unfortunately, if ever there was an era of truth, we are now well into a post-truth era. the world is full of, is run on, and is continually generating more: utter bullshit.

Not only does “pics or it didn’t happen” no longer have any meaning, neither does the stock market or the SEC or any of this rule of law or liberty and justice for all horseshit we were fed as kids in school, or any of that trickle down Reaganomics horseshit our parents and grandparents were fed. AI is only the latest in a long line of advancements in the manufacturing, repackaging, commercializing, re-distilling, and the redistributing of greater amounts of complete bullshit than ever before.

It is Bullshit 2.0. It is New Bullshit. Crystal Bullshit, if you’re more a bepis fan. Bullshit Classic was what got your parents and their parents riled up in the aftermath of 9/11 – Fox News and all the other things Rupert Murdoch infected. Now, we can get custom, personalized bullshit for each of us parsed through whatever moral lens ChatGPT is paid to have (or, worse, parsed through whatever moral lens Elon Musk gives to Grok). We have “people” acting as little more than a sausage casing for an OpenAI/Claude API key churning out more infuriating bullshit on the internet every waking minute of the day (and some of them, I’m almost certain, automate some of this during the night while they sleep). And in any form you like – text, audio, video – we have bullshit generators for any and every sort of media you like. Whatever makes the narrative they want to push just that little bit more believable to the gullible.

what a wonderful world indeed.

I feel like Mr. Roth has forgotten that being taxed is the alternative we came up with to beheadings for the upper class when they got too rich and powerful.

I’m pretty sure I got TM 32-201-1, the master blaster’s training manual, the improvised munitions handbook, and a handful of others from archive.org.

Less reputable sources are available in all sorts of dark corners of the web, and certainly people could upload tampered versions to IA, but it is generally best to stick to resources that have… some kind of pedigree, when dealing with things that go boom when you look at them wrong.

Not that I’d ever do anything of the sort.

users from lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad who generally believe that Russia, China, and North Korea can do no wrong, among other things. They (usually) correctly criticize the US or its allies for their imperialist actions or atrocities or human rights abuses while simultaneously handwaving away any imperialist actions, atrocities or human rights abuses in those countries as “Western propaganda”. It is generally pointless to argue with them, and fortunately as of late the latter two have mostly stayed contained to their respective cesspits – .ml users, on the other hand, tend to wander about and regularly start whiteknighting for China on other instances.

Generally, you should block those instances and you’ll stop seeing posts from their communities, but unfortunately you’ll still see their comments. Only solution for that is manually blocking individual users, which is especially true for .ml as the developers of lemmy (who are tankies themselves) have previously tried to position it as a “default” instance, leading to a lot of non-tankies registering there and finding themselves promptly banned for anti-China talk (and there are still lots of non-tankies there so you can’t just block them all indiscriminately)

I assure you, that has stopped nobody here – especially not the tankies – do not let it stop you.

I’m still fondly remembering GTA 4 as a game that released as a complete product, with DLCs that gave you another games worth of content. And the multiplayer had no monetization and was just a nice, big sandbox for you and your friends (and possibly other, random people if you wanted).

GTAV was their first time monetizing the fuck out of GTA, and I am still pissed off about the additions to multiplayer that have not made it to singleplayer. Between this experience and the union busting, I’m never paying for 6; I might pirate it if the singleplayer isn’t enshittified for the sake of milking whales but frankly they’ve already done it to the multiplayer and nothing is sacred anymore, so I fully expect a shitty singleplayer experience as well. This news only further cements that expectation – if they’re whipping the devs this hard, imagine how much they’re gonna squeeze the players. And I suspect that divide between singleplayer, included-in-your-purchase-content and what gets added to multiplayer after launch will only continue to grow larger the longer the game is updated if they do it the same way as 5 – so I’m aiming to get my first (and likely only) playthrough in soon after launch, before that gaping maw of missing content is too upsetting to ignore. Hopefully it’s cracked relatively quickly, I expect it will be.

I mean, for you, at home? No, probably not, I don’t believe there is. In a lab with dedicated testing equipment, sure, that’s how they calculate THC levels you see advertised (or at least it’s how they should come up with that number).

Edibles:

• tend to last longer (6+hrs vs ~3hrs for inhaled forms to wear off)
• are, generally, more potent in terms of effect (pain relief, mood elevation, and so on)
• give you more of a “body high” than a “head rush”, if that makes sense
• take a while to kick in (resist the urge calling out to you telling you to take another, you will regret that second brownie more than you could know)

Joint: weed wrapped in thin paper, smoked like a cigarette.

Blunt: A thick joint wrapped in tobacco leaves instead of paper.

