Yeah it’s gotten shitty. I used to play competitive shooters all the way back to the original Team Fortress mod in classic Quake. It’s not really fun anymore, for me anyway. It’s way too overproduced and overmonetized, it’s become a serious business, there’s too much on the line so anti-cheating becomes a priority and it just sucks all the fun out of everything. I’m reminded of the scene in Ted Lasso where Roy Kent takes Jamie back to the little local pitch he grew up playing at with other guys on his street so he can remember what it’s like to just play the game for fun again where there’s no money on the line and nobody is watching you.

My suggestion would be have you considered getting into speedrunning at all? It’s highly competitive, but is available for basically every game imaginable, can be done solo and can’t really be gatekept by the multiplayer gods. And there are many different categories for all sorts of different playstyles. It’s not just a straight line to the fastest finish either, or grinding out the best run after thousands of attempts, depending on the style you get into there’s strategy and risk and RNG can sink you or save you. Most competitive fun I’ve ever had was speedrunning Legend of Zelda randomizers against people head-to-head. Same seed, same start time, green light go and your skill and choices will decide the outcome. There’s a lot of fun to be had, I think, and it goes in a lot of different directions if you take some time to look around the scene to find if there any parts of it that appeal to you.

The cruelty is the point.

Individual human lives are no longer considered things of value. Only the ideology and the nation are allowed to have value. Welcome to fascism. Enjoy your stay.

I agree. Trump’s comments about Canada were beyond the pale. They were effectively a declaration of war in my assessment, and even if it is only ever a trade war and an economic war and an information war and a ideological war, and even if it never escalates to territorial seizure or armed conflict (and I’m not convinced those things aren’t in the pipeline) I am treating them like a hostile nation from this point forward until Trump and his allies are not just removed from power, but either punished or meaningful change is implemented to prevent someone like them from taking control of the country again.

I live in one of the safest countries in the world, and I put extreme value on that safety. Threats to our safety from our neighbor are going to be treated with the utmost seriousness, and we will defend ourselves. Elbows up.

I disagree with the suggestion that there’s no technique. It’s not just trying to blow the water off your hands, it’s also trying to evaporate it, and both of these things are improved by mechanical action, and can be affected by environmental conditions, so even the super high power dryers sometimes need your help with that. Just like using soap is significantly improved by mechanical action, you have to put the effort in to rub your hands all over each other and get good coverage when you’re doing it because the blowing air is not going to do enough on its own.

Water has a tendency to bead up under surface tension which reduces its surface area to the minimum it can and protects it from evaporation. High surface area is what allows increased heat transfer and evaporation, so you want to maximize it to get dry. Rubbing your hands together continuously and thoroughly pushes the water around, breaks up the beads and the surface tension. Don’t neglect the areas on the back of your hands, sides of your hands, between your fingers, those are all additional surface area that is wet and are places where water can bead up, and that will protect it from evaporation.

Another issue is the human perception of how “dry” feels. Temperature and moisture are inextricably linked in almost every sense but particularly in our sensation of “wet”. Evaporation on wet skin causes a very real cooling effect, which creates the lasting sensation of moisture even when there isn’t any left. Hot air dryers can help combat this but it’s actually quite difficult to avoid completely and it’s possible to get hands dried in cool air that won’t feel dry at all (until they eventually warm up later). On the other hand rubbing your hands together creates friction which does in fact heat your hands, but also creates a sense of dryness even if there is a little moisture remaining. It’s a complicated balance and the point is that our perception of whether our hands are dry isn’t totally reliable to begin with. It’s much different than using a cloth or towel which wicks most of the moisture away without immediately evaporating it and doesn’t create the same cooling effect on your skin.

