Sounds like it would make a good wedge issue for the next election.

PS: And yeah I get it, it’s weird that you KNOW someone breathed that out lol. I’d even support it if it was based on annoying someone with vaping at a buss stop or in a park. Like it’s a misdemeanor if someone complains, and only then. That should be enough so people police themselves to be more courteous.

Ahh, now I’ve instructed my bot army to downvote you :D But seriously, I’ve read proper research papers about electronic cigarettes. Not the fake ones put out by big tobacco or the puritans where they deliberately measure dry hits, which are sill orders of magnitude better than cigarettes. Ultimately it’s just vegetable glycerin, polypropylen glycol and nicotine, with optional flavor. It’s not like you’d get addicted just by smelling a vape in a park. There is also no gateway to go from vaping to smoking.

There is simply no valid legal argument you could give why it should be banned. Well, unless it’s massively annoying to a majority of people. But then they should really go after those kids with ghetto blasters and skateboards first.

“Vaguely annoy”? :D I mean vaping isn’t really harmful, so what would be the legal basis to ban something like this?

Ban everything that mildly annoys us!

You’re not wrong. Obama won because he was a corporatist and easily manipulated and ran on empty slogans, so he had the backing of the mainstream. Harris did too, but AOC won’t have that backing.

That also means she could run on actual popular policies. Something Trump did. His voters now kinda got the same scam with him than the progressives got with Obama lol.

But there is deeply entrenched propaganda in the media and the minds of people. Like you’d need a movement that comes together. But you can see the liberals in this thread would balk at any tankie demanding and end to US or EU imperialism lol, just like they will balk at putting another women on the ticket.

I was thinking of the Gemini (protocol) - Wikipedia but a bit more elaborate, and yeah I’m not sure how far text compression can be pushed. But I think LLMs could be useful and help reach a critical mass of being able to download and store tons of articles.

Torrent V2 and other official extensions Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items allow some ways to do this. Like hosting a youtube channel and updating it with new videos, without any new network protocol. Well theoretically since this isn’t yet supported well in torrent clients or lib.

I’ve been thinking how this would work for a while but it’s kind of frying my brain haha. Like a “P2P version control database” that is truly open source. For articles and blog posts, but also for metadata for manhwa, movies, tv, anime, books etc. Like anybody can download and use it and share, edit, fork it without needing to set up some complex server. Something that can’t be taken down, sold or if abandoned someone else can just pick it up and you can merge different curated versions and additions easily.

You’d basically want a “most popular items of the past X time” that almost everybody downloads, and then the whole database split into more and more exotic or obscure items. So everybody has the popular stuff but also has to host some exotic items so they don’t get lost. And it has to be easy to use and install.

But the whole database has to be small and compact and compressed enough that you can still easily host it on a normal HDD. It the current times with economic and political dangers lurking this would be a crucial bit of IT infrastructure.

Time to block this community lol

People, in general, do not work for material gain. They work because they have to in order to live, procreate and raise their children. People want a minimum amount of prosperity and economic safety. Beyond that, they want to work in a way and a place that fulfills them. Work itself is fun when done right, and working with others is awesome. Not even the “smart ones” or whatever work mainly for material gain in general. There are an overwhelming amount of counter examples to any variation of your claim. It would be more accurate to say people work for fame and glory, or to get laid (again reproductive success).

But even if what you said was true, it does not justify a complete monopoly. You could have something like “congrats you patented a new idea - if it catches on you will get a free house as a price!”

Of course you know all this and are just arguing facetiously. If “the person who can solve climate change” does anything but trade stocks they would contradict your argument. There is no money in inventing climate solutions. But nice insult to the people who are working on things like that.

Your actual argument is that we reward gambling and non-productive activity too much. That the smartest people are not working towards the survival or wellbeing of humanity, but for… crumbs off the table of the capitalists. That our economic system is not efficient in working towards our shared human values.

Patents mean genocide.

They slow down adoption of innovation and raise prices to levels the market can afford. With the existential need to change and improve like 50% of all industrial processes, this results in too slow change. It never mattered if climate change is anthropogenic or not.

That is just stupid. How about a slighly more complex markdown.

