Sad thing is from what I understand, Spanish language news commonly available in the US (Unavision I believe?) basically fed Latinos a straight up false version of the guy, the description I read sounded even less accurate than Fox.
The overwhelming effectiveness of widespread media manipulation is the real story (and human tragedy…) here.
Dope, detailed writeup, thank you!
Oh, also - largely with you on Robux. I mean I don’t have a problem with it in principle, ideally it lets kids (through their parents) effectively choose which games and creators to support, and there have lately been some big games with big frequent updates that kids have found to be super enjoyable. Like, content updates at rates traditional games would be embarrassed by.
But like all things involving $, I’m sure there’s lots of eventual exploitation. And manipulation of kids to want to buy is definitely bad. But then again, by my measure, kids need to be instructed on recognizing and resisting precisely that from a young age. That manipulation is everywhere and getting worse all the time.
You’re probably right, I’ve once or twice (from an older account) asked a user to elaborate or give specifics, after they’d made some wild claims about safety, never gotten anything.
I do know of at least one truly hideous group of people using the platform as communication and recruitment to some really horrendous (life ruining) stuff, maybe this article references that too. But again, that’s a problem of sufficiently large user bases (especially of kids). Among millions of users it’s mathematically not realistic to prevent every possible group in the size of dozens from congregating to attempt their awful shit. Motivated humans are good at overcoming even well-designed systems.
We’re certainly right to care about safety though, and I do want to know if Roblox is less safe than I imagine.
Roblox chat is so restrictive that it routinely makes it difficult to talk about normal things. My daughter has spent a ton of time on Roblox (while being prohibited from many other things including unfettered YouTube, for context) and I really don’t see what the fuss is about. I’ve played with her on and off for years, it has always struck me as a generally safe platform, and I’m both sensitive and clued in about the topic.
Anything with user numbers like Roblox is going to attract the darkest corners of the internet, that’s unavoidable. It doesn’t strike me that there’s anything particularly dangerous about Roblox beyond that fact, they seem to manage it well and actually the platform seems pretty safe all things considered.
Seriously dangerous! I like your analogy, it’s even a little worse though, it’s like doing that but also the planes have an engineered preference to steer towards the worst places.
Right, this is simple stuff - for a 4 year old, content of any kind must be curated, and I’d argue that stays true in different ways for quite a while.
Yeesh. Before ever turning over entire decision-making power on a very uncontrolled platform to a kid, ya gotta help walk them through stuff and spend time curating / selecting content together. And also wait for them to grow up some and demonstrate readiness.
And certainly never trust YouTube’s curation, ever, agreed.
4 yo rawdogging modern AI slop YouTube shorts, solo, is wild.
I have a 12 year old. I considered YouTube unsafe for her unsupervised, when she was growing up (and largely still do, we have a healthy teamwork approach to it). The place is just magnitudes worse now. And yep, parents are super ignorant (and have been), they have no idea what the kids are even watching, many don’t really restrict the time they spend at all.
YEAH MF, congrats, now your brain is malwared to fuck, you shouldn’t have looked at it dead on. Limewire is best treated like a Medusa… whose effects show up later.
Guaranteed 10 years earlier dementia onset at a minimum, probably some strokes that leave you “revealing” family secrets invented out of whole cloth by the w4r3z in your now-compromised, botnet brain.
Sorry, Limewire was a wild ride. Could just be the way memories work, but looking back, I think Limewire delivered what I actually tried to download <50% of the time, maybe <30% by the time I stopped using it.
Napster was super dope (and, oddly enough, accidentally produced a solid way for me to buy drugs from the hood, lmao), and Soulseek was absolutely delicious, but - alas.
I just bought two oldish business class Dell laptops this last week and put Bazzite on em both, for the fam. Easing out our Chromebooks we’ve used for minor things, just can’t abide a machine that won’t let me actually own it anymore, with the way the world’s going.
