hobbitstan

Music started to die in the mid-90s and was official dead by 99.

- Human beings cannot change sex. This is a scientific fact.

- There is zero proof of such a thing as a male of female soul. The soul is without sex or gender.

- There is zero proof of the concept of a woman trapped in a mans body, or vice versa.

What we're dealing with, or failing to deal with, is the onslaught of autism within the homosexual community, mixed with internalized homophobia and largely male sexual predators.

Having a law that says otherwise will NOT solve the problem and will simply make it worse. Scotland is about to find that out.

Bee-Free Honey is really good. Vegan Un-honey is more like a syrup than honey, but it's OK.

'I’m legally female. But I have facial hair. I have a penis. I have no breasts. I don’t have a feminine voice. I don’t wear makeup or dress up like a female.'

Quite the interview!

- nondescript building

- weird security

- hard to get ahold of anyone to interview

Yeah, I'm thinking OpenAI are going to be in the news fairly soon regarding their operations.

The idea of ‘human rights’ is a western construct, largely enacted after WWII by countries who invented concentration camps and dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations.

Do human beings have the ‘right’ to live by their own, often ancient, standards? Or is everyone expected to bend the knee to the UN and adopt alien standards of living?

What’s interesting is that the very people who decry colonization support forcing western standards on ‘primitive’ cultures worldwide. They will not be happy until a Pride flag flies over every government building in Afghanistan.

'nonsexual nudity'

Can the EFF not tell porn when they see it? Is softcore porn no longer porn?

OK, I’ll bite since ChatGPT posts are flooding HN:

Is this legit? As in, no human interference in the responses? Something feels very off with this. Is there a building full of former Twitter employees churning out responses and pretending to be an AI?

Do artists still release radio edits of their singles? Back in the 90s, I was always a little pissed off when my fave bands did that. It was likely their record labels, but still… edited length for airplay is such bullshit.

Edit: I’ll add that I much prefer the single edit for one of my all-time fave tracks, Firestarter by The Prodigy. It’s shorter and harder hitting than the album version.

Given the long history of IoT devices becoming compromised, it’s common sense to be cautious.

Yeah, don’t use ‘he’ or ‘she’ in case someone takes offense.

Orwell wrote that this politispeak was used to make palatable the most disturbing actions. We see it more and more every day.

You really think Roomba owners know how to do any of that, or even would?

‘iRobot declined to let MIT Technology Review view the consent agreements and did not make any of its paid collectors or employees available to discuss their understanding of the terms.’

The reporters tried to validate and were blocked. That’s where my suspicion lies.

There was a huge backlash to this. There was the potential for thieves to find out the layout of someone’s home and when it was unoccupied. Add cameras to that and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

My friends and I feverishly played Street Fighter II at the local arcade all the time and, as a huge Nintendo fan, the SNES release was a big hit. BUT it was noticeably a downgrade from the arcade version. It didn’t play nearly as well and suffered from slow down during action sequences. It was a bit of a disappointment, and an expensive one. But it was popular so what could you do?

I never understood the appeal of Mortal Kombat. It played like absolute garbage. The gore and extreme violence was a mere gimmick.

For most of vegan and animal rights activist history, the focus has been on morals: explaining and showing the horrors we inflict on animals in the name of meat and dairy. Then at some point it became, primarily, an environmental issue, closely tied with reducing carbon footprints and emissions etc.

Reducing animal suffering, by any means, is great, and this method has worked somewhat, but my concern is the lack of ethical consideration. Those who speak out against animal cruelty seem to have been pushed aside so as not to spook the normies.

Yeah, I’m not sure I buy their explanation about special development roombas since they offered zero proof. I have an ancient Roomba that’s still going and dread having to replace it one day.

Caroline Ellison has been awfully quiet recently.

The AI-generated dubstep was spot on. Sounded just like Excision!

This worked for me and changed my entire outlook on life: https://krishna.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Science-of-Se...

He’ll claim it was bait for bots then not step aside.

'Reddit is a great community already.'

I remember when Digg started going to hell, then Reddit was created. All the tech folk moved over there. Now Reddit has become an autistic hive mind and people come to HN.

The Twitter takeover was fun for a while, mainly due to the people who have spent the past few years deplatforming dissenting opinions and being real shits having major meltdowns and tasting their own medicine, but… enough is enough. It’s but one more failed tech company.

Many years ago I read a story, that I took as potential fiction, about a very rich man in Eastern Europe who hired warez scene kids to digitize all the movies, TV shows, and music they could. There were financial incentives involved and the files could be shared freely, as long as he had copies.

The idea that, somewhere out there, is a man sitting on petabytes of digital media, like a James Bond villain, makes me smile.

Well, that’s a nightmare I never knew existed…

I tested a few recordings of an Indian Swami giving speeches in English back in the 70's. Recording had a lot of background noise, not great. You have to listen very carefully to hear what is being said. I was hoping for good results, but...

Results:

- background noise was reduced

- some previously clear words are turned into garbled non-words

- some parts are replaced by a different Indian voice, I assume AI, so it sounds like multiple people talking

All in all, the results are not anywhere near what the sample shows.

Twitter is home to many of these conmen. Fitness geeks posing as natural bodybuilders, promoting heavy meat diets etc., pushing their own brand of supplements, but they owe their form mostly to steroid abuse.

Taking fitness or nutritional advice from a bodybuilder is like taking financial advice from SBF.

That’s common. School teachers face the same problem. They don’t quality for sick leave until they’ve used up all their PTO first.

A great movie theater experience for me was living close to a very clean and nice theater that was a ghost town early Sunday’s. I’d go see movies and be the only one there.

I’m in the US and have never heard of such a thing. If you’re sick on vacation then that’s not eligible for sick leave.