And all it took was 1,000,000 dead Ukrainians!

I’m not a tankie, but I probably am what everyone in this thread is calling a “tankie”, so here’s my answer:

Yes, it is extremely bad that Russia invaded Ukraine. The ideal scenario would have been Ukraine quickly repelling the invasion when it happened. But we don’t live in magic fantasy world where everyone gets what they deserve. We live in the real world, where Ukraine cannot possibly defeat Russia in a war. The option which saves the most Ukrainian lives is a negotiated peace, with Russia getting much more of what they want than we would like.

All that is achieved by pouring more weapons into Ukraine is prolonging the meatgrinder for years, wiping out an entire generation of Ukrainians and risking a global nuclear war.

And the end result is it didn’t happen, so how is he wrong that it won’t happen? Supreme Court hasn’t changed.

the 6 digit code ones really aren’t that big of a deal, you just whip out your phone and open an app

Until you’re in tough times financially and your phone company cuts you off, permanently locking you out of every account with SMS 2FA! This actually happened to me, and there was nothing I could do about it, unlike phishing and shoulder surfing, which are easily within my power to prevent.

I’m not going to use digital currency or a digital ID so that I’m protected from myself.

I am so fucking tired of entering a password, then a code I got by by text, so I can set up an authentication app and register my physical auth key. Why can’t I just use a different strong password for each service, same as I have for the last 30 years without getting hacked.

You should be allowed to opt out of this bullshit if your password entropy is high enough.

My bike was stolen, and I live in a small enough town that the cops actually did go through the footage to find the thief.

He called back 15 minutes later for more details and mentioned he was 15 minutes into the footage.

Really the lesson is, don’t run a business that 100% depends on another company.

Why would going bald give a man gender dysphoria?

Come on, this is silly. You can disagree with it politically but technically it would work fine. I already have a digital ID issued by the government for doing online tax returns. Validating a social media account against that ID would be no more difficult than letting people sign in with Google or whatever. There will always technically be a way to get around it but 99% of people won’t bother.

Of course bitcoin is a scam. It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere. It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.

I was the opposite, I accepted going bald early on and went full-shave for a few years. When it grew back a bit everyone said it looks way better, and I regret spending most of my 30s with a shaved head.

Yeah I always cringe when I see the “hair transplants are gender affirming care” meme. It’s so embarrassing when someone on your side of the argument says something so dumb. Going bald isn’t feminine?

My first sound file was a supercut of Keiko O’Brien giving birth on Star Trek: The Next Generation, edited to make it sound like an orgasm 😆

Yeah it pisses me off the way people are like “tech bros ruined the internet”. No, users ruined it! There was no reason to stop self-hosting webpages, forums and IRC servers. Users switched to Facebook instead because they preferred it and didn’t care about the downsides. There’s an alternative to every website and app which respects privacy, serves no ads, and has no algorithm to farm your outrage. Users refuse to use them because they aren’t cool enough.

£100k per year is not middle class, it’s the top 3% of the country.

I grew up middle class, my family are lawyers, high level civil servants, software engineers. I don’t know anyone who earns £100k.

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren’t art, but that doesn’t mean someone working in photography as a medium can’t be an artist.

In my experience it’s only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they’re comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don’t physically make the marks yourself and it’s the concept and composition that’s important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like “oh, that’s interesting”. They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn’t art depends on the intention not the process.

Is this part of a series or something? I have no idea what any part of it means

The reason they’re not able to pay for home ownership is because people buy homes to rent for profit. If poor people only had to compete on price with other poor people instead of with investors, house prices would go back to 20th century levels where you could buy one for 3x your salary.

Also they shouldn’t do it unless they’re going to apply it to all politicians, like when Biden lied about seeing photos of beheaded babies in Israel.

All the answers you got show why this conversation goes badly. No one can come up with an actual problem that data collection causes, it’s all silly comparisons to giving people your credit card number or shitting in front of them.

For me, having my data collected is like having CCTV cameras in stores. Yeah, technically someone is filming everything I do. Yeah it would be bad if a private individual was filming me for nefarious reasons. But no one actually uses that data for anything bad, and it doesn’t actually cause any problems.

All that happens is I get more relevant ads.