my roommates are very, very good programmers. some of the most technically competent people in the world. and yet both of them flail around helplessly when it comes to piracy. one of them couldn't pirate rimworld and the other needed help getting howl's moving castle. how? perhaps not all people are gifted with innate knowledge of Crime?? i dont understand it, but ive decided to write this helpful guide for them and everyone else with no cyberpunk in their souls*
Helpful reference but too much information for your first time: r/Piracy megathread
Download vs Torrent vs Stream
There are three main ways to pirate things:
Downloading**: this is when you go to a website and click a button and then your browser firefox gives you a little notification telling you it's downloading a file. Then you have the file on your puter and you open it or run it or whatever.
Torrenting: this is when you go to a website and download a torrent file. Then you open that file with another program called a torrent client and it downloads the real file for you.
Streaming: this is when you go to a website and you press play on a video/song and it plays you the thing right there in your browser firefox. no file ever gets downloaded to your machine
Or in flow chart form:
Downloading: firefox -> website that has Movie (2022) -> download button -> wait for it to download -> Movie (2022).mp4 is in your Downloads folder -> you play Movie (2022) with a video player VLC
Torrenting: firefox -> torrent website The Pirate Bay -> search for Movie (2022) -> download the torrent file -> open the torrent file with qbittorrent -> it downloads Movie (2022).mp4 -> Movie (2022).mp4 is in your Downloads folder -> you play Movie (2022) with VLC
Streaming: firefox -> streaming website swatchseries -> you find Movie (2022) -> click play -> Movie (2022) plays in your firefox window
Security Shit
Will I get in legal trouble (in the US or Canada) (I am not a lawyer this isn't legal advice etc etc):
Downloading: No
Streaming: No
Torrenting: No, see fine print. If you use a VPN Mullvad, then no, definitely not. If you don't then: there is a small chance the copyright holder will notice and send a letter to your internet provider. You will get a scary letter from your internet provider (ISP). If that happens a lot there is a chance your ISP will turn off your service (I don't know anyone who has actually had this happen). There is basically zero chance that the copyright holder will sue you: they don't know who you are. They need to get that information from your ISP, and ISPs don't give that information out very freely. They would also have to actually successfully sue you, and that mostly stopped. Overall the risk is that your ISP gets mad at you, not that you get sued and/or go to jail.****
Will I get hacked???
Streaming: No. If you don't have ad block it'll probably open a bunch of annoying popups tho. Get uBlock
Downloading/Torrenting Data (Video/Music/Books): These will generally be safe. Keep your player/reader software updated. Make sure the file has the right extension (mp4, mp3, pdf/epub/mobi, etc).
Downloading/Torrenting Executables (Games/Applications): Not safe. People can and do insert malware into the executable. It will still run, but it will do things in the background you don't want. The way to avoid this is by downloading only from places that are well-known and vetted by the community. I recommend fitgirl repacks. If for some reason fitgirl goes down, check the r/Piracy megathread
Don't ever give anything administrative permissions unless you're really super duper extra sure.
And of course, standard internet security advice applies. See the r/Piracy list of untrusted sites if you're curious about a particular site.
Books
Use libgen. Note that every once in a while libgen gets kicked out of a particular country and that link will break. In that case you should use your favorite search engine to search for libgen and find the new extension
Scientific Papers
Use scihub. Same thing as libgen applies.
Movies/TV
I generally recommend streaming rather than downloading. There's less risk and it's rare that you can't find what you want. Currently I use 123 chill (use uBlock). You can also use Video DownloadHelper to download a video file from a streaming site.
Music
uhhh tbh I get music with a script I wrote myself. Good luck lads, try reddit???
Games
Get torrents from fitgirl
thread.
*I'm deliberately picking one program/site for each step to minimize complexity. please dont do anything unbearably silly like list 8 different torrent clients or get into the minutiae of Firefox vs Firefox Developer Edition***.
**inb4 someone says "well actually torrenting is downloading too". you fool. you absolute buffoon.
*** if you so much as mention chrome I'll download your car.
**** if you are torrenting a lot then maybe your ISP sells you out. if youre going to torrent idk every video game ever then get mullvad
if you have an android phone get newpipe
thank me later.
I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:
We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.
Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.
Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.
For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.
Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?
Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?
As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)
There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.
In summary:
Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.
There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.
just an FYI for trans people in the US right now
[id: reddit post by user spaghettishoestrings titled "(UPDATE) Just lost my healthcare !" with the flair "Celebratory."
Post reads:
Original post is viewable through my profile. Apologies, since I’m on mobile, I couldn’t hyperlink. The TLDR: my doctor called me on Monday and informed me that their practice would no longer be providing treatment for gender affirming care as a result of a recent presidential Executive Order, even though the EO was for people under 19. Even though I’m 25.
Also, because it was asked a few times, this happened in Michigan, and I’ve been on HRT for 5+ years. It’s a practice that includes like 15+ physicians, and I think that the decision was made over my PCP’s head, given that she once told me that she literally moved states to be able to provide gender affirming care here.
First off, genuinely, thank you so much for all the replies and messages. I genuinely felt frozen after that phone call and didn’t know where to start, and you all really helped me get my feet off the ground.
A couple people mentioned contacting the ACLU, which, truthfully, I thought, “there’s no way that the ACLU will get back to me” but I sent a message anyway. They actually called me a few hours after my post and we talked about the Executive Orders and my rights. They offered to fax my provider a letter reminding them of my rights and some other legal terms. It’s crazy how a post on reddit resulted in my name being on the official ACLU letterhead.
Anyway, today my doctor’s physician assistant called me and shared that their practice is reversing their decision and they will continue to provide gender affirming care. I’m still keeping a bunch of the resources that y’all shared saved, including Planned Parenthood, Plume, and looking into a private endocrinologist.
This whole experience just reminded me how great this community is. I appreciate y’all <3"
[end id]
source
[id: reddit user copurrs commented:]
You should contact Chase Strangio from the ACLU, I believe he is looking for reports of folks being denied their GAC due to these EOs. He's @chasestrangio on IG and Threads.
[end id]
If you struggle with pullups (or any exercise) because of grip strength - here are some things you can try!
Essentially the idea is:
1.) Find a way to still train the exercise. You can use gloves or wraps to assist your grip OR you can do easier variations.
2.) Do grip exercises afterwards. The simplest one I can think of is a passive bar hang. Both active and passive ones work (that means essentially means shoulders down or shoulders up, respectively), and you can use any angle you want.
Weight lifting or rock climbing chalk can also help!
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