COVID-19. People simply refused to do the absolute minimum to stop the spread of the virus. At least in my community, everyone was still socializing with friends and family (without a mask, of course), going out to eat, taking part in recreational activities with other people. Something as simple as “stay away from other people until we get this under control” was too hard for the American public. It certain changed my view of the people around me.
Actions > Talk. They were telling you their true views. People rarely say the quiet part(their views) out loud so it is valuable to be able to translate their actions into their true views.
When you know how others truly feel, it allows you to decide who is worth listening to. Not to say you shouldn’t listen to people with different views, but instead decide whether they are telling you their beliefs or telling you what they think you want to hear(BSing you) and use that rate how trustworthy they are on the topic.
Unfortunately my knowledge only goes for the base program. But i’ve heard many saying that with the right time and extensions GIMP does replace Photoshop.
I have to admit that I only found that one myself because I was curious what “premium apps” were included in Zorin OS Pro, and eventually found this list they provide of alternatives:
Yes. Illustrator is vector graphics so Inkscape is a more direct replacement, and Krita is raster so it’s closer to Gimp and Photoshop. One or both of those probably also have some vector, but not as much as with Inkscape/Illustrator. I think.
This is what I use if I can’t use Illustrator - it’s also got some terrific conversion tools. Currently the only app i know that can open and convert old Fireworks files.
I agree the “brain-rot” is real. I don’t even watch TikTok or Youtube shorts but even normal 10 minute Youtube videos now feel way faster and more condensed than a few years ago, and it’s definitely harming my attention span.
I’ve been going out of my way to get back into more long-form content I enjoyed before and not get suckered into watching hyper saturated media.
On the plus side, it’s a refreshing move away from the opposite: videos that are dragged out, padded up, and way longer than they need to be. Remember when YouTube required videos to be at least ten minutes to be monetized or something like that and suddenly every video that should have been less than five minutes was 10:01? Every basic how-to video suddenly had a filler arc.
Netflix’s docuseries are getting this way. 6 Episodes about things that could be covered in 45 mins if they didn’t interview completely pointless “experts” who are experts in drama and nothing else. Or these weird semi-reenactment ones where they use the original people? And the whole thing is still written the Cable TV way where they keep repeating themselves and hyping up whats going to be coming up after the commercial.
People forget how shit TV was for wasting your time, summed up perfectly in that Mitchell and Webb skit with the TV show that was entirely teaser clips of what’s coming up followed by recap clips of what we’d just seen
There’s endless extended longfirm content on YouTube, someone like Isaac Arthur with his 60 hours just taking about one category of solutions to the Fermi paradox or you can watch someone talk for forty minutes about their ten minute morning routine.
I hate, hate, hate, haaaaate, that the fake ai voices on short videos has leaked to YouTube and Instagram and anywhere else that hosts videos. I’m assuming that happened, because TikTok started off mostly as a Chinese company. People couldn’t speak English and used ai voices to remedy that and here we are.
A runner up is the downward trajectory of reaction videos. Now people are just pasting their floating heads nodding in the corner of a reposted content.
How about camera manufacturers? If someone uses a Nikon camera to create CSAM (“child porn”), should the Nikon company be liable to the victims? Cameras are made, by design, to produce images of what’s in front of them, even if that is a child being sexually abused. There have been proposals to require digital cameras to spy on their users to ensure that illegal images can be more easily tracked. If a camera manufacturer refuses to do this, citing “privacy” or “freedom of expression”, should the victims of CSAM be able to hold that manufacturer liable?
Some countries, such as the Soviet Union, have restricted the ownership and use of printing equipment, including photocopiers, to deter their use to spread illegal capitalist propaganda. Should photocopier manufacturers be held liable for illegal material that a user photocopies?
Or, sticking to the gun example — How about 3D printer manufacturers? 3D printers can be used to create illegal guns. If you use a 3D printer to illegally create a gun, should the 3D printer manufacturer be held liable?
Alternately, we could stick to considering people liable for the choices that they themselves make, and not for merely creating the opportunity for bad users to make bad choices.
Car manufacturers aren’t liable for every incident of drunk driving or every robbery getaway — but they are liable for defects in a car that cause it to go off accidentally. Similarly, gun manufacturers should be held responsible to ensure that guns work properly and do not go off accidentally, e.g. if a loaded gun is dropped.
Those are good points, but let’s use an example of companies being held liable for consumer behavior: drink companies being held liable for litter from their products. In some places, companies like Coke will receive fines for their products being found as litter, to prevent the use of single use plastics. In a system where the consumer has no choice about how their products are received, it becomes a fair method of harm reduction to penalize companies. The individual is responsible for harming the planet, yes, but the company also shares part of the blame for manufacturing products that are designed to be thrown away.
