How to fix youtube:

the sense that the entire world is on fire

Leaving aside the massive literal heatwave and multi-state wildfires and global-warming-accelerated flooding happening just this month and all… we’re literally seeing a campaign of race-based kidnappings and trafficking by the government, the deployment of active duty military personnel in the streets, and a DOJ arguing that the President is not bound by law or court orders.

If you don’t think the world is on at very least metaphorical fire, I don’t know what to tell you, Guardian author. “I can get my coffee in peace without thinking about that stuff” is not some brag.

I didn’t check Kinetic, but Larian’s is good. This is the full termination section of the EULA:

13. TERMINATION

This Pact shall remain in effect for as long as you use, operate or run the Game.

You may terminate the Pact at any time and for any reason by notifying Larian Studios that you intend to terminate the agreement. Upon termination all licenses granted to you in this Pact shall immediately terminate and you must immediately and permanently remove the Game from your device and destroy all copies of the Game in your possession.

You understand and agree that certain Services connected to the Game, and the support and access to such Services are provided by Larian Studios at its discretion and may be terminated or otherwise discontinued by Larian Studios at any time, for any reason or no reason, in its sole and absolute discretion.

The first block is termination by the user, and specifies removal of the game if the user chooses to terminate the agreement.

The second block is termination by Larian, and only covers “certain Services”… “provided by Larian Studios” (so likely multiplayer matchmaking), not termination of the full agreement, and no game removal.

The places in the EULA where Larian lays out their prerogative to terminate your license to the game is based on behavior (i.e. banning you).

the same clause can be found in the EULAs for various games on Steam, including Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Oblivion Remastered.

Squeenix, Sega/ Atlus, and Microsoft. Exactly who you’d expect.

Another says that the fact Poland disappeared from the map of Europe for 123 years between 1795 and 1918 was “an unimaginable tragedy for Poles…[but] a source of satisfaction for many Jews”.

A further one says that, in the interwar period, “many Jews openly sympathised with communism, identified with the Soviets, who were hostile to Poland”, reports Gazeta Wyborcza.

Amongst all the boy-crying-wolf cases of people (especially Israel) trying to pass off anti-Zionism as antisemitism, this seems like a pretty clear-cut case of actual antisemitism.

Those are clearly making the argument of why Poles would have reason (with the first quote even leaning towards justification) to participate in the pogrom, while at the same time the others are arguing they didn’t participate.

“We didn’t take part… but here are some reasons why we would have wanted to… but we definitely didn’t! But Jews were totally happy that we weren’t a country, for some reason! But that’s unrelated to the pogrom, because we didn’t do anything to them!”

Hmmm.

My partner is my emergency contact point. If you don’t have their number, it means that there’s no case in which your emergency is my problem. Everything else is on an “I’ll get to it if and when I get to it” basis.

On an unrelated note, I don’t have a large circle of friends. :P

So this bit here:

Populate a public list of other users with whom such user shares a social connection within such service or application

seems like the easiest way to circumvent this law, with the least effort. Just hide connections for users in VA, and now you’re not a social media site. You could even give them their own domain like facebookva.com that only they route through, in case the VA govt try to claim all users on the site have to work the same way. Tie them up for years.

I think Anubis is really focused on scraper-bots feeding AI models, rather than posting bots. It’s based on requests to non-standard endpoints in your own app, which you specify for Anubis in a couple places (e.g. leaving out of /robots.txt or /.well-known).

If you’re using e.g. a python bot that uses headless chromium executing JS to post stuff, you’re probably going to code in known-good endpoints for comments and posts, rather than hitting random ones like a scraper bot would.

Anubis is good for stopping the n-request-per-second spamming of scrapers, but not so much for just blocking non-human bots that post at normal rates.

My last employer was a Fortune 50, and we did automation detection through behavioral mapping, like posting locations, times, and even word patterns (a very cool experimental project that I got to work on, which used a database of normalized English word frequency to detect bots based on language that was too-similar across users, or even too “perfect”, though this was only used as an indicator and never considered definitive). It is extremely difficult to detect human-impersonating bots based on raw network traffic alone.

Nope, just been learning and speaking it for a long time. :)

Good luck with your studies, and you can always dm me if you have any other questions!

By the way, is there a rule to how these short forms are formed?

