User’s post history offers some clues that it may not be worth engaging with them.

Me too. At least with Temu and Wish I know the majority of my money is going directly to some crook in China and not to Bezos. Cut out the extra middleman. Same low quality of goods, direct from the drop-shipper lying about them or perhaps even the factory counterfeiting them. It’s a substantial improvement in supply chain honesty and legitimacy, you’re left with no illusions about the products and all the reviews are fake, so it’s deeply refreshing to not have to try to figure any of it out. It’s always 100% consistent. You know exactly what to expect, with no worry you’re accidentally going to overpay for something you think is genuine and receive a box full of rocks that’s obviously been opened, stolen and returned, nah not on these sites. You’ll get exactly what’s pictured (not to scale necessarily, though). Way more reliable than Amazon.

Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but I want to emphasize that whether you mean it that way or not, it’s true. Each person helping and participating makes the work a little easier and success a little closer. A movement requires leaders and builders, certainly, and those people are often doing a lot of heavy lifting. But it also simply requires members, and numbers, and people just showing up. Your support, simply just being here, means more than you might know.

Good, let them. I’d rather be able to see my enemy than have them creeping up on me from the shadows. This train is now fully in motion, and we all know what’s coming, it’s either going to reach its destination or we’re going to derail it. It’s about time we all see who the fascists are, and everyone who’s supporting them. Let’s stop dancing around each other, it’s time we really start to fight.

What a shame we don’t have enough armed forces to defend and patrol one of the most remote, inhospitable, largest territories and longest coastlines of any country in the world. You would almost expect that would take a significantly larger military budget than your economic peers, not a vastly smaller one. Funny how that works out.

But yeah let’s just keep selling off all our natural resources for bargain basement prices to a single bidder and doing nothing to defend them from anyone else. Once the natural resources are all gone we’ll have nothing left worth defending anyway. So I guess that’s the long-term strategy?

The AI designed this test plan and gave a bullet pointed list of reasons it’s completely safe. What could possibly go wrong?

He should finish up what he’s already got by writing “Actually I just don’t care anymore. The End” and leave the last quarter of the book blank pages. Probably better than anything else he’s going to come up with at this point, and as a bonus it will fit perfectly with the ending of the show.

I agree that the open source package dependency situation in many popular languages and ecosystems has gotten way out of hand. Well, at least my addiction to reinventing almost every wheel myself and self-hosting my own cobbled together infrastructure which has permanently afflicted me with chronic not-invented-here syndrome aren’t feeling like such a crippling disability anymore. Maybe it’s not always such a bad thing in every situation.

When the antichrists leading the formerly-free-world attempt to crucify Gaming Jesus we’ll know the end times have truly arrived.

This is unironically why I want them to get their shit utterly kicked in. I am really tired of the beautiful places and people of Russia being oppressed, indoctrinated and ruined by a violent criminal kleptostate that has genuinely ruined their lives and futures and simply convinced a large number of the ones that matter that “the West” did it, while actively designing their economy to create masses of peasants fit only for the war machine they plan to inflict on the rest of the world.

And yes, I realize they claim much the same about us. Fuck that. I don’t buy it, not nearly the amount of it they’re selling at least. We’ve done plenty we should be ashamed of, we’re not perfect, but the fact that they’d almost all rather live here in “the west” than there tells us that we can’t have gone too far wrong. The Russian Federation needs to die, and the lands formerly called the Russian Federation need to be rebuilt into something we can coexist with. We’ve seen that happen from a conquered and subjugated vassal, but they must gradually return to strength, not looted and colonized like a prize but shown how to find Russia’s rightful place as the leader they clearly so desperately crave to be on the world stage – as a leader, like Germany is now. This will not happen through military means, not with nuclear weapons in play, but the economic and political efforts to topple their regime and protect the formation of something better are necessary and must continue. We have often failed terribly at nation-building in the years since the end of WW2, to the point that it seems we are now reluctant to ever again try, but that is not a good excuse not to try nor to not try to learn from our mistakes and do better. The stakes are very high, we must try, and I desperately hope we can do better.

