Lol, someone loves the taste of boots

If you are sleeping so heavily that you sleep through your alarm every time, you probably aren’t getting enough sleep. Go to bed earlier.

As a forever DM, this is pretty real. I try to always hear my players when they tell me they had fun and take it to heart.

You’re always your own worst critic.

Halloween, in January?

Silicon Valley (the HBO show) was joking about this a decade ago. “Making the world a better place through highly scalable caching and consensus algorithms”, “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do”, etc.

An Abrahamic religion based around worshipping a hereditary monarch is problematic? Colour me amazed.

I never said it can’t understand it. I am agreeing with the notion that it has a bias against using it.

Those who fail history will be doomed to repeat it

Code names don’t need to be good for marketing, they are just for being able to talk about a thing

Makes sense. AAVE is mostly a spoken thing, LLMs are mostly trained on the corpus of written text on the internet and in books. It’s pretty rare for people to write in an AAVE style in those contexts.

None of this is a likely threat, but is any of it completely outside the realm of feasibility?

Yes. It’s well beyond being worth considering. You’re describing a massive conspiracy where hundreds of people from multiple countries’ governments as well as private corporations would all need to work together without any information leakage. All this to entrap some Canadian programmer who tried to torrent season 2 of a TV show aired in 1990. If any of this was worth doing, it would have been done by now, yet we hear of nothing like this ever happening.

I’ve gone my entire adult life downloading copyrighted material without using a VPN and it’s never caused me any problem. My contract with my ISP confers me a level of trust that I’m perfectly comfortable with. I’m familiar with the Canadian law around this stuff, and how it’s been interpreted by the courts in the past. I am under no threat of financial damages being pursued against me. My ISP has no incentive to log my online activity or report it to foreign authorities. And even if they did, the Canadian courts limit the pursuable damages to four figures; barely enough to pay for the lawyer that would file the suit.

That level of paranoia is a waste of energy. I know that what I’m doing works just fine. Why would some Hollywood studio plant CSAM in a torrent? That would implicate them as well. It makes zero sense. They have better things to do than entrap some nobody in a country whose laws don’t favour them seeking any damages. It would cost them far more in legal fees to come after me than to just leave it alone. The notices they send out are entirely automated and exist primarily as a scare tactic.

If you’re willing to be curious and open minded about things beyond your limited perception and experience, rather than be a know-it-all, I’d be happy to share with you an example email that I recieved recently. I think the language they use is quite interesting.

The law in Canada limits the ISP’s risk exposure and the pursuable damages of the rightsholder. Also it definitely would cost them if they told me “we have not responded to this notice from the rightsholder” and then turned around and did exactly that. That would be a flat out lie to their client. I’d have grounds to sue in a situation like that.

Also, I’ve been doing this for almost a decade and never had any problems. Maybe you shouldn’t assume that your situation is everyone’s situation.

Your ISP has the same access to your data, but they also have a payment account linked to you, and they regularly cooperate with rights holders and law enforcement.

This varies widely by ISP and jurisdiction. I never use a VPN and my ISP doesn’t give a fuck what I download. They forward me the scary letters from the rights holders but they always preface it with “don’t worry, we ain’t no snitch”

New Theranos!

You’re comparing apples and oranges. It should be like this:

I sell my apples for $1500

People buy them

I sell my apples for $1500 (but they cost me less to make)

People buy them, I make more money

Relatable

How about just making them actually pay an amount of taxes commensurate with the burdens they apply on society?

No, it’s a bunch of doodles. It’s not a statement.

What is this blurry incomprehensible image?