Not rubbing your hands at all will take a silly amount of time for your hands to feel dry even under hot airflow, because it is just a slow process and because of the issues mentioned previously. But also keep in mind if you’re just rubbing the palms of your hands and flats of your fingers together that’s only like maybe 25% of your hands total surface area and you’re not even allowing the airflow to get in there, the combination of the two the evaporation of water will be similarly underwhelming. You have to really put some pressure down to flatten out all those little wrinkles of skin and you have to get a good rotation going with some wrap-around and between the fingers to get all the skin on your hands involved while also still exposing all the surfaces to the airflow at some point. As you forcefully spread the water into a thin film with high surface area more of it can evaporate quickly into the airflow before it can bead back up, as long as you keep doing this continuously you’ll keep exposing new spots of skin with super thin films of water left on them and it will evaporate much faster and after 10-30 seconds should give you almost completely dry feeling hands (that are probably actually dry). Give it a try. See how it works.

It absolutely is possible to detect and that’s not an urban legend. While it’s theoretically possible to build a totally passive signal receiver, it’s not realistically how any kind of contemporary receiver will actually work. It will broadcast signals that are detectable and with the right knowledge and intuition about how that signal is getting produced can quite conclusively indicate all sorts of things you’d think would be totally private. CRT TVs in particular are well-known for absolutely blasting out electronic signals of all kinds as they seek, process, and display the image. There are many ways to detect not only that they simply exist and are turned on, but also what station they are tuned to and potentially even what’s on the screen without even being tuned to any over-the-air station.

It is even possible to detect what a car radio is tuned to, and it is in fact so possible there are even billboards and advertising companies that actually do this, roadside. For advertising, naturally. This is not new technology either. It has been known about for a long time.

We assume all these things are secure and not getting spied on because they ought to be, in an ideal world, but the reality is far from ideal and security through wishful thinking and obscurity is not security at all. The same kind of wishful thinking and obscurity on the other hand is an absolute playground for people want to detect and spy on things. Obscure tricks like this are widespread and it’s impossible to hide from what you don’t know about. Real security is hard work with diminishing returns, and perfect security is almost certainly unattainable.

And unless you think this kind of obscure observational trickery is limited to spying on us poor ignorant peasants, there was a report just recently that found a significant chunk of space-to-earth communication (including some military communications) is basically plaintext and being broadcast to everyone and anyone who knows where to look. Oops.

You can’t stop the signal, Mal. (Unless you build a Faraday cage, at least)

Replace CEOs with AI. They will be just as crazy and incompetent, but we can pay them a lot less.

Check your communities, and what instances they’re on. Not all are created equal. lemmy.ml tends to be pretty wacko unless you’re of their particular ideological alignment, lemmy.world is very very large and thus has a very very large number of obnoxious shitheads compared to other instances. On the other hand, beehaw.org is intentionally and pathologically positive. I also find lemmy.ca quite friendly, though I might be biased.

In case anyone is misunderstanding, they explicitly say this is not a new phone or piece of hardware at all, it is simply a project (and for now, more of an investigation than a project creating actual deliverables) into the scale and scope of closed source binary blobs being used on phones, so they can start work to address them.

It’s an important and necessary project, and I support the FSF in most of the things they do, but if you’re picturing them riding heroically to the rescue by Christmas with a new phone-of-freedom they’re going to sell to you, it’s a very very VERY long way from that.

Librewolf. You’re welcome.

Benevolent dictators can happen by accident, but never by design. A system designed to govern fairly will inevitably be abused by people who have no intention of fairness. You can place as many obstacles in their path as you wish, you can’t stop them forever and eventually they will get around them all.

There is nothing serious on Quora, it is a troll zoo. There are only trolls and idiots feeding the trolls. Does it matter which is which?

Our economy is based on magic already anyway so it’s not like it’s a particularly hard pivot.

What would you want a VSCode fork to do that can’t be easily done with extensions? (which Codium can run)

It’s more about not reinventing the wheel. A fork needs to have a reason to exist, because it takes significant effort to maintain and develop, and there is significant opportunity cost when that level of development activity is committed to that purpose. If there’s no reason to have a fork, then it’s more efficient to keep all the development energy and momentum focused in one place. And for Codium, that place is the extension repository.

If Microsoft starts actively making the core software worse, restricting or stopping updates to the open source code, tying telemetry into features in ways difficult to remove, or otherwise sabotaging the functionality or features of the non-Microsoft parts of the code, there may eventually be a need for more, harder forks taking things in potentially different directions to get around Microsoft’s interference. But since that hasn’t happened, the non-Microsoft build process remains quite trivial and VSCode remains a perfectly cromulent editor when building it without the Microsoft crap, there’s really no need for any other forks. Codium does everything it would be reasonably expected to do.

