> I can be a dick and…

> I do it... for a... mental health boost...

Sounds like a very healthy mental health regime, LOL.

You're now arguing that "it's not that serious, bro, it's just a joke." But my point in the first place was that the "joke" made no sense.

There is a difference between running a command to copy someone else's entire project (which you might then do whatever with, including manually building on top of or copying things from), and running a prompt to generate a new project (which you're then going to consider "your own").

Also, the person you replied to mentioned Moksha; that's a fork of Enlightenment 17 (which is what at least two of your cool-looking example screenshots appear to be from).

Doctors might do the same thing, of course, but at least then there's a real (accountable) person responsible for deciding that "threshold."

(I actually spent a lot of time just sitting on our home computer browsing the webpage for a Mac-only "3X" edition[1], which had a fire extinguisher instead of the bomb, among other minor differences. But one day, we got a mysterious email making an offer of the normal version for Windows on sale. In hindsight, I have no idea where that email came from, and it's a small wonder my parents didn't get scammed buying through it.)

[1] https://www.mackiev.com/kp_big_screen.html

If you think your nagware is going to get back at US citizens for completely unrelated policies you're mad about, then maybe you should list those policies in your message instead of bringing up tariffs? That seems like it would be more productive to your goals, and less likely to make it look like you're salty and/or making a faulty argument regarding tariffs.

I'm assuming you're outside the US based on having this idea.

You might as well just say "I'm mad at your country for the tariffs, so here's an extra wait." From the fact you feel the urge to spite people in a tariffing country like this, it's clear the tariffs have had some negative effect on you, which goes against your narrative that they're "effectively paid for" by those in the tariffing country who voted for it.

But aside from that, I don't think that means you only need one state to get unified transit off the ground. Every locality that operates public transit would need to be on-board. (Even if CTA started taking payments via Illinois toll road accounts, me swapping my Colorado toll road transponder for an Illinois one wouldn't help me use RTD unless they're also on-board.)

I think the bigger implication you've pointed out is that if toll road & public transit payments become integrated in lots of different jurisdictions, it could come along with free multi-jurisdiction transit integration via the existing multi-jurisdiction toll integration. But it would still require that toll/transit integration to be built out in lots of different places first.

E-ZPass now has interoperability with the Central United States Interoperability Hub (which reaches as far west as Colorado and as far south as Texas). We're much closer to the point where you can drive anywhere with a single transponder than we were back then. The main thing missing now is California cooperating with anyone else.

I like the idea of my toll road account also being useful for public transit, if nothing else. But it's difficult to imagine toll road operators and public transit operators seeing a big incentive to cooperate in that way. Even though they're both "pay for transit," their intended/typical users are very different (people who can't/won't drive vs. people who not only drive but are privileged enough to pay for less traffic).

> yeah, this isn't due to some inherent acceptance of unreality, the massive volume of low-budget vertical 微短剧 (weiduanju) on Douyin and Kuaishou is driven by economic factors like digital ad-arbitrage [0]. most of these studios spend the vast majority of their budget on advertising with an incredibly small amount reserved for actual production and so you get AI filtered slop because it's cheaper than paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew

> plus, the CAC cracks down a lot more on cruddy micro-dramas than US regulators do on low-quality TikTok/YShorts/IG Reels content (ie not at all, ever)

I'm not following your argument with this one. American production companies (which also use and are funded by advertising) also certainly care about their bottom line, and would cut the budget of "paying actors or make up artists or the whole supporting crew" as much as they could get away with. As you note, the reason they can't get away with cutting that stuff more isn't because they're regulated more in America. Rather, they can't cut more because viewers wouldn't tolerate it. What argument are you actually making about why Chinese companies getting away with the low-budget (low-quality) "slop" isn't the fault of the people tolerating it by watching?

In response to your edit (ignoring that you used a piece of hardware for that example): Apple makes a lot more software than ASUS. Everyone knows the software is part of an Apple product; that's been a thing the whole time macOS has only been (officially/easily) runnable on Apple products.

The surprise is that Google decided such an "efficient yet limited language model" is suitable to be shown before actual search results on every search, even though it gets things so wrong, so often. It's not about the technical limitation or design. You really don't understand why that business decision is surprising to users?

With the amount of blatantly false information I've seen LLMs spew out in response to my very simple questions, I can very easily imagine one would get this basic information wrong somehow, although I did just Google it (as Gemini, and particularly the on-search-result-page version of it, seem to be the absolute worst of the common models in my experience), and it did get the answer right.

I Googled that name and found a bunch of stories about him being excluded/banned from council meetings, because he was consistently disruptive.