Maybe even breaking sanctions and supporting terrorists

This is incredibly important. Signal is considered the “gold standard” of encrypted and private communication for a reason.

Wow, is this not the case everywhere? People can’t know the laws of their own country without paying? 😵‍💫

I totally get why he prefers to just update SDV.

He is already rich from the original game. He loves expanding on it. People love him for the additional content.

So there is not a huge incentive for him to not just do exactly what he likes and expand SDV indefinitely 😄

Some photographer took a picture of a politician in the Trump admin using a Signal clone. That signal clone allowed the user to archive chats to a third party.

While I agree in theory, in practice open source has a similar amount of expected trust as closed source can have in many cases. I use all sorts of open source software without reading the code. I ain’t got time for that.

I can trust that software from a lot of organizations are trustworthy even if it is closed source, but I can’t trust any open source repo without reading the code. I habe to use other ways to evaluate it, is it probable that someone has audited it? Is it popular? Is it recognized as safe and trustworthy? Is the published and finished build the same as the one I would get if I built it myself?

But yes, you can never be 100% certain without open source and auditing it yourself.

I do trust that my travel pass app from a government organization doesn’t install malware / spyware on my phone. I can’t trust a random github repo even if it is open source.

We had some emergency law that was almost passed recently. As in it passed the first of two rounds. The second voting round is just a formality, all laws are just passed after the first in practice. Luckily some law professor raised the alarms and it did not pass the second time. So within a couple of hours margin it was stopped.

The law gave the government the ability to force people to do a lot of stuff, work any job at any place in Norway. If you do not comply you could get up to three years in prison. It would not be a problem with the current or any government in the near future, but it is a law. And we can’t have laws that rely on trusting politicians. Because we might have politicians with anti democratic tendencies in the future

I think certain arguments work, and certain don’t.

I live in a very high trust society, Norway. This has a lot of advantages, but also some downsides.

We trust eachother, our neighbours, our government and our media. Which is fantastic, and well deserved. The government deserves the trust.

This makes it hard for me to make people realize how important privacy is, because they trust organizations with their data.

During COVID, Norway made their own app for tracking who met to prevent the spread. Of all the apps in the world, Norway wanted to push about the least privacy friendly app in the world. This from a country with the highest press freedom and rankings for democracy. Most people though it was fine, because why not? We trust our government.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/norway-covid19-contact-tracing-app-privacy-win/

Luckily someone protested enough, and it got scrapped for something better.

When I try to convince someone I have a couple of angles:

1. You trust the government and organizations with your data today. But do you trust the government in 30 years? Because data is forever. The US has changed a lot in a very short time, this can happen here as well

2. You have a responsibility for other peoples privacy as well. When you use an app that gets access to all your SMSes and contacts you spy on behalf of companies on people that might need protection. Asylum seekers from other countries for instance.

Can you elaborate on the spyware part? This is new to me

I have been thinking about how or if I would track my own children. I do not have any at the moment though.

I think the only system that would work with tracking and still be ethical is a system with accountability.

They need to know that I would never check unless there was an emergency. So we’d have to have some sort of immutable log that they can check regularly. So they know if I checked their location. It should not be like a panopticon. in which they don’t know if the parent is checking their location or not. That changes behaviour. Even with the trust that I would not check, just me having the option would alter behaviour probably.

Youth and kids are independent individuals with their own rights to privacy, autonomy, right to select their own friends and acquaintences, right to freedom of expression and movement, right to make mistakes, etc. If they are thought right and have a high trust bond with their parents, preferably with little judgement, then it will probably be fine and most issues can be solved.

I agree in principle, society is demonizing nudity and sex. This has got to change. Society needs to change in order to fix this and many other issues related to sex and nudity.

As long as it affects a persons reputation and their standing, this is a problem. Any person can harm someone with this technology, and as a society we can not accept that.

Most people could not make a decent fake sex tape with any person in the world with low effort before. Now they can.

Should creating deepfakes for personal consumption be legal/illegal? Distribution is the real problem. The rest is fantasizing with tools more or less. Some people will understandably not like it if they find out other people fantasize about them, but that is close to thought crime. What is acceptable? Is a stickdrawing with names too much? What if I am really good at realistic drawings? What if I draw many images in a book and make a physical animation of ouf it? Is the limit anything outside my head? What if I draw a politician fellating another one and distribute it as art/satire?

The short term solution is to ban deepfakes, the long term is probably something else, but I am not sure what. There is not inherently any actual abuse in deepfakes, there is no actual sex either. So it’s a reputational/honor and disgust thing. These things still matter a lot in societies, so we can’t ignore it either.

I completely agree, the only thing a woman needs to be complete is a husband, four children, and a clean house.

/s

Given the choice between living in a authoritarian oligarchy without freedom vs a imperfect european liberal democracy, is not a tough choice for most.

