Hamartiogonic

Companies change the contracts all the time and customers just agree to them.

Consumer protection would help, so maybe it’s time to start voting for the people who support it.

Here’s my risky comment of the day.

I think piracy isn’t like stealing, but it’s still wrong in some interesting and nuanced ways. Just so you know, I’m in no position to judge people for pirating, because I’ve done my fair share of sailing the high seas. However, I would still like to discuss the ethical aspects of piracy and how it compares with stealing.

IMO, calling stealing is completely wrong, but free-riding or trespassing could be more suitable words for this. Obviously, the movie industry would love to compare it with the most severe crime they can come up with, but they certainly have financial incentive behind that reasoning. I’m looking at it from a more neutral perspective.

Stealing has clear and direct harm associated with it, whereas the effects of piracy are more subtle and indirect. Free-riding a bus or sneaking into a circus (AKA trespassing) are somewhat similar, but there’s clear indirect harm. If you watch a football match from the outside of the fence, it’s probably still considered free-riding, but I would put that into a completely different category. IMO it’s also closer to piracy than the other examples.

Most pirates shouldn’t be counted as lost customers, so the argument about depriving the creator of their rightful income is only partially correct. If pirating wasn’t possible, but paying for the movie was, vast majority of these people would prefer to do something else like, go outside and play football with friends. To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical IMO. Still not wrong enough that I would stop doing it, especially considering what the alternatives are. Again, I have no moral high ground in this situation, and I’m willing to call my own actions unethical. You can call yours whatever you want.

Sodium batteries would be a welcome change. Solid state batteries are another interesting technology that looks promising.

Charging infrastructure is another huge bottle neck. I don’t have a charging station anywhere near my home, so even if I had an EV, I wouldn’t be able to charge it anywhere.

Then there’s also the grid. If everyone were to plug in their EVs in the afternoon, that would overload the grid beyond its capacity.

Current Li-ion batteries have numerous issues, but fortunately there are several alternatives too. Bringing a new battery chemistry to production scale hasn’t been easy, but we’re taking small steps like that every year.

We may still need lithium, nickel or manganese in the near future, but the demand for cobalt (per cell) has been decreasing gradually. Who knows which alternative ends up dominating the market after a few decades

And when people send me FB links that only display the login wall.

Yeah that’s funny how a gaming laptop with a beefy i7 can’t be upgraded but an enterprise laptop with whatever pitiful i3 can be. Even though gamers see windows as their primary OS, Microsoft clearly doesn’t see gamers as their primary audience.

Reminds me of the amazon products titled: “I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy,”.

I think we’re way beyond the point of no return. The internet has been ruined for good.

Drop table animals, is clearly the best one.

Google gets more money if the video has more ads. Google also pays more in bandwidth and storage if the video is really long or high res. Also, advertisers don’t like drugs, violence or guns, whereas makeup and mobile phones are totally fine, so those videos are a suitable background for ads.

All of these variables go into the calculation that determines the sweet spot for Google, and the search results are ranked accordingly. You may be looking for an hour long video essay on the torture methods seen in the Hellraiser movies, but Google really wants you to spend more time on 5-minute crafts instead. Actually, 30 s shorts would be even better, as long as they keep you preoccupied.

Having tried to photograph purple flowers, I can confidently say that the human eye+brain combo messes around with the colors a lot. You can spend a lot of time trying to take the most authentic photo you can think of, but you’ll somehow still be dissatisfied with the end result, because that’s not what the flower looked to you in real life. Naturally, you’ll assume that your experience of the colors is exactly what real life is, but your camera still somehow comes to a different conclusion. Most likely, that’s because the camera doesn’t do all the fancy color corrections and distortion your mind does automatically. It’s also possible that cameras are really bad at seeing shades of purple.

Fun fact: These fancy automatic corrections also fail under certain circumstances and produce interesting visual illusions.

If you’re using a camera as a scientific instrument, normally you try to make the picture as real as possible. Conjuring up imaginary detail just isn’t acceptable.

However, you can use false color to highlight whatever it is you’re interested in, and this is a common practice in areas such as electronics microscopy, thermal imaging and astronomy. Even that might not be acceptable is you happen to be interested in the color of different things.

In normal everyday photography, the user usually isn’t interested in authentic textures or colors. Fake internet points are far more valuable to most users, and Samsung knows this.