If Meta actually stopped collecting data on users who instead pay them in a straightforward money => experience transaction this would be a great improvement. Except, of course, you know they won’t.

It added that Microsoft “is not in the business of facilitating the mass surveillance of civilians.”

Damn, first I’ve heard of it. The NSA must be running Linux.

Yes, and also I want to know how he fit these on the casings.

One read “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” Unfired cartridges in the magazine allegedly read “Hey fascist! Catch!,”followed by five arrow symbols: one up, one right, and three down. Two others read “Oh Bella ciao Bella ciao Bella ciao ciao ciao” and “If you read this, you are gay lmao.”

I clicked it so you don’t have to. He doesn’t actually answer the question in the title, but the closest we get is this:

I had a couple people say [while I was streaming] that there was a guy on Twitter being like, “Charlie Kirk just got shot in the neck at the event I’m at.” And I was like, “There’s no way.”

He also talks generally about Kirk (who he was going to debate in two weeks), death threats he’s received, and having to see gruesome stuff like the neck shot video.

I had to look up that HBCU, a US-specific term, stands for “Historically black colleges and universities”.

Even lawyers can’t get you out of trying to patent something that was clearly already in the market. Previously, Nintendo’s patent lawsuits had been for specific mechanics such as throwing a ball to capture npc animals.

It sounds incredibly vulnerable to this exact argument. Patents aren’t valid if it’s been invented already.

I thought him including video of a trump rally was too blunt, the audio was enough. I enjoyed the implication he was making about the game’s difference between the US and south american superweapons, which isn’t openly stated and doesn’t have to be.

It’s a shame, because their launch site in Bowen is much closer to the Equator than the continental US. When/if they get it right, they’ll be able to need far less fuel than US launch sites.

Remember how everyone was horrified when an authoritarian government like China forced everyone to disclose their identities to get online? You’re thinking of Korea, its government required every citizen to have a ten digit online ID until 2008.

Yes, Settings -> Update & Security -> Activation will give you an offer to upgrade your edition of Windows or change your product key.

Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent.

This is both funny and also an excellent summary of why Wikipedia uniquely has an incentive not to jump on the AI bandwagon. Like a bank maintaining COBOL decades after everyone else moved on, its (goal of) reputation for reliability means that there’s a strong internal conservative faction opposed to introducing new disruptive features.

Every establishment candidate, worldwide, lost in 2024. There was a massive populist trend spurred by the pandemic lockdowns and subsequent economic inflation to pay for them all.

He’s indicated he wants to give Trump a sentence of unconditional suspension, eg. a sentence of zero actual punishment but which nevertheless designates him a convicted felon.

The judge, Juan M. Merchan, indicated that he favored a so-called unconditional discharge of Mr. Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation. He set a sentencing date of Jan. 10, and ordered Mr. Trump to appear either in person or virtually. An unconditional discharge would cement Mr. Trump’s status as a felon just weeks before his inauguration — he would be the first to carry that dubious designation into the presidency — even as it would water down the consequences for his crimes. Unlike a conditional discharge, which allows defendants to walk free if they meet certain requirements, such as maintaining employment or paying restitution, an unconditional discharge would come without strings attached.

• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/nyregion/trump-sentencing-hush-money-case-ny.html

I played the first one, and found it to be extremely boring but with potential. Unfortunately, playing 3 and Syndicate afterwards showed me clearly that Ubisoft smothered the potential and cranked up the boring. The worlds they’ve created are certainly immersive, but they’re also devoid of energy. 3 has a half-Native American protage who spends five minutes in his home village and then goes off to the colonies with barely a thought spared for his home, so when it’s played for drama it falls flat because we haven’t seen his relationship to his family. And Syndicate’s characters had might as well be carved from soap with how crude and flat they are. There’s a transgendered gangster from New York who joins the Assassins’ gang, and he has absolutely nothing to add for the entire game. Characters with seeming potential come in, have one side quest, and that’s their lot.

Oh, it occurs from time to time. Jones will shotgun tons of contradictory predictions, then quietly drop the ones that don’t work out and never shut up about the one that actually happens.

Not only that, but trust from a self contained community is not the same as safe for the general public outside of context. Imagine asking for a summary of the Gamestop shortsqueeze and getting an answer from Superstonks.

honestly, not sure I -ever- found a useful answer on Quora.

Reading them taught me one thing, Quora had/has a weirdly strong hardon for Steve Jobs and is/was all too happy to talk about anecdotes of him buying the authors’ lunch or reconciling with his estranged daughter. The only time I read criticism of Apple or him was when the question specifically asked for it.

There’s ways to rate limit, like increasing response time per IP address per hour to make rapid, massed requests slower and easier to handle. Taking them all down at once is an extreme move.

Let me add one thing more, that a realistic aesthetic brings with it certain expectations. For example, I don’t question how Security Bots in Bioshock refuel themselves, or fly, or recognise intruders. I don’t ask how come the turrets in Portal never run out of bullets (though it’s answered as a gag in one of the videos). They’re not presented as realistic, and I don’t expect them to be. But when you make the choice to use realistic miniguns in Talos, those questions are going to bubble up to the surface, like “Where’s the ammo box on that thing?” and “Who’s maintaining these on islands in the middle of nowhere?” and “Scratch that, who’s making them?” and “If Elohim (yeah real subtle name there) did all this then why bother with a machine that requires maintenance in the first place instead of a magic pillar of fire or smth?”