Not exactly revolutionary lol, but your enthusiasm demanded something in response, so I wanted to let you know that we (and I bet lots of others!) are all in. And I really hope you keep doing stuff like this!!
If I haven’t contributed something to Lutris by this year’s Hacktoberfest, by golly I’m committing (heh) to putting an open issue to rest during best month.
Cheers and thanks again!!
I’d commit grave sins to be able to inhabit and play in Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe. The bizarre post-human factions alone, so alien and horrifying in the best way. Could legit make for a really dark MMO. I’d have to go Ultra, though, no question.
The extreme timescales, the highly personal, self-driven body modification, culminating in a truly unique, grotesque sort of personality to one’s own body…one which can’t help but physically, visibly project the creeping, gibbering paranoia nurtured by millennia spent slowly becoming so estranged from every other lifeform once called kin, making one’s journey through time and space utterly, irreversibly alone, even when traveling with others…
For sheer thrill and a tight looter-shooter game, on the other hand, I’d be SO stoked for one using his Revenger universe. Ohhhh to crack those baubles, each a potential Pandora’s box of hilariously dangerous relics involving hideous and long-forgotten exotic physics…not to mention, who knows who or what has been lurking just beyond perception, waiting for you to do the risky dirty work of extracting some particularly nasty doodad…
One can dream.
Now this is top tier pedantry, ya love to see it.
Edit: if you would’ve subtly but deliberately screwed up that idiom, this would be elevated to a true masterpiece
Billy Mays did pass into the Great Beyond, after all…that guy could sell some As Seen on TV omnipotence to a whole pantheon of deities, I’m sure of it.
Completely useless comment here but maaaan, Max Payne, Red Faction, and BloodRayne were all easy 10/10 for me (to be fair I was easier to impress then). Seeing them stacked together like that immediately short circuited the joke and just made me worry this was a list of great games and I’d missed a bunch.
Great point of view and yet another strong reason not to just allow internet connections on every damn thing. One other huge reason - being forced to accept brand new (legally binding!) licensing agreements, long after the device has been paid for and installed.
Roku was in the news somewhat recently for auto-installing an update that required users to accept a new license agreement to continue to use the device they’d paid for and had been using up until that point. And that license wasn’t a trivial change, it required the user to agree to forced arbitration!
In other words, in a very real sense, they came into the house and modified the TV (not just the cheap little streaming devices), then turned around and said “Want to keep using this thing you’ve made a part of your daily life? That you already paid us for? Well, fine you can, but - we don’t want any of you to ever sue us, so agree not to or fuck you. Don’t think too hard about it, it’s your TV, just say yes and get on with it”.
Wild stuff! And I guarantee it gets worse before it gets better. We need high quality FOSS hardware badly, I really hope we see that start to take off in a bigger way. I’m not super optimistic though, hardware being just a lot harder to iterate on.
This is a particularly useful way to phrase it / think about it, gonna hold onto this one, thanks!
That guy’s still at it?! Fairly sure I listened to him (and Leo… Laporte ?) podcasting 15-20 years ago. Crazy
Completely agree about watching the privacy destruction ramp up significantly in recent years. The one silver lining is that deciding how much and what to allow for myself and my children is just a lot easier, and even in less abusive scenarios, less smartphone use is good for basically all of us.
Goddamn, that is dark…Black Mirror here we are, I guess.
I’ve personally never met a carpenter, union or otherwise. I’ve known a handful of framers - these are the folks assembling (way faster than is reasonable to expect) the somewhat pre-built wooden structures that eventually comprise a new house. The demands placed on those folks are extreme, they seem to be among the worst treated among the trades.
Spending your career in a trade isn’t a bad idea, probably a good one - it’s way better for a lotta folks than a thoroughly dissatisfying stretch of time in largely meaningless, forever anxious, corporate jobs.
Exercise some care though - don’t just assume something like “working with my hands will pay off”, do the research to find out what you specifically can be happy with, and the pros and cons involved.
And by and large, if you’re going the trades route, prefer one with a heavy union presence.