Anomandaris

Obviously things cost money, you patronising jackass, but pining all your hopes on CEOs and the ultra-wealthy to cut in to their own profit margins for the sake of humanity makes you more braindead than I am. It’s scientific innovation that drives discovery, cost reduction, and economic growth, not profit-hoarding conglomerates.

A large portion of our discoveries and inventions in the past fifty years or more are building on top of innovations made during the 60s, 70s, and 80s by NASA’s launches. Electrical engineering, structural engineering, communications and data, materials sciences, all needed to be advanced for space travel. Handing this responsibility off to SpaceX just leads to all the data, discoveries, innovations, and corollaries being patented, trademarked, and locked away to make sure no competitor can take advantage of it.

Shell knew climate change was going to devastate the planet over 50 years ago. Did they capitalise on that opportunity to develop green and renewable energy first and completely dominate that market for the betterment of themselves and the planet? No. They locked down that information, spread misinformation for decades, and made short term profiteering decisions to advance their own individual careers. Now we’re watching the planet slowly burn. So sure, let’s trust the corporate pigs.

This is a horrible take. Absolutely awful, ultra-capitalist drivel. Why does every action or accomplishment have to be viewed through the lense of economic benefit? Not even holistic or utilitarian, just stakeholders and making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier… Who gives a fuck about space tourism? What the hell does that give us as a species?

The original comment about the importance of aerospace and space exploration is absolutely correct, but the idea that the end goal is space tourism is more than enough to make me turn against it also. The end goal is exploration, technological advancements, and a greater understanding of how our universe works. We should be taxing the ever-loving shit out of sociopaths like Musk and Bezos and feeding some of that in to NASA, and ESA, so scientists can make discoveries for us all, rather than businessmen making discoveries so they can exploit, gatekeep, and profit off it.

It seems like their economy is reliant on a series of short term fixes, and as each one winds down another bigger one needs to take its place.

12% interest is another example of this, it will improve things in the short term but has no effect on the underlying problems, meaning that in a couple of months or so something even more drastic will be needed.

And the rest of the developed world is going to follow close behind as long as the wealth inequality stays as ridiculously broken as it is.

gold checkmark identifying that the account belongs to a verified brand.

Blue checkmark and gold checkmark are different things.

RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.

All are good choices.

But the other side of that is no political accountability. There’s no risk of punishment, so why should they care? Insider trading, corruption, nepotism, general lying, acting in bad faith, and intentionally misrepresenting facts to disrupt useful debate.

Politicians get away with all of that and more, and get paid massive amounts of money, above and below the table, while they do it.

It’s so weird to me, what do they expect to happen to the economy of their state when their workforce has such a poor education?

I don’t think so, the ARPG I have in mind wouldn’t be open world, would have no campaign and much less focus on story overall, a much more detailed crafting system akin to Path Of Exile but perhaps less punishing, and much more focus on stacking up as many extra modifiers as possible rather than being limited, push your team to get the best rewards.

No timegating, no daily/weekly quests you must log in for, the only limitation is your skill.

I’ve been thinking about an ARPG based around World of Warcraft’s mythic dungeons.

Scalable, multi-player, enhanceable instances where completion of more difficult versions of the instance rewards in better gear and crafting options.

The idea is that the content is created for a 5-man party (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps) but you can try solo it, or bring up to 20 people to massively increase the difficulty and the rewards. Instances would follow WoW dungeon’s formula of trash mobs (which drop crafting materials and have rare drop chances for certain gear) pathing you towards a succession of bosses with very different, complex mechanics with stages, signaled abilities, and skill requirements.

This would include a character levelling system to unlock new class abilities and mechanisms, a party finder system, certain dungeons locked behind character level and the completion of other dungeons at a certain difficulty level. Perhaps you could extend it to add in “world bosses”, massive 200-man bosses with a chance at particularly unique loot, but of course that would require a certain level of infrastructure and a game population making it justifiable.

To provide a different perspective to everyone else, I would say that it’s not the right time if you want everything to “just work”.

I tried out Ubuntu 22.04 just a couple of months ago, and only one game of the several I tried “just worked”. Everything else either didn’t work at all, or required hours of searching and troubleshooting and problem solving, with mixed success. And I’m not a technophobe, I’m a software developer with experience in system support.

