This is gonna turn into the gamer version of "this is extremely dangerous to our democracy" isn't it

Fucking Christ I am so sick of people referencing the Google books lawsuit in any discussion about AI

The publishers lost that case because the judge ruled that Google Books was copying a minimal portion of the books, and that Google Books was not competing against the publishers, thus the infringement was ruled as fair use.

AI training does not fall under this umbrella, because it's using the entirety of the copyrighted work, and the purpose of this infringement is to build a direct competitor to the people and companies whose works were infringed. You may as well talk about OJ Simpson's criminal trial, it's about as relevant.

I personally did read it that way, but I will concede that perhaps I was being uncharitable.

Regardless, I have seen people explicitly questioning whether it was faked elsewhere, and it makes me cringe every time. Talking about this serves literally zero purpose--it makes the left look crazy, any alternative explanations that make Trump look bad fall apart under the barest scrutiny, and it just serves to keep the assassination attempt in peoples' minds. There are literally hundreds of other things to complain about Trump over, talking about this doesn't help.

I was one of those that thought biden shouldn't drop out, because I was worried about the risk of infighting breaking out over who would replace him, distracting everyone and driving away voters, and I was also concerned about throwing away the incumbent advantage. I still feel the risks of that happening were real and valid, but I'm immensely pleased that those worries didn't come to pass and everyone immediately unified behind Harris.

Basically, X11/Xorg doesn't isolate programs from one another. This is horrible for security since malicious software can read every window, as well as all the input from mice and keyboards, just by querying the X server, but it's also handy for screen reading software, streaming, etc. Meanwhile, Wayland isolates programs in their own sandbox, which prevents, say, a malicious browser tab from reading all of your keyboard inputs and logging your root password, but also breaks those things we like to use. To make matters worse, it looks like everyone's answer for this and similar dilemmas wasn't "let's fix Wayland" but "let's develop an extension to fix Wayland" and we wound up with that one fucking xkcd standards comic that I won't bother linking because everyone has seen it a zillion times.

ETA: Basically, my (layman's) understanding is that fixing this and making screen readers work in Wayland is hard because the core Wayland developers seem to have little appetite for fixing this themselves. Meanwhile, there's 3-4 implementations of Wayland that do things differently, so fixing it via extensions means either writing multiple backends in your program to do the same damn thing (aka a giant pain in the ass) or getting everyone to agree on the same standard implementation (good fucking luck).

They did use them as best they could. They were hamstrung by a filibustering Senate, and two conservative Democrat senators (Sinema and Manchin) who refused to support getting rid of it, making killing the proposition of killing the filibuster DOA. As a result, their only choice to pass legislation was budget reconciliation, which aren't subject to filibuster. The issue is that reconciliation has several big limits:

1. The bill has to be related to government spending, revenue, and the debt ceiling. You can't toss in things like minimum wage increases or voting rights legislation.

2. You can only pass one of these bills per year (theoretically you can do more, but additional reconciliation bills have to go through the budgrt committee and with a 50/50 senate the GOP can just skip those meetings to deny quorum and keep it stuck)

3. Whatever passes still has to get at least 50 votes, which means either appeasing Manchin/Sinema or getting Republican votes (which ain't gonna happen)

And despite that, we still got the CHIPS act, an infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which--even with Manchinema throwing as many grenades in the process as they could get away with--was the biggest climate change bill in our country's history. Not perfect, no, but a sizable step in the right direction, for once.

Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn't access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.

Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.

My dude, they're trying to combat the peer pressure effect of someone's buddies razzing them over drinking a "frou-frou sissy drink" instead of grabbing a cold beer. I know it's Lemmy, but come the fuck on.

Yeah, IIRC a knight's suit of armor and weapons alone were worth more than most people in medieval times would ever earn in their entire lifetime. Knights traveling on horseback were the modern day equivalent of a celebrity rolling around town in a Ferrari

Basically, companies are required to pay for unemployment insurance that funds the government's unemployment benefits system. If you lay someone off, the employee files for unemploent, and gets paid a portion of their weekly salary while they look for another job (the amount you get paid and whether there's any additional requirements varies from state to state, with Democrat-controlled states usually being more generous, but generally you have to show you're actively seeking a new job), and the employer pays a bigger unemployment insurance rate to compensate for the additional burden the former employee is now placing on the government benefits system.

However, if you're fired for cause--say, you get caught stealing from the cash register--then the employer can contest your unemployment. If the employer can show you were fired for a good reason, the employee can be denied unemployment benefits, and the employer doesn't have to pay extra unemployment insurance. This meeting is the company trying to cook up a justification for firing with cause, and the employee trying to get them to admit they're just being laid off, because if the company admits during the exit interview that she's just being laid off without cause, it's nearly impossible to contest her unemployment benefits claim later.

Good sci-fi usually treats this on par with using nuclear weapons (which it kinda is?). In Babylon 5, mass drivers are banned by intergalactic treaty, and when one race uses them anyway it literally bombs their victims back into the stone age, and it's treated as a horrifying event --one of the character's defining moments in the show is just him looking on silently in horror.

Take solace in the fact that the justices are likely to uphold this law!

... and somewhat less solace in the fact that one of the justices (I think it was Jackson?) said this was the easy case and they have much hornier Bruen cases in the pipeline.

... and even less solace in the fact that a supposedly "easy" case like this one still made it to the supreme court because of how much a shitshow the Bruen decision is.