Bong: Something that allows you to smoke weed and have the smoke pass through water to cool it before you inhale it. This allows you to take big rips and get very, very high, very quickly.

all in all, I consider any method of actually combusting weed to be inferior, to tell you the truth. Let me tell you about my friend the dry herb vaporizer, where you get your pot hot but not on fire, hot enough that a significant portion of the THC on your pot is able to be carried away by water vapor coming off the pot that you inhale. It tastes and smells nicer than weed smoke, it doesn’t leave behind that smell that clings to fabrics like weed smoke, and what of the rest of your THC? Well, if you save your already toasted pot in a baggie, and then grind that shit up real fine with a coffee grinder, you now have an easy to use brown powder that you can add to brownies or fudge or whatever else you want to make edibles. You get to enjoy the same pot twice.

I want to give a shoutout to a particular kind of dry herb vaporizer, the Dynavap, for being economical as fuck too. Gets you very high off of tiny amounts of weed, it’s genuinely great. Combined with being able to enjoy the same pot twice, I consider it a necessity in these fucked, economically uncertain times. There are downsides (it’s fiddly, it doesn’t produce very thick clouds if you use an induction heater instead of a lighter, you can fuck up and overheat it and then you’re smoking pot through a titanium tube[not pleasant], the screen is fragile if you’re not careful with it and irritating/not cheap to replace, etc.) but for stretching out your supply of drugs, accept no substitutes.

And don’t even get me started on how we drive on parkways and park in driveways.

A fate worse than death.

yup. at the moment if you want a truly private, properly useful local AI agent you basically have to set one up correctly, manually, yourself. Having one come as part of the OS already largely set up for the user would be a massive W.

but yeah, If.

oh good someone else remembers he went this way, too, I’m not just imagining it.

Personally I’m quite a fan of Peter Brown, Styropyro, Chronova Engineering, Attoparsec, and Robert Dunn’s channels (the woodworking/maker channel Under Dunn, the car channel Aging Wheels, they’re both fantastic), to name just a few of the better ones. I do genuinely miss AvE’s storytelling abilities and Red Green style humor, but there are still lots of people who are enjoyable to watch who I don’t think support fascists, or at least have the good sense to keep it to themselves.

I knew someone was gonna ask me about this, so allow me to clarify: I don’t know that for a fact, but I picked up on bits and pieces and you would too if you watched him long enough. The thing that made me say “yeah this dude’s politics are probably problematic” was when he put out a video in support of the Freedom Convoy. He never came out and straight up said he loved Trump or Poilievre or whatever – at least not up until then, but that was the point I stopped watching. But it was enough altogether that made me go “yeah nah I don’t need to watch this dude I’ve got other ‘make/do cool things’ youtubers I can enjoy”.

you mean, someone else found a way to do the exact same job but cheaper? According to capitalism, all is as it should be and you should rest easy buying the knockoffs.

More pragmatically speaking, from what I recall when I watched AvE (before he revealed himself as a canadian maga), the performance of knockoff batteries was in general adequate as long as you didn’t expect the same low temperature performance. That’s apparently where knockoffs and the legitimate batteries tend to differ, is when you’ve got to use them in freezing temperatures. So if you’re planning on using your power tools in a frozen shithole, stick to buying legit batteries – I know you were asking about the ethical concerns, but that’s something else to keep in mind. but imo fuck DeWalt, they’ve already got their pound of flesh out of you buying the legit tools in the first place.

Yeah, we’re considered contractors legally, not employees, so we should be able to set contract rates. We don’t set the rates, though, Lyft or Uber does.

There are some apps that allow drivers to set their own rates (Empower seems to be one), but they don’t serve my area, and even if they did they’re probably vastly less popular to use exclusively right now until they pick up traction.

maybe it’s just what I tell myself to cope, but I feel like Lyft fucks the driver and the passenger slightly less than Uber. I don’t drive for Uber at all now, I can usually get 100% of my rides from Lyft without much downtime, and when I did drive for both Lyft was never as keen on offering me dogshit rides as Uber was, especially after I started declining the bad offers. Uber, on the other hand, seems to want to punish you if you don’t want to take every <$25/hr ride they offer.

Don’t get me wrong, Lyft will still try to screw with you, but they do it less frequently. I get paid for all my wait times, I check. It’s not much for the shorter ones (a minute late is like a couple bucks, maybe) but the longer delays on meant-to-be-shorter rides (fiasco at the checkout, an argument has begun, etc.) can sometimes double the ride profit.

Blasphemy, Mint is amazing.

It definitely does not answer their question, as the Sentinelese seem to consider everyone and everything that comes near them an enemy. Given how colonialism usually plays out and how contemptible other people are in general, I can’t say I particularly blame them.

beep boop, son, beep boop.

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