following its acquisition from Sony

Has anything good EVER come from big company acquisitions AT ALL?

Geocities -> acquired by Yahoo -> crap -> death

Youtube -> acquired by Google -> ad crap

Blogger -> acquired by Google -> crap

Macromedia -> acquired by Adobe -> Monopoly crap

Washington Post -> acquired by Bezos -> political crap

MySQL -> Acquired by Oracle -> copyright crap

Github -> acquired by Microsoft -> crap

Reddit -> acquired by Conde Nast -> political crap

Twitter -> acquired by Musk -> utter crap

Every single time I see a cool startup get bought by a big player, all I can see is the service going to shit.

It’s one thing to be uncooperative with Linux development.

A very different thing is to introduce vulnerabilities into existing working code.

Okay, here’s the full explanation for you:

VTubers are simply people using 2D or 3D avatars that move using face tracking technology.

The issue at hand is that many VTubers have skimpy outfits but many of them are classy, i.e. not overly sexual. Furthermore, the content they produce is SFW even if at times they talk or joke about NSFW topics. Most of the time VTubers just engage in chat, gaming or reaction videos. And the official with Twitch’s new rules is that changing a VTuber model requires hiring a digital artist and a model animator aka “rigger”. These are super expensive, many of those models can cost thousands of dollars to make. So when Twitch days “cover your hips or be banned”, VTubers whose models have FROM THE BEGINNING shown hips, now have to pay artists and riggers a huge amount of cash simply to cover themselves up.

To make things worse, Twitch’s rules are arbitrary and unpredictable. Who knows if tomorrow they’ll have to cover their shoulders? Cover their cleavage? Skirts below the knee? You don’t know, and every single time Twitch updates their TOS, VTubers have to spend money just to stay in the business. The least Twitch could do is state a fixed, immutable set of rules so VTubers can design their own outfits without fear of being targeted by Twitch’s sharia police. But that doesn’t happen. Twitch rules keep changing over and over, but mysteriously they never affect women wearing super tiny bikinis and showing off their sexy bodies in their pools and hot tubs section.

That’s the issue. That Twitch’s TOS are not only unpredictable, but inconsistently enforced. One could say managers don’t like VTubers and engage in these practices to virtually kick them off their platform.

TL;DR: VTubers are NOT porn. And yet, Twitch is selectively enforcing these rules against VTubers while completely allowing exactly the same - or even much more sexualized - content for IRL streamers in their bath tubs and pools section.

Intentional? Better use Negligent. It’s hard to prove intent; knowledge of something going on is much easier to prove.

Agreed, fantastic story but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t moved to tears.

Hey, Robin! I know you have to vent sometimes into your works, but give the poor guy a break, won’t you?

• Hyperion Cantos.

• Neuromancer.

Repeat after me: There’s a difference between free speech and being a bigot.

When techbros said “you can type a question and the AI will answer”, they seem to have forgotten that we expect the answers to be true and accurate.

And they seem to have forgotten that to do that, they actually need a database of facts.

Not necessarily. Corporate money has a hidden contract. Mainly, you will develop what we tell you to develop and you will stall what we tell you to stall.

Google money is ad money. It’s DRM money, it’s private silo money, not general development money.

If you believe corporations drive all good development in the world, look at how many projects have been bought and killed by Microsoft.

In fact, why would Firefox accept money from one of its competitors? That’s SUPER fucked up.

Just think about the anti features that Google mmay want Firefox to implement: Unlockable ads, third party cookies, user tracking, and so on.

Is tha the development we want?

I say, let’s open fundraisers and keep Firefox free of corporate influence.

It’s a threat to the Mozilla CORPORATION, not the Mozilla Foundation nor the browser.

Nothing to be really scared about. Move along.

My colleagues and I have developed an artificial intelligence system that helps buildings shift their energy use to times when the electric grid is cleaner.

Meanwhile, AI systems are getting trained while using the equivalent of several countries’ use of electricity.

What a bullshit article. The headline itself is so deceptive it makes my blood boil. Now everyone will think AI is a net positive for reducing power usage while it’s all the contrary.

That little fang there tells me she’s up to no good.

Especially after the events that transpired last week. Politicians need to show the people that opposing them nonviolently IS viable. It’s in their own best interest.

Otherwise it’s “fuck the rules, let them try”, and based on history they WILL try.

Thanks!

Alright, question. If market prices are supposedly driven by supply-and-demand, and the supply is nearly 30 times the demand, why are housing prices so fucking high?

Despite that, its depiction of an ignorant society unaware of the technology supporting it was incredibly prophetic. If we ignore the “dumb people reproducing” bit, we can see it as a warning about how an uneducated society is detrimental for everyone.

I mean, we have flat earthers, for fuck’s sake.

More interesting is the origins of that phrase to designate prostitution.

Fortunately, I found an article in worldhistories.net, that shows the first documented time of this phrase. The person who coined the phrase was none other than Ruyard Kipling (“The Jungle Book”):

Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world. Lilith was her very-great-grandmamma, and that was before the days of Eve as every one knows. In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved. In the East where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice, and that is a distinct proof of the inability of the East to manage its own affairs.

- On the City Wall, in In Black and White (Allahabad: A. H. Wheeler & Co., 1889), page 78

If you want to know about actual prostitution, we should go far back to ancient Mesopotamian texts.

According to “The Epic of Gilgamesh” (the most ancient epic in the world), the gods created a savage man, Enkidu, who lived in harmony with the animals in the woods. Gilgamesh wants to tame Enkidu, and is told to bring a “harimtu” (a “sacred prostitute”) to him.

and he [Enkidu] possessed her ripeness. She was not bashful as she welcomed his ardor. She laid aside her cloth and he rested upon her. She treated him, the savage, to a woman’s task, as his love was drawn unto her.”

Later, as he regrets joining civilization, Enkidu curses the harimtu:

“I will curse you with a great curse… you shall not build a house for your debauch you shall not enter the tavern of girls…. May waste places be your couch, May the shadow of the town-wall be your stand May thorn and bramble skin your feet May drunkard and toper (ed note: someone who drinks alcohol to excess) alike slap your cheek.”

Researcher Gerda Lerner, in her article “The Origin of Prostitution in Ancient Mesoportamia” (Signs, 1986, pp. 245-6), says:

The nature of this curse tells us that the harimtu who mated with Enkidu lived an easier and better life than the harlot who has her stand at the town wall and is abused by her drunken customers.

This would confirm the distinction we made earlier between the women engaged in various forms of sacral sexual service and commercial prostitutes. Such a distinction was more likely to have existed in the earlier period than later.”

So yes, there were prostitutes in ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization.

EDIT: typo

This is the reason why IT admins usually disable the installation of automatic updates on the workplace (so THEY can decide which updates to install and which ones to skip).

Then one day Microsoft wanted to be an asshole and decided to lie and mark an anti piracy phone-home update as a SECURITY update, breaking thousands of systems in one single night. Admins were forced to block Microsoft’s own IP addresses just to prevent company’s assets from breaking unexpectedly.

No wonder Microsoft is so hated worldwide.

The dots and lines suddenly forming the ohno face was genuinely unexpected.

Well played 😁

By any chance, were the clamps filled with styrofoam or something? 😁 (Tofu-dreg joke)