Something I do not see discussed enough in this context is the fact that whether or not Trump or any other potential asset is an actual knowing asset or not has no bearing on whether they act in the interests of the Russian government. If he does something in the interests of the Russian government it doesn’t really make that much of a difference if he is doing it knowingly or not. The effect of his actions is the same, the only difference is how likely you think he is to do another thing in the interests of the Russian government.

If he weakens the western alliances, withdraws from NATO, creates economic chaos, and makes everyone poorer then the Russian government benefits. Regardless of the cause of his behaviours they are still damaging, he is still destroying the US government, he is still hurting all sorts of people, and he is still destroying the global economy.

Asset or useful idiot, he is still setting the world on fire.

What is a CHA score? I can’t find something that fits the initialism with any relevance, certainly not a CHADS score (stroke risk).

OK so I can definitely see why it would seem pointless or really narrow, but I think this would have actually been very helpful for me and people like me. I have dyspraxia, a coordination disability. Mine is specifically graphomotor, meaning the exact types of movements involved in writing. My handwriting was absolutely terrible, causing pain in my hands (I also had incomplete hand dominance, so yay, both hands sucked equally), inability to express in a written form, and difficulty with tasks like painting, drawing, sewing, and cooking. Over the years the most helpful things were gaining strength and switching to printing only, no running writing at all.

If this tool could help with increasing the feedback from my hands to my brain and also push my fingers through the shapes of letters I think I would have had some benefit. I think people who have had a stroke may also potentially benefit, though obviously it would need thorough testing.

What do you do with a faulty RAID drive? Early in the morning!

I disagree. The current setup is like having the real estate have a key and you have a swipe card. The swipe card let’s you into parts of the house but you don’t have access to the basement or electrical box. If you wanted access to those you could ask but the real estate basically says no unless they really messed up, and even then they send a tradesperson to do the work and give them the key. If that tradespersons loses the key or gives it to someone else the real estate shrugs and says “What do you want us to do about it? Security is hard.”

They also have a contract for all the furniture, most of which is bolted down, so you can’t even rearrange your house, let alone install a hand rail in the bathroom for your disabled brother who needs support getting in and out. You also can’t install anything on the walls like a TV or a picture frame, and attempting to do so would lead to the possibility of piercing a pipe or cutting a wire in the wall because you don’t have schematics.

You can’t put a different OS on, you can’t modify the one you have, and breaking any of the protections on software is a violation of the DMCA, so you are a renter. You rent the device, they control the features, they decide what parts are available to the public (usually none), they decide when it will be end of life, and they make it very technically difficult to repair anything by using parts pairing. If they sold the device as a subscription with hardware upgrades included, repairs included, ongoing support included, then maybe locking it down would be OK, but otherwise no, it is unreasonable and I don’t think we really own our devices in a meaningful sense.

This is simply incorrect. Implementing a lock on a bootloader is not dissimilar to a lock on your house. A person breaking in doesn’t care that they are breaking the law, they just need to find the how of breaking in. If I as a consumer want to enter my house or give a copy of my key to someone else as a backup I should be able to do so. If I want to leave my door unlocked I should have that right however foolhardy it is. And when it comes to locking the bootloader of a computer most people won’t notice it in general use but that isn’t the point. It is about the edge cases, the end of life for the device, the lack of security updates.

You could make it a selection for the player, they choose one then the other is destroyed in a comically horrific manner. The narrator could berate the player for so callously destroying the unchosen duck who clearly has a deep and tragic back story and has long lost relatives who will sorely miss them. The duck you choose may turn out evil or maybe somehow the worst, just an awful duck who you should not have saved. The Duck Linked Content could be an included DLC.

And a much smaller footprint. It could even be binary data for tweaking your algorithmic profile, say the name of a branded product or in the case of a product with few options just the type of item. Audio runs in the megabytes per minute, transcripts in the kilobytes, but reducing to a conclusion of interest in a single specific item is really very small, hard to notice tbh.

