Newsom, we get it - you want to run for president. But don't fuck up my state to do it.

You've done ok in CA when you've kept your mouth shut and followed in Brown's footsteps, but this latest bullshit display of throwing widely popular progressive initiatives (this one passed 66 to 9) under the bus is a slap in the face to all Californians, proving yet again that you're an empty neo-liberal suit playing progressive to pander to the public.

California is not your billboard for a future presidential run. Do your damn job and stop using your veto pen to try to appeal to voters who aren't even your constituents yet.

I avoid this by not watching porn that makes me sad. There's plenty of consensual, happy, joyful sex-positive porn out there.

While your point is valid about this particular situation (which is horrible and criminal on multiple levels), your overbroad generalization of porn and the implied assumption of guilt in the viewers is what's led folks to react negatively to your statement.

On a larger level, this kind of statement plays into the puritanical doctrines towards sex that paint it as a negative force, and subsequently leads to the twisting of a positive, creative act into a negative expression of power and rape in those that accept those doctrines.

Porn is not at fault here, nor are its viewers. Those at fault in this crime are the producers and publishers, who were well aware of the abuses happening under their watch, and deceived their viewers into believing they were observing consensual performance acts. I hope that these women get every cent and more, and it would be excellent to see a class action suit from Pornhub's subscribers arise in tandem to and in support of their complaint.

This article stinks of an agenda. The author goes out of their way not to mention the term Fediverse (pluriverse? wtf is that?), and they clearly haven't done their due diligence on Activity Pub. Either they skimped on the research or this article was heavily edited afterwards to remove any concept of the Fediverse being a viable alternative to centralized platforms. Doesn't surprise me coming from Business Insider.

That being said, the overall dynamic the article speaks to is valid, as is the discussion it engenders, so have an upvote despite my gripes with the writing.

The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, "The Creativity Machine" register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI's the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What's clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn't work for them.

You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

The ruling is excellent, and I'm glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.

This is not going to stop porn. All it will do is criminalize the actors, producers, and viewers.

I'm reminded of the drug war, where they took a relatively harmless narcotic used disproportionally by minority populations at the time (Marijuana), and used it to criminalize and imprison large swaths of the population, especially within the black community.

It's no coincidence that most of the folks targeted by this effort are women and sex industry workers, which skew liberal by a large degree. Note I'm not just talking about prostitution or porn actors, but the entire sex industry, including toys and books.

The GOP is scared shitless of the rising power of women in modern society, and being able to criminalize and consequently attack the revenue stream of sex industry workers is a way to blunt it. There's also an element of class warfare involved, as OnlyFans or similar sites are often the most economical way for a young woman to lift herself out of poverty if she has no other marketable skills.

Man, the ACLU is gonna have a field day with this one. And Newell should be charged with making a fake police report:

The search warrant identifies two pages worth of items that law enforcement officers were allowed to seize, including computer software and hardware, digital communications, cellular networks, servers and hard drives, items with passwords, utility records, and all documents and records pertaining to Newell. The warrant specifically targeted ownership of computers capable of being used to “participate in the identity theft of Kari Newell.”

She's claiming that because Meyer did research on her, he's participating in identity theft. Great job at keeping this story out of the papers, Newell, now everyone knows you're a drunk-driving criminal with no respect to for the rule of law or freedom of the press. Welcome to the Streisand effect.

Let's call out the particular global investment vampire in this story, KKR - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, because it's the Count Dracula of hedge funds, and also the company that killed Toys 'R' Us:

This whole thing smelled like enshittification to me, so I kept digging, this time into OverDrive itself. Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR.

With that sentence, my audience just divided into two types of people

• the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction,

and

• the ones like my friend who happens to be a business journalist at the New York Times, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream.

The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong.

Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile.

KKR was the subject of the famous 1989 book (and subsequent movie) Barbarians at the Gate, in which a pair of investigative journalists from the Wall Street Journal detail what one Times reviewer called the “avarice, malice, and egomania” of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco with “all the suspense of a first-rate thriller”. The ultimate result: KKR’s private equity barons raked in the cash, while thousands of employees were axed and consumer prices of RJR Nabisco products soared.

More recently, KKR teamed up with two other private equity firms to execute a leveraged buyout of Toys ‘R’ Us. They deliberately weighted down the company with a crushing level of debt in order to begin feeding on its profits; they sucked out half a billion dollars as the company staggered along for another dozen years. When Toys ‘R’ Us finally collapsed and died in 2018, the vultures flapped off, unconcerned, leaving 33,000 desperate workers unemployed and without severance.

Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

...and now it's come for your local library.

For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.

You're right - this is very reminiscent of the Microsoft Antitrust suit of 1998. Technically, per that ruling, Google could be subject to an AT&T style breakup. However, it's pertinent to note that on appeal, the Justice Department chose to settle with Microsoft on the issue of splitting the company rather than go back to trial.

Clearly, in the real world, the ruling didn't stick, as today Microsoft, Apple, and Google all package their browsers on their operating systems. As such, I don't think it likely that enforcing an API standard would exceed the current antitrust abuses that we've come to accept as a fact of daily life, and highly unlikely to attract a serious case from the Justice Department.

That being said, I fully support your effort - we've needed stronger antitrust enforcement for a long time, and AT&T shouldn't have been the high watermark of the Justice Department's efforts in this arena.

Forum management 101

Lesson One:

1% of your readers produce 99% of your content.

Only about 1% of the population producing content is interested in enduring the shitshow of toxicity that comes with moderation.

Don't piss them off.

End of Lesson

The July metrics must have shown them engagement is plummeting, especially content submissions, which have been garbage since the blackout. One look at r/all shows most posts being up for hours and sometimes days at a time - it used to be a matter of minutes. Doubtless this is also reflecting in their traffic metrics as well.

As someone who contributed there since the pre-Digg days, after discovering the Fediverse, I'm never going back. Reddit arrogantly assumed that there was no other platform mods and contributors could go to that would provide what they do. But when it comes down to it, the Fediverse does what Reddit did, with more features, flexibility, and without the threat of centralized mismanagement. The only thing Reddit had that the Fediverse doesn't was an audience of millions, but the audience follows the content, and the best place to create content online is right here, right now, right here, right now, right here, right now.....

Welcome to the next evolution of the web, Reddit, and to the realization that you pushed your audience to evolve past their need for you.