The last president to talk about that got a magic bullet for his troubles.

I might also look into Social Fixer, if that addon is still around. Used to be the best one for customizing Facebook’s bullshit away.

Maybe her other books are better, but Atlas Shrugged was such a slog for me. I can’t even reccomend it as a curiousity.

Ayn made even the sex scenes mechanical and cold, which would have been a great artistic choice to show how dead inside the MCs all were, but she was going for “this makes Dagny strong and empowered!” It wasn’t intentional at all.

Then there’s the section in the middle where they fuck off to “galt-land” and everything the was building up in the real world just kind of stops mattering, until they decide to leave. Another thing that would have been great if intentional, if there were consequences for running away from things, but they just come back like nothing happened.

Except for the biggest problem of all in the book: The fucking radio broadcast chapter. It’s 3/4 of the way into the book. If you don’t understand the themes by that point then you’re blind. But she devotes an entire fucking chapter to having John “perfect representation of the themes in human form” Galt blather on for (iirc) over 20 pages reiterating the themes explicitly.

Some jackass takes over all radio broadcasts, spends hours rambling about the supremacy of people who make things happen… and nothing fucking happens as far as I can recall.

It’s been over a decade and a half, but I had the opposite problem with my English courses.

My writing classes established such a rigid pattern to our essays that they would give us an outline with what kind of sentence went where, you filled in the blanks and ended up with an essay. Which is great for kids struggling, but it didn’t allow for any fucking deviation from the pattern at all.

Only need two supporting paragraphs with a little more in each to make your point? Like hell you do! Three supporting paragraphs or you lose points.

Things would flow better if you broke one of your supporting paragraphs into two smaller ones, for a total of four? Well that’s just impossible! Three supporting paragraphs or you lose points.

One of your supporting paragraphs have a point that needs two sentences to communicate well? No it doesn’t! One sentence for each detail in your supporting paragraph!

You have four supporting details/sentences instead of just three? Get fucked kid!

Lose points for any deviation.

It wasn’t until my junior year of high school (penultimate year of non-university school, for folks who use a different structure) that one teacher finally went “Hey, this kid is reading college literature course books for fun (Don Quixote, at the time) and can hold a decent conversation about the themes and such. Maybe I could try letting him off the leash.”

I went from the English class for kids who underperformed to the “Hey, take a college course for college credit early kiddo!” class, and killed it.

Nice, an analognowhere I missed!

There’s no reason it has to be post 2077. Silverhand was already an established character in the lore, there’s plenty of shit that could be adapted. 2077 was in part a time skip epilogue to a whole bunch of notable characters from the TTRPG, and I think there’s a decent amount of people who’d be down for the earlier stuff.

There are plenty of other horrific medical conditions without cures or significant funding into their research.

Blanking on the medical name, but there’s a disease that fucks the immune system into turning bruised flesh into bone. Most sufferers of it don’t even make it to 20 years old. And the existing treatments to reduce it all have terrible side effects.

Yes, it was one of the more contreversial changes he did. Before, you had to be “vetted” by xitter staff as being both notable and who you said you were. That wasn’t a great system, and was effectively a nepotism/who you knew game, but you wouldn’t see blue checkmarks for fake accounts.

It used to be a sign of trustworthiness.

Now anyone can get one for a monthly fee.

What the shit? Pressing and holding power and a volume button used to be for force shutdown. It’s been that way for over a decade! Fucking hell.

Does that actually bring up a menu, or just outright shut it down?

The two button shortcut has historically been for forcing an immediate shutdown in the event of like, a full system freeze. It’s the same as ripping the power cord from a running desktop PC, and isn’t the intended graceful shutdown that these devices are supposed to get.

Unless they’ve changed things, that’s been the standard since the first smart phones and PDAs.

I have a first gen iPod Touch somewhere in a box here. It was press once to lock and turn off screen. Hold to get power menu.

Fucking hell, Samsung? I’m typing this on a Galaxy A52 5g. Same thing. Press power to turn off the screen and lock, press and hold for power menu. They did have press and hold for bixby about a year after I bought it, which I disabled, but it wasn’t out of box default.