It is called Planck’s principle, so we are stealing from Max Planck.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
— Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97

Cool phrasing from him, lots of people have enjoyed it since, and honestly from my exposure to the field it is accurate. The push back against plate technonics was hard, as was the clinging to steady state cosmology. Oh, and miasma as a model of disease. We really are just slightly smart monkeys.

“It’s basic biology, XX or XY, man or woman!”

“OK, but have you ever looked into intermediate or advanced biology?”

Dawkins is such a disappointing person. He has all the knowledge required to not only understand but also advocate for trans people but instead is defending the Anglican church, “light pedophelia”, and gender essentialism. He wrote a couple of books with some good parts but honestly, he is a sad old man and should be forgotten. Science moves forward one funeral at a time.

Important to remember the race hierarchy is as below

Black < Latino < White < Rich

I think he is saying that of the total interactions he gets he would expect a large amount of hostility to his opinion on Mastodon, and it is also a small population which is available to interact with on platform. Consistent, just talking about the experience and an objective measure. In my opinion Mastodon will be helped by Bluesky adding a paid membership. The worse it is the better for Mastodon, and honestly if people have already started moving out from Twitter to Bluesky they are not locked in yet so moving out again is easier, they already dropped Twitter but Bluesky is not solidified yet.

Half Life 2, I got a new laptop a couple of years ago and it was the first that could actually play it properly but I never got to it, then the big update came out and wow, so worth it, loving it.

TES IV Oblivion. Love it, so silly, I love thieving.

Autonauts vs Piratebots, such a fun and cute little programming game.

The claim by Meta that they block this type of material combined with the existing spread of this type of material mean that adding a temporary source of material does not carry the same level of harm as may be expected. Testing if Meta does in fact remove this type of content and finding it failing may reasonably be expected to lead to changes which would reduce the amount of this type of material. The net result is a very small, essentially marginal increase in the amount of self harm material and a fuller understanding of the efficacy of Meta filtering systems. If I were on the ethics board I would approve.

HUMILIATION!

“Its war, and it ain’t easy”

Honestly one of the best games ever.

I think piecemeal is a good way to go. Switch from MS Office to LibreOffice, from iOS to android, from Photoshop to Krita, then go to dual booting Linux (probably Mint or similar) with Windows, learn more using both, find what things you reboot to Windows for, find solutions for those using Wine and alternative software, get used to solving problems in Linux land and learn the tools. Once you are comfortable with a mix of both get rid of what you can, use Windows less and less, try CalyxOS or Graphene for your phone if possible, keep making steps. Each step makes progress, and imperfect solutions are a better starting point for finding better solutions.

That said, for the earliest steps a virtual machine is an amazing tool, as is an old laptop. You can learn to solve problems on virtual or real hardware without making your life harder then inch closer to freedom. I’ve been using Linux since 2006 and honestly it has been a constant learning process. The first year was mostly VM learning, then an accidental install on my external HDD taught me about hubris and data protection. Since then I have kept moving towards more open hardware and software one step at a time. Getting started is the key, nothing teaches as well as trying.

What OS do you use? Windows, Mac, Linux? And same for your phone? Android? If so, you should be able to get it set up on your desktop and phone.

First, get it installed on your desktop. For windows and mac go to the Syncthing download page and grab the installer. On Linux you will find install instructing below, but basically use your package manager to install syncthing.

Once it is installed you can start it up and it will open a GUI, most likely through your web browser (probably 127.0.0.1:8384 or similar). From here you will have your Syncthing interface for your computer set up, so on to the phone.

On your phone install syncthing from whichever store you use, fdroid is my favourite. Once installed open it and you should have an option to add another device. You can use this to scan the QR code on your computer Syncthing interface.

Good idea is to use something like Syncthing to copy data between your phone and another device like a laptop or another phone. This depends on the app, for Drip you have to manually export the data yourself on a regular basis.

Another useful idea is if you have an old phone lying around get it connected via Syncthing and back up everything to it. If your current phone dies or is lost you can switch back immediately, a hot backup. If you have root on your device you can use NeoBackup to schedule backups of the data into a folder Syncthing can access and send to backup locations, say a home computer or spare device.

And the fashion, oh wow, such an aesthetic.