that setting occurred only after about 16 hours of multiple rounds of switching, uninstalling, resetting permissions for, adding permissions to, and clearing data from the Messages app, multiple rounds of turning off RCS through Google, etc. I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere in support posts or the extremely long release notes pages until after that prompt.

Admittedly, my ability to find anything useful through DDG or Google seems to get worse every week.

the idea was that making electricity and phone service universal would benefit the country as a whole and bring everybody on board with the idea of government doing things for people.

Well, a certain type of folk refuse to rely on the gubmint for anything, but they’ll get mad as hell when the gubmint tries to take away something it was already giving them. That didn’t count, you see.

I did recently and its been better than I expected. The only real issue was RCS. After 2 years of me not having a Facebook account, my friends finally switched from Facebook’s system to a group text… which broke utterly without RCS.

I had to install Google’s Messages app and fiddle with the native app and Google’s RCS settings and eventually it start working again. I am pretty competent but the support for this seemed to be digging through forum posts and trying a bunch of different solutions unsuccessfully and then having it suddenly work and not knowing why. I hope they manage to get a solution working in the native app.

Otherwise a great experience!

SO broke her relatively new glass one just trying to clean it. She’s got a metal one now.

I haven’t played TF2 in a long time so I can’t comment on that specifically. I just wanted to expand on criticisms. There is a lot to be critical of - the lack of proactivity and resistance to change goes far, far beyond whatever is happening with TF2.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish them ill - I want them to be better. I want to shine light on the bad and hope the public will force them to be better.

Also anticompetitive practices and lying about anticompetitive practices. They take a good chunk of every sale unless the game is wildly successful… at which point the developers aren’t in desperate need of that extra income. Neglecting the entire system for extensive periods of time and rarely being proactive about anything that requires they change anything or do actual work. Their servers often break on Tuesdays with no warning or notice or consistent timing. They had forced arbitration for quite a while and only dropped it because some clever lawyers made it extremely expensive for them to keep using it.

In my eyes, they are a bunch of semi-douchy gamer folks who stumbled into being the most successful digital storefront on PC and have dominated by default for literal decades. They are gamers as such and have had a few decent ideas. They also aren’t obsessed with the next quarter and don’t eagerly sacrifice long term for short term gains. I have no problem giving them credit for that. They also occasionally take actions/stances that, whether or not it is their primary motivation, feel pro consumer to their customers. They are mostly just lazy and hesitant to change anything until forced to - they are absolutely fucking rolling in money and don’t want to mess with a good thing.

If there was a well-funded competitor that wasn’t lead by money hungry asshats, I think everyone would feel differently about Valve.

GOG has its own issues, but honestly I’m just happy they both exist, even with their flaws. In this capitalist hellscape full of businesses eager to harvest every cent possible from customers with no regard for anything but their next quarterly profit… I’ll take heavily flawed.

That’s why they won’t let US citizens have it, and pretend it’s something else when they get old enough for Medicare.

Thanks!

I didn’t think the perceived distance mattered - as you say, things rendered as “close” were not easier to see without glasses when I explored this phenomenon.

However, I didn’t realize that it was all due to the focal length of the lenses. I know very little about lenses and vision.

So the lenses essentially make it so that the headset screens feel ~2 meters away, as far as your ability to see things near/far?

Thanks!