Different example: car manufacturers aren’t liable for drunk drivers, but bartenders can be found liable. Bars and bartenders can be held liable for accidents involving drunk drivers, if they came from a bar. I wouldn’t change that for anything, even if there’s a perceived “unfairness”.
It’s good that you bring up design flaws and manufacturing errors, because currently firearms manufacturers are immune to product recalls. There are pistols out there from Sig Sauer that are capable of accidental discharge, even with the safety on. To my knowledge it’s still manufactured and hasn’t been recalled. The Consumer Protection Agency can politely ask for a voluntary recall, but current laws mean that the government can’t force a recall on faulty weapons. This needs to change.
I don’t have any ideas on how to apply the littering concept to weapons manufacturers, but I think we should figure it out to prevent people from dying. We should also make guns recallable.
Sig Sauer that are capable of accidental discharge, even with the safety on. To my knowledge it’s still manufactured and hasn’t been recalled.
If you’re talking about the P320, Sig changed their manufacturing and offered to repair/replace any firearms that were made with the faulty trigger, as identified by serial number. I personally helped a ton of customers send their guns back to Sig to get this fixed. This happened over well over 5 years ago. While it wasn’t a federally mandated recall, it was a voluntary fix by Sig, similar to how a ton of vehicle recalls work.
Thanks for those extra details. I’m not a gun enthusiast anymore, so I didn’t know that the design flaw was fixed. However, from what I remember about that situation, that information was very difficult to find and was made worse because it wasn’t a voluntary recall. They essentially said “yea, this is a problem. We’ll fix it, but we didn’t do anything wrong”. You did a great service by filling in the gaps left by Sig, but it should have been loudly broadcasted with a recall.
It was pretty cut and dry at the time if I remember correctly. It wasn’t a difficult process, nor was the information difficult to find. Again, if I’m remembering right, it was right on their website. It was a number of years ago though, so I could definitely be remembering it wrong. I worked at a gun store / shooting range at the time and remember it being a big deal and we had customers asking US about sending their guns in for repair. So it was widely known they were doing fixes.
I feel like the analogy of the camera would be more valid if Nikon designed a camera that was specifically designed to cater to the needs of child molesters.
Almost all guns are designed as weapons first and foremost. That’s it.
Fencing is a sport that allows people to duel each other. The foils are items of sports equipment - they have specifically been designed to not be lethal.
Guns, on the other hand, are not items of sports equipment. They are weapons that some people use for sport.
In the US, gun companies are quite happy to produce these for supply to the untrained, unregulated masses. And actively promote this as totally normal. I’d say they hold some of the blame.
There’s an entire field of shooting sports. The Olympics has shootings events. There’s guns made specifically for specific competitions like PRS & IPSC.
When manufacturers do market guns for the purposes of broadly shooting at other humans it’s more specifically the self defense market. There’s a difference between making a product for self defense and making firearms for drive by shootings.
The core issues are not that individuals have the capacity to do ill but the motivation and desire. To meaningfully impact homicides you need to first understand the different motivations behind them and change the system that created poor circumstances.
For example tackling drug related gang violence by changing the laws on drugs so as to not create room in our societies for criminal organizations structured around their illicit trade.
Sure if a hunting rifle was used to kill someone then the manufacturer wouldn’t be liable. Killing people isn’t the primary purpose of that kind of firearm.
But a gun that’s primary purpose is to kill people and is marketed as such? Yeah they should be liable for that.
If they are marketing guns for home defense and not making purchaser of the firearm aware that they’re statistically more likely to kill themselves or a family member than ever need the gun for a burglar, that seems like negligent behavior to me.
Also if they’re marketing anything other than a shotgun for home defense they are creating a dangerous situation unnecessarily. Suggesting someone should fire a weapon which has bullets that can penetrate through the drywall inside a house while the person firing is scared leads to all kinds of foreseeable life threatening scenarios. Shotguns exist, they would be better suited for this (extremely rare) scenario. If they are marketing anything other than a shotgun for home defense they are needlessly putting people’s lives in danger.
If people approach this logically (without the standard gun nut wackiness) then yeah there’s a lot of negligence going on, possibly gross negligence.
I don’t know which kind of shotgun loading you have in mind but sufficiently effective shotgun loadings (read not bird shot) will 100% penetrate dry wall several times before reaching a not fatal velocity. High mass projectiles maintain course better when flying through materials like dry wall.
A cartridge like .223 which relies on velocity, instead of mass, tends to penetrate walls the least. This is because upon it’s first impact it begins to destabilize, resulting in a faster loss of velocity.
