We don’t just worship the dollar, we literally elevate thieves and conmen and praise them for suckering so many people. They’re just smart businessmen by fucking over the populace for their own gain.

GOG digitally signs their games and have no DRM, thus no need for cracks.

If you can get a hold of a GOG version, you can check its validity.

For games outside the GOG ecosystem, they are all unfortunately at risk.

I played Baldur’s Gate 3 via a pirated GOG version on release with friends until I was able to afford my own copy, then moved the saved game over to the legit copy.

I also did not like something Newton said at the end of a (paywalled) blog about what he learned from the reaction to his piece about AI skeptics. Newton said, and I quote, that he was “taking detailed notes on all bloggers writing ’financial analyses’ suggesting that OpenAI will go bankrupt soon because it’s not profitable yet.”

I do not like bullies, and I do not like threats. Suggesting one is “taking detailed notes on bloggers” is an attempt to intimidate people that are seriously evaluating the fact that OpenAI burns $5 billion a year and has no path to profitability. I don’t know if this is about me, nor do I particularly care.

Musk has also made weird veiled threats to keeping lists. I bet Zuckerberg is just smart enough to not tell people he keeps a list of people he keeps tabs on and uses his immense wealth to crush.

I mean, we know Monsanto had a “fusion center” that fought tooth and nail to have any negative coverage of Monsanto destroyed, intimidated, or flooded with negative reviews and responses.

We have had executives from eBay mailing critics dead animals.

If I were Zitron I’d be worried about way more than just another journalist who is stuck up powerful people’s asses, but that’s the price of speaking truth to power.

The thing I always try to remind myself of is that most people are too deeply wrapped up in their own lives to really be thinking about me or anyone else all that much to begin with, so whatever I am worried about is at least likely to just be me overthinking it.

Me, to Google right now:

Scorpion King Approved.

Finally. We’ve let these fuckers operate as black boxes for far too long.

Get your ass algorithms out in the open so they can be regulated or close up fucking shop, assholes.

It’s not a fucking trade-secret, it’s hiding behind ideas like trade-secrets so they can operate with impunity to alter what people see in their feeds however they want and however benefits them most.

This is what the US should have been doing to Tiktok, but the reality is they need to be doing it to all social media.

Since this is obviously a gas station, it is quite likely the person who made this sign speaks english as a second language.

Even if its their first language, working at a gas station often implies they don’t have the education or work history to work elsewhere.

Can we stop punching down?

After 30 years of the international internet I am pretty fuck sick of making fun of people who don’t speak English well. (Especially when native English speakers would fare way worse if the situations were reversed)

It would be like going on RedNote and getting dogpiled for speaking Mandarin badly.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say knowingly burning down the world’s future so you get to party now was and always has been the position of someone who is a fucking loser. This goes as much for current tech barons as it did for Exxon when they discovered climate change was real and covered it up because their profits mattered more than, you know, not burning the planet to a fucking cinder.

So, in other words, no you shouldn’t be shocked they’re such fucking losers because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be angling to burn the world down so they can party. Only a true fucking loser could and would pursue that to begin with.

It’s like when former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was caught paying boatloads of prostitutes to fuck him in an orgy, and his defense was “I was just sure all these beautiful young women wanted to have an orgy with me because I’m just so amazing and beautiful, and it never had anything to do with the vastness of my wealth and the fact that they were being highly paid to even look at my filthy ugly old body.”

You’ve gotta be some kind of fucking loser to think anyone would believe that when you’re a fucking Methuselah-lookin-ass ugly goblin like Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

They were, and always have been, losers.

Next up on Sick Sad World…

This is tragic, but not unexpected. Michael Moore released Sicko in 2007 and medical debt continues to be the number one reason for bankruptcy in the US nearly 20 years later.

Like, my cancer isn’t considered severe enough for me to even bother with disability benefits because I’ll just be denied.

I am not working mostly because none of the jobs I qualify for make enough money or have good enough insurance to afford the medications that cost $18k a month out of pocket.

I’ve done the math and it makes more sense to fall apart in poverty and at least be able to have the medication covered.

When the Republicans repeal the ACA, I will probably die a preventable death from lack of coverage.

They’ve always had money for wars, but never had money to care for their citizens.