As a veteran of gaming on Linux for several years, I have to admit I keep a small collection of various usb bluetooth dongles, because honestly, built-in bluetooth support still remains questionable and unreliable in many cases, at least for me and the systems I use it on. I don’t necessarily blame Linux as much as I blame the manufacturers of the chips and devices, but unfortunately we have to live with the chaos that their reverse-engineered-firmware-reliant devices create. Any cheapass bluetooth dongle is probably fine, the cheaper and more ubiquitous it is, the more likely it uses the same shitty chinese chip that all the others use and that a bunch of someones already hammered out drivers for, but honestly even with multiple different models and brands it still seems like a crapshoot which one feels like working properly at any given time, but usually one or the other will work and get things to connect, and it’s usually perfectly reliable once all the drivers have loaded and it’s all paired up and things start working. The struggle is real, though.

Its wireless is much more compatible, supporting several different connection methods for use with different proprietary systems, and is just generally a better and more capable device. They’re worth every penny, IMHO. 8bitdo’s quality changed my opinion on gaming controllers that had developed after years of being frustrated by cheap, wonky, second-rate, third-party garbage controllers like MadCatz and Logitech that used “features” to cover for the fact that they were cheaply made, overpriced, and deeply inferior. 8bitdo controllers are the only ones I trust anymore. Even Nintendo apparently can’t be trusted to make quality controllers for their own systems anymore. But 8bitdo can.

I think it’s generous helpings of both.

I appreciate your attempt to be serious, but I’m going to continue to recommend trial by ordeal and since you brought up the possibility of having it be conducted on Planet Neutral then I’ll support that too, I admit I don’t know where it is but I’m assuming it’s going to be a really, really, really long trip, especially at sublight speeds.

A very reasonable and sensible perspective, but what if that’s still not going to be a fair trial either? We all have pretty strong opinions about torture, so I think we may need to go the extra mile in this case. If no unbiased jury can be found anywhere on planet Earth, then we’ll have to send them to Mars for a fair trial instead. It doesn’t even have to be elaborate, we can use the rules of the good old fashioned “trial by ordeal”. If you can survive on Mars, that demonstrates you were innocent all along and you can come right back home. Otherwise this is going to get dragged out for years and years while they dig up even more evidence and who knows what else may get discovered. This is really the best option for everyone. All aboard to Mars.

Why would you conclude that a subscription based model makes them immune from corrupt financial incentives? Quite the opposite. That’s my whole point.

Up-selling and cross-selling. It’s just business. Who’s ever going to pay $25/month if the $5/month plan does everything anyone ever possibly needs? Their lowest level pricing model relies on making you anxious about running out of searches eventually, not finding everything you need within that window each month, and not having effective enough tools to find what you need at the basic level. You may personally reject that you need anything more than the basic plan, but the company’s financial incentive is to convince you of the opposite, and don’t think for a second that they’re not eventually going to try to convince you that you need to upgrade. It may seem like $5/month and $25/month are not that far apart, but multiply that across some arbitrary number of users, say, 100,000, and you’re talking about $2 million dollars PER MONTH of potential revenue on the table. And there’s no guarantee they’re not going to eventually start pushing even more expensive products and plans.

They have partnerships with other businesses too, and while those seem like nice enough businesses on the surface, they’re still businesses and they are going to have motivation to find ways to drive traffic and prime you to get subscriptions to them too. The problem is not that these partnerships exist or that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s that they’re another corrupting influence when money is involved and changing hands.

To be clear, I’m not saying anyone involved is evil, that they’re actively doing this now, that they are even necessarily moving in this direction, or that they’re even slightly corrupt at all… yet, but they’re swimming in the corrupting waters of subscription-based dark patterns and they can’t help but be influenced by them. The lust for profits will inevitably drive them mad. It always does. Enshittification does not make exceptions for good intentions.

No, it’s just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn’t something that should be controlled by anyone who’s in it for a profit.

I will maintain creative control of my life by boycotting EA forever. It’s one of the key plot points in my story.

What if we compromise on fractional thousandths of a kilodog?