Aceticon

That's just self-indugent tribalist scapegoating using an argument which is circular and self-disproving.

• If there were too few people who cared about the Israeli Genocide enough for it to affect the vote, which is would justify the decision of the Democrat leadership to not do anything meaningful to agree with the demands of those voters (Biden pausing his own decision of sending 2000lb bombs is very much a "I'm saving you from myself" moment), then you can't really blame those few people for the Democrat loss since there were not enought of them to make a difference and something else made the Democracts lose, so the fault is in the strategy followed by the Democrat leadership on other subjects.
• If on the other hand there were so many people who cared about the Israeli Genocide enough for it to result in the Democrats losing the vote, why did the Democrat candidates not go after that vote? Again, the blame is down to the choices of the Democrat leadership: it's always easier to change what a handfull of people do than to change what millions do, so for the handful of people in the Democrat Party leadership to change their position with regards to supporting Israeli in its Genocide would be far more logical to expect in that scenario than for such a large slice of the electorate - millions of voters - to change their position instead. Even if one thinks "our leader's position is more important than that of millions of people so it's the millions who have to change their positions, not our leader" (a bootlicker's mindset, BTW), it's still incredibly stupid to go with "we're going to convince millions to change their position rather than just that one guy" as a strategy so the blame still rests with those who chose to go with it.

All I see here and now is people making a pseudo-"argument" that is entirelly reliant on the axiom that "the boss is always right" to manage to somehow blame millions for something which the "the boss" could have (per the part of that very same pseudo-"argument" which claims it was the people who were against the Israeli Genocide that sawyed the vote) easilly avoided by just meaningufully changing his position on just that one subject. That presumption that the leaders are blameless and it's the peons who are to blame for not being willing to follow the leaders no mater what they were doing, is a 100% subservient mindset.

If you're going to assign blame for Trump, look at the handful of people in the Democrat Party who chose to do things in such a way that the results was that millions of their own electorate chose not to vote for them, thus delivering the election to Trump.

It's called a "Final solution" and, yeah, multiple people in the Israeli Government talk about wanting a "Final solution for the Palestinian Problem".

The police are an income source since they can confiscate property and create legal slaves.

The fire department is pretty much a pure cost center.

Before this Mini-PC TV Media Box I had an actual dedicated TV Media Box which lasted for maybe a decade, and at some point its remote broke, so rather than throw the whole thing out I made my own IR-translation box with a WiFi-Enabled micro-controller (so it had an IR emitter pointed at my TV Box and that was controlled by some software running on the microcontroller that exposed a REST interface on the WiFi) and also made my own Android app to remote control the TV Media Box via that translation box.

A dedicate remote and a remote control app on a smartphone or tablet are just not the same thing in practice.

Whilst I don't tend to have my phone on my living room, I do have a tablet there, but a dedicated remote is much more straightforward to use because it just directly works with zero delay: there is no need wake it up and unlock it like I would my tablet, I will never need to switch apps like I do on a tablet if I was using the tablet for something else, the user interface in a dedicated remote is as standard and familiar as it gets, and that remote can just stay there in my living room all the time for anybody to use just for that purpose alone whilst the tablet will move around to be used for other things and even taken away from home.

The smartphone/tablet remote control app is a more flexible option that can pack-in as many or as few controls as one wants, but that is a tradeoff for it being overall more of a hassle, less practical and slower to use for the most frequently used commands. Ultimately I just want to select a video and start it, possibly stopping it or pausing it, with the least hassle possible and with no unrelated tasks (like getting the tablet from somewhere else, having the unlock it or switch tasks on it) getting in the way.

So in my experience, having tried both ways, the dedicated hardware remote is a superior option which is why I recommended it.

No, no, no.

Censorship is when people that I agree with are silenced.

When people I disagree with are silenced, that's just stopping trolls!

/s (Needed exactly because there are people out there who genuinelly agree with this, so it's not obviously satirical)

I'm pretty sure those things are trained on content which was obtained without paying royalties to the creators, hence by definition pirated content - so that would count as "piracy around them".

On the opposite side, as far as I know the things created with Generative AI so far can't be copyrighted, hence by definition can't be pirated as they've always belonged to the Public Domain.

As for the engines themselves, there are good fully open source options out there which can be locally installed (if you have enough memory in your graphics card) and there seem to be thriving communities around it (at least it looks like it from what bit I dipped into that stuff so far). I'm not sure if it's at all possible to pirate the closed source engines since I expect those things are designed to be deployed to very specific server farm architectures.

Personally I would've gone with a Protection Racket metaphor.

"All hail me: I have saved you from myself"

I did get the idea you were just quoting their excuse and meant it the same as in my post.

I just wanted to really hammer down the point beyond any doubt.

Yeah.

Those of us paying attention have spotted long ago that the Ju$tice System is mainly a tool for violent enforcement of the power of the moneyed and well-connected elites on the majority of the population behind a charade of "rules are rules" and it being just an independent and a fair mechanism for equal application of the "rules defined by Society" to all (all of which is nowadays and in a painlfully obvious way, clearly a bundle of lies).

All it takes is comparing how the Ju$tice System reacts to merelly the peons breaching uneven contracts with big companies or to the occupation of the property of the very wealthy by the poor, compared to how it reacts to violent crime in poor neighbourhoods, to see how their Ju$tice is not in any way form or shape Fair or Just.

Maybe it's less so in some countries and more so in others, but nowhere is it actually fair and independent.

For over a decade I've been watching TV Series and Movies from a Media Box connected via Ethernet to my home NAS (which is generally an old notebook or even my router - once I got myself a decent router - with some external hardisks), which is actually a pretty simple network to set up using Ethernet Over Powerlinr adaptors (which were already good enough for it back when they only did 20 Mb/second and now that they're 1000Mb/s will handle even the huge resolution lightly compressed stuff that one can now find as booty out there).

The setup has been recently upgraded to a Mini-PC with Lubuntu and Kodi, which is in my living room (right next to my Internet router to which it is connect with Gigabit Ethernet) and is also my home NAS and Bittorrent server over always on VPN, with a wireless remote for using in my living room to control Kodi (so it works the same as a TV Box for watching media) whilst the background stuff I control from my main PC remotely using a mix of web interfaces and ssh command line.

I had never had this good an environment for TV entertainment and I'm not even using any of the *arr suite or Usenet to source content so a lot of it is really just doing the same stuff as a decade ago but with better hardware and a more modern UI for media playing and (most importing) a way faster Internet connection.

Anyways, the point I'm making is that nowadays one can actually upgrade a little bit from your setup (which, by the way, is superior to what I had before my Mini-PC upgrade) cheaply and even get themselves very close to the same experience as the corporate stuff (media box with remote and a nice UI to play stuff from a media library) whilst maintaining maximum control and getting no shit from enshittification.

PS: I couldn't recommend more getting a wireless remote if you want to just be able to sit down on your sofa and have a no hassle media box experienced (even whilst behind sits a far more complex home infrastructure that what people who outsource that side of things to the likes of Hulu have). It real helps with having a shit-free under your total control entertainment experience without sacrificing the part of that experience that comes from having a modern interface for media selection.

Just force them to use open standards and for it to be easy for people to move platform whilst keeping all the connections to their profile: the power of such social media entities is that people are locked-in because if they move they lose the connections of both followers and those they follow, which often means family and friends.

Basically a solution similar to that adopted in Europe for phone numbers - that you can take your number with you when you move providers - would reduced social media companies down to "just a pipe for social media connectivity" which would ultimatelly kill those with the worst practices given that the barrier to entry to be a "social media provider" is way lower than to be a fixed line telephony provider.