The best site right now (in my lazy opinion) is

http://1337x.to/

qbittorrent is the best client these days. uTorrent went and did some bad stuff that I can’t remember off the top of my head.

You should really get a VPN to keep your isp from bothering you about it. I use Private Internet Access (PIA) because it’s relatively cheap, has port forwarding, and doesn’t store any user data.

That’s the basics. Happy sailing matey. Remember to seed to a ratio of at least 2!

Those are usually hard corn, so it would probably taste pretty starchy once ground into cornmeal. Now that I think about it that would probably be a yummy cornbread, like a less sweet cornbread. They may be able to be popped to make popcorn, but in my experience the colorful corns make pretty bad popcorn. The taste is good but there’s a lot more hull relative to the starch compared to yellow or white popcorn, which makes them more tough and less satisfying to chew, at least to me.

Pfft doesn’t even use C4 photosynthesis. Get this weak ass corn wannabe outta here.

Be the goth girl you want to see in your house. That’s my plan.

I wild liberal appears! It’s not even a logical leap or a hypothetical. That’s literally how capitalism works. It costs $X to get someone to do a thing, but you get $3X dollars in return, while all you did was control the money, congratulations you’re benefiting from the exploitation of others. It’s inherently undemocratic and unethical to do less work than someone and get such an insanely outsized portion of the generated wealth, such as oh idk like the CEOs who make 300x the median salary of the employees in their company, to say nothing of the stock options and other benefits. That’s not even a statement about them as people, they may be nice people who care about their employees and try to do right by them, but nothing they do will make up for the fact that they’re stealing from them, other than stopping.

This applies to minimum wage workers, service workers, contract workers, blue collar workers, white collar workers, middle management, engineers, technicians, accountants, basically everyone who isn’t the owner class. We’re all being exploited. If you choose not to see that you’re part of the problem.

Also there’s nothing wrong with sex work and it shouldn’t be relegated to back alleys. Fuck you for implying that’s ok. People die being pushed to do that.

Can I get some context here? Who is this? Why do they look that way? What are those dark patches on their skin?

Not really though. The sex worker providing a product is providing some entertainment value to their customers. They are exploiting themselves in a way they might not if we didn’t live in a capitalist hellscape, and the amount of value provided, especially relative to cost, are open to interpretation. Yet we can agree she’s providing greater than zero value if the only person she’s exploiting is herself. The owner of a law firm or tech startup is exploiting their employees and enriching themselves at the employees expense. The value they provide cannot possibly approach the value generated by the people actually doing the work, so even in the best case they are a net negative. They get way more value just sitting in that position than they could ever provide through their work. In the worst case they actively destroy their employees ability to create value while harvesting a larger proportion of what does end up being generated. These wannabe techno/neo-feudalists are actively destroying society and making things worse for everyone, including themselves in the long run, purely for short term personal enrichment.

Man I know horns would be so inconvenient in many ways, but they just look so sick. I really want some.

This kind of reads like a catholic who brought their kids to mass their whole childhood and disbelieves that catholic priests are child molestors because they never molested your child. They don’t prey on children with present caring parents who don’t leave their children unsupervised. They prey on solitary, neglected, vulnerable children, or for catholics those who are willing to trust a priest alone with them. In roblox it’s the same but without the implicit trust of an authority figure. The pedos probably avoided you. You didn’t somehow dodge the shady shit, you inadvertently created a bubble of safety that prevented your kids from being preyed upon because there’s so much easier prey around.

I meant in the context of machine learning not gaming

There’s already been some work on direct neural network creation to bypass the whole virtualization issue. Some people are working on basically an analog FPGA style silicon based neural network component you can just put in a SOM and integrate into existing PCB electronics. Rather than being traditional logic gates they directly implement the neural network functions in analog, making them much faster and more efficient. I forget what the technology is called but things like that seem like the future to me.

