Show me what Stalinism looks like
This is what Stalinism looks like

One of these, “free credit report”, is additionally full of scams. Here’s the FTC on the issue.

They don’t index Wikipedia. Why not?

“Hey, George? Can you send me a hundred bucks?”
“Password ass-sword? Gay geek goat god goon gout, Galaga Gaelic Gorky?”
“Hemp hops hoop harangue horny hope hobags, hyper Hungarian hippies.”
“Infinite Ixian idiots incinerate imbeciles in interesting inquisitorial igloos.”
“Just joking! Jerboas jaunt jerkily, just juxtaposing jinn, janky jobs, and jalopies.”
“What’s the password?”
“Always Swordfish.”
“Okay fine, come on in.”

Put another way, spam sites have become more effective at defeating anti-webspam measures.

Is it that, or just the reverse?

A Google spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement at the time of the unionization that it had “no objection to these Cognizant workers electing to form a union,” but that it would not bargain with them. “We are not a joint employer as we simply do not control their employment terms or working conditions—this matter is between the workers and their employer, Cognizant,” the spokesperson said.

NLRB seems to disagree. This will be an interesting case, I suspect …

… and I just realized that people fluent in sign languages could talk while they snog.

Headphone jacks are not little. They take up a huge amount of board space on a device that people want to be small and light. They’re also fragile and they open up a big hole for crud to get in.

Why don’t Elon and Donald pay their bills?

On the contrary, I accurately reported my impression and my refusal of consent for you to post any more fiction about me.

Please stop.

That seems to be your thing, but it’s still off-topic here, and writing me as a character into your weird fantasies is still nonconsensual.

You’ve got a lot of dark, lewd fantasies about other people. Please don’t post them here. I’m sure there’s an NSFW community where you can post them instead; but you do not have my consent to post your dark, lewd fantasies about me and what sort of person you fantasize that I am. You’ve already crossed over that line.

Please stop.

I’m asking you specifically: stop inventing dark, lewd fantasies about me and posting them here.

FYI: You’ve now escalated to making knowingly-false accusations about a specific person.

You keep making up weird, defamatory accusations. Please stop. This isn’t acceptable behavior here.

Would you extend the same evidence-free argument to fictional stories, e.g. the Harry/Draco slash fiction that I mentioned?

For what it’s worth, your comment has already caused ten murders. I don’t have to offer evidence, just as you don’t. I don’t know where those murders happened, or who was murdered, but it was clearly the result of your comment. Why are you such a terrible person as to post something that causes murder?

It’s messed up.

SF and Oakland have Monkeybrains.

North Bay / East Bay have Sonic.

Silicon Valley has … um … yeah …

One option would be to decide that the underlying point of removing real CSAM is to avoid victimizing real children; and that computer-generated images are no more relevant to this goal than Harry/Draco slash fiction is.

What development roadmap? You’re not a product manager and this isn’t a Silicon Valley startup.

https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vb515nd6874/20230724-fediverse-csam-report.pdf

I’d suggest that anyone who cares about the issue take the time to read the actual report, not just drama-oriented news articles about it.

East Bay Area, California, US; Sonic.net.
$65/month for 1Gbps fiber to the premises.

This is tangentially related to inventory management, encumbrance, and other mechanics that often come across as tedious. Does it make sense that the character is sitting down and taking a while to decide how much & which stuff to carry, which gems to socket, which items to upgrade? How much is the game supposed to be about resource management vs. about swinging swords at skeletons or solving puzzles?

Yep. But old arcade and console systems can also have pixel-perfect gameplay not only because the pixels are big 'n chunky, but because the controls are extremely low-latency and entirely synchronized to the game processing and the display.

Older systems have much less delay between the controls and the screen than modern systems do. USB is slow. HDMI is slow.

Games are for fun. If you’re not having fun, stop playing. Don’t spend effort on griping about the game; just stop playing and do something else. Do not go on the game forum and spend hours arguing about whether the game started sucking with the last release or two years ago. Just stop playing and do something else with your time & energy. Stick a potato in the ground and see what happens.

Software quality varies widely in online games; even for “simple” games such as abstract strategy board games. One of the highest-quality pieces of game software is lichess. Most board-game software, even for other abstract strategy games like Go, absolutely sucks compared to lichess. The best Go client is KGS; it’s pretty good, but it’s no lichess.

Regarding CCGs: Hearthstone is terrible. Magic Arena is okay. Eternal is fine but I stopped playing it when Magic Arena released for Android. Mythgard is pretty neat. Runeterra is probably okay if you’re already into the League/Arcane characters.

Paying for games is fine, but consider your opportunity cost in both money and time. (“Opportunity cost” is an economist’s way of asking, “What else could you be doing with this money and time?”) Maybe you just want to go see a movie instead. Or go stick a potato in the ground and see what happens.

Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection is an astonishingly good collection of puzzle games that runs on pretty much any computer or device you use. You can install it for free on your phone. It’s all open source, no ads, no bullshit, just puzzle games.

If the game you’re paying for is pissing you off, consider whether you’re paying for the service of being pissed off. Maybe just stop doing that?

Elon, next week: “Layoffs are free speech, but hiring the discarded rejects of another Employer is dumpster-diving and therefore theft.”

Like the sticker says: there’s no cloud, there’s just someone else’s computer. When the someone decides to use their computer for something else, this sort of thing happens.

I suspect these changes come from very different motivations. My guesses are ① Reddit needs money, and ② Twitter engineering has been brain-drained.

Reddit’s changes are a desperate attempt to please investors. This is a standard tactic for tech startups that are having trouble showing a profit: figure out what the company has been giving out for free, and start charging for it. They looked at API traffic and said “what do we have to do to monetize this?” and the current situation followed directly from that.

This is not just a vague appeal to “the market”; there are specific big-money investors involved, and they will have been communicating directly with Reddit management on what they want to see from the platform. CEO Huffman is probably listening to specific advice (or demands!) from those investors, and making policy changes to appeal to them.

Twitter’s situation is quite different. The goal of Musk’s takeover was political: to reverse Twitter’s user conduct policies, which had led to Donald Trump and other fascists being banned from the platform for shitty behavior.

Twitter is falling apart on a technological level right now because most of its skilled engineers have quit, leaving the company no longer capable of responding effectively to technical problems.

(As an aside, it turns out that being rabidly anti-trans is not an effective way to retain skilled engineering staff in the Bay Area tech scene.)

I didn’t post it all because (1) it’s long and most of it isn’t directly pertinent, and (2) this is the Web, we have hyperlinks. :)

It’s literally not “Reddit’s content”. Says so in the user agreement:

You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content […]

Huffman should be careful calling it “Reddit’s content” — by claiming ownership, he’s arguably taking on liability.

Back when the US was still treating encryption software as a “munition” and restricting it for export, France banned it entirely. Up until 1996, it was illegal to encrypt documents in France without government permission.