Carl

The TL;DR is that there is a voluntary system that tracks court cases and will alert CSAM victims when it suspects images of them (either known images, or new ones) are the topic of criminal investigations. A Jane Doe was repeatedly raped in the early 2000’s to produce copious amounts of CSAM, which was broadly shared among pedophile groups. Her images were apparently very popular and prolific. Doe was alerted that Grok was producing new explicit images of her as a child. The images in question are novel (generated by AI, and not matching any known existing images) but are undoubtedly of Doe as a child. Meaning it was using Doe’s images as part of the training data for the images it generates.

Essentially, if Grok was trained on CSAM, Doe’s popular images were almost certainly included. And now Grok is producing new images of her. It would be like asking Grok to make an image of a popular egirl, and getting an image of what is undoubtedly Belle Delphine. And then X goes “no no no, we didn’t use any images of Belle Delphine in our training data. We promise!”

That’s actually surprising, because lots of admins end up lumping the entire anarchist block of instances together.

I think you’re actually the first person to notice (or at least the first to mention) the reference! Always good to see another crawler in the wild.

Tight hip flexors can also cause back pain. There is a group of muscles that run from the inside of your hip joint to your spine. They’re called the iliopsoas muscles. They’re basically impossible to reach with regular massage, because they’re fully surrounded by your pelvis. And when those muscles are too tight, it causes lower back pain.

If you get lower back pain from sitting too long, or from laying on your back for too long, you may have tight iliopsoas muscles. There are technically ways to reach them for manual massage, but they’re not easy nor comfortable, (and they basically require a physician to do safely.)

Super weird it’s basically College Humor legally, but they’re doing a really good job.

Yeah, the transformation from College Humor to Dropout is honestly a masterclass in business (and marketing) management. I fully believe that it’s the kind of thing that college marketing majors will be writing papers on in the future.

If F-18’s aren’t meant to be in the water, why does the navy keep throwing them into the ocean?

Also, you can’t afford time off work to do anything actionable. And even if you could afford it by using accrued time off, the lack of worker protections means you’ll be unemployed as soon as you start doing anything too controversial.

It’s nice to say “just get into the streets” but the vast majority of Americans are one missed paycheck away from homelessness and food scarcity. The average American is basically living hand-to-mouth, (many are even putting groceries on credit) just to survive. Regime change sounds nice, but a revolt would take months or even years, and your kids will go hungry in a few days. The only Americans who really have the time and means to effect meaningful change are retired or rich enough to not need a job. And those two demographics overwhelmingly support the current regime, because they’re old and rich.

It can be difficult for Europeans to properly grasp just how dire the situation in America is. The average American would need to travel for at least three days just to reach the capitol. That’s a solid 3 days of driving, only stopping to eat and sleep. All while not being able to take time off of work. Saying “just go protest” is like telling someone in Madrid, Spain to travel to Warsaw, Poland just to protest against their “local” leadership.

“Oh but you can protest at the state level” I already hear some people typing. Great, my state capitol is 450 miles away. That’s not even an exaggeration, it takes a solid 8 hours of driving to reach my “local” capitol building. It’s not something the average person can just do on a whim, nor can they do it regularly. It’s not like the average person can just pop over to the capitol for a protest, then be back home in time for dinner.

Maybe go make some noise at the city level. But that’s not going to do anything at the national level (or even at the state level) because they’re far away and easy for the lawmakers to ignore.

Lastly, good luck revolting against the federal government. I’m sure the average gun-nut’s AR-15 will be extremely effective against drone strikes. Oh wait…

It’s because of the recent explosion in bot traffic. Bots are largely run on Linux, using basic desktop user agents. So when studies like this look at desktop traffic, they see a disproportionately high number of Linux desktop users. But in reality, the vast majority of those “users” are actually just bad bots and scrapers who aren’t properly flagging themselves as bots (because they know sites will block them for scraping content).

Piefed has a built-in blocklist that is controllled by the dev. db0 is on that hardcoded list, after the db0 admin called out the dev for something. So the answer to OP’s question is a resounding “yes, piefed is blocking them” but I think my instance is also on that list. So they won’t be able to see this comment.

Let me save you some trouble: It costs $20 to make an account.

They think homeowners have roommates to get labor from them. The same way they have servants who cook and clean for them. To them, the idea of not being able to afford housing is literally inconceivable. It’s not even on their radar, because they’ve never had to worry about it before. The only reasons they can think that someone would have a roommate is for convenience.

HoS is a phenomenal piece of DLC that you’re supposed to play alongside the main story. It has a truly fantastic villain. BaW is a nice capstone for Geralt’s story, which takes place after the events of the main story.

I tend to fall into the “DLC is bad” camp, but both W3 expansions are perfect examples of how DLC can be good. I tend to dislike DLC because it tends to break (at least) one of the following criteria:
The base game is already complete, and doesn’t require the DLC for a full experience.
The DLC meshes neatly within the base game without feeling bolted onto the side.
The DLC adds genuinely interesting content to the game.
All three critera are what I would typically complain about with DLC, and Witcher 3’s DLC passes all three litmus tests. So any complaints I would have about them would essentially boil down to personal preference rather than objective reasons.

