that’s the biggest part of it. I really don’t get the controversy, to be honest. Yes I get it, some people think weed is awesome. Awesome as it may be it’s NOT a completely benign substance, it is a psychoactive pharmaceutical product. It needs to be treated as such, especially edibles because of the long duration of…

If you’re worried about “what will be left for adults”, ideally, things that are very clearly medical products in form and function, but no they don’t have to be made of kale. This is basically a solved problem in the pharmaceutical industry— they make fentanyl bucal-absorbtion lollypops for trauma cases (no need to…

how is it a parenting problem, when kids are not locked up in the home 24/7. It seems needlessly risky to allow people to make a psychoactive product that is indistinguishable in form or substance from a candy intended for and often consumed by children. It’s trivially easy to change your packaging to make it…

That’s fair, but unless you never let your kids see friends and literally lock them in the house (which would be child abuse, frankly) they are exposed to the world-- you don’t have perfect control as a parent and that’s a good thing because kids learn that way.  But as a society we take some steps to ensure that…

They have, and they’ve been right because of technological factors and economic ones— gaming PCs being 1200+ dollars and consoles being able to be built to run comparable games for slightly less than half of that is still a huge factor, but as things move towards more cloud connectivity, as the cloud delivery…

Thank you for an actually well-researched and well-justified, nuanced take.  A lot of people’s opinions comes down to either a blanket “mergers are always bad” or “big corporations bad” view or their personal feelings about Microsoft, Sony or Blizzard-Activision and their corporate decisions and mid-level governance…

Exactly, and that was the reason I made the post-- a lot of people were saying “this is clearly infringement” or “this is clearly fair-use parody” when in reality it’s a murky case in an already murky area of law.  It would be up to a judge or jury to decide and they’d have to go from there.  I could see strong…

Pretty clear case to me.When the government is prohibited from doing something that includes indirectly acting by gesturing suggestively while going “won’t someone rid me of this turbulent tweet!”

Starlink cannot physically cause kessler syndrome because it’s such a low orbit that anything there will de-orbit naturally and burn up within a few years. In order to eject something into a stable orbit would take more orbital energy than these craft possess.

If you’re going to dedicate space to any use I can think of far worse ones than a global communication network accessible to anyone on the planet.  Plus they’re in such low orbits that accidents are “self-cleaning” as they naturally de-orbit and enter the atmosphere, burning up completely.

It matters because that’s what opened the door for the entire mess we’re in.  The vast majority of Americans support abortion rights-- but the vast majority also want to see laws similar to those of Europe where the time limits are fairly low (yes, even in “progressive, humanist” Europe most countries ban abortion…

this is a pretty good take, but I think it’s worth pointing out that parody doesn’t necessarily have to make fun of the object of the parody— it’s possible, though difficult, to be sufficiently transformative if you’re using it as a commentary on society or wider culture rather than specifically lampooning the object…

it could well be parody, which yes, is protected under the First Amendment as any other speech is. And no the fact it is a private company that owns the rights does not change that, because when you sue someone in civil court you are asking the government to use their power to make someone pay you— hence the…

parody has requirements though, without seeing the film it’s impossible to really judge if it’s sufficiently transformative and distinct to count.

I got bored of ELIZA too. ChatGPT is very good at abusing human biases towards language to make it look like it’s more profound than it really is, the problem is for anything OTHER than surface-level conversations it’s a dead-end tech.

The way it’s designed it cannot possibly have contextual knowledge or the ability…

“breadcrumbing”-- rather than presenting content in a convenient and easy to digest form a platform offers up an interesting tidbit and strings out the rest of the meaningful content across an interminable number of pages (each with their own ads and tracking cookies, natch) hoping to keep you clicking if not to the…

One I’d add of my own: “The grass man”— a grass man is a relative of the straw man where a real person with a real and genuine but radical and extreme position is presented as if they are typical and representative of the other side. Examples are things like presenting revolutionary marxists as if most leftists…

It’s standard practice to administer narcan to anyone who remotely may use street drugs or has an opiate prescription who is found unresponsive just because the downside is minimal (you can’t give them pain medication for a while and you could cause precipitated opiate withdrawal, both are unpleasant but not medical…

this case didn’t hinge on protected class grounds but compelled speech and commercial code grounds. But even if it had, religious belief is a protected class and if they claim their position comes from a sincerely-held religious belief it is protected.

But that’s why this ruling is so powerful, it offers no…

I think that’s only a partially accurate take. They didn’t completely abandon cybersecurity, the servers were safe for legitimate users, and they didn’t have NO anti-cheat, they just lost the constant war against hackers trying to make better and better tools.