I played a long while ago and a string of similar incidents eventually made me leave.

I came back ~6months ago, and it was more chill, but still not great.

I will say that if you’re in a group of 3 or more non-toxic people, you almost never get toxic players. Not only because you’ve only got 2 chances to roll low rather than 4, but also because they’re more aware that probably won’t get anywhere.

Free to play with microtransactions is just the way to go for games that can be monetized in that manner. The lower barrier to entry means far more downloads and the piecemeal monetization means that players will frequently end up paying more than $60 alongside the larger player base.

Even if the CEO of Wells Fargo loses your money, you will still get at least $250,000 of it back (assuming you had deposited that much) via the FDIC.

The FDIC will honor their obligations because to do otherwise would be to risk a massive bank run, of the sort that started the Great Depression. This wouldn’t just screw you over, it would screw over the ultra-wealthy too, and we can’t have that.

At the end of the day, someone can just not take your mattress money and you might be out of luck. Your mattress can burn down and all that money is gone, which is far more likely than Wells Fargo taking your money and then the FDIC not giving you anything.

Dwarf Fortress (before the Steam edition.) There was no in-game tutorial. I found a 2 hour long fanmade tutorial on Youtube, and even after that I had to learn a lot of stuff from the wiki.

At 16x, you will get 72MB/s read speed. My SSD has a 560MB/s read speed. Because of this discrepancy, loading a game from a blu-ray disc will take roughly 7.7 times longer. A 20 second loading screen becomes a 2.5 minute loading screen. This alone justifies the cost of keeping it on my SSD. Especially because if I want to remove it I don’t lose permanent access to the game, I can download it again in a couple hours.

At least in the areas where I see pronouns, they often do it in their status or the like and may not use brackets. “He/him” seems to be more widely understood than brackets or parentheses.

And now this is also just how we communicate that the speaker is stating their own pronouns. If I put “Pseu he” as my username, there’s a high chance of confusion. If I put “Pseu he/him” as my username, it’s obvious what I’m trying to say.

My parents briefly discussed sending me to a military-style boarding school because I was not the greatest kid at the time. This one wasn’t the “kidnap you and force other kids to watch you pee,” kind of place but it did bill itself as structured and instilling discipline.

Naturally, they googled and researched it and places like it. My mom found stories about the stress that such places out on students and research concluding that kids often end up with more behavioral problems rather than less. After that, they never brought it up again.

This kind of research probably isn’t going to change minds in an argument, but there are parents of transgender kids who are exploring treatment options. They very well might be convinced by research when it comes down to sending their own kid to conversion therapy.

Because nuclear is not a threat. This is the first reactor in 30 years. At this rate, we’ll have a fully nuclear grid in 87,000 years, assuming US electricity consumption doesn’t increase in that time.

Fortunately, the article states that the munitions have a dud rate of 2.35%, rather than 30%.

I’d include grocery shopping in “the process”.

Personally, this was the most exhausting part of cooking for me. My recipes are often complicated and call for a lot of somewhat obscure ingredients. Then the risk of forgetting something or buying the wrong thing is also there. Half the time, by the time I start actually cooking I’m already a little bit tired just because I could not find lime oil or whatever for the life of me.

I’ve started ordering all my ingredients for pickup now. I get a search bar so I’m not walking down isles hoping I’m in the right one, and I can check it against the recipe easily. I can pick it up on my bike ride and it just feels so much better.

You’re right, copyright won’t fix it, copyright will just enable large companies to activate more of their work extract more from the creative space.

But who will benefit the most from AI? The artists seem to be getting screwed right now, and I’m pretty sure that Hasbro and Disney will love to cut costs and lay off artists as soon as this blows over.

Technology is capital, and in a capitalist system, that goes to benefit the holders of that capital. No matter how you cut it, laborers including artists are the ones who will get screwed.

Minecraft. It’s so dang cozy to me.