Without knowing a lot about the older historical context here, I would imagine that the people of Russia and Ukraine have been fairly close throughout modern history. They are neighbouring countries with a language that is very similar, and was both a part of the USSR.

To me this attack on Ukraine seems like betraying family and/or friends. Ukraine did nothing besides existing peacefully. Russia decided to take land and citizens from Ukraine by annexing Crimea violently. They have continued killing and destroying Ukraine for years to seize land as their own. I have a tough time imagining Ukrainians in Crimea supporting the killing of their fellow countrymen by their violent neighbour for no good reason.

Since Crimea now is annexed by Russia we can’t trust any polls from there either.

I guess Russia should just give it back to Ukraine, and then they can do a legitimate vote. Russia obviously won’t do that, because they know how that will end.

What is the saying? If you love something, then set it free. If it was meant to be, it will come back to you. Russia should use that tactic with all regions of Ukraine that it is currently occupying. I am suuuure it will work out for Russia 😂

As a happy and satisfied Linux gamer I disagree.

Linux is the best OS overall, at least for me, but not the best for gaming for most people. Not yet.

Emulators Xenia (xbox 360 emulator) was not mentioned, because it is Windows only. There is no Xbox 360 emulator for Linux.

Game compatibility 80% are platinum or gold on ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/

This is impressive, but you can’t claim that a system that can’t play up to 20% of game titles is better. Not to mention that some of the other titles might need some tinkering as well.

Conclusion Linux gaming is now a great and viable option for most people. But it still isn’t better than Windows if you don’t care about bloatware, security or privacy, and just use your machine exclusively for gaming.

Bonus: Linux is free, so you could maybe also get slightly better hardware by selecting it over Windows.

Honestly the thing I kinda care more about would be a fully developed sandboxed permission controlled system like Android, just with the storage permissions like GrapheneOS. I know there are some support for this, flatpak & flatseal etc. but it is not prominent enough. I want it to cover everything, like android.

I am not so sure. Trump couldn’t even hold his moronic tariffs for more than a few days, before having to cave.

USA does not produce much besides services. China have a big surplus of production.

China also owns a huge amount of US debt. They can start dumping it which will increase the interest rate on the huge US debt. This would quickly put the US in a difficult position. Any solution besides just paying down the debt would weaken trust in the US, so they either have to take it or make everyone in the world lose faith in the current financial system with the US as it’s guardian.

I wouldn’t mind microtransactions, gacha games and gacha mechanics if there were sane upper limits to spend.

I was trying to learn how different gacha games work and monetization in f2p games in general, especially obes for smartphones.

I was surprised about how similar all the methods across games are. Some were a lot worse than others though.

I think the monetization method is sometimes viewed as acceptable by some, because the games often have a lot of content and can be a lot of fun to play. The thing I really dislike is that it’s unfairly monetized. Some people pay the majority of the income, they are also known as whales. There are of course some people that spend small sums, but the whales is where it is at.

After Arcade games went out of fashion we had a nice long period in which players paid about the same for a game, and got the same experience.

Now vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone, and still everone gets a limited experience.

Some of the games I enjoyed the most had terrible gacha mechanics. One of them had items and mounts with 1/500 chance per pull. Of course it is designed so that it appears as 1/10, but it is really 1/500. To justify this they had the PITY system. Yes, thats the actual name of it. The pity system makes it so that after buying 500 pulls ypu are guaranteed the mount.

The price for 500 pulls? 500$

After the free pulls you could play to get, about 480$.

So I actually can’t get the entire game for even 500$…

That was just one of many such instances. I could probably spend more than 10 000$ and still not unlock absolutely everything.

Was it purely cosmetic? Nope. It gave an advantage too.

Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.

I think I kinda get what you mean. It’s so backwards that it is still necessary and that it is still a fight that has to be “won”. Personally I am not bothered or in any way opposed to gay rights, trans rights etc. so I personally do not need “convincing”. But I am not everyone. There are many parts of society that have little to no respect for LGBTQIA+.

In Norway a pretty liberal place, most of the population support gay rights, but there are especially a large portion amongst certain religious and minority groups that do not approve.

The fight is not over. It is not equally acceptable to be gay as hetero, or trans as cis. The fight is not over in most of the world.

Even in one of the most liberal countries in the world it is not actually equal.

The US has in a couple of months launched numerous attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community, and by protesting / marching we support those that need it. We show that they are not alone, and that those outside the community also protect them and wish them well.

I am personally a cishet man, but I also march with my wife. It takes maybe a couple of hours of my life every year, and it means a lot to the community to have all the support it can get.

I encourage you to participate as well. If not, consider staying neutral or verbally supportive. Your comment makes it seem like you disregard their continued struggle, but I think you are just trying to convey that it’s absurd that its still necessary, which I agree that it is 😊