I recently read some of his interviews from a decade or so ago and in several of them he brought up the idea that the U.S. had lied to Gorbachev about not extending NATO eastward in exchange for letting Germany reunite, then had been trying to move east ever since. I’m guessing it’s related to this since I’ve heard this argument from Russia after it invaded Ukraine.

Your Pokémon comparison reminds me of something I’ve noticed with gaming. Sometimes the game just has to hit me at the right time, regardless of nostalgia. I’ve had games that I bounced off of multiple times, then years later I decide to give it a go and get sucked in. I’m fairly sure this sometimes happens due to other factors in my life at the time (situations I’m currently experiencing, things I haven’t experienced, etc.).

For me, personally, these games are the closest thing on a computer to a nearly endless sandbox tabletop rpg experience. I don’t like having to do some grand “save the world” narrative that RPGs push you into, and in Skyrim I can avoid it after the intro or mod it out. Then I create characters like a tabletop RPG (I develop a backstory and where I choose to go and what I choose to do is based on the character’s personality in my mind) and essentially play it like it is a solo tabletop game where the engine takes care of a lot of the work.

I haven’t played in years, though, because I can’t get the same level of immersion as I did when playing for 5 hours straight before having kids.

Some just want money.

I think this article: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/23/17043978/uk-porn-age-verification-law-mindgeek

Is about pornhub’s parent company trying to lobby in favor of this because it thought it could make money by selling age verification. I read an article saying something to that effect quite some time ago, and I think this is the article, but can’t be sure because it’s requiring a login and the archive site isn’t loading for me at the moment.

If they work anything like the far right in the U.S., they’ll raise hell about it til they get elected then implement it themselves.

Scrolling to the right is also slow as hell with this. It used to scroll across several videos at once but now it scrolls one per swipe.

I stopped using the main page and started using the subscriptions page, which still has the smaller icons. I’m using YouTube a lot less, though.

The more data they have, the more accurate the picture. You may be underestimating how much we all change over the years. At 24 you know what your parents taught you and maybe have a degree. You probably aren’t married. You probably don’t have kids. You probably don’t have any diseases (that you know of).

At 30, maybe you’re married and they’re collecting information about that. At 35 you’ve changed careers and gained or lost a religion. Maybe you have children (now they’re adding info on your children). Maybe you’ve found out that you are diabetic or bipolar. Maybe you’ve had two car accidents. At 40 you’ve cast off a lot of the demands of your parents. Maybe you get divorced. Maybe you realize you’re gay or trans. Maybe you become invested in a different type of politics. Maybe you change careers again. Maybe the bipolar diagnosis gets removed as a misdiagnosis. Maybe now you’ve had cancer.

Imagine how much less they’d have on you (and your children) at 45 if you had cut them off at 24.

Some of those mean the more people that use anti facial recognition tools, the more effective they will be for everyone. So we should probably just encourage everyone to use it.

I’ve read that the encryption keys are stored on Google servers. If so, they could decrypt them if they wanted.

A while back I tried to create an account with vpn and got notice that said something about how I couldn’t use it to validate other accounts without validating that account because other companies had threatened to label them as untrustworthy or spam.

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We already do it for utilities. A financial company should not be deciding what its users are allowed to spend their own money on except within the confines of law.

I think US customs said it was because he admitted to using drugs in the past and had photos of a paraphernalia on his phone. He said they ignored that stuff and focused on the photo. So it comes down to whether you think one specific customs employee could potentially see something they don’t like and choose to refuse entry for another reason or that customs is being honest and open about the reason his entry was refused and that the people making the announcement fully understand the situation (including the thoughts of the person that examined the photos).

I feel like the latter is unlikely, but I don’t have enough evidence to say either way. I don’t think drug paraphernalia in a photo or admitting past drug use are good reasons to refuse entry either.

It’s too hot for that and I don’t think Google should control what people wear.

One thing to keep in mind is that dual booting can work to highlight what you’re missing because generally all of the games that run on Linux will run on Windows, but the reverse is not true. It becomes easy to just default to windows so you don’t have to reboot to play something that doesn’t work in Linux and that can undermine the attempt to switch the OS.

Seems like they could just release the server software for the online only games. I’m pretty sure people are reverse engineering it anyway.

0.286x damage done, 3.5x damage taken. Doesn’t scale well at all. It would be nice if it were more granular and they had separate sliders for damage done and damage taken.

Invisible weapons are all the rage these days.

2021. This whole thing blew up and they backed down.

Honestly, I don’t want age signals sent at all. As long as I (the parent) can use parental controls to limit app access, that’s all that matters. Give users the option to deny ad personalization and that protects children from ad personalization. Companies don’t need to know anyone’s age. Meta is pushing for more data, but this feels like an underhanded way to take a middle road that gives Google more data (but not as much as Meta wants). We should take the high road and tell them both to butt out.