Over 200,000 innocent Iraqi’s were killed in the Iraq War because they don’t actually care about regular people anywhere in the world, not just the USA. They called us “human capital stock.” When they show you who they are, listen the first time. We’re just products to be used and discarded to these people.

So, let’s go over this shall we.

Humans were always the weakest link in the security chain. Why? Because humans aren’t logical and can be tricked with words and ideas.

So we’ve developed this new type of computer program that “thinks” and speaks naturally like a human, right? Responding naturally to human conversation with it.

The issue is (as I’ve said before) that we’ve essentially created a computer program that is just as fallible as humans.

In other words, no shit simple prompt engineering works. There’s no way to “secure” a human brain from dripping out things it shouldn’t on accident, and by extension, there’s no way to “secure” an LLM “brain” because they operate in a somewhat similar manner (or at least appear to). Prompt engineering is just social engineering for computers. We’ve created a computer that can be tricked with words and ideas, just like a human.

Humans were the weakest link in security and we just made computers as weak of a link as humans. Who really thought making computers as bad at everything as humans was a good idea?

The question is, do you know the real you?

According to the Writer in Stalker, we never know who we really are or what we really want.

WRITER: I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway – I’m sorry, but… You are so foolish! You don’t have an idea about what’s happening here! And how do you think, why did Porcupine hang himself?

STALKER: He came to the Zone with a selfish purpose and sacrificed his brother in the “meat grinder” because of the money…

WRITER: That I can understand. But why did he hang himself? Why did he decide not to return – absolutely not after the money this time, but after his brother? Ah? Why did he give up?

STALKER: He wanted to, he… I don’t know. In several days he hanged himself.

WRITER: He understood here, that not all dreams come true, but only the most precious ones! And you’re just shouting in vain!..

WRITER: That, what is in accordance with your nature, your essence, is what comes true here! That essence that you have no idea about, but it sits in you and rules you all your life! You understood nothing, Leather Stocking. Porcupine was not overcome by his greed. He crawled on his knees in this very puddle begging for his brother. And he got a lot of money, and couldn’t get anything else. Because a Porcupine gets everything what’s porcupine-like! And conscience, throes of the soul – it is invented, it‘s brain work. He understood that and hanged himself. I will not go into your Room! I do not want to spill all the trash that has accumulated inside me, on anybody’s head. Even on yours. And afterwards run my head into the noose like Porcupine. I’d rather drink myself to death quietly and peacefully in my stinky writer’s private residence. No, Big Serpent, you are bad in sorting people out, if you lead such ones like me into the Zone. And then afterwards … ah… How do you know, that this miracle really exists? Who told you, that dreams really come true here? Did you see anybody, who would have been made happy here? Ah? Maybe Porcupine? And actually, who told you about the Zone, about Porcupine, about this Room?

Similarly, from the Don Hertzfedlt film “Everything will be Okay”:

Bill dropped his keys on the counter and stood there staring at them, suddenly thinking about all the times he’d thrown his keys there before, and how many days of his life were wasted repeating the same tasks and and rituals in his apartment over and over again. But then he wondered if realistically this was his life and the unusual part was his time spent doing other things.

Some countries are easier to get into than others. Start researching which ones have a path that could work for you.

Most are pretty strict but some are more open. If I recall correctly the Nordic countries may be a little easier, but don’t quote me on that. It’s been a long time since I accepted that this country had successfully trapped me here.

Mario is really excited about this development.

Only comic who was in all six seasons, no less.

There’s no stopping this disaster at this point. It was nice being the dominant species.

We now have definitive proof that human intelligence isn’t the net evolutionary positive we thought it was.

Dom Irerra was more open about his sexuality than a lot of the comics of his time, and it always made me respect him.

Rewatching Dr. Katz and thinking about the time period it was in, sometimes Dom feels absolutely subversive to the times.

His obsessive love for Dr. Katz is something a lot of men comics would have been afraid to commit to, even to this day.

People worship corps.

Exactly. I have services running with staggered automated updates/reboots to keep things stable. Since at least one of them is always available, it’s like having no down-time but with actual stability and redundancy.

Musk is loud and dumb so he gets most of the attention for this sort of shit but Zuckerberg seems calculatingly evil.