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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Are you trying to defend DHS? You do realize it was created by Republicans right? George W. Bush created it taking advantage of the panic following 9/11. It’s an entirely redundant organization whose function can be met by the existing institutions that were doing the various jobs prior to it being formed. ALL of the legislation that was passed as a result of 9/11 needs to be repealed, and that includes the creation of the DHS.






  • They’re not quite interchangeable but rather are more of a scale. They start out with propaganda that’s still mostly believable but subtly wrong in various ways on Fox, but the constant hammering that they’re being lied to by <insert any non-Fox news source that’s left of Hitler> eventually drives them to checking out the crazier places like OAN, Newsmax, and Breitbart. Then the whole thing repeats but now the fact that reality doesn’t line up with the things that they’re being told convinces them that everyone is lying to them and there’re conspiracies under every rock and leaf which then drives them to the real kooks over in the podcasts, talk radio, and social media. At which point they genuinely start believing in jewish space lasers and secret pizza parlor basements where people drink the blood of children, and the transformation from mildly misinformed libertarian asshole who watches Fox News into white supremacist neo-nazi who listens to podcasts you’ve never heard of and posts racist conspiracy theories on Facebook is complete.

    You know they’re nearing the end when they start complaining about how Fox News is too liberal and has been taken over by Democrats so they don’t watch it anymore. At that point they’re so far down the rabbit hole I’m not sure if anything short of professional psychological help is going to fix them. At this point I’m afraid that about a third of the US is clinically insane and I’ve really got no clue how you fix that.



  • Sure, but that’s not the way the story is framed. The framing makes it seem like the FBI having the records is the story rather than the FBI firing agents for doing their jobs. The headline is just terrible and is blatantly biased to try to make the agents actions seem nefarious. To be clear I wasn’t criticizing the posting of this story or trying to suggest that the poster shouldn’t have submitted it, it’s more a criticism of reuters and the way they’ve chosen to approach this story. It would have been nice to see an article posted about this that focused more on the blatantly corrupt firing of the agents rather than dedicating most of the story to discussing the seizing of the records and getting sound bites from politicians.



  • Internet of Things is a terrible no good idea, but Intranet of Things has some potential. Entirely local mesh networks like Zigbee and Z-wave solve most of your problems, doubly so if you properly confine their controllers into their own non Internet routable subnets.

    It’s honestly my biggest complaint with the Matter standard, it has Internet bridging baked into the design while the prior standards made that completely optional.


  • Part of the problem is that it’s a feedback loop. People use social media and somebody makes some misogynistic content which angers people which then gets the algorithm to promote it heavily. Then somebody else who’s inspired by that content makes their own misogynistic content and the cycle repeats. Once enough of that content is circulating it becomes the norm and a bunch of people start dogpiling on it to be part of the in crowd. It’s particularly pernicious when it’s being used to blame people’s problems on others which is how the incel and red pill groups got their start.

    It’s not just the girls/women that need to get off these platforms, it’s the boys/men as well. Algorithms that reward anger and controversy are a significant part of the problem and really should be looked at to be regulated the same way gambling and addictive drugs are.









  • The tricky part here is that many of these reviews aren’t about how they feel about the game but rather how they feel about the developer or publisher, often based on wildly inaccurate speculation. Valve has a particularly tight rope to walk on this one because it does seem problematic to dogpile some game because of a perceived opinion that has nothing to do with the actual game itself.

    One possible solution would be to add a category system to reviews that let’s reviewers correctly categorize their reviews, purchasers exclude categories they don’t care about, and Valve only removes miscategorized reviews. Categories could be something like “game contents”, “game bugs/technical issues”, “drm”, or “publisher/developer opinions”. Maybe make an entry form on the review itself for each category and you can just leave any category you don’t care about blank in your review.

    This might also help solve one of the more long standing problems with Steam reviews which is that reviews of early buggy builds often linger long after those bugs have been fixed and can provide a somewhat inaccurate impression of the current state of the game.