Free speech issues are not relevant because it’s a private company. Free speech is about limiting the government’s ability to control speech, companies are always free to do so for their own reasons on their own platforms. While that can be problematic when you don’t know whether the government is leaning on the companies behind the scenes, what the first amendment is really written to prevent is the overt fascist gestapo tactics the Trump administration is now using to bully their critics.

It is important to understand the constitution and why it was written, so people can act accordingly. It’s especially important when the government is not acting accordingly.

I am not a fan of platformers and puzzles, in general, and am not too interested in this concept specifically. But I may end up buying it out of spite for hateful people. I also suggest taking a peek at their previous game Semblance which, although also a platformer, looks genuinely sort of novel to me (granted, as I said, I am not a fan of platformers in general so maybe it is in fact not unique at all). Feel free to take my thoughts with a large grain of salt, this is not really my area of expertise.

The moment Trump says any sort of number the event should just end, return to your regularly scheduled programming, no need for any further attention because you know for a fact that everything he says past that point is complete fiction without a shred of usefulness to anybody.

No one’s going to convince me that an accurate numerical figure has ever passed through that man’s lips, and if it did, it was a cosmic accident.

True, that’s what I was trying to imply when I said it’s necessary to progress. I suppose someone could maybe devise a mod to provide evidence to the contrary, but I’m pretty sure the starter deck pool simply wouldn’t have enough scaling to survive at higher ascension levels.

That said, I would absolutely love some kind of mechanic that allows you to control the contents of the overall pool to some limited degree as well. (Too much freedom would essentially trivialize the game and I’m not sure if there’s any mechanic that would provide effective counterplay to a literally stacked deck)

Absolutely. The reason for this is that as you get to understand the mechanics more you’ll naturally start adopting higher risk play which provides access to higher potential rewards, and that is in some ways necessary to progress, and also really incredibly satisfying when it pays off. But the risks will bite you more often, which then feels like you’re just “being worse at the game”. The progression and scaling mechanics of games like these basically force you to adopt riskier strategies to overcome the challenges that higher levels of play bring.

The really experienced high level players do a very delicate balancing act of min/maxing to do get the absolute most they can out of the minimum level of risk they need to realistically have a sensible chance of success. Finding that sweet spot in the ocean of randomness is the real skill, and people will all have their own different sweet spot of risk vs reward, but in almost all cases there will always be a significant risk of losing because that’s just how the game is balanced especially for higher level play. Luck and trying to make perfect decisions with imperfect information are always a factor.

There’s a difference between thinking the change is dumb, which is something that happens in an individual’s own mind as a passing thought, and thinking you suddenly need to tell everyone about it, and have arguments about it, and seek validations of your passing thought about it in large communities of other people and turn it into a national discussion. Bots are why everyone started talking about it, and that made people feel like they needed to tell everyone else what they thought about it too.

People were simply not losing any sleep over this (and never would have) until bots made it go viral. Some people might have legitimately formed such a thought without any significant outside influence, but it would have been an empty, meaningless, inconsequential thought, like thousands of others that likely go through everyone’s brain in any given day to be summarily dismissed and promptly forgotten.

The point the article is raising is that the attention economy has now weaponized such insignificant thoughts, and can exploit them into controlling people’s behavior, and thus, create actual real world consequences, the same way a hacker exploits access into a home computer to turn it into a botnet that they can orchestrate to perform actual attacks. It may not do any particular harm to the individual who has been motivated in this way, but it can do catastrophic damage to the targets of their collective wrath, scorn, and ridicule. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words might destroy civilization.

Make sure to let us know when they start pouring the foundations for the Trump Resort-Casino. You know it’s coming.

These people are literal ghouls. Never let anyone forget the genocide they have perpetrated.

So, we’re gonna see a whole bunch of new domestic factories making billions of USB charger and LED lighting driver chips is what you’re telling me? Great, I love cheap chargers and LEDs.

I also find it loves to caption background noise “Heat” for some reason.

They told us journalism is dead, but they have really just driven it underground and made us uncomfortable to listen to it because it sounds like crazy talk compared to the rotten corporate media. Until the crazy talk keeps happening and evidence keeps piling up until it finally turns out to be true. Support your local crazy person today. They may simply be a rogue journalist in disguise.

Youtube’s AI generated subtitles are the worst. They’re borderline useless, I have to spend as much time trying to explain to my hard-of-hearing grandmother what the people actually said instead of the confusing grammarless gobbledygook that the subtitles said, as I would if we just had subtitles off and I had to simply tell her the words she couldn’t hear. I hate it.

They were my first choice, but like this user I found they were quite fragile, arguably poorly designed, and either way you’ll get no sympathy from customer support. Two different models, both in cases, both screens broken, one within days of receiving it. Very disappointing.

Granted, I torture my devices. I read in bed and almost every morning I find the ereader has fallen on the floor at some point during the night. It takes a pretty beastly device to withstand the abuse I put it through, and my Kobo does that without breaking a sweat. That’s why I recommend them.

The not-ridiculously-cheap Kindles do not have any ads. Yes it’s scummy and gross to sell something with built in ads, but I expect most people who “loved theirs” did not have the cheap ad-supported one, they had the more expensive models. The ad-supported cheap versions are not representative of the general quality or experience of a more common and typical Kindle.

That said, it is still a locked down piece of shit. There are much, much better options. Kobo is great hardware that is as straightforward to “hack” as copying a file into a directory, as it’s running a stripped down Linux basically. Kobo with KoReader is all I need.

