So I’m not a fan of guns but, “marketing guns” is not per se illegal nor unique to video games. Yet the lawsuit separates out video games specifically. So I am not sure I agree that it’s less crazy at the end of the day.

So I did read the article, and… I’m not understanding a word you are saying. The families are suing a video game company for a gun in their video game. Also the article is not at all making the emphasis that you are making between marketing a specific game and video games writ large (the article kind of speaks to both of those at the same time and isn’t making any such distinction), so I don’t know what you are talking about. As far as the article is concerned this has everything to do with the fact that the gun was in a video game, and even Activisions statement in response was to defend themselves from the idea that their video game is a thing that pushing people to violence. So even Activision understands the lawsuit as tying their video game to violence.

I’m not saying I agree with the logic of the suit, but I literally have no idea what you think in the article separates out video games from the particular model of gun because that is just not a thing the article does at all.

I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.

This is not from Google. This is Extinction Rebellion registering a domain to prank Google, by speaking in their voice and resolving to stop funding climate deniers. It’s both a cheeky prank and a way to put pressure on Google to take accountability.

Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

Are you sure that you actually know how to browse the rooms? I just opened my app, and I see, just for some examples, Linux gaming, vegan, and pine 64 all having activity within the past hour or so.

I mean it’s no discord by any stretch, But you’re actually straight up saying that even the most active ones are 100% dead, there’s something going on with how you’re browsing and looking at the rooms.

I feel like one of the biggest communication problems with stuff relating to open protocols or fediverse stuff, is that no one knows the lay of the land, there’s no broadly held consensus of whether things are active or not, what the culture is like, and you end up with people making confident matter of fact statements that are just transparently not true based on cursory examination.

When Mastodon was new, reporters would just make matter of fact claims that one of its downfalls was that instances couldn’t connect with each other, even though that was called federating and just one of the most basic built-in features. Not that I’m the biggest fan of Blue Sky, but now that people are talking about blue sky, I’ve seen people just matter of factly claim that Blue Sky was 90% furry porn and rage bait. A totally outrageous claim, not even remotely aligned with my experience, but, just because there’s no settled consensus about what’s going on, there’s not really any disincentive for someone just coming in and randomly saying that.

Because it’s pointless.

This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it’s tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS’s do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

You have:

• experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don’t align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
• user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
• study/teaching in academic context
• niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it’s the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). “Because it’s pointless” makes me feel like I’m witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

It doesn’t mean there’s no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there’s so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.

This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a “missing” feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.

If you get a new email address, it doesn’t bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don’t even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can’t, then it’s a dealbreaker.

If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic ™ every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.

I just logged in to two smaller instances where I have accounts, anticapitalist.party and mastodon.xyz. I found them in one step and I could see their posts and replies on both of them.

Uh?? Is War & Peace not literary fiction? Also I think Diablo, arguably the most famous RPG game (for better or worse), is an action RPG.

Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain

What was there to figure out in your case?

I couldn’t just find you by searching for p03locke, I’d have to search for @[email protected].

I literally just searched “p03locke” from mastodon.social and found them in one step.

Right, and to your point, part of that is stymieing focused, direct action and ramping up of industry in the western world. So it makes perfect sense to be a global leader in every part of the EV supply and manufacturing chain while being interested in sowing division elsewhere so there’s no convergence of public interest and policy momentum that grows competitive industries. There’s no contradiction between those two things insofar as they serve China’s interests.

Sounds like the heydey of the Geo Metro, which got astonishing MPG for its time.

is one where our impact as private citizens is as close to nil as it can be

Individual choices aggregate into large scale consequences, and individual choices do matter at scale.

When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.

Amazingly, you’re missing your own point. If it’s not about individuals, well, even Taylor Swifts jet by itself is a rounding error when considered in the context of global emissions.

But more importantly, it seems like you are contradicting yourself in a pretty fundamental way. You are perfectly comfortable taking Taylor Swift’s emissions and holding her responsible for those due to her belonging to a class, namely folding her into membership of “corporations/billionaires”. So Taylor, insofar as she represents the collective actions of that class, gets moral responsibility.

But individual consumers are also contributing significant emissions when conceived of as a class, which is a way of conceptualizing individual actions that, by your own Taylor Swift example, you are perfectly comfortable doing.

It doesn’t mean it’s the only thing we should strive to change, but it definitely is one of them, because the global collective emissions of people using internal combustion engines is in fact a significant input into CO2 levels, and we can reason about these things at those scales if we choose to.

other than limiting exhaust, or is that it?

Gee, when you say it like that, it makes extinction-level events sound not so bad! It is That Bad, so that would be the most direct answer.

The important thing to note is that even though some electricity is generated from fossil fuels, EVs eliminate the path-dependency that ties transportation to fossil fuels.

Right, this is what it means to have a sober and comprehensive look at the issues that separate the parties. Nobody who says both parties are the same ever seems capable of participating in this type of conversation, they just talk in memes.

I agree that there is an unfortunate bipartisan consensus on national security issues that is normalized bombings.

I would nevertheless say you can find significant differences on foreign policy. And, you can find huge huge huge differences on domestic policy, on things like respect for the rule of law, on the type of people appointed to courts, on economic policy.

So I think you raise a legitimate concern, but then you proceed to completely abuse it by trying to make that concern stand in for the whole of everything that matters about political decisions.