Except these sanctions actually materially affect their lives. Nearly all card transactions are run through American processors (Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, etc.), and just having those avenues blocked from use is crippling. The EU has not yet built up an equivalent infrastructure.

All because these judges in a totally different country did something Trump didn’t like. It’s a badge of honor, sure, but it is not without cost.

This is not public health information. This is pseudoscientific propaganda.

A&M is in a conservative county, and these orders come down from the State legislature. They didn’t care about Plato until the State ordered them to care, or else.

It’s pathetic that the University President, Chancellor, and Provost didn’t put up much of a fight, but let’s make sure we’re also assigning blame to the originators of this mess.

…OpenAI now faces calls for sanctions and demands to retrieve and share potentially millions of deleted chats long thought of as untouchable in the litigation.

Proof that chats are never deleted, they’re just hidden and archived. Stop giving the slop bots free training data.

Similar ideas but different approaches. ReactOS is trying to essentially reverse engineer Windows, whereas Loss32 is going to run literally everything in Wine.

I’m kind of excited about this one, because it’s likely to uncover issues in Wine and upstream any improvements they make.

I mean, it’s not the entirety of Gen Z men, but they are the young demographic largely joining evangelicalism. The “big revival” is certainly an illusion, but cherry picking data to project an image is practically a rite of passage for evangelicals.

Tate and the rest are just mouthpieces facilitating that shift, but I imagine people won’t last long when they start to recognize that their dating pool is now limited to mostly men—and that everyone else doesn’t want to be anywhere near them.

Salon unfortunately glossed over a really important detail: young people are, in fact, rushing to Evangelical Christianity, but it’s a very specific demographic: Gen Z men. Women, on the other hand, are leaving in droves.

This would be alarming, except as a female former Christian pointed out: good luck running church without the women. Who runs the food pantry? Who organizes the potlucks? Who answers phones? Who schedules the weddings? Who runs the nursery or Sunday school? Because on the whole, it ain’t the men.

If they want to call this a revival, I say let them, because it will be short-lived when the men say, “Hmm, yeah. Being an office manager isn’t really what God has gifted me in doing…”

Good anecdote but this is just hegemonic propaganda. Social media has also revealed the reality behind the hegemonic narrative. That’s what they’re actually afraid of.

It’s not propaganda, it’s a fact. The rise of conspiracy theories becoming mainstream, the rise of fascist groups that are currently undermining global peace and stability, the ability for long-debunked pseudoscience to be treated as equal with science: all of that is facilitated by social media giving an equal platform to people that do not deserve one, particularly the platforms run by capitalists. Social media has indeed done some good, but my argument was never that social media is wholly bad, just that it’s a net negative.

I agree that “they” are afraid of The People organizing and seeing through all the bullshit, but that’s not something unique that social media is able to facilitate, and it’s not something social media has been particularly effective at doing. People of the past were able to see through the bullshit without social media, and if we all lost the internet tomorrow, people would still manage to communicate and share ideas. We did it for decades through books, newspapers, speaking events, zines, etc.

We don’t need social media to progress, and I would argue that recent history seems to indicate the contrary.

It’s not true. What about the people in charge of this platform? The bulk of the issues arise from capitalism and this type of censorship is designed to abolish its criticism.

There are no people “in charge” of this platform. If you wanted to, you could spin up your own instance with the sole member being you. You could fork the code and start your own Lemmy v2.0. We are collectively responsible for the operation of this federation of services, and even here, you still find the tolerance of bad actors and the spread of rotten ideas.

Has the Fediverse been a net positive? Maybe. But we are small fish compared to the fat cats that are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Xitter, etc., and there’s no dispute that their influence has reached far and the ideas they’ve allowed to fester for profit have been destructive, to say the least.

Social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s within the context of a global society run by greed, and the fact that it sometimes does good doesn’t outweigh the capitalists who weaponize it against us.

Yeah, I even tried rolling my own downstream distro based on Bazzite by trying to install it at build time (when they do most of their system changes), but I kept running into trouble either with extracting the files or moving the files where they needed to go.

I mean, it has enabled every goober and bad actor with an opinion to essentially have a megaphone and build platforms and movements. I’d argue that’s a net negative. Even the Fediverse isn’t immune to propaganda and conspiracy theories.

I think putting a warning on the tin is appropriate, especially for platforms run by billionaires whose explicit goal is to get people hooked and keep them feeding the machine by any means necessary.

It’s true that the bulk of the issue arises from the people in charge of the platforms, but nobody currently in power is going to do anything about the billionaire problem. This is at least a vague gesture acknowledging that a problem exists. Also, it’s just a sign. When have warning signs stopped people from doing things that are unhealthy?

Oh, Private Internet Access. The way it installs itself is wonky on immutable systems (i.e. it was written for mutable systems in an odd way). I remember seeing someone say on the PIA GitHub that there’s a workaround, but I haven’t given that a go, and my own experience trying in the past still led to problems, even if you got the client and daemon working.

You can utilize the OpenVPN configs just fine, but you lose out on some nice features in the client, like WireGuard and some other QoL things.

I love them, too. Ironically, I’m not currently running one, but that’s more because I need a VPN client that I haven’t been able to get working on immutable distros, but I’d use one if I that was solved

I’m not familiar with this library or this dev, so I can’t say if this is intended or not. There’s plenty of bad actors out there who would love to get their hands on existing projects with a base of trust, which they can weaponize for their nefarious means.

I think everyone here has offered good advice, so I have nothing to add in that regard, but for the record, I fucked up a Debian bookworm install by doing a basic apt update && apt upgrade. The only “weird” software it had was Remmina, so I could remote into work; nothing particularly wild.

I recognize that Debian is supposed to be bulletproof, but I can offer commiseration that it can be just as fallible as any other base distro.

Batman: Return of Joker is also an amazing feat of NES technomancy. Not a supremely great game, mind you, but what they were able to achieve graphically on the NES rivals some SNES games.

Especially with big AAA companies, I think devs have gotten lazy with their optimization passes, because bigger cards means they can just continue cramming more into a game without bothering to budget for optimization.

It’s not truly a discount either, it’s a subsidy. That cost is recouped by the aggregation and sale of your data, which is far more valuable to Meta than a single product sale.

Wait, they are? I thought I was going crazy and missed a big shift in the latter’s project goals! Thanks for pointing that out

It’s probably still a good option if you don’t have a VPN, though.

…or they should just move to Linux, kill two birds and all that.

I like the idea of Portmaster, but it didn’t work with dynamically assigned VPN IPs when I used it a couple years ago. It’s also not easy to temporarily switch off; iirc, I had to uninstall everything to get my VPN to work again.

Unless they’ve figured out how to fix that issue, it’s a caveat anyone with a VPN should know about.

Sounds like ptb.

AI is not some mystical transgression, it’s glorified autocomplete.

LLMs are certainly that, but AI is an umbrella term that includes image and sound generation, both of which are extremely fraught topics. Image generation often relies upon the egregious and sweeping theft of artists’ work to train and develop the models, as do sound generation models (voice, music, etc.). On top of that, the energy requirements alone are threatening entire populations, in no small part because the models aren’t getting more efficient, they’re just getting bigger.

So while I agree on a basic level that LLMs are just glorified autocomplete, I do not agree that AI isn’t some kind of transgression against humanity in the way that people generally understand AI. I think it’s reasonable, therefore, to expect hostility towards AI-generated video, sound, and images.