• Allow parents to set age-appropriate content controls from the start, including limiting access to social media, apps, and AI platforms.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t most, if not all, OSes have these capabilities already? Parents already don’t use them, what is supposed to make me think they’ll suddenly start using them if only there was another law mandating them?

One thing many people have surprisingly low comprehension of is that people ≠ government.

Regular Israeli civilians did not partake in the war, did not cause the apartheid, and did not steal the land. They were born there, or went there on a promise of entering a friendly Jewish community - not of murdering people.

People defending this have a surprisingly low comprehension of the fact that Israelis, generally speaking, are literate and educated enough to be aware of the fact that most of the “Oh, we’re just a nice friendly Jewish community” is a lie and their taxes and labor will go towards supporting this stuff. Israelis are not stupid people, they are not incapable of accessing news and information from non-Israeli sources. The longer Israel continues to be such a predatory, imperial state, the less sympathy I have for the civilian population that says “Oh, I don’t actually support this, but my mom and dad live here and won’t move, so I have to stay here.” Well, fuck your mom and dad, and fuck you too if that applies to you. At this point, I only have sympathy for the small portion of the population who are either actively opposing this regime from within, or who are planning on leaving and are still in the process of finalizing their departure.

This is catastrophic when it happens to Palestinians, and not much better should it happen to Israelis.

Considering that the longer we avoid this for the Israelis, more of their neighboring countries are going to experience it, I will once again be unequivocal in saying, screw the Israelis in that case. I would much prefer that literally every resident of Israel gets told to screw off back to where they came from, rather than to see the genocide and displacement of the Palestinians be expanded to the Syrians, Lebanese and other neighboring nations, like Israel has already signaled it’s intent to do.

My sympathy for the Israeli people is directly proportional to their opposition to the actions of the Israeli government, which seems unlikely to change much, considering that this is just the continuation of decades of Israeli policy, rather than some exceptional state that only emerged because they were attacked once by Hamas. Contrary to what Israeli propaganda would have us believe, this isn’t something special that is only happening because the Israelis were shocked by one particular attack.

Ont the food shortage front, North Korea kind of got hit by a perfect storm of problems that might not have been so severe, had they not all occurred in short order. In brief, over the span of several years in the 1990s, the DPRK managed to lose their greatest backer and trading partner with the collapse of the USSR, which in turn meant that flaws present in some already failing internal policies could no longer be ignored, and were, in fact, exacerbated. Then they had widespread flooding that devastated domestic agriculture, making a bad situation worse. International sanctions would have also impeded efforts to turn to international markets temporarily to purchase additional food and necessary supplies to turn the situation around. While the US did supply food aid starting in 1996, much like how the US weaponized the embargos on Cuba and sanctions on Iran in a way that worsened their situation during the Covid pandemic, George W. Bush severely cut US food aid, and in some years, it was eliminated entirely.

There’s a whole article on the subject on Wikipedia that is a good start for understanding it. While there are certainly plenty of things to criticize North Korea for, I think the general “Hurr durr, communism is bad, look at all this nice food I have,” take that has become widespread in the US is a pretty reductive bit of anti-DPRK propaganda. Also, I don’t know how much of their relative success before that point was due to the USSR propping up an allied state and how much could be attributed to Kim Il Sung’s capabilities as a statesman, but his successors don’t seem to be his equal either in finding strong parties to ally with or in their statecraft. It’s also entirely possible that they are simply the Juche version of failsons, slowly dissipating their father’s legacy for their own gratification after having grown up fairly privileged and viewing the enterprise left to them (or state, in this case) purely as part of their inheritance to plunder for personal gain.

From what I’ve seen in other articles about the same case, it’s basically nothing special. The North Korean applies under a false identity that isn’t associated with North Korea, and they have (or at least claim to have) relevant education and experience that would make them good fits for roles like programming, then they apply for remote jobs where they can continually work at one job without having to go in and interact with people face to face.

I kind of doubt the problem is being suspected of being an operative, though, so much as ex filtration of corporate secrets and potentially falling afoul of sanctions against North Korea if they continue to employ someone in their company once they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is a North Korean national working under a false identity. They would be helping the North Korean government to maintain a steady inflow of foreign currency that they need, which I’m sure could land them in trouble. Aside from that liability, I would imagine they would beore concerned about company IP and tratedsecrets this employee would have access to being available to the DPRK to do what they will with, as well as others in the government being able to use their credentials to potentially access and compromise systems on the company’s network that this employee could access.

