I would rather not do it and hope nobody else does it.

While this is certainly something to dream about, I live in the Bible Belt. If I hadn’t taken it, there would have been a hundred others lining up to do it.

“Oh, if I don’t use my electrical engineering skills to bomb children for a MIC company then someone else will do it, nah bitch I’ll work in a different field”

It’s a bit of a stretch to equate it with making bombs. And if you have the flexibility to work in a different field, then you’re already speaking from a position of privilege. Not everyone has that luxury. Some people have niche skills or have small tight-knit job fields, where burning a bridge with one company could cascade to other companies as word spreads.

Edit: although I do have to say you have to consider all aspects. If you’re only making content that changes gender to sex and you gotta feed yourself, then it’s a big jump from killing people for a war company for fun.

There are absolutely arguments for why we should require engineers to take engineering ethics classes. Hell, even city zoning departments can be abused by racists. But it all eventually boils down to a cost/benefit analysis for the person considering the job; Ethics studies may cause an engineer to weigh the moral “cost” more heavily on certain topics. But it’s still essentially just a mental calculation when deciding whether or not to take the job.

At what point do the benefits of the job begin to outweigh the moral costs? When you’re going to go hungry if you turned down the work and burned bridges? When your family is going to go hungry? Sure, the high horse may be attractive when it’s just you… But nobody wants to see their child go hungry because they refused work. Eventually, people will compromise on their morals in order to put food on the table. And effecting change is a lot easier to do when you have a good job and can afford to donate (either your time or money) to causes you believe in. Homeless people aren’t exactly known for their political weight.

So I used to do a lot of freelance, and encountered similar situations a few times.

The most blatant example that comes to mind was a charity run. I had the client reach out for AV gear and crew for a charity run. They needed some projectors and a small stage (and all of the AV gear+crew to go with the stage) for a charity event; They were going to be at a college campus, with joggers making laps on a 1/2 mile loop. For every lap, sponsors would donate to charity.

The projectors and stage were to give the MC a place to be, and to keep the audience entertained while the joggers ran. They’d have a band playing, and cap the event off with a movie screening. Sounds fun. I quoted the job like any other gig. The perceptive reader may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned what kind of charity they were raising funds for. That’s because I didn’t think to ask ahead of time. I got there, and discovered it was a pro-life fundraiser. Fucking yikes.

But I still did the job. I needed the money, and didn’t want to burn future bridges with other companies that were involved. I simply made a mental note to ask more questions the next time a charity event came across my desk. But the big takeaway is that even if I didn’t do it, someone else inevitably would have. The event still would have happened, and the charity money still would have been raised. At least with me doing it, I was able to avoid adding another enthusiastic voice (whoever would have taken my spot) to the echo chamber. Even if I had climbed up on stage to interrupt the event, it wouldn’t have changed any minds. Afterwards, I donated what I could afford to Planned Parenthood and moved on.

It’s in French, but here’s a link:
https://www.watson.ch/fr/!884988581

Basically, Yen did an interview for Watson (a magazine) where he talked about the swedish government encroaching on encryption. He got political when he started talking about how all of the Swedish government officials were useless bureaucrats, and praised the US government’s methods instead.

And the CEO just did it again, because apparently it wasn’t enough backlash the first time.

The issue with baby formula is that it’s pretty strictly regulated by the FDA, and getting approval is a lengthy (and extremely expensive) process. So there are only a few companies that hold a functional near-monopoly on the production, because they’re the only ones who had the resources to go through the process.

And to be clear, I’m not advocating for looser regulation on formula. Safety regulations are writ in blood. But local formula production would essentially require massive subsidies and fast-tracking to offset the costs and testing associated with starting production.

The Gatcha system is why I never finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The first game was phenomenal… But the second game required a gatcha system to unlock new party members. There were even quests that were locked behind certain ultra-rare party members. It’s an entirely single player game.

Does that really count? As far as I know, the golden keys mechanic was just a way to get some good gear. It wasn’t exclusive gear, and you could get it just by playing the game.

After a certain point, I’d imagine that there are diminishing effects. The difference between 100ug and 200ug is huge, but the difference between 1100ug and 1200ug isn’t anywhere near as big. After a certain point, it all just becomes a trip. But the size of the trip is entirely up to your mindset and individual brain chemistry; I know people who have found or lost religion on 300ug, and others who said 1500 was just a nice smooth trip.

To be clear, it would be a mind-bogglingly large trip. But I doubt it would have any more of an effect than a much smaller (but still very large) dose.

Most I’ve done was 1200 and I had a wonderful time. When I was doing it every weekend, 200 was my “chill out and play a video game” dose, and 500 was my “I’m too fucked to focus on a game because the edges of the screen are wobbling. I’ll just zone out to some anime instead” dose. The tricky part about acid is that it’s entirely subjective.

“No mom I’m not taking hormones! It’s the 5G towers immense amounts of pussy that I’m drowning in, I swear!”

Could even put it on a USB drive, so killing it is as simple as yanking the USB. Hell, if the feds come sniffing, you could just toss that bitch in the microwave.

