This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

Every day on the internet, a lucky 10,000 get to learn “common knowledge” for the very first time.

Like everyone said 50 times, yar har be pirate, all that.

Or, buy hard copy, which is refusing to completely die because of this shit, right here.

BUT, you have to make sure the data is on the hard copy and that you can access the data (play the songs, watch the movie, etc) WITHOUT internet access, that is you have to make sure the hard copy of the media is really on the damn disc, and it’s not just a glorified access key to media that will then be streamed from their servers they control. If it is then do not pay for it.

This is honestly why vinyl is still a thing, once you rip things back out of the digital realm it gets a lot harder for them to pull bullshit, they pretty much have to put the songs on the wax if they want your $40, and they do, oh boy they do they want that money bad.

Piracy is always a bigger pain in the ass than internet techies act like. No, I don’t want to buy a Plex server and learn how to use it and learn how to make my own VPN and make sure the VPN doesn’t just report my activity to 7 Eyes or whatever that things called and and and and, and results like “my movie got unbought” are also unacceptable.

Yes, we know, there are “special” websites that you can just surf to and it’s like a janky Netflix that “just works” so long as you already know the name of the thing you intend to watch, otherwise it’s just a blank search bar. Also, you cannot tell other people about the website or the website gets taken down. Nothing is more useful than a website that you absolutely can’t tell people about, wow, what a problem solver that is.

“I want to watch a movie” is a very “This activity must offer zero friction, I will only accept push button get movie” kind of activity so, yeah. “Be pirate” is not that useful, it’s just the internet’s go-to answer, they always speak loudly for the tiny minority in this place.

What we’re actually doing is drastically limiting our spending on any of this type of thing, and never, ever pay money to “own” something digital. That era is over. It sucks, but it’s yet another shitty thing that would take bullets to change, and since it’s not worth bullets it’s not changing.

Honestly I doesn’t even take bullets but if you’re going to build the kind of political movement it would take to create change then all that work would be absolutely wasted on this problem while everyone eyerolls at you like you’re stupid and worthless for caring so yeah, it’s not changing.

So yeah, do not pay for digital ownership of any kind, ever. It’s only ever a lease with one-sided terms, at best. Amazon lost the contractual right to provide that movie, so you lost the right to watch it, and “buying” it meant buying a license to watch it on their terms, the end. Don’t pay for it.

It’s pretty insane. At first I thought damn, from now on our culture will be so thoroughly documented that future historians will struggle to parse it all, but now I can’t trust anything to last for 5 years and I can’t have copies of it, either.

Piracy shmiracy, some random dude’s homegrown server is not an archive, and anything that fails without electricity to power it is not a copy.

This is why hard copy is refusing to die.

The thing I am now curious about is if this is, quite predictably, Lemmy’s existing culture, OR if they were having a perfectly good time in their clubhouse until all the most insufferable Redditors came charging in here.

Ooh, yeah, good call, I always forget them when things get dweeby.

I swear, nothing is commie enough for Lemmy. “Linux? Pshhhsshs! Cuck!” Mentions no alternative

Oh, yeah, that’s the new normal, I’m a bit surprised they gave you a whole 100MB to call your own.

The modern Dad pro-move for giving the kids a game console for Christmas is to sneak the box open, set it up, do all the ridiculous downloads and patches then sneak it all back into the box nice and tidy so that the kids can just open it and go on Christmas morning.

Bond fund here we come, that’s as ensured as you get now, moneybags.

The thing I’m seeing that does sort of skirt the issue is that it’s very obvious a lot of YouTubers have jumped on AI image generation to produce static images instead of drawing the images themselves or farming it out to an artist on Fiverr or something. So if they want “evil Jerome Powell with flames in his eyes” they hand it to the AI, it spits something out, and into the video it goes, to be published on YouTube as a memey splash image in the video.

Now that it’s in the video, along with all the other clear acts of human creativity that form a video, it’s sort of “washed” in the money laundering sense, and I don’t see how you legally separate that image from the video in a way that makes the image ineligible for copyright. I don’t see a court being flummoxed by that, at all. If you filch the image from the original video, or try to pull excerpts from the video featuring Evil JPow, you’re in violation of copyright, and we’re on pretty solid, well established legal ground with that. At the very least, you are not completely in the clear to just yank that image for yourself.

