I’m not saying it was a majority issue, I’m saying the beginnings of the social turn against LGBTQ openness and inclusion has been brewing under the surface for a long time and this is potentially evidence of it.

Not just that, but this is free home-made ice cream.

so I think we could say that this trend of being a disgusting bigot is one which is being ‘allowed’ more recently than it once was in social media.

I always try to bring this up because honestly, if we go pretty far back in internet terms, we can see that this has actually been brewing for over a decade.

In 2013, EA won the Consumerist poll for “Worst Company in America.” While mostly people pointed to arguably rational reasons for these votes (DRM, microtransactions, badly made and released games), the COO of EA had some other thoughts as to why they got hammered so hard as the worst company:

In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America. That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we’re not caving on that.

When this happened in 2013, most of us thought this was absolute bunkum and just EA doing damage control. Now, I’m genuinely not so sure anymore. I think perhaps some suit at EA had noticed something happening, some change in the waters that had not yet become “mainstream” but was bubbling beneath the surface, slowly growing. People made fun of this response from EA, because we thought at the time “this is the modern era, those are just backwards fools stuck in the past that are complaining about LGBT inclusion, if they even exist at all, I bet EA is making it up to cover for how shitty they are.” But… were they?? At the time it was roundly dismissed because popular culture widely accepted LGBTQ inclusion, but now we’re on a backswing and people feel emboldened to be disgusting bigots and be loud and proud about being a exclusive asshat who hates people different than themselves. Has it just been brewing under the surface for over a decade?

I think both of your arguments in this thread have merit. You are correct that it is a misused tool, and you are correct that the better solution is a more compassionate society. The other person is also correct that we can and do at least make attempts to make such tools less available as paths to self harm. Since you used the analogy of people jumping off bridges, I have lived near bridges where this was common so barriers and nets were put up to make it difficult for anyone but the most determined to use it as a path to suicide. We are indeed failing people in a society that puts profit over human life first, but even in a more idealized society mental health issues and attempts at suicide would still happen and to not fail those people we would still need to do things like erect barriers and safeguards to prevent self-harm. In my eyes both of you are correct and it is not an either or issue as much as it is a “por que no los dos?” issue. Why not build a better society and still build in safeguards?

You’re welcome. Easy mistake to make, I make it constantly, in fact haha!

LLMs Have Lead Led to 14 Deaths

FTFY

There’s a few different ways for you to probe for info on your USB devices:

lsusb - lists pretty much everything usb related, including root hubs on your motherboard

For a more readable lsusb output you can lsusb -v | grep -E '\<(Bus|iProduct|bDeviceClass|bDeviceProtocol)' 2>/dev/null in my experience it can be helpful to slap a sudo on the beginning as well because sometimes certain devices can’t be polled without root privileges.

usb-devices - similar to lsusb but produces much more detailed (but less human readable) information

find /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb*/ -name dev - produces a list of where the system saves information on usb devices. Each of the listed folders will hold a lot of files with a wealth of information on each usb device, but be very careful and do not edit these files.

You can also do this to see what the system is doing in the background and then try plugging and unplugging devices from the offending usb ports:

watch "dmesg | tail -20"

You’ll at least be able to see if the system is registering anything at all when trying to use those ports, or if it’s as though the system doesn’t see them at all.

I have a similar issue on my Lenovo ThinkBook but the ports don’t work in any OS despite being enabled in the UEFI. I still haven’t figured out what is wrong with them, but it seems they may just be toast. Thankfully the USB-C ports still work and I can just connect a hub to one of those.

I have so many reasons to not use Kagi.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20240412153748/https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770/

Yeah, pretty sure it was called “Fex” translation layer for emulating x86 binaries on ARM64. To me that was absolutely the biggest takeaway, because that’s a massive game-changer for eventually moving the industry away from x86 exclusivity and into wider adoption of other architectures.

RSS support is absolutely my favorite old-web thing that’s still around. It truly is fantastic to have your own curated RSS feeds.

The Fediverse specifically lets you create them really granularly as well!

Misleading title.

There are indeed “weird blogs” they just have to be devoid of capitalist funding.

Corey Doctorow’s Pluralistic seems in many ways to be a natural extension of his BoingBoing days albeit a bit more serious than the lighthearted BoingBoing.

MetaFilter fully became a non-profit and still retains a more a blog-esque format than it’s contemporaries.

Mother Jones has a strong online presence and has avoided the capitalist machine for it’s entire existence.

The thing is (and the more important part of this story is) that submitting to the capitalist machine is to submit to its machinations and unwillingness to adhere to the age-old social contract of a business producing profit to be sufficient enough for a business to exist. Modern capitalism is indeed a shell-game of extracting maximum value, essentially truly squeezing blood from a stone until the stone no longer even exists. Anyone who willingly plays this game will be bitten by this game, unless they themselves become ruthless capitalists and focus all their energy on shell-game chicanery over producing actual products, services, or content. There is no end-game here where the plucky capitalist-minded business-owner can overcome all and become the master of their own domain. The few who have (Valve, for example) had a solid financial footing to begin their more unique forays into profit-driving and they have stayed independent companies instead of publicly owned companies. That alone has saved them, and most of them (again, like Valve) started in an era before the behemoth of VC (Vulture/Vampire Capitalism) took hold, and made their early profits soon enough to not need such outside funding. Starting such a company today? Without outside funding? Get real. You’d have to be someone like Gabe Newell, who exited Microsoft with enough money to take a risk to make a profit of his own without needing outside stake, and the number of Gabe Newell’s exiting industry to make their own goes at new business are exceedingly rare. The ones that actually succeed in making a profitable company are even rarer.

In capitalist America, the “free market” binds you and dictates your future.

Which is even sadder because Ethereum has always been a trash coin.

Absolutely, which was my point. That the tooth thing wasn’t “only two years ago” it’s actually been in the research and development process for probably over 15 years at this point, with a long way to go.

I hear pocket pool is a lot of fun.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2014.00036/full

It’s been in the works for over ten years. Here is a paper on research into it from 2014.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3000521/

Here’s another one from 2010.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1882761608000070#cesec60

And another from 2008.

Potentially even one or two tech companies that have been around for decades depending on how large it gets before that burst.

Please be Microsoft, please be Microsoft, please be Microsoft.

Sometimes you just cant beat the classics.

Underrated because the game itself was often kind of lacking in terms of solid foundational RPG systems…

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Pretty good attempt at putting a Middle Earth type world ahead a few hundred years in the midst of an Industrial Revolution.

Really thoughtful stuff like the labor exploitation of certain races like orcs, with quests like a half-orc you can help start a labor union or help the shop boss shut down the nascent union.

Twice now I have tried to make a top level comment and accidentally responded to a thread instead… Anyway…

Instead of leaving this deleted I will agree wholeheartedly that while I personally am not the biggest fan of the TES series they have some of the most deep, complex and (somewhat) organized lore there is.

I just wish they would hire better script writers and weren’t so afraid of locking content behind player choices. Always having every option available just feels a little silly.

Wait Raft has lore and world building?? I love that game but I never even paid that close attention. Guess I need to go look now.