Stupid teenage me in highschool thought the 20th century had been the “age of fascism” and that people learned from history.

God, I miss that naïveté.

In other words it’s about the oil.

It’s probably more about Epstein than anything else, but it’s definitely also about the oil. Otherwise why choose Venezuela?

Generally, a company going public is a surefire way to either begin or accelerate the enshittification of its products and services, worsen working condition for its non-C-suite employees and just make everything to do with it worse. But in this particular case, I don’t think it will make any difference at all.

Don’t worry, we won’t learn that. Even though it’s probably true.

And other people who have no idea what SQL injection is, yes.

Sorry to disappoint lol.

It’s bad enough I acted like a fool without persisting in my folly through pride after realizing it.

You understood my arguments correctly. But I have since had my mind changed by [email protected] so please forgive my ignorance.

You know what? You are right. That Wikipedia article was a fascinating read. I recant my previous statements uniquivocally, sincerely and unironically.

Thank you for the humbling lesson on what it’s like to be on the left side of the Dunning-Krueger curve. I’m an ignorant fuck.

Just because a category is fuzzy doesn’t make it invalid. That’s whynwe have laws to force standardized definitions of various concepts. You arguing against whatever definition I proposed would indict only that definition, and not the broader concept that there is an important line to begin with.

I very much don’t want some corporation to be able to just take a 9 year old’s drawing and slap it on their game because someone thought it wasn’t artsy enough to be awarded protection.

Yours is a completely fair statement to which I have no objections.

That is artwork inspired by the letter “E”, representing the letter E plus additional elements. It’s not correct to say that it is the letter E.

Now open a word processor, choose a font, hold your Shift key and tap the E key. What you’ll see on your screen is not “inspired by” the letter E nor does it represent the letter E. It IS the letter E. Therein lies the difference.

I made exactly zero references to effort. Nice strawman. Yes, I’m sure some fonts take decades of hard, grueling effort to make. Just like I’m sure the nine-year-old’s green Sonic took him a lot of effort too. And no, I’m not implicitly saying it’s about talent either, before you accuse me of that.

Letters belong to humanity. Licensing your version of them because it is “unique” is bullshit because everyone’s writing is unique. Gatekeeping text presentation for money is so dystopic I have a hard time understanding how you support it, though I do admit your arguments seem to make a lot of sense if we ignore the fact that we’re basically discussing a copyright on how to write.

It’s debatably artwork. Every single person has their own handwritten “font” - more than one if you write cursive and block letters. A font doesn’t have a message or a meaning, it is just a means for conveying information through text. I’m sure you can produce several examples of specific fonts that qualify as “artwork” (though it’s just a numbers game since there are literally hundreds of thousands of different fonts on the web, if not more) but that doesn’t prove that every font is automatically “artwork”.

We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork depending on how we define the word, but that doesn’t mean that every nine-year-old who draws an “original character” that’s just a green Sonic the Hedgehog should be able to use the legal system to bully other people because he’s an “artist”.

“Font” and “licensing” are not words that belong together.

“Oh, I took the alphabet and made it slightly different - you know, like every single person who ever learned how to write - only I did it on a computer so now you have to pay me forever if you want your computer to write like mine does”.

Bold of you to assume that any conservative woman actually cares about her kids, as opposed to just seeing them as something she is obligated by God to create for her husband.

This looks interesting to me as a beginner self-hoster. I’ll definitely look into it this weekend.

Congratulations, but not everybody is capable of reaching that conclusion on their own. Like you said, having good parents is a huge part of it. Good teachers too. But some conditions, like depression, bipolar and others, include low self-esteem or excessive self-blaming as a symptom, which in many cases totally precludes reaching the same conclusion as you unless a grown-up tells the kid that what’s going on isn’t their fault.

Now, if the grown-ups are actively calling the kid out for behaviors that are the result of an unmanaged condition, the prime example being a kid with ADHD or ADD who has trouble paying attention in class, and especially if they’re assigning negative traits to the kid based on those behaviors, such as telling them that they’re lazy or antisocial, then they’re just making everything a lot worse and that kid is likely to self-blame for years, even after receiving a valid diagnosis.

It makes a huge subjective difference for the person afflicted, and I say this from experience. Like OP said, it’s the difference between “I have a disease that causes X symptom” and “I’m a bad person for displaying X trait”. And that is the difference between proactively finding ways to deal with X versus blaming and punishing yourself for it, which in most cases will only reinforce X. So in addition to the person having greater self-respect and self-love and thus a greater quality of life, it also helps them to manage their condition, even in the absence of treatment.

The odds that your dishes will get done are higher if you understand that the reason you’re putting them off is because you have a condition and you need to be extra dilligent to compensate, as opposed to you telling yourself that you’re a lazy piece of shit who is too worthless to do something as simple as washing the dishes, and by the way, remember last week when you let the dishes pile up for days before doing them? Yeah, here you go being a slovenly swine again because that’s all you’re ever good for, you waste of oxygen. Nobody loves you and you’re going to die alone, so what’s the point of doing dishes anyway? Just keep living in the filth like you deserve, you disgusting animal.

That’s where my head used to take me pretty consistently before my diagnosis. Doing the dishes, making my bed, every simple chore brought down a cascade of self-humiliation and judgement, which in turn strengthened my executive dysfunction to the point where entire days would go by without a single productive task being done, no matter how small.

Now, I have trained to remind myself that completing the task is much better than dreading doing it, so I do it. I can’t credit the diagnosis alone for this, as I’m also on medication. But a proper diagnosis is the first step without which none of the others can be taken.

So the “age verification” boils down to the same level of security as that pop-up on PornHub asking if I’m over 18? And Newsom wants to create a legal precedent that can open the way to mandated State-controlled malware on every electronic device in the State just for that?

I mean, he’s a politician. He’s very aware that people can and do lie all the time. Which means that the stated goal of this legislation is very obviously not its actual goal.