I’ve never encountered this multi-button power shit you’re talking about outside of old click wheel iPods, or as the force shut down option (equivalent of ripping out the cord on a desktop PC, definitively not the normal/intended power off procedure).

Don’t know what you’ve been using, but this has not been some standard thing forever.

It’s not about like or dislike. I’d have almost no complaints if they added a button or a unique gesture to open it, like they already had with holding the home button (looks like they may have removed that shortcut functionality). Or how some phones made the lock/power button touch sensitive so a touch (not press) or a swipe over it opened the assistant.

But silently changing the function of a standard piece of UI/controls that have been standard for over a decade, and common on even slide phones since the fucking pre-smart phone era?

I’m shocked that anyone actually needs this explained to them.

It would rightfully be a news story if Honda’s newest car hid the window controls behind a settings menu, and what normally were window controls (still visually the exact same and located in the standard spot on the door) raised and lowered your seat instead.

That’s all without getting into the mess that is a company trying to artificially pump user numbers of one of their products, or my personal dislike of these “assistants”.

Internal emails from Google have become public through court cases which reveal that the rumor they were making search worse intentionally is true, and it was in order to inflate their ad impression numbers. There is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt on this, and active explicit reasons to do the opposite.

Just one big incestuous sewer orgy of anti-consumer practices!

There really needs to be a directory of “not so smart” devices. Like one that’s still readable via bluetooth, but not requiring an account for data harvesting.

There’s so fucking much potential in modern tech that is being squandered by every fucking company trying to be their own walled garden data brokers. And the results of all that data collection are abysmal! When’s the last time most of us have seen an ad that legitimately informed us of something we didn’t know existed but ended up wanting?

The productivity and quality of life lost because everything doesn’t just have an open/publicly documented interoperable API is immeasurable.

Stamets has been on here, for multiple years across multiple accounts. He’s made and moderated a decent amount of communities. He’s active in the “side communities” like instance related matrix chats. His pedigree is proven.

He’s also had some pretty intense emotional moments (could call them crashouts) from time to time. He’s also done drastic detective work (with mountains of fucking receipts) on ne’er do wells in the fediverse. It’d be pretty hard to fake all of it.

He might be using a script to schedule his posts out, but I’ve not seen any floating around, and karma doesn’t accumulate here like on reddit. There’s no end game with a cash out option for “being vaguely known on the fediverse”.

Look, no one’s above skepticism or investigation, but If you’re going to go after a well known member of the community, at least bring some receipts rather than telling people to look for themselves.

Hahahaha, they violated that well over a decade ago. It was supposed to give acceas to all future releases at one point, which died the moment it released on consoles. iirc people were pretty upset about it way back when.

Unfortunately the actual text of the alpha license terms appear to be lost to time, but you can find a number of posts online claiming the same thing, that it was worded in a way to indicate the license covered all future versions (across all systems), not just all future updates of java (and bedrock if you converted your account early enough).

They don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. Facial recognition has already resulted in false arrests, damage to people’s homes, vehicles, livelyhood etc by normal police. ICE has even less supervision and is known to willingly hire people with violent crime records.

I’ll say it again: If they remotely deserved the benefit of the doubt, we wouldn’t be looking at the reality we currently inhabit.

This would go great in reactionmemes too.

Yes, that’s something we all should be doing, but that won’t stop this from effecting you.

Google is trying to make a change so that all apps will have to have their creator show their identity to Google so they can be installed. This specifically applies to sideloaded apks. That means it applies to everything from sketchy random apks, to github, to F-Droid.

There’s no way to work around it (if it even can be) until Google rolls it out so custom ROMs can reverse engineer it to offer an option to disable.

Even if it can be disabled on the phone’s end, that now cuts your potential userbase so dramatically that it’s going to gut the open source software scene on android. Either give in to Google (so goodbye high school student devs, people from not ok countries, or people making shit Google doesn’t like), or enjoy your potential userbase of maybe a few thousand people who have the custom rom(s) with a workaround, resulting in an actual userbase of maybe one hundred.

Watched everything before the gap for the “final seasons” I think the last episode was an AU of them all living happily in the more developed enemy state. Last thing I remember Eren doing is running off and becoming this big doomsday titan with an exposed multi mile ribcage thing leading a stupid big horde of titans.