The sad part is this stragey often works because many in the general public don't see through these regulation lobbying schemes, however obvious they are. The fearmongering always works on some part of the population as well. Feels like they were just waiting for the next end of the world scenario to be announced.

The law is the law, there can't be different law for corporations with billions in backing. I don't agree with current copyright laws btw and think they should be changed. However, they probably should have lobbied for that before illegally downloading all this material.

I find the brazenness of saying this while running what's arguably the largest copyright theft operation in human history astonishing. If libgen is "sketchy", then what is OpenAI?

Well, having lived there I'd describe it thus: You might get shouted at for taking a harmless picture at a conference; They brag about their great "data protection" laws, and the same same day you read in the news how yet another of their universities got hacked and how some incompetent government agency leaked the sensitive private information of hundreds of thousands of their citizens. Not that anyone cares or that anyone would get punished for it. But don't you dare forget adding cookie popups to your website or trying to build a finance app without extremely invasive and questionable KYC.

Privacy-mindedness with German characteristics.

They didn't use to, this has become a thing over the past few years as MSM outlets have completely given up on journalistic standards, including editorial ones.

The old web was a very different place, it wasn't as centralized and there were significantly fewer people around. There were specific forums that you'd go to for specific topics. Say you were interested in West African dances - there was usually the one forum where all the West African dance nerds hung out. At most a couple of different ones. And they were very small communities. If there were issues with the admins or moderation users could and did do mass walk-outs and create a new place.

Sadly the hardware is amazing and so much more efficient compared to Intel/AMD x86. We need M-series chips for Linux.

And mind you this is psychology, the entire discipline is only borderline scientific anyway. But even studies in the hard sciences are very often flawed if not outright fabricated. Adjusting data sets to fit the desired result (who'd ever know as long as you do it properly), changing the experiment and measure until they get what they they want, repeated measuring until the "right" data for the paper appeared randomly - those are all things I personally observed in the lab.

Not to even get started on the house of cards that is basing ones flawed assumptions on other flawed studies without even the slightest attempt at replicating their results first. It's standard practice to simply presume what's been published (especially by friendly authors) can be regarded as reliable.

Democracy with Brussels characteristics.

Existing legislation favors the haves, not the could-haves. And many people go to jail every year for breaking rules that big banks get a slap on the wrist for. Money laundering, terror financing, fraud,... Name a major bank and I'll list you some crimes no one ever spent a day in prison for. But that's fine because they have a license.

Just another day on Wikipedia.

For context that's not where the flood happened, there's a massive mountain range in between those vallies reaching over 8000m (Shishapangma).

In earth science there are thousands of worst case scenario models published, but it's hard to actually predict reality.

https://x.com/PeterAndersonE

In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time.

It's Eternal September.

Is it not rather down to identity? If the victims had paler skin and a different religion, we'd never stop hearing about it. But unfortunately for Papuans their complexion is too dark for international media to care and the perperators are with "You-Know-Who".