So while the original raw image of Evil Jpow that the AI spit out was not eligible for copyright by itself, now it is as part of a larger work, open and shut.

Near the end of the article it affirms pretty much that, saying, "An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” [as quoted from the copyright office]

My quote is a bit messy there (i’m quoting the article who is quoting the copyright office) but you get the point.

The raw AI output, assuming no human was involved, cannot be copyrighted, but as soon as the AI output is somehow arranged into a larger work by a human, that changes everything.

So yeah, a bit of arranging, some editing, and the completely AI generated footage can be copyrighted all day. At the very least there would be a court case there.

Weird thumbnail vs headline. She looks like I just asked her if she wants to hit this joint and she does, which doesn’t go at the top of a story about atrocity.

On the one hand, lol, on the other, we shouldn’t need permission from either of those companies to do a goddamn thing.

that’s cool. The Masto instance I’ve been on for the last half year is no longer available and I’ll have to start over because I didn’t have a main and a back up account like I ended up with on Lemmy, but sure, that’s alright. I have no idea what happened, the instance still has a blank page up, but it ain’t Mastodon.

I was finally feeling moved in but now, kaput.

I don’t think this thing was really ready for absolutely everyone on Twitter to bail onto it, is the problem. I don’t think it was ever supposed to be. It was always supposed to be like a clubhouse for people who didn’t mind being the dweebs of the internet.

I’m really not interested in this being a Reddit clone. Several of the subreddits I wanted to be rid of have already popped up, here, while the better side of Reddit isn’t really showing up, especially since Reddit re-opened and purged pesky mods so they could all get back to their scrolling.

Oh, yes lawd, that’s what I need. I need fucking antiwork to shit up the place with their misery vibe while 196 goes skipping back to Reddit and takes all the fun times with her. Sign me up.

I wanted to become involved with a completely different community, with different mores, a different feel, and its own vibe. Fuck Reddit. I left that place looong before the blackout thing, I got tired of its toxic culture that sucked the life out of me after a few minutes.

Now that’s starting to leak into Lemmy and I’m frankly eyeing the door.

If you liked Reddit, you need to go back there. I didn’t like Reddit. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want there to come here, either.

The joy of the Fediverse is that growth is nice but we don’t NEED growth. A lot of you can’t understand that. You can’t understand that the platform will NOT fail if it doesn’t get the kind of exponential, runaway growth that you associate with social media success. We do not actually need to hit TikTok numbers, ever. We need steady, slow user growth from people wanting something different, that’s what. If the Fediverse becomes the Linux of social media, fine.

So no. No to this idea. Let Reddit stay on Reddit, thank you.

Oh lets all land on the fuckin moon at once

Honestly, I would expect spike traps, those might be deadly indefinitely

He saw them coming from a thousand years away.

Transport Fever 2, because I can ride da choo choos

It’s super chill and relaxing, you just have to ignore the rest of your empire falling into ruin

Fuck sake.

I’ve been using the desktop stock app, which lets you follow tags. It’s pretty unintuitive, though, and they just redesigned the interface so I’m not sure I know how to do it.

My biggest problem with tag-following has always been actually finding the tags.

But yeah, I always forget everyone else is phone phone phone all the time. So of course they’re using a bunch of different apps.

The move by Fitch makes sense.

No, it does not help that the US has a very high level of national debt, but here comes somebody to scold me about how debt is different when you’re the government and yadda yadda, so never mind that angle.

No, this is a direct reaction to yet another game of fucking chicken with the debt ceiling. The finance world moves both fast and slow, second by second but also quarter by quarter; for every day trade where microseconds count, there is another action where it takes, oh, 3 months for the relevant body to react to what just happened. This is one of those actions. They’ve spent the last couple of months running their numbers, and now here we are. They have delivered their verdict for the current fiscal quarter, after much deliberation.

It does not make any sense at all to go around talking about US Fed bonds as if they are “zero risk”, or even “effectively zero risk”, if every 8 years there will come a game of chicken slash pissing contest where the hostages are everyone who has been foolish enough to buy US Federal debt under the expectation that the interest rate will be paid on time. If somebody in the US government does not blink in this game of chicken, then fuck you, the US will default on its “zero risk” debt.

