deathbird
@deathbird@mander.xyz
- Comment on ‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing 8 hours ago:
Move fast and break things, but it’s a passenger vehicle on a public road.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 3 days ago:
Once again trying to do a good redstone in Minecraft. But mostly just mine and chill.
- Comment on The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. 5 days ago:
I mean, you do, but… Often you just attest citizenship. Not sure if it’s checked on the backend or not. And illegal immigrants often have SSNs, just not their own. That’s how they can work much of the time.
- Comment on Facts and minds 5 days ago:
Without seeing the studies, it’s hard to know if they were good studies that support her position or not.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
This is an excellent policy position, if only the argumentation wasn’t dogshit. I am begging everyone even vaguely lib-left, stop writing like this. If you’re trying to write a petition, open letter, or public statement, for the love of god write it for people other than yourselves or just don’t say anything at all.
Internet censorship is bad for alphabet people, but it’s also bad for the straights. It’s bad for everyone. It’s just bad.
Freedom is for everyone. And Heritage wasn’t coming to the parade anyway.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
The only org they call out by name is The Heritage Foundation.
I assumed that they were already skipping the parade.
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 1 week ago:
- Idgaf about China and what they do and you shouldn’t either, even if US paranoia about them is highly predictable.
- Depending on the outputs it’s not always that transformative.
- The moat would be good actually. The business model of LLMs isn’t good, but it’s not even viable without massive subsidies, not least of which is taking people’s shit without paying.
It’s a huge loss for smaller copyright holders too. They can’t afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can’t fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.
Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There’s all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn’t it.
- Comment on Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users 2 weeks ago:
As explained, it’s not even quite user identification, but rather verification of a unique individual. The ability to identify that an account is held by a unique person (as opposed to possibility being one of many puppet accounts) is pretty useful, particularly if it’s not possible to backtrace it to an otherwise identifiable person.
Even so, the problem I see with this system is that a person has to be careful to never, ever, ever associate their unique ID with themselves, though there will be constant pressure to do so.
- Comment on Israel once again openly declaring genocidal intentions against civilians from the very start. 2 weeks ago:
Tbf, this is just declaration of intent to commit war crimes, not genocide.
- Comment on How Do I Prepare My Phone for a Protest? 2 weeks ago:
So first, even here we see foundation money and big tech, not government.
Facebook, Google, etc mostly love net neutrality, tolerate encryption, anf see utility in anonymous internet access, mostly because these things don’t interfere with their core advertising businesses, and generally have helped them. I didn’t see Comcast and others in the ISP oligopoly on that list, probably because they would not benefit from net neutrality, encryption, and privacy for obvious reasons.
The EFF advocates for particular civil libertarian policies, always has. That does attract certain donors, but not others. They have plenty of diverse and grassroots support too. One day they may have to choose between their corpo donors and their values, but I have yet to see them abandon principles.
- Comment on How Do I Prepare My Phone for a Protest? 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on People with social anxiety disorder have a different gut microbiome - transplanting their microbiome to mice causes the mice to suffer from increased social fear 2 weeks ago:
Further evidence that we’re all just billions of microbes standing on top of each other in a trench coat.
- Comment on Founder of 23andMe buys back company out of bankruptcy auction 2 weeks ago:
Actually an interesting turn of events. Sounds like she’d been fighting hard to get it back, but they’d been fighting her on it.
Not sure what it all means, but there’s something going on there. It’s all very unusual.
- Comment on 'We're done with Teams': German state hits uninstall on Microsoft 3 weeks ago:
Spread responsibility thinly across as many organizations and departments within those organizations and across as many legal thresholds as you can to minimize blowback when something inevitably has to be held to account.
- Comment on 'We're done with Teams': German state hits uninstall on Microsoft 3 weeks ago:
I would say “even busier” and “over-integrated” rather than “incomprehensible”.
Not to start a fight or anything, but it almost reminds me of emacs, because it’s like someone started with an idea for one kind of program, but they just kept adding and adding and adding to it. But emacs at least is free, flexible, long established, free, and quirky.
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 4 weeks ago:
Not so much because Elon is the way he is, but because the company is vital to the national interest.