If you have infinite inventory space, then you need a way to navigate through infinite items. Towards the end of the game, a player could easily have nearly every item in the game. For some games, that would be fine, but for many, that would make the list of items prohibitively long. Filtering and searching would help, but if you’re looking for an item that you forgot the name of, a search doesn’t necessarily do much.

Then there’s balance reasons. Some games use their inventory system to limit the player, making sure they don’t start a level with enough health potions and grenades to cheese every fight.

In survival games, a finite inventory sets the gameplay loop: you go exploring/mining and then return to base, drop off your stuff and head out again. It makes your base valuable, if only because that’s where you keep most of your resources and moving would be hard. It also gives the player a break from one task. I played a Minecraft mod that gave me an effectively infinite inventory. I went mining for so long that it started to feel like an awful slog. Because my mine shafts went on too long, getting back was itself a hassle. When I reverted back to a more typical inventory size, I could feel how a full inventory breaks up the grind and prevents mining from getting out of hand.

Hopefully, it can also be used to prove that someone was not at the scene of a crime, enabling prosecutors to rule out suspects and innocent people to get off.

I wish I could ride to work. Unfortunately, there is no route other than taking a left turn on a 4-lane highway. That is not safe on a bike.

Supposedly my city is adding a pedestrian underpass that would connect my work to home, but that’s been planned for 4 years now, so I don’t think they’re making any work on it.

The person outright rejects defederation as a solution when it IS the solution

It’s the solution in the sense that it removes it from view of users of the mainstream instances. It is not a solution to the overall problem of CSAM and the child abuse that creates such material. There is an argument to be made that is the only responsibility of instance admins, and that past that is the responsibility of law enforcement. This is sensible, but it invites law enforcement to start overtly trawling the Fediverse for offending content, and create an uncomfortable situation for admins and users, as they will go after admins who simply do not have the tools to effectively monitor for CSAM.

Defederation also obviously does not prevent users of the instance from posting CSAM. Admins even unknowingly having CSAM on their instance can easily lead to the admins being prosecuted and the instance taken down. Section 230 does not apply to material illegal on a federal level, and SESTA requires removal of material that violates even state level sex trafficking laws.

Texas has policies regarding opioids, its treatment of people with addiction and it’s enforcement of drug laws that directly contribute to the crisis. For example, Lt. governor Dan Patrick is responsible for laws that remove protections for people seeking help with addiction, which naturally results in fewer people seeking help. His office is currently stalling a bill (that passed in the Texas House) to declassify fentanyl test strips as drug paraphernalia. These decisions obviously have an impact on the opioid crisis, which was the topic of her lecture.

From the article:

According to one student who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the school, some students wondered if it was when Alonzo said that the lieutenant governor’s office was one of the reasons it’s hard for drug users to access certain care for opioid addiction or overdoses.

A second student who also asked to remain anonymous for the same reason said Alonzo made a comment that the lieutenant governor’s office had opposed policies that could have prevented opioid-related deaths, and by doing so had allowed people to die.

A third student who also spoke on the condition of anonymity said Alonzo talked about how policies, like the state’s ban on fentanyl test strips, have a direct impact on the ability to prevent opioid overdoses and deaths. A push to legalize the test strips died earlier this year in the Patrick-led Senate despite support from top Republicans, including Abbott.

Much of research is supposed to inform the public about issues and risks that we face as a society and examine the effects of decisions, including political decisions.

First off, the first amendment says otherwise.

Second, in this case, it was an expert on the opioid crisis pointing out that the lt. governor had made policies that made it harder for people with opioid addiction to get help or be safe without being prosecuted. And that naturally this had the effect of people not pursuing treatment that could potentially land them in legal trouble. She wasn’t commenting on the personal life of Dan Patrick, she was commenting on his policies and the consequences of those policies on a subject that was the topic of her lecture and her field of research.

Or you’re me, and can use neither trouble-free. I’m basically this man.