I mean, Japan depends on the US for defense too. Their constitution only allows them to maintain a small “Self Defense Force” and everything else is run by the US. It was one of the largest and most impactful changes to Japan’s constitution in the wake of World War 2. Basically, the Allies went “you fucked around in Korea and China so hard that we need to prevent you from ever building an invasion force again in the future.”

That’s why Trump threatening to pull the military out of Japan was a monumentally stupid move. The US military is already wildly unpopular in Japan; The average Japanese person’s experience with them is “US military dudebro gets drunk off base, sexually harasses a Japanese girl on the street, drives drunk, causes damage/injury in a crash, and flees back to the base to avoid punishment.” Even if the solider is penalized by the military for it, Japanese people still see it as avoiding punishment… Because Japanese punishments tend to be much much harsher than US punishments. So since he’s not being punished by Japanese authorities, he’s getting off too easy.

Trump made the threat at a time when conservative (bordering on jingoistic) rhetoric is at an all time high in Japan. Japan has always been an extremely conservative country, but there has been a new wave of nationalism and xenophobia recently. So when Trump made the threat, there was a non-zero chance that the average Japanese person would go “fucking good, we deserve to have our own military again anyways.”

It’s also why people were talking about China, Korea, and Japan banding together to oppose the tariffs was such a big deal. The three countries hate each other due to blood grudges that go back centuries… And yet Trump was able to get them to agree on something.

I think a lot of the liberal attacks were more of a “there’s a time and place, and this is neither” issue. The Genocide Joe posters were at their peak right as Trump (who straight up said he’d be worse about genocide than Joe was) was at the height of his campaign. The big difference was more about whether “perfect” should get in the way of “good enough.” Nobody thought Joe (and later Kamala) was the perfect candidate. But they thought it would be better than Trump.

If you live in a state that’s 100% guaranteed to go blue, then sure, abstain your vote in protest. After all, it won’t make a difference. But if you lived in a swing state, then abstaining was the same as saying “I don’t care who wins, even if it makes the genocide measurably worse in every way.” It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face, while also trying to claim moral superiority. Refusing to vote for a democrat because of the genocide was like handing a flamethrower to a compulsive arsonist, because the current administration didn’t do enough to support firefighters.

The end goal should have been to keep things from getting worse first, before you focus on hammering the genocide before the midterms. But apparently people on high horses don’t know how to play the long game.

Personally, I’d be against corporate owned IP. Leave the IP with the individual artists and writers, who are historically shit on by the large companies. Force the massive companies to actually keep the artists and writers around (and pay them well!) if they want to continue using an IP.

While I agree on the surface, the stark reality is that this would inevitably be used as a eugenics program. Imagine the current “speedrunning fascism low %” administration having the legal authority to decide who does (and more importantly, who doesn’t) get a parent permit.

While I agree, my ex once lit the house on fire while trying to make ramen.

Given, she was stoned out of her mind and passed out long enough for all the water to boil off. I got home from work just in time to find the bone-dry noodles burning in the pot.

Yeah, the fact that you can want to go somewhere, and have the resources to do so… And a faceless government bureaucrat hundreds of miles away can just go “lol no you’re not allowed here.” It is mind boggling.

Yeah, 18k games, but a lot of that is going to be shovelware. Steam has a big issue with shovelware designed to look like a good deal. They’ll release like 25 games, one will be priced at like $100, with the rest priced at like 50¢.

Then they do a publisher bundle, which marks all of those 50¢ games down by like 90%, but doesn’t touch the pricey game. So on the surface, the bundle is marked as like $100 for 25 games, at 87% off. Looks like a great deal. When in reality it’s just 24 cheap games marked down, and one super expensive game. And all of them will be shovelware. But it’ll be enough to fool anyone who doesn’t bother to dig into the actual bundle details.

The app has already been inactive for a while now. There hasn’t been any active development in several years. They clearly have no interest in continuing it, and just want to move on to other projects.

What’s to stop actual child abusers from just photoshopping a 6th finger onto their images and then claiming that it’s AI generated?

Aside from the other arguments people have presented, this wrecks one of the largest reasons that people produce CSAM. Pedophiles are insular data hoarders by necessity, because actually creating and procuring it is such a big risk. Every time they go online to find new content, they’re at risk of stumbling into a honeypot. And producing it requires IRL work, and a LOT of risk of being caught/turned in by the victim. They tend to form tight-knit rings, and one of the only reliable ways to get into a ring as an outsider is to provide your own CSAM to the others. CSAM is traded in these rings like baseball cards, where you need fresh content in order to receive fresh content.

The data hoarding side of things is where all of the “cops bust pedophile with 100TB of CSAM” headlines come from; In reality, it was probably like 1TB of videos, (which is a lot, but not unheard of) but was backed up multiple times in multiple places, because losing it would be catastrophic for the CSAM producer; They can’t simply go grab a new blue ray of it. And the cops counted the full size of each backup disk, not just the space that was used.

Intentionally marking your content as AI-generated would ruin the trading value, because nobody will see it as valuable/worth trading for if it’s fake. At best, you won’t get anything for it. At worst, you’d be labeled a cop trying to pass off AI content to gather evidence.