Ahh right yes, gotcha. I misunderstood you and thought you didn’t think the statistics were believable because they’re so skewed

How do you propose these “open source journalists” make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it? At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that’d just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who’s not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn’t worked out too well for most publishers so far.

no one ever tactfully includes ads

This is pretty patently hyperbole; I’ve run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.

Whether it’s class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can’t just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that’ll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I’ve seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it’s not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.

While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher’s paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not

Why does it seem statistically unlikely? If the assumption is that minorities are somehow being targeted, wouldn’t statistics like this be exactly what one would see?

If Trump wins, I figure it’s fairly likely that Russia will turn its sights towards attacking one of them smaller NATO members at its borders. Probably not a full-on invasion at least at first, but more of a test of whether Article 5 actually holds water or not – and with Trump in charge of the US, it’s unlikely he’d decide to stand up against Russia

Average conservative moment. What’s scary is that calling for an ethnic cleansing of leftists isn’t a fringe opinion anymore, and people like him are gaining more and more power by the year.

And it’s not like this is just the US. Here in Europe, Italy is ruled by a party that is a direct descendant of Mussolini’s Fascist Party; Hungary is… well, Hungary; extremist right wing parties are very popular in Germany; Finland’s government has multiple literal neo-Nazis in it, with one extremist right-wing party eg. blocking legislation that would help guarantee the impartiality of courts; and the list goes on and on. It’s pretty telling that at least here in Finland, the under-25’s are much more conservative than Millennials or even Gen X – the majority of them voted for either a “fiscally conservative” party (ie. they’ve started down the “everything I don’t like is woke” path and would be fine with concentration camps for leftists as long as they’re privately funded) or an extremist right wing party, which has members who have eg. publicly fantasized about murdering gay people and who stan Breivik

Well, whatever the solution to this problem is, I’m fairly sure “put a blockchain on it” isn’t going to be it. Distributed ledgers do potentially have some uses, but using them to carry “proof of humanity” information doesn’t make much sense

Well, for many publishers the choice is either ads or paywalls. The fact that people feel entitled to get everything for free is a part of why things are going to shit, because ads bring with them a whole slew of perverse incentives (eg. optimizing for ad views instead of content quality)

Oh yeah it absolutely is bullshit, I’m not saying that. Or, well, it is true they’re likely collecting tons of data but it’s not like US companies don’t do it too and for reasons that are probably just as bad. This is why I tend to think that if you’re going to ban TikTok for collecting data, you can’t ignore Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple et al

Well, they’re totally different platforms . The rationale behind the TikTok ban (and I’m not saying I’m in favor of it or opposed to it) is that they can do spooky spooky things with your personal data and your attention – your opinions can be nudged once there’s enough data on you and your eyeballs are on the app half the day. And just to repeat, I’m not saying I agree with the ban (well, not with banning just TikTok anyhow…)

Temu and AliExpress have their own problems (like the absolutely mind boggling waste of finite resources) but nobody’s worried Temu is radicalizing boys or collecting tons of your personal data. And yes even Temu does collect data just like everyone else nowadays, but it’s a shopping site; compared to a social network there’s not all that much you can get out of your users or too many ways to really influence them outside of making them spend more money

You’re just throwing a tantrum at this point

Sure, but it’s not a landline anymore

I live in an apartment building that was constructed in '22 and a landline wasn’t even an option anymore, it’s all just gigabit ethernet.

Even though I occasionally toy with the idea of learning eg. COBOL so I could rake in the $$$ from consulting jobs to add features to some 60 year old codebase for a bank or something like that, I’m not sure that amount of stress would ever be worth it

But don’t you see, everybody needs to know exactly their opinion

They take any presence of minorities as part of an agenda to, uh, I don’t know what exactly. They always screech about an agenda but I don’t think even they know what the agenda is supposed to be about.

Oh yes doi of course, that was just a brain fart. But yes exactly this, it was such a spectacularly gAmEr moment.

Yeah I remember the “waaaa it went woke, Abby is trans” insanity

Edit: no brain, it wasn’t Ellie

The v2.0 changes were actually pretty good, made me want to start another playthrough. I really like the new metro system even though it’s such a small thing considering everything else they changed, but it’s fun to be able to hop onto a metro to get somewhere. The game is already pretty immersive and that small detail just adds to it

Doesn’t seem too likely that’d be more than a few percentage points. Which non-Chromium browsers even do this?

users can modify their useragent string, and sometimes they have to because some webdevs are morons.

The minority of users do this or even know about UA strings.

some browsers actually default to using chrome instead of its own.

Sure, but Firefox isn’t one of them

The same thing is happening globally, and it’s becoming clear that moderate conservatives are very much in the minority. It worries me to no end that fascism seems to be winning, and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it

You are a nerd and your back hurts

Wine works pretty well for a large percentage of Windows programs

Cloudpunk is nice, although it’s more of a “walking simulator” than a fully-fledged RPG. It’s a cyberpunk-ish indie game in which you’re a delivery driver, although with a flying car and a sentient dog.

Elon shouldn’t be in this chart, too easy to win

One would think, but with both Thiel and Bezos in the competition this isn’t as cut-and-dry as you’d assume. Thiel especially is fucking evil, he’s way worse than Musk

The only libertarian I personally know is anti-LGBT+, just not as rabidly outspoken about it as a “regular” conservative. He’s the sort who’d be happy with gay people being murdered on the streets as long as he doesn’t have to do it himself

Rewrite in Brainfuck!

The thing is that Fallout: New Vegas used the same engine, and it proved that you can do a much more interesting and engaging story and quests with Creation Engine compared to what Bethesda is capable of. Sure, Creation is still a bit of a piece of shit when it comes to engines, but it can be used for creating complex storylines etc. and not just “go there and push a button” or “go there and kill a person”

any attempt to implement libertarianism will only bring mass amounts of misery and destroyed lives to anyone beneath the Parasite Class.

This is a feature, not a bug

Conservative LGBT+ folks always just puzzle the fuck out of me. How stupid does someone have to be to support a cause that would have them eliminated if they got their way?

Gives some really big Association of German National Jews vibes; a pro-Hitler Jewish organization, the founder of which eventually got sent to a concentration camp

Oh no no, you see he’s the default and everybody else is a minority

He’s the sort of person who probably wouldn’t at least say out loud that they want to murder minorities, but I can tell you completely without any doubt that were some political party here to actually start doing it, he would be more than happy to see it happen – he’s convinced that white hetero men are the most repressed “minority” right now, and he’s literally said that the mere existence of sexual minorities is “polarizing” and “adversarial”.

This is pretty much how it is with all “moderate” conservatives. They might not outright say they want to murder minorities, but they would absolutely approve of others doing it.

Looks like it’s written in C of all things, huh

Moderate conservatives pretty much don’t exist anymore. I had a “fiscally conservative” and “moderate” acquaintance tell me that the world would be better if there were no sexual or gender minorities

Well it collects data from you, and one use case for your data is allowing a nice 💰 exit for the venture capital -backed company building it.

Other than that, not a whole lot that’s worth yet another “powered by open web standards” Electron piece of shit

It’s not like an average person would be unable to use their laptop and some media player, regardless of which OS they use; the fact that I use a weird-ass player doesn’t mean it’s the only option available on a laptop. It just seems pointless to get another gadget to do the same thing you can do on a gadget you own (assuming you have a laptop, of course.)

Generally mpv

An old hand-me-down 1080p TV and my laptop

I guess those devices make more sense if you don’t have a laptop. I only have a laptop (well, that and a Steam Deck which counts as mobile Linux I guess) so I just plonk it into the HDMI port