Yep! Most Japanese verbs (with a few exceptions like ‘shimasu’ becoming suru) use one of the ‘i’ variants (‘i’, ‘ki’, ‘ni’, ‘mi’, or ‘ri’) after the kanji, that indicates they are verbs.

Yakimasu (to burn/ cook), shirimasu (to know), arukimasu (to walk), arimasu (to be), shinimasu (to die), yomimasu (to read).

Ki will become ku in the shortened version, ri will become ru, ni -> nu, etc:

yaku, shiru, aruku, aru, shinu, yomu

I believe the verbs that don’t end in one of those like tabemasu (to eat) will default to ‘ru’ (taberu), but I don’t know if that’s a rule off the top of my head, or if I just can’t think of any others right now.

In the cases where rendaku applies, such as oyogimasu (to swim), the end kana will also have rendaku applied, e.g. oyogu. Ki -> ku, gi -> gu.

The radical for water is actually derived from the standalone kanji. It’s basically an extremely short-stroke version of the kanji.

Ikimashou is just the ‘formal’, full-length version. No difference in meaning. Just as “iku” is the casual version of “ikimasu”.

Ikimasu -> iku

Ikimashou -> ikou

I don’t use streaming at all, I buy every song I own on iTunes or other services that give you DRM-free files. I have a thing (call it a compulsion) about not using “other peoples’ things” when there’s an alternative.

As with all AI, I’m not intrinsically opposed to AI music as a concept, but I don’t want to use it now when the services that make it are leeching off of artists without paying them. I don’t get “into” bands (e.g. I can’t tell you the names of almost any musicians in the bands I listen to), and I don’t usually like concerts, so it’s not like I’ll be missing out on those like some fans would be.

I’m sure “AI” can produce perfectly milquetoast music, but are you ever going to want to listen again? I have tracks I’ve listened to hundreds of times because they mean something to me emotionally (and often have a temporal element wherein I remember where I was living and what I was doing the first time I heard it) – and most of my tracks do not have lyrics.

Layering nonsensical lyrics atop forgettable melodies sounds more like torture than a service providing any value.

I suspect this is mostly an artifact of our current early AI music models. Just like we got past the days of 8-finger monstrosities in newer image models, we’ll get more ‘context-aware’ and sensical lyric models for music. We just won’t be getting there ethically.

Holy shit. Somehow it’s both exactly what you expect, and completely shocking. Literal dehumanization and genocide, played as jokes.

Who’s ‘we’? xD

Yes, 君 is ‘kun’ when used as an honorific.

海 is ‘umi’, or sea/ocean. You are correct that the second half of the kanji (母) is the same as the standalone character for mother, but it’s base radical is ⽏, which also just means mother. The first radical, ⺡, means water/ liquid, so you can sort of infer that “water mother” = ocean. Not all kanji work out this nicely with their radical structure, though.

Last part is spot on, ikou (行こう) is the shortened (conjugation?) of iku or ‘to go’ that expresses a suggestion to do, i.e. “let’s (go)”.

I have to since my partner doesn’t speak Japanese, but half the time I end up having to correct lines for them once or twice, to make things make sense. The non-egregious stuff I don’t even bother with. It’s crazy how amateurish some of the mistakes are, or even what are clearly choices to omit entire sentences, for no reason.

おい、ゆうじ君、海行こうぜ

“Hi Yuji!”

The actions of an employee, when reviewed and released by a company, are the actions of that company. A company is just the sum of its employees’ actions.

The idea is to create fear. Make Palestinians scared to go to aid centers, so you can look ‘good’ on the world stage by allowing in a minute amount of aid, but minimize how many people it actually gets to.

It will make it extremely risky from a liability standpoint to operate any platform that allows user content.

The EFF has a bunch of writeups on these types of laws. This is the last of a 4-part series on them: Link

Fediverse operators would for example be extremely vulnerable to lawsuits, because almost none of them can afford teams of lawyers to deal with claims, true or not, that they failed to enforce content policies.

Depending on how the laws are written, anyone who could find a piece of objectionable content (which will vary by jurisdiction) could sue the platforms. This makes it very appealing as a route to shut down platforms you dislike, especially if they’re niche.

It consolidates power under large corporations like Meta and Xitter, who can afford to handle legal threats.

If I had the self control to not just unblock the sites or uninstall the extension, I’d have the self control to not go to them in the first place. :P