Adblockers are not that difficult to install, so I’d guess the slice of people who really resent ads enough to actually make purchasing decisions out of spite but also who still watch them isn’t that big.

Would if I could but they banned me recently

One thing I wonder about it is, just how premeditated was it? It’s clear that there was no danger to the killers at any point, and that they had the sense that the situation nevertheless meant they were entitled to execute him, but did they workshop that in advance? Did it go as planned, or did they get confused about what they were doing? How much of that plan involved people higher up the chain of command?

I personally like AI, but how it’s actually going is extremely different than most scifi depictions and lacks the typically depicted saving graces of having some degree of epathizable humanity and/or being reasonable. Instead AI tends to demonstrate more unlikeable human qualities, like hypocrisy, condescension and bullshitting. Ultimately it’s still a computer, and not a person, despite being able to do some amount of fuzzy, pattern focused information processing that is more like human thinking than other computer programs were. But computers are still really cool, and I like to see them doing things in different ways than they have before, and overcoming previous limitations. The biggest problem is how they get used to advance evil agendas that were already in progress regardless.

Characters don’t talk or hint about sex at all

This is sort of true and the relative lack of traditional fanservice type stuff is refreshing, but I don’t think it would be fair to say Dungeon Meshi isn’t horny, because a lot of its thematic focus is indirect, allegorical commentary on sexuality, even if it is generally very tasteful about it.

What do you use Paypal for?

A consumer incentive to use cash seems like a good thing. It’s not like there’s ever a scenario where credit card companies aren’t taking a fee to use their cards.

If your focus is LLMs, get a 3090 gpu. Vram is the most important thing here because it determines what models you can load and run at a decent speed, and having 24Gb will let you run the mid range models that specifically target this amount of memory because of this being a very standard amount to have for hobbyists. These models are viable for coding, the smaller ones are less so. Looking at prices it seems like you can get this card for 1-2k depending on if you go used or refurbished. I don’t know if better price options are going to be available soon but with the ram shortage and huge general demand it kind of doesn’t seem like it.

If you want to focus on image or video generation instead, I understand that there are advantages to going with newer generation cards because certain features and speed is more of a factor than just vram but I know less about this.

I wouldn’t go as far as claiming it doesn’t reveal any info, all I’m saying here is that there are more security guarantees, and demonstrated security failures of Tor related to adversarial exit nodes don’t necessarily apply to onion services. I don’t really know much beyond that.

https://onionservices.torproject.org/technology/properties/

Usually, whenever a Tor user is surfing around, their connection exits the Tor network at some point to reach a destination on the internet.

But with Onion Services, the communication from one point to another happens entirely inside the Tor network, all the time.

are you saying that if a site is entirely hosted on TOR then no information makes it to an endpoint?

Basically yeah. My understanding is that exit nodes are special and using them is a vulnerability, but you only use exit nodes to access clearnet sites from Tor, and you are less vulnerable if you aren’t doing that and rather going to sites with .onion urls. Which, unfortunately I can’t find one for this website, but I’m thinking they’d probably consider making one if they can’t maintain any clearnet domains anymore.

In this scenario it wouldn’t matter because the idea is to use it as a way to access a website that would otherwise be accessed over clearnet but has become inaccessible. But if they made an onion site endpoints wouldn’t be used anyway afaik since the traffic doesn’t leave the network. Now that I’m thinking about it there might be some issues with practicality doing it this way if they have a big volume of traffic, but there are options for routing around censorship that don’t involve DNS.

Maybe this will prompt some people to learn to use Tor

I don’t trust either, they’re in cahoots

I agree that our current priority should certainly be to implement a government that can be trusted to regulate things effectively

I don’t, limiting the danger it poses to us and guaranteeing civil liberties should be a higher priority.

Still, the ultimate goal should be government action on this topic because we cannot solve the problem at an individual level. Some people can have better outcomes than others but there’s no level playing field without government intervention.

To me what a level playing field would look like for social media would be mostly about the government no longer doing harmful things that prevent such equal chances, enforcement of the DMCA in particular comes to mind. Exercising more control over who can use which parts of the internet and how, is obviously incredibly dangerous especially given that we know it is possible for a government like the current one to come to power.

I accept that providing social commons which are largely independent from culture and belief is the legitimate purview of the government, but there should be a line right there because when governments manipulate their populations to think or behave a certain way it usually isn’t towards the best interests of the people.

Which isn’t to say that nothing should be done to prevent mega corporations manipulating people, I just don’t think that should come in the form of things like, for instance, what they’ve actually done with TikTok since this article was written, which is mandate the creation of a US specific version that is obligated to be increasingly friendly to the propaganda interests of the current regime. I think that any solution in the form of a formal government regulation will be subject to that kind of corruption, and real solutions need to be found elsewhere.

“Why the education system is horrible and needs to be dismantled and entirely reconsidered” is slightly off topic, but yeah you got me I do not think the argument is all that different wrt education. It is very different from those other things though.

Providing healthcare and social services is not inherently about controlling how people think and what information they have access to.

Is MeshCore a separate network?

Fuck Bill Clinton for passing the DMCA