The charges were dropped not too long after this piece was written. It sounded unwarranted and it appears that it was decided to be unwarranted.

For me it's mostly the characters and the narratives that feel "less real" than they used to. Something about seeing the same actor, in the same role and doing the same things, but 30 years older doesn't really sell the realism. Similarly, a new actor in an old role doesn't really either. We've lost a lot of novelty, real life is much more spontaneous whereas movies are increasingly contrived.

business exist to extract value aka money from people as efficiently as possible.

of course it's going to devolve to slop, they want money not realism or contrivance.

And this method of extracting money is only efficient within the current culture. It will not devolve to slop if people reject the slop. There sure are a lot of slop hogs at the moment though.

Sounds pretty similar to how I felt in middle school. I learned a lot while getting around their silly controls. I'm sure things are much more locked down today, but where there's a will there's a way!

I live in the US and order a decent amount of things from overseas... I got hit with tariffs once by UPS when ordering some clothes from Germany. They wanted 44% of the total value of goods in government / brokerage charges. It's pretty clear that UPS is scamming people and hoping they don't fight the obscene charges. That being said, I hit pause on ordering from overseas. I don't want to deal with such terrible transparency in what I will be charged.

Just host on a server in your basement. Put another instance in someone else's basement. I'm only half joking - track the downtime.

Surely we must be ignoring the rules...

And yet, all the while, force remained equal to mass times acceleration.

Are people doing image generation really using these models much? I've generated a lot of images, but I always use ComfyUI with local models and custom workflows. I only have 8GB of VRAM and I can easily do 1000s of images per day if I want to.

Why don't we just create a better system? In order for you to text / call me, you must first request to be able to text / call me; you can't modify this request or add your own language to it, this request identifies your device. Also allow me to toggle off "Allow new requests" and I feel like the phone starts working the way it should.

I've been yelling into the void for smaller phones for ~15 years now. I get that I'm not the audience... I use a PC all day. I only use my phone for text communication, talking with my parents, maps, weather, and maybe a bit of web surfing while I'm waiting in line somewhere.

I see a lot of similarities between big cars and big phones: i.e. They're not really well suited to their most-common applications and there is also not much of another choice. The average person seems to just gobble it up without much thought though. Very strange from my perspective.