And so here is Fitch quite reasonably questioning that status quo, that US debt is “zero risk”.

Keep in mind that the entire damn globe is holding US Treasury Bonds, the debt in question. Just as importantly, the biggest holder of US debt is US citizens. You, somehow. That’s where the yields on a CD come from, and your money market account. US Bonds.

Typically, 10 year US Treasury Bonds provide the highest guaranteed interest rate -ignoring recent rate inversions because COVID black swan shitshow- because obviously if you are going to lock up your money for a decade, you would expect the best return at maturity.

But this debt ceiling BS happens every 8 years. This means that every truly serious investor who holds a 10-year T-Bill, from Wall Street funds to the Chinese government, is heavily exposed to the threat of complete default on this debt thanks to that entire debt ceiling thing, to say absolutely nothing about the solvency of the US government, in general.

That’s not fucking zero risk. And Fitch is tired of pretending that it is.

Fuck sake, they aren’t even trying to have a debate upon whether the US can sustain its frankly obscene debt level. No, it’s just that AAA rating means “zero effective risk, barring nuclear war or alien invasion or some unforeseeable shit” and all that clownfuckery with the debt ceiling is NOT “zero risk”, nor is it unforeseeable.

Is that zero risk? When the person who owes you money can watch the due date tick down from 5 years out and wait until the last fucking minute of the last damn day to decide they’re going to pass the law that will allow them to pay you? No, the fuck it ain’t.

Did they appear to care about the creditors? The bondholders who they owed interest to? No, that whole song and dance was about, I don’t know, probably abortion. The Republicans have been using the debt ceiling as a hostage for a decade or more, so if you’re the French government, for example, and hold a bunch of US Treasury bills, you can’t call that shit zero risk with a straight face, come on. It doesn’t even matter if the US can pay the debt, the question is, will they?

I need you to understand that literally everyone in the world is investing in US Federal debt, it’s not just you, US person. It’s kind of frightening how US Federal debt is the cinder blocks that many other nations are building their economic foundation on. That’s what being the reserve currency is about.

Fitch knows that, and they know it back to front, so when they issue a rating, the weight of it is upon them. Can we call it zero risk? Like zero, zero??

If you have any money in your brokerage money market account, or a CD, anywhere, you’re in this boat, wondering if US Bonds are zero risk. The whole world is in this boat, wondering if US Treasury Bonds, especially the 10-year ones, are really zero risk guaranteed money on maturity. Like, really really, tho? Maybe there’s a smidge of risk? Even the 30 year bonds??? 30 fuckin years on the bond, my dude, zero risk on that?

We’ve all been on American social media, they all talk like they’re going to have another Civil War; probably not, but still. Zero risk on the 30-year US Treasury Bond? That’s a long time. Shit can go nuclear. Zero risk?

Could you look your best fucking friend in the face and say, “oh, yeah, buy a US 30 year Treasury Bond, there is absolutely no risk of any sort on that, you will get your interest even if Florida slips under the sea, taking Disney World with it.” Could you? No.

So pretend that there you are, some team of analysts at Fitch, knowing all of this, knowing more than I do because it’s your job, and looking at each other like, “Can we call this zero risk? Because that’s what AAA means. We all know that. So can we?” And nobody wants to, because it isn’t, and we’re all tired of pretending like it is.

And Fitch looks at the obvious, it downgrades US Treasury debt from AAA - perfect, the best possible - to AA+ - still near perfect, but room for improvement.

Fitch is right. Fitch is right to shoot up the warning flare. We’re lucky that China’s situation is still a bit of a mess, and the United States Federal Reserve needed the wakeup call, not that they want it. We’re lucky that buying a bond from the Chinese Federal Government doesn’t quite make sense, because if the state owns all things, then what is a bond? It doesn’t matter what the answer is, it only matters that we have to discuss it. We all know what a US Treasury Bond is, that’s beyond debate. That certainty elevates it.

It’s not like Fitch are acting up to get attention, fuck that. Every other respectable bond rating house should have done this first. It’s not fair that Fitch has to be the odd ones to call the obvious. Fitch is right. The US needs to get its shit together.