Yes, the famous communist fascist. His name is Stalin. You’ve probably heard of him.

In a world gone mad, you have to be insane to stay sane.

They won’t stop there. AAA game developers and the awful productivity software giants like Adobe, Oracle and Microsoft themselves have already gotten everybody used to live service, cloud software, and subscription models where they have all the control and you’re just renting. They will destroy indie software and games next too, if we let them, Microsoft’s TPM requirement on Windows 11 is likely just the first step in putting up unbreakable walls around their garden, which they would build even faster if Linux weren’t providing real competition they can’t just buy to suppress.

All currency is a scam. All the way back to the beginning of currency it’s been about stealing things from nature, claiming it as your own entitled right to have, and then selling it to someone else as if you have the right to sell it and they don’t have the right to it themselves anymore due to your claim.

As long ago as we are aware of, people traded with animals and animal products like bones and shells, because they were sometimes rare and the animals were good eating and they were the first things that prehistoric humans figured out how to take from nature unsustainably and the first things that we needed to compete with other people for and actively prevent other people from taking. Then we found metals, and eventually metals that stayed shiny forever like gold and used these instead because it was even more rare and it pleases people’s “ooh shiny” magpie brains. It worked great for awhile. Wars were fought over it, empires were built with it, continents were colonized over it. But it wasn’t convenient enough and became too valuable to carry in any meaningful quantity, so we abstracted the gold away and used coins and paper monies that simply represent portions of gold. Then we decided it only needs to represent some of the gold not all of it because we still needed more money and that’s crazy because nobody has that much gold. Then fiat currency said nobody’s actually using the gold anymore anyway and got rid of the gold standard entirely, the money itself is now what’s valuable, because the government says so. Crypto is just taking it to yet another new level saying we don’t even need a government to back it anymore we’ll just do math and have the math say it has value. The scam is the same in all cases. The currency is the scam. It’s a pyramid scheme all the way down. It’s a way for someone to convince you they’ve got something you want, convince you it has value, so you give up some of your basic personal autonomy, rights, and freedoms to do work for them or give them stuff, in exchange for this store of alleged value that you expect you will either be able to hoard for personal pleasure or theoretically later be able to use to convince someone else to give up their autonomy, rights, and freedoms to do work for you or give you stuff, and they convince you that it may even be worth more in the future, but in reality it’s less, because inflation happens and the things you want are a moving target and the target keeps moving to more expensive goals. And the lie is believable because it almost works. And you can attribute the little ways it doesn’t work to bad luck, or personal failings, maybe you didn’t work quite hard enough.

They’ve created a whole impenetrable mythology around it, western civilization is built on a whole secular religion of easy prosperity, of job satisfaction, of car ownership, of homeownership, of shopping, of consumerism, of retirement, of entrepreneurship, of being independently wealthy, of building generational wealth, but it’s all a fucking lie, it’s an infomercial, acted up to look so easy absolutely anyone can do it, and so obviously wonderful that everyone needs to, while showing any alternative as so hard and awful it’s virtually impossible. It’s all marketing fluff, it has no grounding in reality. The currency itself is the scam, the society expectations are the ad copy you’ve been sold about your future and what you should expect it to look like as a result of your continued acquisition of that currency. Just keep buying into the system, it will give you the returns you’ve been promised eventually. Don’t look behind the curtain, you’ll only find wars and thefts and toxic waste and cruelty and foreigners who are not technically slaves because that has a very specific meaning and the more narrowly we define it the more room we have to use even better, more modern working arrangements. We paint a romantic picture of infinite growth and utopian progress while the only thing that is actually progressing is our accelerating destruction of the planet. Even the most stubborn capitalists won’t be able to deny reality forever, because reality happens whether it’s been denied or not.

Late stage capitalism has been a long, wild and exciting journey, hasn’t it? Stay tuned for the dramatic and heavily foreshadowed ending, now quite possibly coming within our lifetimes!