People keep saying there’s lots of guides out there for most things, and that’s true. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the guide will work for you. I tried multiple “guides” to get my games working and most of them didn’t help. Either they were too old, or there was a step that I couldn’t complete, or I completed the guide and there was an error that isn’t mentioned in the guide. Or any number of other problems.

Regardless of what people say, it may not be as simple as “switch to Proton and install Lutris”. In the end I just got frustrated with having to work so hard to get my own computer to do the things I wanted it to do, and so I reverted back to Windows and had all my software working as expected within a couple of hours.

-50% ad revenue says otherwise

One of the topics I’ve seen become more prevalent in recent years is the idea of limiting your use of privacy addons and softwares, with the aim of trying to prevent your fingerprint becoming too unique.

For example, there are probably a billion users with 21 inch monitors, running Windows 11, browsing on Google Chrome. Providing them with that information just makes you one more in the bunch, but if you stack up privacy addons you end up creating a more easily identifiable picture of yourself through the hole you created by hiding information.

Like most things, it’s about balance. All changes to open source software must be approved by the community managing it, and if that community is lazy or poorly managed or simply too busy then there’s an opportunity for new vulnerabilities to be created, either accidentally or maliciously.

But for well managed software, as other people have said you can get more changes more frequently, more security as many people are evaluating the code base, and greater attention to what users want rather than what’s profitable. Whereas with closed source software there is a greater focus on profitability, and sometimes that leaves vulnerabilities open when development is rushed and/or vulnerabilities are not seen as important enough to justify the cost to fix, but sometimes that tendancy towards profitability can also ensure the product stays a market leader. Steam may be a good example of a good closed source product.

It would be interesting to see exactly how Meta is managing to block VPN users. Is it simply a matter of looking up instagram or facebook account related to email addresses used to sign up? Is it evaluating some sort of browser fingerprint? That’s assuming VPN users are doing so via desktop, if it’s an Android device for example is the OS itself providing information that’s not getting obfuscated by the VPN?

This is the issue with the new “own nothing, subscription only” and “if you’re not the customer, you’re the product” type models. Everyone went to Threads to take a look at the brand new thing, but now everyone has seen the new thing they’re gone.

All the hype that was built up initially based on that curiosity comes across as arrogance and empty promises as users inevitably get bored of the new shiny thing that’s really just another attempt to harvest them for their metadata and ad-sense.

But it’s definitely only part of the solution, that alone is not enough, but nothing else will have a strong effect while so many guns are on the streets and easily accessible.

No I didn’t, I think I was pretty clear. We need to reduce the number of guns available, nothing else will be effective until we do. I do believe any solution that does not involve removing guns at some point is incomplete. But removing guns on its own is not enough.

Yes, technically weapons are tools

Again, I’m not arguing a gun isn’t a tool. In fact, in the very comment you’re replying to I said they are.

But all of this is besides the actual point, you derailed the point of gun culture and availability driving gun violence with an ultimately meaningless conversation about semantics.

Yes, technically weapons are tools, that’s because the definition of a tool is so broad, just a device used to carry out a particular task.

That’s why I never said he was wrong to call a gun a tool, I said it was misleading, which it is. When a reasonable person thinks of a tool they do not think of a gun, you think of a wrench or a screwdriver or a swiss army knife, or something like that.

Calling a gun a tool is intentionally misleading. A gun’s sole purpose is as a weapon, using it any other way is a misuse of that “tool”. Whereas knives have various practical purposes. Which was obviously the purpose of my initial reply.

In some cases, yes, having a gun is entirely legitimate (assuming used safely) such as protection from dangerous wildlife. But the number of legitimate cases does not even come close to justifying the number of guns, or the gun culture, in America. Violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum, the presence of guns, the acceptance of gun culture, and the normalization of gun violence are things that contribute to the frequency of gun crime.

The removal of guns, and restricting of them to legitimate use cases IS dealing with the underlying social issues. But it’s definitely only part of the solution, that alone is not enough, but nothing else will have a strong effect while so many guns are on the streets and easily accessible.