Would you give a few hundred dollars and couple dozen hours of learning? Because this is a very achievable goal

Oh no, you’re not signing your life away. You’d be dead

You’re signing away the right to get any justice for those you care about

Holy shit… When I got my wisdom teeth out, I literally broke down in tears after being awake for 20 minutes without Percocet

Friend, it’s ok to take opiates sometimes…

Kratom could be an option. You make it into tea, the first cup is a weak stimulant, the second (on an empty stomach) will start to work as a weak opiate. The third or fourth might give you stronger relief. The red strains are supposedly better for pain relief

You can’t OD on it, it’s commonly available in head shops or online. The addiction potential is very low, you’ll make yourself nauseous before getting what you’d get out of normal opiates. It’s most closely related to the coffee plant - the toxicity concerns are all about contamination, the plant itself is pretty innocuous

I can give brewing instructions if anyone wants to go down that path, I drink it for anxiety but others say it helps with pain management

Fuck the webcam, what about the mic?

It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron

We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then

It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support

Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently

So this isn’t a compelling argument because it sounds outlandish and the implications (while serious) are indirect

Every major power, and some companies, have population simulations. It’s not that hard to build one - we’ve been using them for decades, and they start yielding useful results even when they’re pretty simple. Individuals are complex, but populations can be boiled down with statistics pretty easily

Let’s say I want to increase stochastic violence in America. I rate the traits of as many people as I can across as many useful criteria as I can measure. I could then tweak an algorithm to show something I think would radicalize people to a test group, and measure again. I then take what I learned, and polish my approach until I’m ready to go live

You can do this to whatever end you like - and browsing habits can only tell a human so much, but this is what big data does. It finds associations humans wouldn’t see through math

This probably sounds like I’m wearing a tin foil hat, but this is a real thing. This is how foreign election interference works - astroturfing blindly only does so much, and modeling a population isn’t difficult (depending on what you’re trying to do)

Now as for browsing habits - like location data or Facebook friends, with enough data points you can find out things about a person they don’t know themselves. It may or may not make sense to a human, but big data is all about finding associations through blind math.

If you provide a set of data points, you contribute. It may or may not influence you, but either way it improves the ability to influence those around you.

I don’t know how much opera collects, I don’t know how much of that data is exfiltrated to China. I know I don’t want anyone to have too much of that data, but I also have to live my life.

It’s a matter of harm reduction - educate yourself on your choices, listen to people who dive deeper than you’re willing to, and do what you can to make the most ethical choice based on where you are right now. There’s no perfect choice

You guys are circling around the answer

Aero looks, better menus (I refuse to believe nested drop downs are peak layout, but ribbon stuff looks pretty, at the cost of useful organization)

And finally, make it look good in dark mode. We aren’t a print-first culture anymore, and I prefer my retinas intact

Yeah, but like, everything is like that. The fact your not falling through the floor requires a similar explanation. The fact you can see requires a far more complex one

I remember a flashlight I had, where you could remove the reflector. I could see the little sunbeams coming off them, and I told my friend maybe I wanted to study light. He told me it’s just photons… Which later in life I realized says nothing, but at the time totally killed my enthusiasm

Magnets make sense to me though. Maybe since I’ve been playing with them since i can remember - maybe I can’t see or feel a magnetic field naturally, but I can feel it holding a magnet. Magnets make sense - they’re weird, but they make sense.

Light doesn’t… Our understanding of it is so clearly wrong, but sure let’s pretend it’s normal for something to be a wave that turns into a basic unit of energy when you look too closely. The universe loves inconsistency, right?

Embracing lack of meaning is nihilism talk!

Take in existence as it comes and laugh at the absurdity of it all

Conflicts of interest. Sometimes illegal, but not nearly as much as they should be (almost always)

Like congress members being allowed to trade stock, which can then be affected by their vote

Or one of the specifically carved out exceptions to the medical kickbacks laws is for the people who negotiate drug prices for pharmacies

I just remember the day, as a software dev with a solid understanding of Blockchain, my older dev neighbor started explaining how NFTs worked

I thought he was confused or stupid or something.

“Wait, so like you have these super rare images, proof you own it on a Blockchain, and a link to the place they’re all publicly hosted?”

Him: “Yep”

“And the only use for these right now is as a profile picture?”

Him: Shrug, “yeah, people use them for discord and stuff”

“But… Couldn’t you just download the image and use it anyways?”

Him: “Yeah, it’s all publicly hosted”

And it was about then my brain locked up. I did multiple hours of research later, sure I had to be missing something

I no longer do this.

Not because it’s not delicious (it is), but because it’s a super cheap and easy way to eat 300-400 calories of straight carbs

I’d say don’t knock it until you try it, but just put in a slight effort and snack healthier

Wait… Y’all regularly leave your shoes in a normal place?

There’s many reasons people pirate - sometimes it’s a matter of means & availability, sometimes it’s a matter of controlling their paid-for content (like people who actually buy switch games but want to run them on their steam deck), and sometimes it’s basically a hobby

Some people would surely buy some games if piracy wasn’t on the table (assuming the terms were unacceptable to them), but I used to rewatch the same things and play the same games endlessly. I think the vast majority would do without

And rejecting a service you don’t consider worth it isn’t moral. That’s just basic capitalism and self-interest.

This seems to be our core difference. I don’t think capitalism is a moral system, and “enlightened self interest” only works with equity of opportunity and fierce competition - that’s not the world we live in. And even then, I don’t think it’s a very ethical moral framework

I see supporting a service hostile to users as immoral - it’s like enabling an abuser, however slight, you’re contributing to behaviors that are a detriment to others

I’m not going to say pirating is some morally superior act, but there is something to be said for refusing to support companies that have user-hostile distribution

And I don’t think that act is cheapened by accessing the content anyways - yes, you are not contributing to the creators while enjoying their content. If you weren’t going to pay into the stream that they get a small part of anyways, then you’re not costing them anything - if you wouldn’t have bought it and didn’t, it’s the same result on their end either way

Ultimately it goes back to piracy being a problem of accessibility, and rejecting an inaccessible service is the moral part, I see the piracy in this context as just neutral

Source?

Steam, case in point. You can find cracked games fairly easily, there’s even games entirely lacking drm that could be passed around effortlessly

But steam is very convenient, the prices are reasonable, and they have good customer support. That’s enough that even people who pirate switch games buy pc games on the same device

What about the first month? If you’ve got a buffer in the bank, it doesn’t matter much. But if you were living paycheck to paycheck, those 2-3 weeks might be enough to really set you back