It has always been there, but until Trump’s first term the Nazis were at least cautious about things. They were afraid to openly and publicly spout their BS, unless they were in large groups. Because they knew that if they held up swastika signs on the street corner, that they’d very quickly get punched in the mouth.

But Trump changed that. Depending on how old you are, you may remember the “he tells it like it is/he’s not afraid to say what’s really on his mind” types of support for Trump during his first term. What a lot of those people were really saying is “he makes me feel empowered to say what’s is on my mind.” And what was on their mind was white supremacy and nazism. When the highest office in the land is tacitly (and sometimes directly) supporting white supremacists, they feel emboldened. And when they feel emboldened, they escalate.

What used to be whispered racist jokes escalated into passive racism. What used to be passive racism escalated into active racism. What used to be active racism escalated into openly hostile racism. And what used to be openly hostile racism escalated into nazism.

And the issue is that Trump/Musk have given Nazis a forum to meet other Nazis. Before, being a Nazi was a fairly lonely hobby. Finding other Nazis carried a lot of risk, because it meant potentially exposing yourself and getting your life ruined. But with Musk buying Xitter, Trump building Truth Social, etc… Yeah, suddenly the Nazis felt empowered to actually start talking to each other. The same way flat earthers used to just be your crazy uncle who smoked too much in his garage. But now that crazy uncle is part of a Flat Earth Society that regularly does large “experiments” to try and prove the earth is flat. By finding a forum to connect with other like-minded individuals, people feel emboldened as their views feel more normalized.

This is honestly a win-win. Either the courts recognize that the LLM uses stolen copyrighted content, or they recognize that torrenting is legal by default.

Though with the way courts have been bending case law into knots recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow word the ruling in a way that favors Meta and makes torrenting outright illegal.

The US has a legal concept called fruit of the poisoned tree. Basically, if evidence was obtained by cops illegally, it can’t be used against a defendant. Essentially, the prosecution can’t use fruit that they found from a poisoned tree, because the fruit is considered tainted. For instance, let’s say cops illegally search you, and find weed. If your defense lawyer can prove that the search was illegal, the evidence (your weed) gets excluded from the trial.

There are a few exceptions, like cops being able to use evidence from someone who stole it. For instance, if someone steals a laptop and then finds CSAM on it, the laptop can still be used against the person it was stolen from. Because the initial theft was illegal, but the cops weren’t the ones who stole it; They legally obtained it from the thief who reported the CSAM and turned the laptop over. But as a general rule, if cops break the law to get evidence, the evidence is thrown out.

So if they prove that Luigi was illegally searched, it potentially excludes all of the evidence they found on him, like his written manifesto and the ghost gun in his backpack.

But this trial is already a fucking sham, so I have no doubt that the courts will turn case law on its head to rule the search was legal, even if it was blatantly illegal. Cops have a lot of leeway in how they can justify a search, so the detectives can likely just say “we thought we smelled weed, so we initiated a search” to get the search ruled as legal.

I mean, plenty of people were saying that right when he was first arrested. The dude was able to evade capture for an entire week while the entire country was on the lookout for him… He even had time to leave memeable fake breadcrumbs, like his backpack full of Monopoly money… And yet he never thought to break apart the ghost gun he used, and dispose of it in random trash cans so they’d be virtually impossible to trace back to him? He had a goddamned manifesto on him, like it was a signed confession?

Yeah, no. His arrest smells like “accidentally” disabled body cams and planted evidence.

When anger and disgust combine, you get contempt. And while the word doesn’t sound super impactful, contempt is one of the strongest emotions, and one that is often deeply rooted in your sense of identity. Because if you hold genuine contempt for something, it’s usually because it flies in the face of your core personal values. It’s an emotion that makes it difficult to even function properly when you’re near the target of your contempt; It’s the kind of emotion that drives people to violence.

Also, courts have repeatedly ruled that a punishment has to be both cruel and unusual to be unconstitutional. Which means that if the government just treats everyone like trash, it’s cruel but not unusual. Because the government is what decides what is unusual simply by adjusting how often it is used. If something is unusual and they want to change that, they just do it more so it’s considered usual.

As long as you don’t have a common name, the buying process will be as simple as showing some ID and paying like you would for any other purchase.

