When will people learn that any advertising that occurs during extortion like this is the focal point of hate and fear?

This is like anti-advertising.

Same, I used to have some Caliber extension that stripped DRM. Last used it 2-3 years ago and worked for Adobe DRM at least.

I like to go check out the book I want from the library, and when it gives me the Amazon DRM version I just go search for the epub version online and download that. IIRC, completely legal as I have legal access to the book…somehow.

You have 2 neighbors where it’s basically a public good.

I saw a guy in a park in Milan at almost midnight filling up a few 5 liter bottles from the carbonated water station. He clearly lived across the street and just…needed to bathe in fizzy water right then? No idea. But it’s not just you all.

Bonjour, mon aime.

Right, and so I’m saying that forgetting how to make CPUs as a premise seems far-fetched when the actual fact of the matter than we can easily lose the ability to make CPUs with only a few significant supply chain losses. A total societal collapse isn’t necessary. A single catastrophic natural disaster that only directly impacts one part of the world might be enough.

It’s not just the manufacturing of that one thing that is under consideration. There’s an entire supply chain that gets you to that point where you finally have the inputs needed to enter the lab and make the product. There’s likewise a whole bunch of supply chain needed to get an ISO Class 5 clean room, which is what’s needed for general microprocessors. Even if you’re only talking about a clean work box on a bench top.

Who is mining the cobalt and aluminum and making the glass and plastic tools needed to stock the lab where you’re making 1980’s style microprocessors? Who is making a pure silicon ingot you’ll slice to get a wafer? What will you use to slice the ingot for the wafer? How will you polish the wafer to microscopic levels of flatness? Who is making the oscilloscopes that test the processors to see if they work? Who is making the glass for the lenses for high-power microscopy you need to work? Where will you get the bulbs and needed for the photolithography stage? Where will you get the tiny tiny tiny wires that connect the pins to the chip? How will you purify and process refined silicon dioxide? Sure, the stuff is everywhere, but think through how you go from a piece of quartz on the ground to a material you need to layer on a wafer (where you gonna get the wafer??) and what machines and processes are needed for that. And on and on and on. One of those things missing means you can’t move forward.

And depending on the scenario, each of those things needs to be local to you as well.

This is Carl Sagan “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you need to invent the universe” level picking the process apart. Everything is connected, and we don’t always appreciate how much things are inextricably tied to what we use on a daily basis.

My favorite example: This guy figured it out when thinking through a cheeseburger.

There’s also a book from 2016 called “When the Trucks Stop Running” that is fearmongering oil industry hype, all about how important oil is to fueling heavy machinery. (Spoiler, it’s not as important as they make it out to be) But the real lesson of the book is how many rarely seen or talked about corners of the supply chain are fundamental to keeping huge numbers of industries running, and how fragile many advanced technologies are to supply chain interruption.

I was thinking of modern CPUs the whole time and then people are trying to “What-if” their way into whatever they want it to be.

Fine, it’s whatever you want it to be. We’ll be making modern CPUs in a bucket next to the bucket where we recycle paper.

Yeah, but look at how much other stuff that is highly-manufactured goes into that process? It’s not about just the end product, it’s about the entire supply chain needed to get the stuff to make the 1 product.

You can make vacuum tubes all day. You can even make transistors and integrated circuits at home.

But the definition of “computer” here is a glorified calculator.

A TI-81, the graphing calculator from the 1980’s, used a chip that had 8500 transistors. So if you’re planning to, say, build a dam and need to know how thick the cement should be to account for the pressure from the volume of water when the lake is full - unless you want to do all that engineering calculus yourself (I promise, it sucks) then you might want some more advanced computational power. Sure, dams were built when this was all done by hand. Dams also collapsed and washed towns away sometimes. Something I haven’t heard of happening in a while.

As nice as it is to think about going back to an analog world, things like knowing what the climate is doing, medical advancements, sharing video and images, etc. save lives and advance medicine. No one is making a COVID vaccine without sequencing the genome of a virus. Pacemakers, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, cars with increased fuel efficiency, electric vehicles, solar panels - all perfectly good reasons to enjoy modern microprocessors.

…you say as we both use machines that used a planet’s worth of supply chains and resources to talk to each other.

Forgot? Have you seen what’s needed to make CPUs? Clean Room Manufacturing is a fragile thing.

Developing countries often need a lot of help just getting to ISO Class 7, which is what’s needed to safely make cough syrup.

Injectable drugs are ISO Class 5. CPU manufacturing is ISO Class 1 and 2. In some post-apocalyptic scenario, depending on the scenario, it would be decades or generations of work to get semiconductor manufacturing back. Even if you have an abandoned factory sitting right there. It would potentially be decades to get back to making anything safely injectable. Supply chains involved with specific parts and inputs. shudder

I was going to bring up the Interpol bust all around Africa of SIM farms that is referenced in this article. Usually all about international calling and for scammers to use.

