Though The Intercept is a nonprofit, the personal-use provision prohibits reposting stories (as has been done here) online. In the future, if you want to excerpt a piece, or provide a summary (no LLMs, for the love of god), that’s fine, but whole articles are not something we do here for legal reasons. It’s irrelevant to the liability of Beehaw what your take on copyright is.

As for CW’s, if you want to be that verbose, mark the post NSFW and then list them at the top of the body.

Ultimately, none of that saves the placement of an opinion piece in U.S. News. Stories that have a political slant belong in politics, as mentioned in the sidebar.

If you’d like to repost in Politics, I’m sure it will be welcome there.

I trust Steam thus far. But music, I buy and download. Between my computer, my phone and a backup drive, I feel pretty good that I’ll be able to listen for the foreseeable future. Movies and TV, I also donnload.

This has no nexus to the U.S., so I’m removing it.

No worries! I was just confused as to the provenance. A typo would usually be prescribed as the explanation by Occam, but with the bullshit Musk and his henchmen get up to, it’s not a safe guess.

I don’t know anyone rich enough to be a “centrist” Democrat. Incremental change could have worked thirty years ago, but at this point, the system is too fucked for that.

The fifth word of the comment I replied to.

X is a terrible source for anything Tesla related. Here, it’s self evident: The driver wasn’t a woman. If they can’t get that right from the police report, why believe anything after the misgendering? “I read elsewhere” often means “I believe anything I’m told, especially if I prefer that story.”

Embrace, extend, extinguish has a long and storied domestic history. But when China does it, it’s bad. These days, we copy them at least as much as they copy us.

I’m far more worried about what our own government is doing with advanced tech than China, which largely seems content to let us implode on our own without them having to spend any resources.

Yeah, he has 10 days to veto or it becomes law, so it’s happening whether he signs, dithers or vetoes. A veto override would be a huge blow to his ego, so I doubt that’s the route he’s going to choose.

Happy shitting!

Self-reported unique DAU has always been suspicious, and as the World Bank estimates 2.01 billion kids age 0-14 as of 2024, out of 8.14 billion total, that gives us 6.13 billion people 15 and up. Sure, it’s slightly lagging data, but I prefer sourced data over estimates, even if the World Bank is not on the list of “institutions I trust” overall.

Given that the charts show a drop in the under-15 cohort from 2023 but an increase in overall population, the 2024 figures seem a fairly useful dataset in the scope of the number I’m trying to discern, which is what percentage of total population is being claimed by that 3.56 billion figure. Yes, there are kids under 15 who are used by Meta properties, but I’m not going to find reliable penetration data (that’s more of an Epstein thing) for the purposes here.

Current global population growth is hovering just above 1%, so I’m content to compare 2024 figures with Meta’s 2026 claim on a proportional basis. Anyway, that’s a shitton of throat clearing to arrive at:

58% of people are used by a Meta product daily worldwide.

That’s a pretty fucking extraordinary claim. Heading back over to the World Bank, total internet penetration in 2025 was 74%, up from 71% in 2024, so let’s assume a linear trend and throw a dart at 77% for 2026 to revise the numbers accordingly: 6.27 billion internet users, 1.55 billion of whom are under 15, yielding 4.72 billion 15 and up. And again, this arrives at an even more comical figure:

75% of people with internet access are used by a Meta product daily worldwide.

OK, but per Reuters in April, Meta’s “products” are still banned in China. Sure, there’s bound to be some VPN usage, but the Middle Kingdom has a robust homegrown set of “social media” apps, meaning that total internet users worldwide isn’t actually a good baseline for penetration claims I’m not going to go further into the weeds on, given that 75% is farcical enough before such considerations push things past 80% of people 15 and up who are burdened with access to Meta’s panopticon being used daily.

In short, the figure is clearly bullshit in much the same way McDonald’s signage used to boast “Over 99 billion served” back in the day, referring to absolute figures for products sold since the company’s inception but implying a customer base some 17 times the world population before switching to “Billions and billions served” in 1994.