What I really want is a P2P archive of all the relevant news articles of the last decades in markdown like in firefox “reader view”. And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.

Much of the information on the internet could vanish within months if we face some global economic crisis.

I bought an oled phone for 200€ a few years back. What I’d really want is that every smartphone sold in the EU is open, with open drivers and OS with root access if you want to. And some investments by the EU to support open smartphone OS.

What a shithole civilization.

Source seems to be: https://www.metalsucks.net/2025/06/22/another-woman-comes-forward-accusing-jared-leto-of-abuse-and-sexual-misconduct/

So I first met him when I had just turned 17 and he was 33. I met him after a 30 Seconds to Mars concert. He was immediately flirtatious. And I want to make it clear, I thought this was cool at the time. I was a senior in high school from a small town. This was a big celebrity. And he was handsome. I thought it was cool. I would say by the second show, he had started to move from just like flirting to saying things of a more sexual nature.

I couldn’t remember it either. I described it to deepseek in order to find it. Ironically it mistakenly thought

the short story you’re thinking of is almost certainly “Nanny” by Cory Doctorow. It’s part of his collection Radicalized (published in 2019)".

If you find it, let me know. I think I might have been conned by deepseek.

This FUCK is unbelievable. He wants a cookie for withdrawing a nomination which should never have been made in the first place? Should we applaud?

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/the-shadow-of-1930s-appeasement-hangs-over-us-led-peace-talks/

Read this garbage, talking about appeasement. This Merezhko a fascist himself, and every accusation is a confession. What about the literal far right extremists and nazi sympathizers in Ukraine who are responsible for the maidan massacre and helped grab power and start and escalate the civil war? What a fucking farce.

It needs to become clear to everyone that you can’t just demonize Putin and deify tools like Trump or also Obama. They all play geopolitics. They all only care about gaining and maintaining power. The world has gone fucking insane believing this shit.

Something like 70% of gradates in STEM fields in Iran are women. Their economy can’t absorb the skilled labors because of the sanctions though, but that is their goal: To hinder democracy and a middle class that wouldn’t want to sell out to the west. What the US and Israel is doing is meant to do the opposite of what leftists want for Iran. And war is certainly not going to make any of this better.

They would generate strategies that maximize their objective function based on the training data. Obviously garbage in garbage out, but my point is they would not be prone to certain irrationalities like humans.

It might be possible to regulate how AI CEOs are optimized and trained though. You can tell a human CEO a thousand times “we only have one earth, if you all externalize your cost we will all die and have zero profits” but an AI might actually get it. AI might also be connected to a kind of crowdsourced democratic economic global forum, where people can discuss, complain and make suggestions.

AI also has a much higher bandwidth and might catch institutional problems much easier because it doesn’t have to rely on summaries of subordinates to understand how things are going.

More broadly, it might be theoretically impossible for humans to act according to our shared values - no matter what rules, institutions, education or culture we create. Like “theoretically impossible, the system always degenerates” because individual humans will always follow their own greed and lust for power while pretending to comply, and then using that power to slowly pervert the system and it’s rules. I believe that is the root of our current malaise. But even non-sentient AI might be able to help us just enough to make it work. It’s much more likely that those in power will use it for the opposite, but that shouldn’t stop us from thinking about if it can be used for good.

People are a resource that keeps regenerating after all.

That’s what the AI would call “sustainable business practices”?

I’ve been wondering why they don’t blow up more regularly. I imagine a few long range sniper shots would make them explode easily. They should be relatively easy to hit, seeing how big they are.

I suspect an AI CEO would be more rational and science driven, instead of believing in some ideology that says workers have to feel desperate to be most productive or something. It’s possible they’d look at science and then raise the minimum vacation time so people are more productive and generate more profit.

Huh I read a dystopian short story about AI micro-managing workers, constantly telling them what to do next to optimize productivity. It ends with near “perfect” dystopian wealth concentration. While in another part of the world they used AI to create a utopia.

Oh it was called Manna by Marshall Brain

The gradual takeover of jobs by AI (starting with fast food), The warehousing of the unemployed in state-controlled facilities, A techno-utopian alternative (Australia) where AI liberates rather than enslaves.