IP maximalists really screwed the pooch by inventing the term ‘piracy’ for copyright infringement, they made the act sound ten times cooler.

There's enough astroturf on Reddit for a continent's worth of obnoxious suburban fake lawns.

I’m so far from an expert it’s not even funny but I’m a hobbyist for old valve (tube on the other side of the Atlantic) electronics. You need an industrial base to make semiconductors but if you can do flamework with glass and build a good enough pump that opens the door to amplifiers, radio, telecommunications, and even crude computers which in turn opens the door to a lot of creature comforts and social improvement that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

There really needs to be granular NSFW settings on Lemmy, or more correctly I need to improve my Rust so I can go and implement it myself instead of bitching about it!

I’m not anti-porn but I don’t want it mixed in my normal content. Other non-sexual NSFW stuff is fine 24/7, artistic nudity is fine 24/7, but I don’t want to see outright porn unless that’s what I’m specifically looking for!

Getting people angry drives engagement, YouTube probably thinks you’re going hate-watch it and make them more tasty, tasty ad impressions that way.

The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.

Yeah the Tories in the UK which were once the mainstream right are now sucking deeply on the crack pipe of Republican culture wars because after thirteen years in power it’s all they have left.

Here’s an opinion that’s actually unpopular rather than simply controversial: domestic flights in the UK other than to Northern Ireland (which isn’t on the same island so fair enough) should be forbidden on the grounds their contribution to climate change cannot be justified.

Instead we should renationalise the railways by letting the franchises expire without renewing them and expand their capacity as far as we can. Instead of pissing around with HS2 we fuck the NIMBYs over with an Act of Parliament which they can’t swat away or delay and extend it all the way up to Scotland.

Neither are scams but the UK is fond of permanently doing temporary things. Income tax in the UK was first imposed as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic Wars but after Waterloo it was never repealed since it brought in so much. Same sort of deal for the 70 mph national speed limit, it was a temporary measure in the 1960s apparently in response to someone caning it down the motorway in an AC Cobra and as we know, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

To be fair if nobody can get rich from it the fediverse is probably going to stay a much nicer place than the rest of the internet. Profit motives are fine when you’re dealing with strangers but they always add an element of dishonesty to communities of people you intend to stick around with in my opinion, there’s no good faith when my presence is being monetised any more than a farmer has the best interests of their livestock in mind.

As an Englishman I feel it’s my calling to smuggle cheddar and Wensleydale into Normandy.

The original '90s furby is unironically a fantastic platform for a hardware hacker, because they were so cheaply made the whole thing runs off a single motor and a clever arrangement of cams. It would be reasonably straightfoward to pull out the 'guts', fit a motor controller and a Raspberry Pi Zero, put a camera where the IR and light sensors go, put a better mic and camera in, then hook the bastard up to GPT-4! There's a cam position sensor too so you could modulate its speech cycle by counting the syllables in the GPT output as well as move its ears, eyes etc.

Other improvements could include high brightness RGB LEDs behind the eyes to indicate mood, an ultrasonic sensor with a second motor so the furby can turn around and make eye contact with people entering a room, and using one of the pi's GPIO pins and a suitable piece of wire as an FM radio transmitter (use a low pass filter because doing that shits out harmonics quite badly) to hijack nearby radios.