Backdoored devices are useful for people who can impede that.

And the way EU is approaching privacy, surveillance and all such, - oh-hoh-ho, I don’t think there will be a EU law.

The Russian web is full of that.

This language demeans all creative endeavour. It trashes our ability to communicate. When read out loud it’s infantilising too.

Yes. It makes it appear as if everything real didn’t have any meaning and were just some similar mass, like wine or garum.

While the important people and processes are the middlemen controlling the routes. Or like with USSR, where the real was subject to the administrative and the political.

Since history rhymes, I love how Denmark got absolutely thrashed by Hanseatic cities when it became too dependent on its role as a controller of a big route.

Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here.

Ye-es, people look for outrage. Especially people who left mainstream platforms because of outrage. We don’t have gladiator fights today, so the wish for murder should be vented out differently somehow.

I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.

Right, and wouldn’t it be much more convenient to block posts and users and whole communities by regex and logical rules?

Say, post title contains anything “federal” and “government” like - kill. Post content contains something about voting - kill. More than one third of comments involves political jargon - kill. The resulting kill score is measured against threshold.

But of course that would make communities and instances and moderators as they exist now much less useful. That would transition us back to Usenet in some sense. People don’t want to give up that kind of power, even unconsciously they’ll resist. When they are a community mod and everything about its climate depends on them, it’s different in prestige from them just cleaning up obvious abuse, and the climate depending on individual kill rules set up on clients.

It’s more common.

Were a new Alexander present somewhere, he would be able to repeat his conquests with 1/10 of that sum.

Unfortunately that’s not the kind of people to receive it, but I think one can expect EU to be armed enough by the time Russia finishes digesting Ukraine, and the Sunni international (and Israel as a weird attachment) finishes digesting secular\Christian\Shia remnants of the Middle East.

Renpy becoming popular means there are tons of indie games, visual novella genre, with which you don’t need a beefy graphics card.

I’d also argue that nice graphics is only one component of a good game, and “nice” is very loosely tied to computing power here.

Does it flag “Notmario”?

It seems there are many videos showing them outright massacring Alawite families, and others showing them selling loot. I haven’t researched further than a few I’ve seen accidentally.

And “Assad loyalists” is factually wrong. Just HTS has not been kind to minorities and most of all Alawites due to Assad being Alawite.

Because “user-friendly” UIs have successfully, market-wise, killed normal computing (like under Windows 2000, or even like “advanced users” under Unix-likes do, nothing complex or hard, not even harder than the “user-friendly” way, but very scary when you’re conditioned to think it’s not normal to edit configs or run commands ; it’s very stupid, one would think editing files or entering a few words and pressing “enter” are not godlike powers).

That had the (subjectively) positive results of enshittification and monopolized Web.

Replacing the “user-friendly” UIs with mobile-like UIs mostly failed cause those are simply inferior.

But agentic AIs seem the way to go so that the typical user would never ever try to form preferences of how they use things, their own habits and processes.

And yes, the bigger the heap, the easier to hide a microphone there, and each such level of obscuring and generalizing control makes the heap order of magnitude bigger.

I suppose they can offload a lot of them into the ocean or something like that. But still too fast.

Frankly with what’s happening in Syria right now, can Hamas please convert to Shia or anything other than Sunni before I consider this wrong?

I’m fed up with Sunni Islam existing on this planet. Yes, I know that’s the majority of Muslims. Easily no Christian movement is worse than Salafism and Wahhabism, and those two together would be a lot of Sunnis and their most powerful states and factions.

^ hits the the wrong continent

fixed that for you

Oops. Me too.

I have re-read Tao Te Ching and parts of Azimov’s Foundation and parts of Vacuum Flowers and small pieces of X-Wing series, so - revisited things.

By association with jfk

Such groups getting power love to have attractive, believable faces, like con groups. If such a face has real provable connection to a popular person, even better.

If RFK really is an honest antivaxxer, then yes, “his own research” may lead to him admitting he was wrong and be a wholesome event in general.

If RFK is such a face, then this doesn’t matter.

But skype was really buggy and often did not even work

Could you please specify the time of such assessment? Because somewhere between 2009 and 2012 Skype seemed flawless for me (of course, with ICQ before it I just didn’t know what’s reliable offline messages and message history, so there’s that).

Voice calls worked well enough over like 45kbps. Leaving space for online game traffic (I think it was something like Burden of Crown over Hamachi, not too demanding). Of course my memory might make the experience cooler than it really was.

Skype had very good architecture and compared to things popular today was more usable.

It also worked with unbelievably bad connectivity.

Security-wise - advanced Linux users would run Skype under a different user, so that it couldn’t access their home directory. A weird decision to be honest, since an X11 client can make full screen captures and observe keypresses all the same. Security theater is sometimes just a hobby.

Ah, yes, these stress treatments are more general

Having centralized authentication servers. Otherwise MS purchase of it wouldn’t kill the normal Skype, and by now it’d be probably, like ship of Theseus, actualized for modern security and other requirements. Like X-Wing Alliance and WoW and Warcraft III modding, and other iconic games getting even replacement engines.

Hotline got FOSS clients at some point, some still work, some people even make new ones.

Death is loss of information, so executions are unacceptable. Except when you can’t convict and jail.