Mossy Feathers (They/Them)

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).

    Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.



  • The alternative explanation is that the employers have investments in corporate real estate and don’t want their investments to lose value. Personally, I think that the the people at the top probably have investments in corporate real estate, while middle managers are the way you describe.

    I don’t think the people at the top usually care what the employees are doing so long as they’re making money, and being in the office means they’re keeping corporate real estate prices afloat. As such, being in office makes money for the executives, even if that money isn’t made directly through the company.

    Middle managers on the other hand, likely don’t have any significant corporate real estate investments, nor are they as likely get significant bonuses for company productivity. As such, it makes more sense for their motive to be more about control than it is money.

    That said, I do know some executives do indeed see employees the way you’ve described them; an infamous example comes to mind about the Australian real estate executive talking about how they needed to bring workers to heel and crash the economy to remind workers that they work for the company and not the other way around. I’m just not sure that many executives actually think about their workers in that much depth. I think if they did then we’d see a stark contrast of very ethical companies and highly abusive companies instead of the mix of workplace cultures we have now; because some ceos would come to the conclusion that a happy worker is a good worker, while others would become complete control freaks.


  • I’m… honestly kinda okay with it crashing. It’d suck because AI has a lot of potential outside of generative tasks; like science and medicine. However, we don’t really have the corporate ethics or morals for it, nor do we have the economic structure for it.

    AI at our current stage is guaranteed to cause problems even when used responsibly, because its entire goal is to do human tasks better than a human can. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, even if you do your best to think carefully and hire humans whenever possible, AI will end up replacing human jobs. What’s the point in hiring a bunch of people with a hyper-specialized understanding of a specific scientific field if an AI can do their work faster and better? If I’m not mistaken, normally having some form of hyper-specialization would be advantageous for the scientist because it means they can demand more for their expertise (so long as it’s paired with a general understanding of other fields).

    However, if you have to choose between 5 hyper-specialized and potentially expensive human scientists, or an AI designed to do the hyper-specialized task with 2~3 human generalists to design the input and interpret the output, which do you go with?

    So long as the output is the same or similar, the no-brainer would be to go with the 2~3 generalists and AI; it would require less funding and possibly less equipment - and that’s ignoring that, from what I’ve seen, AI tends to be better than human scientists in hyper-specialized tasks (though you still need scientists to design the input and parse the output). As such, you’re basically guaranteed to replace humans with AI.

    We just don’t have the society for that. We should be moving in that direction, but we’re not even close to being there yet. So, again, as much potential as AI has, I’m kinda okay if it crashes. There aren’t enough people who possess a brain capable of handling an AI-dominated world yet. There are too many people who see things like money, government, economics, etc as some kind of magical force of nature and not as human-made systems which only exist because we let them.









  • You might have already figured it out, but it says

    You wouldn’t pay for 4k Netflix and then download a Chromebook recovery image in order to extract the aarch64 widevine com blobs and then patch in support for 16k pages and then apply miscellaneous glibc compat workarounds and then spoof your useragent, and install a browser extension to unlock HD resolutions, to legally watch media in only 1080p

    Also I don’t think OP made the meme, I think they’re just wanting to know more (as am I). Like, what’s the drama? Why’d someone make the meme? It implies Netflix only lets you watch things in 1080p on a PC if you apply a bunch of workarounds (presumably to make the site think you’re a TV or something).


  • The fact that quantum dots are already being successfully applied to LCD-LED and OLED screens is encouraging for future QDEL products. QDEL stakeholders claim that the tech could bring efficiencies like lower power consumption and higher brightness than OLED. (Research using a prototype device has recorded quantum dot light-emitting diodes reaching 614,000 nits. Of course, those aren’t the type of results you should expect to see in a real-life consumer product.)

    614,000 nits

    That’s fucking insane. HDR 1400 displays are at least 1,400 nits. 614,000 nits seems like you’d be staring at the fucking sun.

    There’s also hope that QDEL could eventually last longer than OLED, especially since QDEL doesn’t rely on organic materials that can cause burn-in.

    Tbh the burn-in issue is the reason why I don’t like OLEDs as computer monitors. I know phones and TVs don’t tend to have major burn-in issues, but the fact that it exists sucks. TVs have a variable-enough image that long-term use isn’t an issue imo, and even the most thrifty person will probably end up replacing their phone every 4~6 yrs. However, I’m used to having computer monitors be long-term things. My last monitor lasted about 10yrs before it died.

    As it stands, QDEL displays would become noticeably dimmer more quickly than today’s OLED displays.

    Aw, that’s disappointing. At the same time though, if they’re able to get even 10% of the 614,000 nits on commercial units, then they’d have to lose a significant amount of brightness to dim to current display levels.

    But optimists believe QDEL display lifetimes could one day be on par with LCD-LEDs and outlast OLEDs.

    Yeah, I hope so too.


  • I wonder if there’s a way to obscure IPs on the side of a torrent tracker. Like an inverse VPN.

    Tbh though, I feel like in this day and age they’re gonna have a hard time cracking down on torrents. VPNs are easier to use and more accessible than ever. Just remember to recommend VPN usage when someone asks about trackers, torrent programs, etc.

    Edit: also this is pure bullshit, I can’t believe anyone actually believes this in this day and age:

    In his speech on Tuesday, Rivkin highlights what a major problem piracy in the US has become, saying it costs “hundreds of thousands of jobs” and “more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales.”

    Pretending it actually does hurt ticket sales, you know damn well companies wouldn’t use the money to hire more people, Rivkin. They’d use the money to find new ways of cutting costs, aka jobs.




  • I looked up the transcript for it out of curiosity. The jokes aren’t terrible I guess; they read a lot like the Carlin bits I’m familiar with. However, I got to the AI part and was like, “nah, they’re pushing it too hard.” I couldn’t see the complaint until I got to that bit, and then I could understand why it made his estate uncomfortable.

    If they’d used the AI bit to poke fun at themselves and talk about how AI’s even replacing dead people without trying to push AI as the future, then I’d be confused as to why the Carlin estate is upset. However, right now AI primarily benefits the rich, so pushing AI as the future of humanity is contradictory even within the context of fake-Carlin routine because it goes against his takes about rich people ruining everything.


  • Interesting. I thought it was fairly well established that Jesus existed in some capacity but the debate was about who he actually was and (from a religious standpoint) if he did any of the things the Bible claims he did. It’s interesting to read that non-jewish people of the time seemed to have no knowledge of his existence.

    At the same time though, I wonder if it’s possible that most people just ignored him, which is why there’s apparently very few accounts of him until after he supposedly died, resurrected and ascended to heaven. Kinda like a street preacher in Times Square, NYC. How many people actually acknowledge street preachers on social media, and how many of them actually know the preachers by name? Then think about how social media didn’t exist yet, so the bar to be recorded in history by uninterested third parties (even just as a letter to a friend about that “annoying Jesus guy”) is probably a lot higher.

    Not saying he existed, just that it’s interesting to think that he could have existed but the lack of evidence is just because no one gave a fuck.