- Comment on United Nazis 4 weeks ago:
“German Foreign Minister profers an invalid defense of a rogue nation’s killing of civilians” to “she is a war criminal herself” to “Nazinazinazi”.
- Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia 4 weeks ago:
This is not the medicine for curing what ails Wikipedia, but when all anyone is selling is a hammer…
- Comment on Google is Using AI to Censor Independent Websites 5 weeks ago:
JFC if there a uBlock list I can add to block most AI crap or do I have to get a new addon for that?
- Comment on A Medicaid researcher attacked by Elon Musk's DOGE just killed herself 1 month ago:
Thank you, yes.
- Comment on Microsoft pulls MS365 Business Premium from nonprofits 1 month ago:
Now now, it’s not like they get the whole inheritance. It’s more like they get cushy overpaid non-work jobs to manage or consult for the non-profit.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 1 month ago:
Problem I see with price based rather than square footage is that it’s going to vary by location and generation. A human being, or a family even, needs a certain amount of space, and beyond that there is some threshold across which one could say this family or person is undoubtedly taking up more than they actually need.
For example, how much housing does a family of 5 people reasonably expect if living a middle class lifestyle in America? I think that’s something that changes generationally and regionally based on income and housing costs, but today I think such a family might expect ideally a house with five bedrooms, two or three baths, a kitchen, dining room, living room, laundry room, maybe also a den or other secondary communal room. I’m not saying all houses should be this big, or shouldn’t be bigger, but that a house about this big could be a fair measuring stick for determining how much square footage a house could reasonably be without the owner-occupant paying property taxes.
Or it could be based on the number of kitchens. If a house is cut up into apartments as an investment strategy, it has to have more than one kitchen generally speaking.
For price based limits I just don’t see how you avoid artificial inflation of assessments by governments or planned neglect by owners to keep houses on one side or the other of the threshold. It would also have very different impacts on different markets. And inflation and changes in the market would require whatever threshold you set to be revised fairly regularly or else fade into irrelevance.
- Comment on Saudi Arabia has big AI ambitions. They could come at the cost of human rights 1 month ago:
Saudi Arabia trying to diversify away from oil, but is also evil. News at 11:00.
- Comment on Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations 1 month ago:
They need to be given motivation, through legal obligation.
- Comment on Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations 1 month ago:
This is scam protection not spam protection. The beta was just introduced and you have to opt-in.
- Comment on Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026 1 month ago:
Why? And that’s two questions.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 1 month ago:
Yeah 10 acres seems a bit excessive to me but I like the basic principle.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 1 month ago:
It’s not a bad compromise, it’s just a matter of finding a good value for X. And that’s hard to do as housing prices continue to balloon and housing costs take up a greater percentage of people’s incomes. Houses that would have cost one year’s income in the 60s can easily cost 8 to 10 times that today.
I don’t know, maybe you should have to pay property taxes if the land occupies more than a certain square footage. That could discourage suburban style development and promote greater population density, which could both act as a net positive.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 1 month ago:
You know what stops people from selling houses? Skyrocketing housing prices. Cuts out buyers, and makes loans against equity more appealing than actually cashing out.
You know what tax people can actually afford, that isn’t based on the opinions of appraisers regarding the fickle whims of a speculative market? Income tax.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 1 month ago:
I still think citizens should pay the bill for their services, but tax should be on the basis of income, and wealthier people should pay more to cover for those who can’t. And why not income, the money you actually bring in, and not a portion the money your home would theoretically sell for if you sold it? The point at which to take tax is the point of transfer, whether it’s labor for a wage or a change of ownership (sales and inheritance).
I absolutely don’t believe that people would be less likely to sell their property because they might have to pay a percentage of the profits from the sale. And if they were less likely to sell it, who cares? Take the money from the excess houses when they die. I think I also mentioned that I’m not principally against taxes on non-resident property (which is essentially abandoned or a business asset if not owner occupied). I’m also not against rent controls.
Like God forbid one recognize that certain approaches to taxation are problematic, it must mean you’re a conservative who’s against government services.