It’s the same strategy used by Hitler and the nazis to seize control of Germany. They initially only got control of some of the smaller, “less important” government departments. And then they just started drastically expanding the reach of existing departments, declaring themselves to be in charge of other departments, consolidating loyalists, etc…

The idea is that by the time opponents have time to push back, you have already seized control and are already ousting them. Court battles take months or years, but the takeover was done in a few days.

It’s a directory. When you create a new note, it creates a new file inside of that directory. My point was simply that you can always just browse the directory and read the plaintext file for whichever note you want. Obsidian simply adds things like text formatting and automatic links to other notes.

Yeah, I tired Audiobookshelf and gave up after fighting with it for a day or two. It refused to read or write any data on my NAS, so it couldn’t actually save/load any audiobook files.

It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.

Honestly, my initial guess was that the department used a fake name to refer to the officer. Because it’s giving big “the hardest part of making a new character is thinking of a name” vibes.

I had an idea for a community along the lines of /LeastSupremeWhites which was the same basic premise. Based on an old comment I saw a while ago, which was along the lines of “why are white supremacists always the least supreme whites?”

They also fired the workers who handled most FOIA requests, so there is nobody to fulfill them anyways.

And here’s a reminder that if you run a Plex server, there’s an app called Prologue which turns it into a fully fledged audiobook server.

Plex doesn’t natively support things like audiobook bookmarks in m4b files, and tries to just play them straight through like a gigantic 4 hour long music track. But Prologue does support bookmark data. Prologue simply uses Plex’s service to access the files, (because admittedly, Plex is good for letting newbies remotely access their content) and then it ignores Plex’s built-in “lol just play it like music” instructions, and actually parses the files for bookmark data.

As someone who couldn’t get Audiobookshelf to work properly, (something about not being able to access network drives via Docker), Prologue has saved my audiobook library by allowing me to just host it via Plex instead.

The server owners can’t see your phone number. Discord allows you to set a minimum verification level for users in your server. The lowest is simply having a verified email on their account. The highest is a verified email, a few minutes old (so no brand new accounts), been in the server for a few minutes, and a verified phone number. It’s just a bot prevention thing, because spammers/scammers are a big issue on large Discord servers. Especially early in Discord’s history, it was a big issue where bots would raid a server and just totally shut it down with spam links. So Discord started allowing server owners to set minimum verification levels before users could interact and send messages.

And then there are things like poor sleep hygiene when very young can trigger a correlates with the development of ADHD later on.

FTFY. Correlation≠Causation, especially in cases like you mentioned. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

Are kids getting ADHD because they didn’t sleep well? Or is poor sleep hygiene an early indicator of ADHD? Lots of people with ADHD have poor sleep hygiene, even as adults. Many will struggle with things like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, because they get their biggest bursts of focus late at night when everyone else is asleep, the brain is releasing dopamine to keep them awake, and distractions are limited. Every single adult with ADHD has stories about getting focused on a project right before bedtime, then suddenly realizing the birds are chirping outside their window and the sun is rising.

Honestly, I don’t think that the current administration’s tactics would work without social media. Social media allows people to feel the outrage and feel like they’re making an impact, all without doing a damned thing to actually stop the current admin. Social media allows you to post online and feel satisfied with the engagement it got, because “maybe someone else will step up because of my post.” But it doesn’t actually spur any action on the poster’s part.

I’d argue that posting about it is the best case scenario for fascism, because as long as people are allowed to post they won’t be motivated to actually start fires.

And here’s a reminder that the US Army handbook on simple sabotage suggests more passive forms of sabotage if active sabotage isn’t possible. If you want to sabotage enemy war production efforts, the handbook suggests getting a job in management and then subtlety doing everything you can to grind things to a halt.

Basically, intentionally become the manglement that every office drone and factory worker hates.

Until I learned the whole story about Musk’s takeover of Tesla, I had no idea how bad and overconfident he was at engineering and business, but once I learned that, a lot of things started to make a lot more sense.

Yeah, my cousin used to work at SpaceX, and it’s sort of an open secret that they need to actively keep Elon away from the engineers. They have entire teams of people dedicated to shoving menial decisions and distractions in front of him, so he doesn’t have time to wander over to the engineers. Like as soon as he steps out of his office door, there are multiple people whose sole job is dedicated to subtlety redirecting him off to other non-critical wings of the building to keep him distracted. Because if he ever talks to the rocket engineers, he’ll try to one-up them by dropping some asinine “we’re going to do it this dumb way instead” decree that requires them to scrap their entire current project and start over from scratch (for the third time this week.)