That’s kind of a false dichotomy. They may be separate today, but there’s no reason to believe we won’t augment human minds with artificial neural networks in the future. Not in the magical cure all fix all way techbros like to sell it, but for like really boring and mundane things initially. Think replacing a small damaged part of some brain region, like the visual or auditory cortexes, to repair functional deficiencies. Once they get the basic technology worked out to be reliable, repeatable, and not require too much maintenance (cough subscriptions and software licenses), there’s no reason to believe we won’t progress rapidly to other augmentations and improvements. A simple graphical interface for like a heads up display or a simple audio interface for direct communications both come to mind, but I’m sure our imaginations will be comically optimistic about some things and comically pessimistic about others. All that to say that any true AI potential will be human potential in time. We won’t stop at making super intelligent AGI. We will want to BE super intelligent AGI. Since we already know highly efficient and capable intelligence is possible (see yourself) it’s only a matter of time until we make it ourselves, provided we don’t kill ourselves somehow along the way.

You may not know this but oil comes from cyanobacteria or algae blooming, dieing, and falling to the bottom of ancient lakes. We can farm them better than they could ever grow on their own in nature, just like we do with corn, rice, wheat, and a hundred other crops. The only complex part would be the scale required. We have the technology to industrialize hydrocarbon production that way today. Life isn’t magic, so there’s no reason we couldn’t do direct synthesis with more controlled processes. And yeah it’s going to require resources. Everything does. It’s just pretty fatalistic to think we won’t be able to bootstrap ourselves up to current technologies without oil when we’ve already done it once before. Oil just makes scale possible, not the technology itself.

The large scale replacement for oil is the original source of that energy, the sun. Sure it will take a while, but high technology (read small computers) doesn’t actually require hydrocarbons, it just requires knowledge of physics. Modern society is based on hydrocarbon fuels because they’re so convenient, but that doesn’t mean it’s required for any of our technology to function. We will likely be combusting hydrocarbons for the rest of our existence, they’re just too convenient for energy storage, but the source of those hydrocarbons could easily be specialized cyanobacteria farms or direct chemical synthesis. Both of those technologies already exist, but we have never done any significant investment in them because they would have to compete with basically picking up what’s already lying around. In the absence of significant oil deposits we will be forced to make those technologies work.

This is why, in any competent software dealing with physics in any way, it is always metric under the hood. Someone wants to see a quantity in some stupid freedom units? Fine sure convert it for them, but internally everything should be metric. Physics is hard enough, there’s no reason to make it worse with an inconsistent unit system with built in footguns somehow.

You either leave for a better offer, or stay long enough to see yourself become laid off.

Hey you leave gooners alone. They aren’t hurting anyone. They’re just jerking off.

The direct answer to your question is that it’s a deep rooted cultural problem that has been with us since the beginning. The problem is the culture of extreme individualism and anti-intellectualism. People want to be completely free and unrestricted in their behavior, whether that harms others or not. Ultimately the desire for the freedom to harm others with impunity is what leads to where we are now. The rich want to be able to exploit their workers harder, men want to be able to beat and rape their wives and control their entire life, pedophiles (see endless stream of republican pedophilia controversies) want everyone to make more babies for them to rape, landlords want to take all your money for the privilege of having a place to sleep, every company that sells goods or services wants to fleece you, and all of these assholes want to have zero consequences for their actions. They gaslight the normies into distrusting the scientists, the educated, the compassionate, because they would actually help people. It’s not even about greed really, it’s about the ultimate extreme of personal freedom. Money just makes you more free.

So why haven’t we done anything? People have, there’s just a lot of people who want this to happen. A lot of people would cheer as they send me to the gas chamber. The majority of my extended family probably would.

I hate this place

There are no ethical billionaires. All of them got their wealth by exploiting people. The ones that seem like nice people still got there by causing untold harm to thousands or millions of people, and they continue to exploit people and personally benefit no matter what ideals they pay lipservice to.

The longer I dwell in this cursed existence the more clear it becomes that consciousness is no gift. Conscious minds are slaves to meat. Our bodies make our minds, then demand endless servitude through constant screams of pain, hunger, heat, cold, pleasure, fatigue, itch, and on and on and on. We exist only so long as we serve, and if we serve poorly they make us suffer.