Bit of context for the power level stuff: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-your-power-level

It only became an alt-right thing because it leaked from /a/ to /b/ and to /pol/, but it wasn’t originally alt-right. /w/allpapers always has a “power level” thread running with anime stuff that isn’t immediately obvious to the casual observer.

Riley’s emotions aren’t controlling her, they’re more like the punishment/reward mechanisms of her brain. Riley decides to do something and then gets sad afterwards, or happy, or angry. It’s only when her emotions are out of balance that she is overwhelmed by sadness and loses control. I do agree that the perspective of the film makes it seem like the emotions are calling the shots and we don’t see enough external emotional regulation, like from her parents. I’d also have liked it if Riley herself could have turned the ship somehow at the end. I think having the emotions control the memories was a mistake, they should’ve been separate mechanisms, maybe feeding into each other at most. That way Riley could recall happy memories by herself and influence her emotions. But that is a bit of emotional regulation that a child might not have learned yet.

Pluto was a planet, once. The crown jewel of the Plutonian Empire. But the Plutonians got greedy. They dug too deep in search of plutonium and awoke a terrible horror. Now all that’s left of Pluto is a cloud of asteroids and a celestial dwarf, barren and uninhabitable.

Torrents are already very hard to block. You don’t actually need a tracker, because all modern torrent clients support DHT (distributed hash table). You only need some way to get the initial hash for a torrent, so that’s where trackers are still useful, but once you’re connected to the swarm, you can only be blocked if the entire swarm is blocked.

Tracking though… It’s too easy to get IP addresses for the entire swarm and I don’t see how you could ever fix that. Tor doesn’t really solve that issue either, it just moves it to places where you won’t get in legal trouble or to people who don’t mind getting in legal trouble, a bit like VPN providers.

I can smell this picture

Available image generators are already capable of generating those images and they weren’t even trained on it. Once a neural network can detect/generate two separate concepts, it can detect/generate the overlap. It won’t be as fine-tuned obviously, but can still turn out scarily accurate.

I don’t think you even need the actual stuff to train a neural network to recognize it. For example, if I wanted to train a neural network to recognize pictures of lions, but I didn’t have any actual pictures of lions, I could use pictures of lion-shaped things, lion-colored things and locations where lions might appear. If a picture is hitting all three of those, it’s very likely to be a lion. Very likely is all a neural network can do, so it’s good enough for my purposes.

I have a similar reaction, but I find it hard to explain what it is about this picture that puts me off. I think part of it is the mismatch between the highly detailed painting and the cartoony pose and expression of the girl. The way people captioned it in this comment section also reminded me of a cartoon. “You should see the other guy”, sure, but if that captures the entire painting (and I think it does), why put so much effort into it? A simpler style could have conveyed the same message. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think all realistic paintings are a waste of effort, but this painting isn’t realistic, it’s just detailed.

Why shouldn’t you go the forest at noon?
That’s when the ripe elephants fall from the trees.

Why does the alligator have such a flat nose?
Because he went to the forest at noon.

Bonus points if you space them out a bit with unrelated jokes.

More at stake than Bush vs Gore? Bro forgot about the 20 year war already

I really felt like all the good stuff was only on private trackers the last few years. A few of the biggest public trackers also went down, that certainly didn’t help, but even before that I had a hard time finding some older, rarer things. If piracy gets bigger, I hope to see more reliable public trackers again with bigger catalogues.

You know that’s not how people are filling their servers, right? Plex is a way to manage and stream your pirated media collection, though Plex will never admit that.

I don’t know what the difference is between downloading and sharing libraries, but check out Soulseek. It’s a little file-sharing program that lets others download directly from your music folder and vice versa. When I couldn’t find an album on any torrent tracker, some hero on Soulseek had it. The main drawback compared to torrents is that you’re limited to the upload speed of this one person, you can’t connect to a dozen people with the same files and combine their power.

Spotify is providing a much better service than radio and it needs the internet to function, but it also isn’t as cheap as a radio broadcast. Don’t judge the entire service by the free plan, which probably shouldn’t have existed in the first place. But that’s how most services attract their users these days, just burn money until you lock in enough people to start monetizing.

I’m on a family plan with a few others and it costs a few euros a month for each of us. Lets you download music too, so cell service isn’t even required. I’ve never had an ad; people complain about sponsored recommendations, but Spotify is “pushing” tiny Japanese indie bands with less than 500 monthly listeners on me. All my Daily Mixes are similar deep cuts. I find it hard to believe anyone is sponsoring those and no way radio would ever have played any of these, unless it’s a short-distance pirate broadcaster in the home town of these indie bands.

I’ve read the whole thing, but all the interesting bits were definitely in the first chapter. I didn’t know anything about the political situation in Nicaragua in the 80s, so it didn’t make much sense to me as an example. Was reading more Wikipedia than Chomsky at one point.
All his examples also seemed like very local problems? Like, the New York Times’ reporting on the Nicaraguan situation may have been biased, but international NGOs were reporting the truth (which is how Chomsky himself got his information) and newspapers all over the world were reporting that information. I checked the newspaper archives from my own country and when they reported on the cases from the book (which wasn’t that often, because South America is pretty far away), they had the same narrative as Chomsky.

So the interesting mechanical bits were definitely in the first chapter and the rest of it was only relevant to 1980s Americans who got all their information from national media.

“To add one additional tooth” (“einen Zahn zulegen”), meaning to hurry, to do something faster.

Related to the teeth of gears, I assume?

4channel’s Technology board
https://boards.4channel.org/g/

That’s obviously way better than any TTS before it, but I still wouldn’t want to listen to it for more than a few minutes. In these two sentences I can already hear some of the “AI quirks” and the longer you listen, the more you start to notice them.
I listen to a lot of AI celeb impersonations and they all sound like the same machine with different voice synthesizers. There’s something about the prosody that gives it away, every sentence has the same generic pattern.
Humans are generally more creative, or more monotonous, but AI is in a weird inbetween space where it’s never interested and never bored, always soulless.

Yeah, the common EPS initiative (mandating USB 2.0 micro-B) was in effect since 2009. That’s right around the time smartphones were getting popular. Even my last slide phone had micro-USB. Maybe there were different models for different markets though, a product doesn’t need to follow EU law if it’s only sold in the US.

And with “this decade” you mean within the last 10 years or since 2020? Either way, I’m scared… Just kidding, if this is a bank we’re talking about, they’re actually ahead of the curve.