Counterpoint:

I live in a smaller, but still relatively big, city in the Northwest. Similar vibe to Portland but smaller.

I searched and counted a total of 6 venues that use Live Nation.

(To be fair, it had more listed, but a couple have been closed since before COVID so Live Nation isn’t exactly updating this list regularly. At least one of these venues has changed hands of ownership a few times in that time, so are they still contracted with Live Nation? Who the fuck knows, I’d have to ask in person to know for sure.)

Other than a Performing Arts Center, basically all of them have much weaker attendance for their shows than pretty much any other venue that isn’t associated with Live Nation.

Literally, I can count, off the top of my head, more venues that don’t have agreements with Live Nation. All these venues get tons of locals showing up, partially because of how cheap the shows are. We also still have a handful of weird houses that do punk shows.

Also, some of these Live Nation places are literally just fucking Old People places, like the local Elk’s Lodge. Nobody is doing wild concerts at the fucking Elk’s Lodge.

Live Nation can have a presence in your area and the local music scene can still be thriving outside of it.

Portland isn’t the only city that still has a vibrant local music scene, with or without Live Nation.

The judiciary which has a backlog of cases and this will further create a backlog.

Lawyers must be happy about endless billable hours, of course.

And sadly clearly does not think voice actors deserve the same protections as film actors.

Their union deals were a win for everyone but voice actors it seems.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/01/10/video-game-voice-actors-criticize-sag-aftra-over-agreement-with-ai-company/

Everyone needs a Gary in their life.

I’m happy to be the Gary for my less technically inclined friends. Their lack of knowledge would get me kicked off private trackers if I invited them so they could curate their own collections, so it’s just easier to be the guy who makes it easy for them.

Be like Gary, sharing is caring.

I’m gonna be real with you people.

I’m not putting something in my body made by some fucking rando with no evidence whatsoever of what kind of materials they made it with.

Maybe, just maybe, this is a good thing because who knows what kind of toxic plastics were being used to make DIWhy sex toys.

The banning of porn is otherwise dumb, of course.

This is fantasy, who cares. Lots of non-US-born people have been suggested and a bunch of fictional people got suggested, so whatever, you know?

I’d take Ali G Inda(White)house.

Like… which scene groups or individuals?

Don’t really have a particular favorite, although Subsplease is pretty snappy for anime if you want it as-it-releases.

Otherwise, for groups focused on US/UK/European media, whatever’s got the quality range I’m seeking and preferably a season pack all from the same group/same quality.

Joe Biden is way too classy to really insult him. I felt like he was just being honest about who Trump is and what he has done. If it’s insulting, it’s Trumps fault for that being who he really is.

Like, there’s reports Trump actually did shit himself during the debate (Sorry about the link to X, can’t find it elsewhere). Joe Biden is way too classy to call Trump out for such a thing.

I agree, though! Hunter is just done even trying to have any semblance of reasonableness or classiness with the right wingers, so he’d probably be like “Okay, fuck this, let’s get dirty.”

provides more security than windows.

Doubt.

Yeah, if you have a fucking clue what you’re doing which most casual users don’t. (That includes me.)

The only significant advantage it has security-wise over Windows is not defaulting to an admin/root account and instead requiring an elevation of privileges.

…but even modern Windows does the same now.

Exploits exist for Linux and other open source products, corporations with Linux servers and GNU utilities get hacked… I mean fuck just go look at all the CVE’s, they don’t make them for nothing.

Thanks, my point is simply just that data is still physical, no matter what.

A document locked inside a box that I personally don’t have a key to doesn’t make the document inside of it non-existent, just inaccessible to me, personally.

Still there for the duration. Being encrypted just makes it akin to being inside a locked box. Being in RAM is like it being transferred in an escrow service.

Negative self-talk doesn’t help.

Of course it doesn’t, but plenty of mental health issues involve negative self-talk, so it’s unlikely they’re doing this on purpose.

One sure-fire way to get someone to do negative self-talk their whole life is for their parents to talk down to them and put them down at any and every opportunity. Ask me how I know.

All of us contain the capacity for great good as well as great evil.

Further, while good and evil are important concepts, they are still essentially made up human ideas that will go extinct when we do.

I guess hard drives and SSDs don’t count as physical somehow?

Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.

All media is still, technically, physical media.

Even when you stream it locally and don’t have access to the file itself, it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.

On average, we respond solely to voice pitch, tonality, body language and facial expressions

I mean, to be fair this is a human thing that is well known. It’s been known since Nixon looked like hell next to young JFK, the first ever televised debate. Nixon boned it because he was sweaty and looked like shit.

It’s been an issue of the television era ever since we began to focus on images instead of words. It’s also an issue with public speeches.

I mean for fucks sake, JFK went to Berlin and gave a speech where he said “Ich bin ein Berliner” while a Berliner is a fucking donut and despite that confusion Germans went fucking wild cheering for him.

“What did he say? I am a donut? Whatever, he’s awesome woooooooooooooo!”

Acting like it’s just American citizens is fucking dumb. It’s humans. It’s an issue with video media, period.

Excellent comment.

Do you know if the lawsuit that involved Sarah Silverman is going? Because I originally thought that one would have more legs, but maybe because the companies using the books3 corpus all dropped use of them, the case was dropped? I’m honestly unsure.

It’s just that the fact that any of them used books3 to begin with should say everything. Everyone knew books3 was the entirety of private torrent tracker Bibliotik. It was not hidden. Bibliotik isn’t just regular old ebook piracy either, they distribute the tools to remove DRM from ebooks. So they’re using a corpus literally made from pirated ebooks that have potentially had their DRM stripped. I just seemed like a big, easy admission that they were more than happy to use unscrupulous methods to profit.

As someone who was booted off of Bibliotik because it’s damn impossible to keep ratio there, it’s mind boggling to me that it wasn’t a bigger deal how widely used books3 was.

My bad, carry on, carry on.

If he ever makes another album, I think you just named it.

Weird Al - Al Generated

Is it that or is it that the laws are selectively applied on little guys and ignored once you make enough money? It certainly looks that way. Once you’ve achieved a level of “fuck you money” it doesn’t matter how unscrupulously you got there. I’m not sure letting the big guys get away with it while little guys still get fucked over is as big of a win as you think it is?

Examples:

The Pirate Bay: Only made enough money to run the site and keep the admins living a middle class lifestyle.

VERDICT: Bad, wrong, and evil. Must be put in jail.

OpenAI: Claims to be non-profit, then spins off for-profit wing. Makes a mint in a deal with Microsoft.

VERDICT: Only the goodest of good people and we must allow them to continue doing so.

The IP laws are stupid but letting fucking rich twats get away with it while regular people will still get fucked by the same rules is kind of a fucking stupid ass hill to die on.

But sure, if we allow the giant companies to do it, SOMEHOW the same rules will “trickle down” to regular people. I think I’ve heard that story before… No, they only make exceptions for people who can basically print money. They’ll still fuck you and me six ways to Sunday for the same.

I mean, the guys who ran Jetflicks, a pirate streaming site, are being hit with potentially 48 year sentences. Longer than a lot of way more serious fucking crimes. I’ve literally seen murderers get half that.

But yeah, somehow, the same rules will end up being applied to us? My ass. They’re literally jailing people for it right now. If that wasn’t the case, maybe this argument would have legs.

But AI companies? Totes okay, bro.