Not even necessarily scams. I backed the CHIP sbc by nextthingco back in the day and it turned out fine. Then I backed their next project and they got tied up with a lawsuit over the name and wound up bankrupt.

Now they can play golf together instead of by themselves.

I meant knowledge wise. Many people in technical industries lack the ability to diagnose issues because they don’t have a true understanding of what they actually do. They follow diagnostic trees or subscribe to what I call “the rain dance” method where they know something fixes a problem but they didn’t really know why. If you mention anything outside of their small reality they will refuse to acknowledge it’s existence.

In my experience a lot of IT people are unaware of anything outside of their bubble. It’s a big problem in a lot of technical industries with people who went to school to learn a trade.

There’s always dumpster diving

eBay, Facebook marketplace/ buy nothing, hibid, thrifts, neighbors, friends, coworkers, family.

Go on Facebook and ask your local buy nothing group. Check thrift stores line the habitat for humanity restore. Farm and home store like fleet farm/ farm and fleet. Plenty of ways to get ahold of something like that without buying new.

Local and state government’s across the country have signed deals with private companies to install license plate readers and databases. The private companies are already toying with selling the data (again) for non law enforcement purposes.

It is a punishment in the form of public humiliation, taking your autonomy, and dehumanizing you. People will automatically assume you’ve done something wrong if you’re in handcuffs.

I think we need to re-examine what copyright should be. There’s nothing inherently immoral about “piracy” when the original creator gets almost nothing for their work after the initial release.

The difference is that the llm has the ability to consume and remember all available information whereas a human would have difficulty remembering everything in detail. We still see humans unintentionally remaking things they’ve heard before. Comedians have unintentionally stolen jokes they’ve heard. Every songwriter has unintentionally “discovered” a catchy tune which is actually someone else’s. We have fanfiction and parody. Most people’s personalities are just an amalgamation of everyone and everything they’ve ever seen, not unlike an llm themselves.

It’s two different things happening. One is redistribution, which isn’t allowed and the other is fair use, which is allowed. You can’t ban someone from writing a detailed synopsis of your book. That’s all an llm is doing. It’s no different than a human reading the material and then using that to write something similar.

I’m pretty wary of helping even those organizations. It starts to become apparent when the people in charge are only really in it for their own clout, or they’re afraid of losing power over the organization, or even worse they are just using the organization for perks and socializing.

I can’t remember, but my dad said before he retired he would just pirate Wolfram because he was too old to bother learning whatever they were using. He spent 25 years in academia teaching graduate chem-e before moving to the private sector. He very briefly worked with one of the Wolfram founders at UIUC.

Edit: I’m thinking of Mathematica, he didn’t want to mess with learning python.

There’s a bunch of websites that give you the answers to most homework. You can just Google the question and find the answers pretty quickly. I assume the people using chatgtp to “study” are just cheating on homework anyway.

Only old farts still use Wolfram

Nobody is going to inspect it that closely, especially if they mount it on the ceiling. It does blend into certain plastics that are smooth.

A piece of clear packing tape would take it out permanently as it would be almost impossible to see that the sensor was covered if the tape was applied cleanly.

YouTube recently rolled out changes that break these third party apps causing a 503 error. Other apps have patched this issue.

Use revanced