Reporting on this said that this setup had been involved with nation-state level threats. I wonder if it’s that these spammers were just doing their spam stuff and have all their stuff automated to sell bandwidth. Like you just send them a CSV with numbers and messages, and they don’t care what the content is. So then nation-state just books a few campaigns that are what kick off an FBI/Secret Service investigation because the nation-state isn’t actually affiliated with the spammers.

This setup is worth a ton of money just chugging along, and realistically, this is not built to overwhelm a few key mobile towers. These things are built to spam and scam.

LOL. Chicago Pope?

Don’t you know? ALL the Holy Water is hot dog water now. Go into any church and you’ll see a priest slathering mustard and celery salt on the wafers.

I have personally told coworkers that if they train a custom GPT, they should put “AI expert” on their resume as it’s more than 99% of people have done - and 99% of those people didn’t do anything more than tricked ChatGPT into doing something naughty once a year ago and now consider themselves “prompt engineers.”

Your hatred is steaming beans?

My hatred usually corns beef.

I now have exactly 1 reason to go to Boston.

OK, so just to recap:

1. You start off by deriding anyone that isn’t carrying the same label as you as either evil or stupid.

2. Immediately and unironically say that it’s only the Right vs. everyone else after just saying that it’s the Left vs. everyone else because they’re either wearing your label or they’re Secret Hitler or an idiot.

3. Double down and imagine that everyone actually has secret but strong political feelings and simply are confused or too chicken shit to reveal them, but that all the secret opinions of average people are not just mildly conservative, but actually full-on far-right?

My friend, I’m not sure you understand how many people don’t spend 18 hours a day online reading political news. Because that’s exactly how you end up alienating normal people who are all out of fucks to give about politics, and fracturing opposition to fascism like you’re doing here. You’re not helping anyone but the fascists by calling the people stuck in the middle fascists for just trying to live their lives.

Case in point, this is a shitpost comm and you’re too wrapped up in your self-labeling to read the room and the meme that most people don’t care about the things you care about. That’s the meme, and lesson, that you missed.

Polls are usually pretty consistent in that the majority of people (usually between about 65% to sometimes up to 80%): 1) Don’t actually care about politics at all, which is a big part of why we have a representative democracy in the first place, 2) Certainly don’t keep up with political news or even the actual news that much, 3) Are so self-absorbed and wrapped up in their own affairs that until the rapid disintegration of the nation and Constitution affects them specifically, they won’t even notice because they have a job and kids and a universe of other shit to be doing so they want the status quo always, whatever that was.

Which is all supported in depth by game theory studies about what it takes to get people out in the streets. Which you clearly can’t be bothered to think about because we’re all secret nazis and idiots you wouldn’t associate with in the streets, right?

You’re taking the same bait that Mandella fought against people taking in South Africa. Apartheid specialized in turning everyone who wasn’t white against each other. Fracturing opposition was how a small minority stayed in power for generations.

Which is exactly how the GOP managed to work out Red Stating and Gerrymander me and my formerly solid blue district into a solid red district. That’s not on me. That’s on you for fracturing opposition to fascism, like you’re happily doing here, because all the rest of us aren’t “pure” enough - because most people are either secret Nazis or idiots, right? I get the same shit from the GOP, but they actually accomplish the shit they set out to do, so at least I have something to react against.

For the people who not only do care about politics, but also hate every bit of it and just want people to shut the fuck up and do rational policy stuff without egos like big boys and girls, it’s cringe to see shit like “Hur durr, all Centrists are just closeted Nazis!” because it undoes coalition; it accomplishes exactly what fascists love to see - infighting among their opposition. You give them power like this, with uninformed blanket statements that alienate people who actually ARE fighting these people and now know that you can’t be counted on as an ally. But that’s fine, I know for sure that I 100% can not count on the Left to accomplish a damn thing because y’all are too enthralled with the Old Money Traditional Branding BS the Dems offer you so they can once again use you up to trot out Candidate Dickbag and get you genuinely thinking “yeah, this time, they’re gonna win!” before they lose again and steal your money and time and energy.

But I expect you stopped reading 4 words in and said to yourself “yeah, secret Nazi I think. Or idiot. Either way, I have to hate that one, too” and turned away an ally once again.

Edit: Downvote all you want - look at exactly what the Democrats are doing to the Left right now. This is not an appeal to centrism - this is a party appeal to stay in power because they’ve fucked themselves.

Doesn’t directly bringing up “enlightened centrism” (I assume sarcastically) from a non-right position indicate disdain for centrism? That would be a conflict between whatever you are and both centrists (for not being where you are - right of you, but to them, still left of the Right) and the Right.

Also, if you’re aware of the Three Percenters and their claim that only 3% of colonial America supported the revolution, it means that even if they’re off by a factor of 10, with 30% for the revolution, and 30% against, it leaves 40%, a plurality of people, who have the sentiment from this meme where they just want to be left alone and not forced against their will into a conflict that indroduces instability and violence to their lives.

Woah.

Hey, like, that’s not “we’re just having fun joke haha” stuff.

That’s enemy for life shit.