I could swear Roxy’s face was more distinct from Megumin’s, and what’s with that exaggeratedly sad expression? … but what do I know?

Yes, banning super-intelligence that doesn’t justifiably hate us is an amazingly great idea.

I mean, you made me look at it again myself, as the multi-part rar files on Usenet are still very much a thing. The allowable “article” sizes for binary content are larger than for text articles, but still too small for video or high-quality audio.

Pirated media(images, movies, ebooks, ROMs) uses binary posts, not text. There are different limits and retention policies for binary versus text articles, and most Usenet servers, particularly cheap or free ones, don’t host a lot of the categories a pirate would want at all.

Please don’t imply that all Usenet providers facilitate piracy.

Magical times before my own on Usenet.

Exactly this. I don’t need 1080P or 4k mp4 rips with 10bit audio, and I definitely don’t have the storage for it, but when that’s all that is seeding, its usually quicker to just download it and re-encode.

Downloading large files from Usenet was paid pretty early on. If the core functionality of Usenet is now paid, this is news to me.

For your second point, its not at all uncommon for previously-legit sites to go malicious. Age alone means nothing, nor does reputation after a few years.

Oh, I’m fully aware. It just boggles the mind how the same tired outlook has endured for decades now.

If I wanted to READ ai “snark”, I would spend more time on facebook, or go back to reddit. How hard could it be to slap a battery and 4G/5G modem on a google home or alexa? Eiter of which would be easier to run on a phone or tablet, which also includes speakers.

How do these morons that can’t match the convenience of existing privacy nightmares, or even DIY stuff, continue to get VC funding?

You had me, until the second-half of your last sentence. Its more like we can’t rely on perfectly rational systems, because we don’t comply, neither perfectly nor rationally.

These projects collaborate and copy each-other’s work way more than you would think. When one stagnates, others pick up the slack, and when one pulls ahead, the others increase their efforts to catch-up. More potential solutions for the same problems is a good thing.

Two of my kids are working-age with their own debit cards, and have their amazon accounts linked to mine. My MIL’s credit card is attached to my account, so anything she wants to order, she just sends me a link. My wife just straight-up has all my logins when it comes to spending money.

… All that, and paying for it once is easier to explain/deal with versus every order having to be >$35 . It’s a pain to get my wife to actually order things she wants/needs as it is.

Basically, I would rather stop dealing with that company entirely, for ethical reasons, than put more thought into my dealings with them with each transaction.

I pirate what’s any good that I cannot find legally for streaming, as well as educational stuff that I want available should I and/or my family find ourselves without internet access.

Sometimes I’ll go so far as to pirate things that I cannot find without ads(even with premiums*), but mostly if it’ll let me see the first few minutes before playing an ad, I just live with it.

* The only reason I still have Amazon Prime is for the free shipping. I pay extra for no ads. I pay extra for HiDive. There appear to be things available on Prime with HiDive that aren’t available on just Prime or just HiDive. Magically, those shows(Ranma 1/2, for example) have ads. WTF?

None of these companies have ethics. Why should you get hung-up in ethics for a victimless crime?

Sending telemetry where? My phone? My server?

Filing for Bankruptcy would potentially allow them to stay in business, even potentially recouping losses or turning a profit(in the form of continuing to pay executive salaries - the executives likely being the owners). They could sell off various assets and keep that money - assets like the contracts they have with talents who would likely be better off without those contracts in-force. Why would anyone, particularly talent they owe money to; want to help them with that?

They don’t deserve to stay in business and should absolutely have their corporate assets seized in the most inconvenient ways possible. Hopefully some of the owners or executives have left their personal assets exposed to liability somehow.

Exactly.

Its not “the Cloud” if its your own systems from top-to-bottom … More like Remote Play? … Seems Sony, Microsoft, and Valve all use that terminology for Streaming Gameplay from their consoles to another device.

Streaming to another location than where your Server is setup is tricky, mostly due to latency and establishing a connection that doesn’t get throttled(or compromised) by the ISPs involved. Personally, when I tried to get into it, about 10 years ago, I didn’t have the budget for a GPU that could be persuaded to support it at all.

Today, I’m more likely to keep such a server in my vehicle(on Battery/Solar), so its always just a local connection away, if I were to bother with the budget and hassle involved*. Around the house, I’ll just slap a new desktop together where I want to play games, or game on my laptop, and call it done.

*Ideally, I could build this for less than my good laptop would cost to replace, and use something much closer to outright disposable to game outside of my car. In practice, I just bring my good laptop with me everywhere, risk be damned.

Honestly, almost any job I’ve been hired for has involved a hand-delivered resume(or paper application, when I first started out). Applying after the interview was basically an afterthought.

The more time goes on with shady hiring agencies and clueless HR departments, and then the automated processing that was messing this up long before the AI slop, the more it seems we’re heading back towards paper resumes and in-person first-contact.

Then there’s the fact there were always people you could pay to polish your resume. In that regard, AI has kind-of levelled the playing-field for job-hunters.

If a company is “evaluating” resumes by SEO standards, or with over-reliance on algorhythms/AI, I would rather not work for them in the first place.