Wow thanks that is awesome, gotta remember that site. For rice I already found the 50lbs pack that also beats my local discount grocer (which is rare).

What pisses me off that amazon has made it’s “sort by cheapest” completely unusable. You find 100 pages of the exact same ultra-trashy product or something related or a replacement part or something.

I’ve recently read a comment saying the great Chinese firewall somehow “learns” that you are using a VPN. So people doing quick tests “yep VPN works” but then a little later it doesn’t work anymore. No clue if that is true though.

Don’t do it… since God is infallible any contradiction would negate all of existence!

Toilet Paper is a lie!

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Using IP laws to legislate this could also lead to disastrous consequences, like the monopolization of effective AI. If only those with billions in capital can make use of these tools, while free or open source models become illegal to distribute, it could mean a permanent power grab. If the capitalists end up controlling the “means of generation” and we the common folk can’t use it.

There are very fine bullshits on both sides

Hmm 😇 The afterlife might be a good way to make it up. Have you seen “The Good Place”?

I agree somewhat with that but: only if the starting conditions were completely random. Otherwise if you set the conditions to be similar to what we know about humanity, you’d have to anticipate both cooperation and competition and parasitic behavior leading to wars and atrocities. And that also assumes that they actually have a chance to grow up for the suffering to have any meaning. If you just turn it off your science experiment at some point you have invalidated the argument.

Either way when you’re playing god you’d have to morally justify yourself. Imagine you create a universe that eventually becomes an eternal hell where trillions of sentient beings are tortured through something like “I have no mouth but I must scream”.

You’d look at things like the holocaust or million other atrocities and say “this is fine”. Also you can’t assume they’d die out naturally in 5 billion years, they might colonize other planets and go on and on and on until you pull the switch. They might have created beautiful art and things and preserved much of their history for future generation and then poof all gone. What if they would find out? Would you say “I created them, therefor I own them and can do with my toys as I please”. Really?

My main argument would be that it would be incredibly unethical. And any intelligent civilization powerful enough to create a simulation like this would be more likely than not to be ethical, and if it was this unethical it is unlikely to exist for long. Those would be two potential reasons why the “infinite regress” in simulation theory is unlikely.

The Starmaker is an interesting exploration into simulation theory.

DDG recently started to exclude terms from my search query and returns more random garbage and a “search only …” link. So often I search, find nothing, then realize DDG messed up again. Really not sure why it’s doing that.

Huh. I hate advertising and think it’s brainwashing that harms our minds, increases consumerism and causes massive environmental damage and biases all content and news production.

Affiliate links are just another form of advertising.

So the solution is very easy, outlaw affiliate links. Or advertising in general. Amazon and others should no longer be allowed to offer affiliate systems. Or remove any page with affiliate page or linking to pages with affiliate pages from search results.

You can’t create rules and structures that prioritize profit and expect positive results.

Rip INTERWEBZ 2023 just preserve it how it was before it got sick

what do you think when you read stories like these

Honestly they are so fucking sad I try to avoid reading them. Another example is this one: She Was Denied an Abortion After Roe Fell. This Is a Year in Her Family’s Life.

The monsters have been trying to do the same things in Europe though, UK has underfunded the NHS and healthcare in Germany is in deliberate decline too.

We need the equivalent of keeping the phone lines and phone numbers compatible though. So that all the vendors that are on amazon can use a commonly shared internet protocol to also sell on other platforms, otherwise the network effects are lost and make splitting them up and true competition impossible.

Yeah. I think social media should be seen as virtual worlds that created new types of “alternative nation” that are controlled by these “cloud capitalists”. They decide the rules of conduct and eCommerce and the shape of society.

Cloud serfs and cloud proles pick up your digital pitchforks and techno-rampage!!! 🤑

Interesting, it seems so, but the DMA isn’t “marketed” as such or explains the problem and doesn’t suggest plausible solutions. What is needed I think is a kind of federation for marketplaces, so they need to use some kind of open protocol that allows others to use the same network of vendors etc. But it seems you could build on top of the DMA.

I do think a new term makes sense because these platforms both scale ultra large so “explode” in market power, and also can’t just be broken up using anti-trust laws because then the network effects of large network effects vanish (this is true for amazon and social media). So it is something different because of those new properties. I think federation and open protocols might be the answer to this.