Some Dumbass With A Blog

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has a Ryu Number of 4.

(explanation below)

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

oh since it's his birthday I can actually allow myself to drop these... dragon sonic!!

Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡

Go into the power shell

then paste in:

reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot /v "TurnOffWindowsCopilot" /t REG_DWORD /f /d 1

like this

Then restart. Also here is how to turn off the awful search suggestions:

Trump’s budget bill has many, many things in it, but buried amongst it is the MILLIONS OF ACRES OF PUBLIC LAND FOR SALE.

This is the entirety of the Arizona state forests, the entire Cascades mountain range. Swathes of pristine desert around the national parks in Utah. On the doorstep of Jackson Hole.

THIS BILL IS BIG, BUT IT CAN BE AMENDED AND ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT PASS AS IS please.

If you have ever enjoyed the wilderness, we stand to lose it all forever.

CALLING your senators - NOT JUST IN THE WEST. ALL SENATORS, is CRUCIAL.

Outdoor alliance has a great resource for reaching out.

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

It describes the state of shutting off all emotions and waiting for either the threat to stop pursuing you or for it to kill you.

Two years after being tasked with commissioning a review of medical evidence surrounding gender-affirming care for trans youth, Utah’s own state health department has concluded that trans healthcare bans “cannot be justified.” The Republicans who commissioned the study aren’t too happy about it.

Back in 2023, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill that placed an indefinite “moratorium” on doctors prescribing gender-affirming care like hormone therapy and puberty blockers to trans youth. That bill ordered the Utah Department of Health and Human Services to compile their report in order to produce recommendations for the state government on whether or not to lift the moratorium.

This week, the department delivered their long-awaited, over 1,000-page report — which is dated August 6, 2024 — to Utah lawmakers. The report’s authors found that “the consensus of the evidence supports that the treatments are effective in terms of mental health, psychosocial outcomes, and the induction of body changes consistent with the affirmed gender in pediatric GD [gender dysphoria] patients.”

The authors added that “the evidence also supports that the treatments are safe in terms of changes to bone density, cardiovascular risk factors, metabolic changes, and cancer.” Trans youth who had received gender-affirming care were within the bounds of normal, non-pathological ranges for these conditions.

selkie au counts for mermay.... riiiiight......

When the Good Place said “Why choose to be good every day when there is no guaranteed reward now or in the afterlife… I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.” 

I had been walking through this forest for days in circles, using my backpack as a pillow and jumping at the slightest sound all the while. It was nothing I wasn’t used to, having become familiar with the sights, sounds, and smells - oh heavens the smells - of the city streets that raised me.

I had to force myself to bite back a response, almost choking on my water as I weighed my words carefully. I wasn’t certain that this was one of the fae I needed. For all I knew, he was just another human in a search party for someone unrelated.

“I don’t know either,” I eventually offered. “There’s a lot of things that need “help”, but how many of those things are lost causes?” I asked rhetorically, biting back a bitter scoff as I looked at my calloused left palm, worn down from repeated injury.