If nothing else, you don’t hand over more information to help them develop leads, and it makes more work for them having to subpoena the providers for suspected contacts and hope they get the emails they want from them. Depending on what it is they want to get you for and how many contacts you had that they would need to follow up on, that could be enough to make it no longer cost-effective to pursue.

Man, Microsoft doubling down on the whole “Let’s force most of our customers to purchase entirely new computers to use the next release!” strategy after it went so well for Windows 11 is just hilarious. Especially with hardware costs skyrocketing due to AI BS.

What flights are you on that you need a powerbank?

As @SpeedRunner@europe.pub said in another post, it’s not necessarily just about the time on the flight, but when you might need them after. Later this year, for example, I’m planning on heading to Europe and will attend a music festival while I’m there. I’ll be out all day, and would like to be able to use my phone to stay in touch with my travelling buddies, take pictures, maybe get a cab back to the hotel, or whatever else. It would be pretty nice to have a powerbank to keep my phone charged then, as well as for other days where I’m planning on being out sightseeing all day. If you’re already forbidden from storing them in your checked bag, and now you’ll be banned from bringing them in your carry-on, what exactly are you meant to do, then? Buy a new powerbank every time you travel? Just for my trip and travel group, we’d need to purchase and discard 4 of them on this trip, as we’ll be staying a few days in one country for sightseeing before hopping on a plane to the opposite corner of Europe for the remainder of the vacation. That’s a lot of added e-waste and expense.

Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.

It could also have something to do with the fact that, for a 20 year old person, none of the games in the series that have come out during their lifetime have been the fan favorites. Even amongst die-hard Final Fantasy fans, you don’t get people losing their minds over FF XIII the way they do for VI, VII, IX, or X. For most of the recent games, the most effusive praise I’ll hear for them is that they aren’t that bad once you get used to the systems and figure out how the game works.

I don’t think they are misrepresenting it. Between the NY State Lotto, Powerball and Mega Millions, the state lotto has the lowest estimated cash payout post-tax, and it’s still $1.6 million prize. You might be priced out of Chelsea and Soho, but there are plenty of decent enough neighborhoods in the outer boroughs where you can find an apartment for $750,000. The Powerball is the next smallest pot, with an estimated lump sum payment of $29.4 million, which would certainly let you buy an apartment just about anywhere in NYC you wanted, and still have plenty left over for living expenses to not have to work again.

Even then, the NY State Lotto has a smaller jackpot than typical at the moment, considering the average jackpot is $10.26 million, according to the state’s website. So, at least in this case, the NY State Lotto still offers one a feasible, if not reasonable, path to homeownership, while the Korean Lotto doesn’t offer that with its average jackpot for those who live in Seoul.

I’m sure there’s a cli program to just do batch audio conversion, but in favor of simple and least amount of hassle, it wouldn’t be that much work with fre:ac. You should be able to just open up the game’s directory in your file browser by going to the game properties in Steam, clicking “Installed Files”, and then clicking the browse button in the top right. Drag the wma files into an open window of fre:ac, make sure mp3 is selected for the output in your preferences and click convert. Or if you installed it in Wine, just browse to where you installed it, then continue the same once you have the wma files. Then just replace the wma files with your new mp3s, and you’re done. Honestly, you’ll probably spend more time waiting for your package manager to install fre:ac than you’ll spend on everything else in this process. Not as easy as just running out of the box, but really not as bad as it might sound at first.

I draw the line at whether it’s something that can be done naturally, as a result of playing the game and enjoying it enough to put in that much time. I’ll entertain trying to 100% a game that has an achievement to farm 1000 of some herb, if it’s something that I’ll just come across in due time by making full use of all the game mechanics, and presumably see some form of in-game payoff for my efforts. I’ll instantly become content with just seeing the credits if an achievement to get a similar quantity of something is just an excuse to pad play time by making me grind some monster drops just for the sake of getting that last achievement.

This gives us the possibility for one of the funniest ends to this, where Trump gets in a pissing match with Italy over something, tries to extort them with tariffs, and the Italian mob takes him out for trying to squeeze in on their territory.

