Or I can pay nothing and get a plain video file that I can do anything I want with, and play on any device without needing a player. And as long as I keep that file backed up somewhere, I’ll always have a copy of it.

The TV business is struggling to learn the lesson the music industry learned a long time ago.

I asked ChatGPT to generate a utopic looking city but make the buildings curvy. It got pretty close.

Technically yes, with perfect or near-perfect management, we could double our population and minimize the damage. But realistically, our resource usage will certainly continue at a rate similar to or more than it is now.

The good thing is, birth rates are proportional to available resources, quality of life, and education; and birthrates globally are already on a decline in non-developing countries. Low birthrates have negative implications on society, but for the planet as a whole, less humans are a good thing

I think it’s just easier for people to cope with bad things happening around them if they can simply point a finger at someone or something and blame that. It’s easier than accepting that the universe is random and chaotic, and sometimes random chaos decides to hurt you.

No, it’d be like if we blockaded and bombed Mexico, then complained that their military isn’t giving out food to the general population.

When you blockade supplies and infrastructure from an entire region of people, most of whom have done nothing wrong, then yes, food shortages are your fault.

The relative lack of content on Lemmy, for me, has been a boon. I go through New, then Top 6 Hours, then Top 12 Hours, then I need to find something else to do. When I was on Reddit, I found myself bouncing between Reddit and YouTube for entertainment. With Lemmy not having boundless amounts of crap to scroll through and no algorithm, my tech usage is far more varied.

unbearable due to the sheer amount of advertisement.

I spent 3 days in a hotel room this week, and while I did bring my Steam Deck and dock with me for entertainment, I got there to find that the TV had no HDMI ports. I was stuck with basic cable and the only saving grace being Showtime, which wasn’t at extra cost and doesn’t have ads.

But when both Showtime channels had stuff I was less than indifferent to watching, the advertisements on any of the other channels were horrible. The shows felt like they were 1:1 in terms of content to ads.

Don’t get me started on the radio, either. I used to love listening to the radio, but now all they play is the same set of a couple dozen songs, with 5 minutes of ads that play every 3 or so songs. Also, no rock station in my area plays anything newer than ~15 years old, tops. They’re all still playing the same music that I listened to on those stations when I was a teen, and I’m a little over 30.

I remember hearing about the potential of Web 2.0 in the 00s and thought it sounded like it was going to be really cool.

Now I just want the old web back. Isolated forums had a sense of community that, even on Lemmy, isn’t present in the same way.

I wouldn’t be that surprised if that look became a meme face

I’m not the guy you’re replying to, but I will say this is a topic that is never going to see a good consensus, because there are two questions of morality at play, which under normal circumstances are completely agreeable. However, when placed into this context, they collide.

1. Pornography depicting underage persons is reprehensible and should not exist

2. The production and related abuse of children should absolutely be stopped

To allow AI child porn is to say that to some extent, we allow the material to exist, even if it depicts an approximation of a real person whether they are real or not, but at the potential gain of harming the industry producing the real thing. To make it illegal is to agree with the consensus that it shouldn’t exist, but will maintain the status quo for issue #2 and, in theory, cause more real children to be harmed.

Of course, the argument here goes much deeper than that. If you try to dig into it mentally, you end up going into recursive branches that lead in both directions. I’m not trying to dive into that rabbit hole here, but I simply wanted to illustrate the moral dilemma of it.

My instance is currently at 19GB after running for about 3 months.

The only thing I really miss is doing data calculations in Google because I have shitty Internet and I want to know how many hours I’ve gotta let this thing download before I get my bandwidth back.

It’s basically rule #1 to not give an addict money, but give them things they can’t trade for material value instead.

At this point, the community is clean. So unless more is posted, then you should be good. If someone searched for the community and caused a preview to load while the content was active though, then it could be an issue.

From what I was informed, purging a post doesn’t remove the associated cached data. So I didn’t take any chances.

Not really. You could technically locate the images and determine precisely which ones they are from their filenames, but that means you actually have to view the images long enough to pull the URL. I had no desire to view them for even a moment, and just universally removed them.

As mentioned in my edit above though, ensure you are in compliance with local regulations when dealing with the material in case you have to do any preservation for law enforcement or something.

I’m on 1.18.4, once I deleted the most recent images, the former CSAM posts(among others) became broken images. So yes, it was pulling from local disk cache. Then I took care of the posts themselves after the content was invalidated.

I mostly do it because I’ve worked in jobs where my locations were graded on such ratings, and anything less than a 5 was unacceptable. So entering junk 5/5 ratings is my small protest against that without messing up someone’s job in the process.

My policy for giving ratings is that I don’t typically rate products, but if I’m asked to rate service, I always rate 5 stars regardless of the quality of service performed. If it asks me to justify why I rated that way, I just write “Yes.” and pad it with as many characters as is needed. Usually dots or problematic unicode characters.