I think the risk of that approach is that if you attempt to copy their accent too literally it can sound like mockery, especially if you are clumsy in your imitation. Like you’re breaking out of your own accent on purpose because you think their name spoken in their accent sounds silly, and by repeating it in an exaggerated way you’re demonstrating how silly it sounds to you, and that kind of response can be interpreted as mocking or sarcastic.

I think it’s safer if you try to strike at most a middle-ground between your own accent and their pronunciation, use it as guidance for the sounds but still keep it clearly in your own voice. When somebody has an accent I expect my name to be spoken at least to some degree in that same accent, so it’s not going to need to be an exact facsimile of the sounds I made.

That’s my thoughts anyway, as a native English speaker.

I work with a lot of people around the world and I feel like I mangle my foreign coworkers names so badly, despite my best efforts, especially if I’ve never heard anyone else call them by name before. Sometimes if it looks too intimidating I’ll just ask how to pronounce it and do my best to mimic what they say. Most people are super understanding and helpful and sometimes even amused, but I have to imagine it must get a bit tiresome. I can totally understand why some of them choose to use “western” names instead, and I respect their choice if that’s what they want me to call them. I probably would too if I were in their position.

Still, I wish I was better at it and could easily speak their native name, I feel like it’s more respectful when I can finally get it right.

The context is appreciated, however I have to take issue with the way this fallacious reasoning is presented as fact, probably much the same way the people justifying this awful decision rationalized it.

However, something had to be done to lower the number of unwanted pregnancies.

a) Not necessarily.
b) How do we know which ones were unwanted?
c) It is better to do nothing at all than to do something you know is wrong. The wrong choice is always wrong.

As a user and developer, I respect you and mourn for you.

They won’t stop there. AAA game developers and the awful productivity software giants like Adobe, Oracle and Microsoft themselves have already gotten everybody used to live service, cloud software, and subscription models where they have all the control and you’re just renting. They will destroy indie software and games next too, if we let them, Microsoft’s TPM requirement on Windows 11 is likely just the first step in putting up unbreakable walls around their garden, which they would build even faster if Linux weren’t providing real competition they can’t just buy to suppress.

All currency is a scam. All the way back to the beginning of currency it’s been about stealing things from nature, claiming it as your own entitled right to have, and then selling it to someone else as if you have the right to sell it and they don’t have the right to it themselves anymore due to your claim.

As long ago as we are aware of, people traded with animals and animal products like bones and shells, because they were sometimes rare and the animals were good eating and they were the first things that prehistoric humans figured out how to take from nature unsustainably and the first things that we needed to compete with other people for and actively prevent other people from taking. Then we found metals, and eventually metals that stayed shiny forever like gold and used these instead because it was even more rare and it pleases people’s “ooh shiny” magpie brains. It worked great for awhile. Wars were fought over it, empires were built with it, continents were colonized over it. But it wasn’t convenient enough and became too valuable to carry in any meaningful quantity, so we abstracted the gold away and used coins and paper monies that simply represent portions of gold. Then we decided it only needs to represent some of the gold not all of it because we still needed more money and that’s crazy because nobody has that much gold. Then fiat currency said nobody’s actually using the gold anymore anyway and got rid of the gold standard entirely, the money itself is now what’s valuable, because the government says so. Crypto is just taking it to yet another new level saying we don’t even need a government to back it anymore we’ll just do math and have the math say it has value. The scam is the same in all cases. The currency is the scam. It’s a pyramid scheme all the way down. It’s a way for someone to convince you they’ve got something you want, convince you it has value, so you give up some of your basic personal autonomy, rights, and freedoms to do work for them or give them stuff, in exchange for this store of alleged value that you expect you will either be able to hoard for personal pleasure or theoretically later be able to use to convince someone else to give up their autonomy, rights, and freedoms to do work for you or give you stuff, and they convince you that it may even be worth more in the future, but in reality it’s less, because inflation happens and the things you want are a moving target and the target keeps moving to more expensive goals. And the lie is believable because it almost works. And you can attribute the little ways it doesn’t work to bad luck, or personal failings, maybe you didn’t work quite hard enough.

They’ve created a whole impenetrable mythology around it, western civilization is built on a whole secular religion of easy prosperity, of job satisfaction, of car ownership, of homeownership, of shopping, of consumerism, of retirement, of entrepreneurship, of being independently wealthy, of building generational wealth, but it’s all a fucking lie, it’s an infomercial, acted up to look so easy absolutely anyone can do it, and so obviously wonderful that everyone needs to, while showing any alternative as so hard and awful it’s virtually impossible. It’s all marketing fluff, it has no grounding in reality. The currency itself is the scam, the society expectations are the ad copy you’ve been sold about your future and what you should expect it to look like as a result of your continued acquisition of that currency. Just keep buying into the system, it will give you the returns you’ve been promised eventually. Don’t look behind the curtain, you’ll only find wars and thefts and toxic waste and cruelty and foreigners who are not technically slaves because that has a very specific meaning and the more narrowly we define it the more room we have to use even better, more modern working arrangements. We paint a romantic picture of infinite growth and utopian progress while the only thing that is actually progressing is our accelerating destruction of the planet. Even the most stubborn capitalists won’t be able to deny reality forever, because reality happens whether it’s been denied or not.

Late stage capitalism has been a long, wild and exciting journey, hasn’t it? Stay tuned for the dramatic and heavily foreshadowed ending, now quite possibly coming within our lifetimes!

Then the world must go on labor strike. Capital requires our consent. Withdraw consent, seize the means of production and begin the class war. We are outgunned, but they are outnumbered, and we can easily get more guns once they can’t get any more numbers.

Viva Revolución, Viva Cuba Libre!