I used to see them every so often on people in stores and such when I lived in NC, I moved to MA sometime around the covid lockdowns and havent seen one in person since, though Ive encountered people that like Trump vocally enough that Id not be that surprised to see one.

Technically, you still can determine what is behind the door and therefore win, because this is a universe where doors cant be opened and not “a universe where doors cannot be destroyed or circumvented by cutting a hole in the adjacent wall”

With an attitude like that, something tells me that pirate won’t be getting any booty

Because having a revolver or a rifle or something is going to really do anything if the government comes after you personally.

Any actual resistance movement capable of achieving much is going to find a way to arm itself regardless of if the country theyre from allowed guns during peacetime or not, they seem to in other countries that such things have formed in after all. Could be through illicit purchases from elsewhere, or homemade weapons, or theft, or whatever else, it always seems to happen.

to be fair, he had more checks on his power then, had less motive for revenge against the justice and electoral systems, and is now even more crazy. Im hoping it will be just some incompetence and international embarrassment, but Im worried that it might be more.

I mean, I feel like it is quite fair to blame the people who voted for Trump for Harris’s loss tbh. I don’t really buy the "the dems would win if they didn’t just refuse to try to win over conservatives and instead promised to go all-in on progressive policy that I’ve seen lately. I wish we got more progressive policy too, but it’s not like they don’t have any idea what people want, they have whole teams of people whose job it is to figure out that kind of thing. If promising some more progressive policy was a clear winner, why wouldn’t they do it? The answer I generally see implied or stated is that the dem establishment doesn’t want that policy, but that isn’t really an adequate explanation, because politicians are perfectly familiar with dishonesty. If supporting some progressive policy they didn’t like would win them power, they’d just promise it and then just not do that thing upon getting elected. It’s happened for state and congressional races before, so it’s not like that’s never been thought of.

I don’t think Harris’s loss is down to refusing to say the right words to inspire her base or anything like that, it’s down to the fact that, somehow, Trump is very good at inspiring his. She gave it a decent shot, but it’s very hard to win an election against a massive cult of personality. He, and the people that support him, are the problem here.

Isnt this the exact reason why there was such concern over the idea of Threads federating with the fediverse at large?

well no, there just arent any wind turbines as far as I remember. No solar either

I mean, theres geothermal

Satisfactory is a weird game where coal and oil are renewable, but trees, as far as I’m aware, are not.

Back when computers were nowhere near capable of teaching kids, one can handwave away issues with the tech by saying “when the tech is ready to do this, it will be great” essentially. When the tech is at the point where it can sort of do something, but not do it well, one instead imagines how badly things might go if one tried the notion right now instead of at whatever point in the future the technology is good enough to actually do a good job.

I mean, It has partially worked, information is more accessible than it would be if you had to go find a library and search through a ton of book that may or may not even have what youre looking for, or had to try to find someone who knew something or had some skill that you wanted to learn. And it has brought together people across distance, consider the number of online communities and subcultures whos members live in far-removed places, some of whom might be in fairly small towns or rural areas that just wouldnt have enough people of a particular interest to even have a branch of that community there. And it does also reduce the monopoly on dissemination of news and information that traditional media outlets and governments used to share. Its just, the predictions didnt also take into account that it would increase the ease of spreading false information either, or that not all debates have an answer that is obvious to everyone if only they are presented certain info, or that people wont want to talk to everyone and will instead choose to talk to those they find commonality with even given the means to talk to people they dont.

That does kinda depend on the nature of the dystopia to be fair. Like, the ones that are just “a stratified society where the poor live in the dirt”, or “an authoritarian regime”, sure, but some dystopian fiction relies on tech that doesnt even exist to run.

disease might be a particular issue beyond just that. Last thing you want is to give the past COVID or modern strains of the flu or whatever else, and in reverse, you dont want to bring back smallpox

While I do agree, I also find that even though I find VR a lot more intense and enjoyable than any flat screen game I’ve played, I also only rarely use mine even still. There’s something about it that seems to make it a hassle to use casually somehow, between actually getting the headset straps feeling comfortable, getting the passthrough cables plugged, launching driver programs on both the pc and the headset just to get to steamvr. It’s not a problem at all if I’m feeling specifically like doing VR stuff for a couple hours as it doesn’t take that long, but if I’m recently home from work and want to just chill for a bit without really knowing what, even that inconvenience means that the VR stuff basically never gets used for me.

My current VR headset feels a lot more polished than my previous, older one, or previous experience with earlier devices owned by people I was visiting, and admittedly I bet it’s probably a bit smoother on standalone than on pc passthrough like I go for, but I feel like to really take off, putting it on is going to need to not feel like setting up a printer whilst wearing a box on your head.

Never heard of it to be honest

the issue with giving someone eternal office work as a punishment is that you cant have them fired without ending the eternal office work, and being dead presumably they cant starve to death, so if they just start slacking off and ignoring their “job”, what are you gonna do?

Theres someone I sometimes encounter in a discord Im in that makes a hobby of doing stuff with them (from what I gather seeing it, they do more with it that just asking them for a prompt and leaving them at that, at least partly because it doesnt generally give them something theyre happy with initially and they end up having to ask the thing to edit specific bits of it in different ways over and over until it does). I dont really understand what exactly it is this entails, as what they seem to most like making it do is code “shaders” for them that create unrecognizable abstract patterns, but they spend a lot of time talking at length about technical parameters of various models and what they like and dont like about them, so I assume the guy must find something enjoyable in it all. That being said, using it as a sort of strange toy isnt really the most useful use case.

“hey Google, download Firefox for me please.”

-“Im sorry Dave, I cant let you do that…”

I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.