There is a running joke among the fanbase that the cat (Princess Donut) is actually the main character, and Carl is just along for the ride. There’s a reason Carl’s catchphrase quickly becomes “God damn it Donut!”

Aside from that, there is also Prepotente, a goat who had the same Enlightenment thing happen to him. He isn’t introduced until several books into the series, (he is part of a different dungeon party, an entire flock of goats being led through the dungeon by his former goatherd) and he is treated like a crawler just like Donut is.

There is plenty of death and destruction, to be clear. It’s a game show designed to kill the contestants. Almost as if Squid Game were being run like a futuristic and very over-the-top Legends Of The Hidden Temple/Takeshi’s Castle. The vast majority of animal-related violence is things like NPC dungeon monsters.

Book 3 can be a bit of a slog if you get wrapped up in trying to decipher the Iron Tangle. The point is that the entire thing runs on vibes, not hard rules. The point is to confuse the reader right alongside the crawlers. But lots of readers ended up struggling as a result, because they wanted to figure out the specific rules of the floor. Anyone who claims to have figured out how it works has either missed a rule or made up some of their own.

Books 4 and 5 are where the series truly hits its stride. I’d say 7 is probably my favorite. 8 was probably the worst so far, mostly because it spends a lot of time setting up potential plot hooks for later. But that also leaves lots of potential room for growth with later books.

The series really hits its stride in book 4. No spoilers, but there is a distinct tone shift, and it’s when most readers say the series truly ascends from “great” to “amazing”. Also, calling it dumb fun is a pretty funny take. The entire series is a scathing rebuke of capitalism and conservatism, wrapped in a fart joke.

The whole series is a good example of how to turn a conservative into a social anarchist. Lonely white military bro with a harsh upbringing, who internalizes all of his feelings? And then suddenly being pushed into a scenario where you’re forced to be a badass hero asskicker? Yeah, Carl’s characterization was grown in a vat to be someone conservative men would imprint upon. He’s meant to be sympathetic to that demographic, so they can then sympathize with the person who is trying to burn the aliens’ entire end-stage capitalist system down and piss on the ashes. The ironic part is that many of those conservative readers end up on social media, arguing the Carl is actually conservative. Because they’re too wrapped up in identity politics to see that the individual actions have all been anything but conservative.

Err-… Uhh… I mean… God damn it Donut! Glurp Glurp! IWKYM.

Similarly, I heard a kid call the Xbox 360 “vintage” the other day. I started to argue that it’s not that old. It only released in… (Checks release date)… 2005? Oh shit it’s over 20 years old. That’s the same as child-me considering the NES vintage when I was playing my PS1.

Pretty much every supermarket near me sells prepaid phones. And yes, they work exactly as you described. You buy minutes or data to add to your account, and then it sits in your account until you use it. Before the memory shortage price gouging BS, I could go get a burner phone for like $75 at my local Walmart or Target. No clue what they’d cost now, but they’re likely still pretty cheap as far as phones are concerned. The phones won’t have great hardware, but they’ll at least be able to run Android and can do all the things that modern smartphones can do… Albeit much slower than a flagship model.

As far as privacy goes, that will largely depend on your local laws. Drug dealers have historically used prepaid phones to avoid being tracked, (buy a phone card with cash, so you never have to use a debit or credit card to pay,) so governments started passing Know Your Customer laws that require the phone companies to verify and log your ID (tying it to your prepaid phone number, the same way a regular phone bill is tied to you) before they can sell to you. That way when the cops subpoena the phone company to see who owns a specific phone number, the company can actually tell them.

This is why archeologists and anthropologists love boring people. Researching Alexander the Great is fine, but we already know the broad strokes. The actual useful “how people lived from day to day” information is almost always found in some boring person’s journal.

{Date} I walked down to the market to get more salt, flour, vinegar, and some wool thread to darn my socks. The morning walk took approximately 20 minutes with the sun at my back. The fish seller has increased his prices to {amount} due to the war. I saw an interesting flock of birds today during my walk back from the market, I believe they may be passing through the area. I decided to make my dinner bread with a slightly different recipe today. {Full recipe listed below}. It was nice, but I’ll probably only use half as much salt next time, like I normally do. The dairy cow has produced a lot of milk this year because of the heavy rain making the grass grow well. So I’ve had a lot of butter to put on my bread. The neighbor has agreed to trade some of my excess cream for fresh veggies. I’ll probably make them into a stew for tomorrow’s dinner {recipe listed below}.

Something something “Ancient Egypt had archeologists who studied ancient(er) Egypt.”

Believe it or not, there actually was an effort to block electric lighting. Because it was someone’s job to walk around the neighborhoods and light all of the streetlights. And “protect the jobs” has historically been a really awful argument against technology.