That thing better be running on TempleOS and be coded with HolyC, or I’m calling BS and telling people they’ve just found a new way to make LLMs even more annoying than they already were.

Would all the Linux versions out there be subjected the same 15 years of updates??

They shouldn’t be, since the model for updates is quite distinct from Windows or iOS in a way that I would argue should effectively meet the requirements anyways. If a distro releases a new version twice a year, outside of enterprise situations where a company is paying for support, there’s nothing to really stop anyone who wants from upgrading. They don’t charge for it, and while new versions might add out-of-the-box support for new hardware, it’s pretty rare for Linux to suddenly change minimum hardware requirements in a way that requires you to buy a whole new machine in order to run the latest release. The only case that immediately comes to mind is that of distros increasingly removing support for i386 machines, but in fairness, Intel discontinued manufacturing of i386 chips 18 years ago.

Of course, this all assumes that the people in charge of making these decisions actually understand the technology in at least a general sense, and it’s not being left up to a bunch of idiots who have refused to keep up with any innovations more recent than the fax machine, so odds are kind of crap.

If you understand perfectly, you’ve yet to demonstrate this. The ask is to remove superfluous, anti-consumer design elements like always-online connections for single-player games, or shuttering official servers with no mitigation plan for those who wish to play the game after this occurs, and people have asked for changes to these, specific sorts of anti-consumer design choices. Meanwhile, you’re over here big brain posting about “That’s not a design change! Now, turning a 100-player online battle royale game into a single player JRPG, that would be a design change!” It’s no great wonder that you’re being treated as either a troll or an idiot when you’ve manage to misunderstand something so fundamental, while confidently insisting time and again that you alone get it, and everyone is just misguided.

Kindly refrain from putting such stupid words in my mouth, and keep them in your own, where it seems they rightly belong, thank you.

You asked about Israel and Hamas, then instantly conflated this particular conflict with a broader conflict to come between Israel and Iran, which are not the same thing. That’s beyond moving the goal posts, we’re no longer even discussing the same events. You’re also conflating Israel with Jews as a whole here. Calling for the state of Israel to no longer exist and calling for all Jewish residents within its borders to be either killed or displaced are two rather distinct things.

I know of no definition in which a single attack in isolation, or merely killing civilians during a war, is considered to constitute genocide. Even if this were the case, the civilian casualties in the many conflicts between Israel, Hamas, and more or less all of Israel’s neighbors in the region have been decidedly lopsided. Israel suffers far fewer civilian deaths than those they inflict on others, so even if we were to entertain the notion that Hamas’ resistance to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories constitutes a genocide and we accept that the Iranian regime is in some major capacity responsible for such actions because they provide funding and support to Hamas (which, lol, even Israeli media admits Israel did, too), just going by the casualties, we’d have to conclude that Israel is either a decidedly more genocidal regime, better at genocide, or both.

Israel continues to interfere in the affairs of other sovereign nations, support settlers stealing other peoples’ land and is actively engaging in a brutal genocide. If the Israeli state were to be dismantled and Israel ceased to exist as a nation, I could only say that it’s past time for it to happen. And before you put more hysterical words in my mouth, note well: Israel no longer existing as a sovereign theocratic ethnostate and the Jews who currently live in the region being in any way harmed are two entirely separate things. Calling for a particular state to no longer exist is not a call for genocide, in and of itself.

Tl;dr: Get lost with your hasbara attempts, they’re woefully transparent.

What makes the Israel-Hamas war a genocide and for example, the Vietnam war not be considered a genocide?

Because Vietnam was a war of ideologies, not a land grab intended to wipe out the current occupants so they could be entirely replaced by a “superior, chosen” people not of the ethnicity of the current residents.

This is such a mindblowingly stupid attempt at a gotcha question. Ffs, you literally had over a million Vietnamese fighting on the same side as the US in the ARVN during the course of the war. The belligerent parties in a conflict both being composed of largely the same peoples fighting each other tends to preclude it being described as a genocide.

Lots of people in Brazil and many Spanish a speaking companies would disagree with you unfortunately. It’s incredibly embedded in those countries, to the point where WhatsApp will often be the primary, and sometimes only, point of contact for a business. At least it’s not that bad here.

I had a similar situation at my previous two jobs, but I just told people I wasn’t installing WhatsApp, if they asked, and nothing ever came of it. If it’s that important, they could text me or use my work email.