deborah

oh god is it from that messed up OCD plot line in one of the bad ones – Xenocide? – which I’d forgotten about until just now? I guess if someone has an OCD diagnosis you could imagine taking that as a reclamation…

they probably do. I worked for a content-as-a-service company that had a contract to deliver our product, airgapped, to a three-letter agency on a regular schedule, and we were a tiny company. Microsoft’s biggest customer is probably the U.S. government; I’d be shocked if they don’t provide an in-house airgapped set of full Azure services for the entire intelligence agency system.

If it makes you feel better, it costs an average of $18,865 for an uninsured American to give birth to a healthy baby, and a tenth of the country is uninsured.

I mean, it doesn’t make me feel better, because I live here. But you don’t, so YMMV. Or I suppose YKMV, in metric, because the US still uses imperial measurements for everything, because we’re too good for real numbers. USA! USA!

Sorry, I’m American, I’ve forgotten how normal human empathy works. I’ve heard that in some places society isn’t entirely driven by spite but I think that’s a myth.

Here’s the “what did you like least” survey entries the organizers say they classified as “edgy people”:

“all the racism stuff” = “edgy people”. Yup.

It’s so beautiful.

How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet? You sound like an asshole and I’m going to kick you in the jaw until, to the relief of everyone, a doctor will have to wire it shut, giving us ten seconds of blessed silence where we can solve actual problems.

also here for “well the opposite of left wing views is racism”

thanks for saying it aloud my friend

It is not, in fact, bad that copyright applies to a wider group than publishers, unless you are using “publisher” extremely broadly to apply to “creators”.

If “someone gets attacked for posting an image on social media”, that rarely means “lawyers came after me because I posted a screenshot of a page from Sandman”. It often means that the poster took someone else’s art, snipped off the artist’s signature, and posted without attribution, and the artist is rightfully angry. Copyright is what enables that artist to continue to eat and make more art. The same goes for music, or software, or movies.

Sure, the system is horribly abused by uneven power structures, as every system in the world is. For music especially, we all know that the takedowns are usually issued by people who have nothing to do with the creation of the protected work, because of the way licensing and rights grants work in that industry. Automated takedown systems (which have to exist because of the scale of online content) also have no reasonable appeal mechanism, and the people making the decisions don’t (and can’t) make reasonable assessments about fair use and transformative works.

I’m not saying that everyone who participates in piracy is a bad, wicked thief–I absolutely participate in it myself. But copyright is not the villain here; that’s just trying to make us feel justified about our actions. Someone made a creative work I enjoyed, and I don’t have a moral right to the product of their effort for free.

When I was listening to the most recent episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast which was all in on mocking J. Michael Bailey with a special dig at autogynephilia theories, I went to go see if David had any history policing weirdos on Bailey’s wikipedia page, as an excuse to bring the episode in for a stubsack link. And he didn’t, which means, once again, booring.