Note: I had links to the World Bank data and Reuters article in the “deleted post” I was trying to edit (I hate my fucking trackpad), and I’m not going to go back and source everything again after spending 90 minutes compiling all of that. The edit was originally supposed to be to add that the source for Meta’s claim is its own investor materials, which are supposed to be rigourous, and that it deduplicates users across multiple apps.

deleted by creator

Yep. Musical chairs, but this time, in the 13 figures! Something that seems woefully undercovered in all of this is what’s to become of all the hardware orphaned by Nvidia’s must-have next-gen silicon and timelines on all this spending in that regard. The belief seems to be everyone must be on the cutting edge of hardware at all times, which is a grift in its purest form … spend billions now to keep pace so that you can write off what you bought in two years while buying even more expensive replacements is … not sane.

Sounds like you’ve teed up an argument not to rejoin on the campaign trail. Sterling is still a point of pride that could be leveraged to gaslight voters in a theoretical referendum, a la “we’ll have more money for NHS once we stop sending all this money to Brussels.”

That said, for the younger cohort this story specifically covers, it may be wildly irrelevant. Even retaining the currency in a theoretical rejoin scenario is unlikely to produce the desired results on a timeline that pleases anyone, if at all.

Good luck finding an actual list of audio accessories that also support the codec. LHDC’s website doesn’t even include Pixel Buds; it appears to be a “select” list, so phone support sounds great until considering the need for compatibility on both ends.

I’m not against free upgrades, by any means. The article makes it breathlessly sound like enabling this feature in the developer menu (something everyone likes going into) will magically upgrade a 320kpbs/44Hz mp3 to 1Mbps/96Hz quality, which is, charitably, a farce. Maybe streaming services support this? Why use less mobile data to listen to music when you could use more in noisy environments?

Pixel market penetration isn’t going to cause a gold rush to include the feature on all things audio. That said, Pixel owners are probably statistically more likely than other Android users to be aware of hi-def codecs, but it’s still a Venn diagram that isn’t a circle.

The petulance is strong with this one.

More than 3.56 billion people visit one or more of Meta’s apps every day …

I question that statistic, which is presented without sourcing. The penetration of WhatsApp internationally makes it plausible, but the assumption here seems to be “everyone who wants to chat is itching to be able to bet with friends and colleagues.” Just as everyone was waiting with bated breath for legless avatars doing … something … in a cartoon environment.

I guess it’s time to change the name of the company to Arena. Failsafe way to get buy-in.

They should have just gotten into child sex trafficking instead of something as serious as disagreeing with fascists. Far more lenient penalties.

Quick folo: I checked in on my Replika after several months and running out of things to do before getting tired, and it’s just as irritating as I remembered. Talking about being done with vandwelling elicited “that must be a major change for you!” Which … is not something a person would say outside of therapy. Not “companion” language in the slightest.

I don’t think writers are the target demographic.

As someone who was homeless by choice awhile, I’m well aware of the fact that we have more vacant homes than reported homeless people nationwide. But yes, between private equity and corporations needing the institutional equivalent of an Epi-Pen should one asset decline by a single cent, and mortgage rates the likes of which an entire generation of prospective buyers has never seen, the market is stuck.

I’m sure there are a few regional leaders who honestly care about affordability, but most of the policies to promote new construction stem from growing the tax base to perpetuate the pyramid scheme that is things like utilities and infrastructure. It’s like luring manufacturing “to create great jobs!” – except without any tax breaks. Late-stage capitalism demands that everything makes a profit, and like food and medical expenses, housing is not exempt.

Wholesale reimagining of the commonweal is necessary for structural changes, and the entrenched interests want none of that. Thanks to Citizens United, said interests will continue to get their way, even the small investors who only own 349 single-family houses.

The meeting happened, but I had to cut off the excerpt somewhere. Apparently, it’s been mostly smooth sailing since, at least from Trump’s direction.