We don’t blame beer manufacturers for drunk drivers, I can see the argument being similar. But guns are meant to kill by design. It is slightly different if there was an actual reason to be making them, like cameras, then I would say we do not need to hold the comapanies responsible. But these are made exclusively for death, which i think should be held to different standards than “useful” things
Many objects are meant to kill by design. Daggers are frankly entirely useless as a knife except stabbing people but would you sue a company for making one? Even then if daggers were banned people would just use kitchen knives.
The bullet that kills the most people in the US is actually the scrappy little .22 LR, a very weak cartridge. If all guns were banned a knife or a variety of other things isn’t much less lethal.
Ya’ll better watch out now y’hear? We don take kindly to that kind’a hate speech ‘round these parts. Equal weight beans and beef, you skimp out either and yain’t fixin’ chili; you might’ina even be inclined to leave for everyone’s sake.
I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. “Kinda” does not mean “kind of.” “Kind of” is not the proper way to write “kinda.” They aren’t interchangeable.
Kind’a is a contraction and specifically means kind of. Brilliant.
As a Texan, this is true. Traditional chili is based on the Mexican “chili con carne,” meaning “chilies with meat.”
Chili normally is a stew with 1 inch cubes of a tougher meat like chuck steak that’s been stewed down until tender in a liquid (water or beef stock, sometimes even beer or coffee added) and a puree of reconstituted dried chiles (not chili powder) and other spices. Nothing else goes into traditional Texan chili. Beans are sometimes served on the side though. Adding beans is perceived as a cheap filter and skimping out on the meat.
This is the dish that started all of these other non-mexican versions of chili and you’re missing out of you’ve never had it!
I’m southern with family from Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas and chili is all about the beans. I call chili with chiles, beans and tomatoes “Chili” and if I make it with beans, chiles, tomatoes and meat (stew meat never hamburger) “Meat Chili”. Would take chili with beans & corn over chili without beans any day of the week.
Chili with hamburger without beans is something to put on a hot dog or bun. Not a meal, it’s like hamburger helper nonsense.
ETA: this is not to say I’ve never made stew meat in Chile sauce. Cubed brisket finished in sauce of anchos and tomatillos is heavenly. I just never call that chili.
What made Reddit bearable for me was that more than half my subs were cat/cute animal subs. It helped drown out the stuff that made me angry or feel despair.
I agree a lot with what Orwell said in he's book, but actually I think Huxley hit a little closer to home on this point. I'm sure you've seen this before, yeah?
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. It’s the diversity that make social platforms interesting, even if some of it isn’t interesting for me.
That’s why we can choose which communities we join on the Fediverse.
This! I cancelled Netflix the same day they raised their prices and never looked back. Was it inconvenient? Sure! But I found a way to cope. Society needs to relearn how to speak with their wallets instead of their mouths. Complaints go unheard otherwise.
Your dollar isn't as important as you think.
Advocate for owning the media you consume as well.
I bought a NAS and am in the process of ripping all the physical media I already own for my Jellyfin server.
Muscle mass is significantly heavier per unit of volume than fat is. Around 15-20% heavier. Muscles also fill in around the bones first instead of on the surface of the skin like subcutaneous fat.
It’s there due to the technical certification requirements of XBox. All games are required to become interactive after a set number of seconds. When you have a complex game with long loading times, that might be difficult. The load start screen works around that, it’s simple enough to load quickly and it is interactive, i.e. “Press any key to continue”. It’s not useful, but it fulfills the certification requirements, all loading time that follows or might happen in the background while that screen is shown, doesn’t count.
It the same reason why you see so many games have the same “You’ll lose all your unsaved progress if you exit the game” screen, even in games that save so often to be a non-issue. It’s a certification requirement too. There is a whole bunch of stuff like this in games (and movies) that is not there because anybody wants it, but because some contract somewhere says it has to be there or you aren’t allowed to publish your game (see also the way names in movie posters never line up with the people on that poster).
PS: This has been around since at least the Xbox360s, don’t know what Sony requires or how Microsoft might have updated their requirements since then.
If you have a particularly slow PC, this screen would be good feedback that it hasn't crashed while booting the game. It also keeps the game consistent across platforms.
Yeah, they're not gonna do all that stuff for cert and then go "now let's remake our whole intro sequence to be more convenient!", I don't think devs typically have that much free time
The problem is that the majority of games do not tell you what you are actually losing or how to prevent it. Do you lose the last five seconds or do you go right back to the beginning of the game? How far away is the next save point? Games don’t tell you. You have to try to find out. There are a few smart games that will tell you “2min since your last save”, but they are pretty rare.
And of course in modern times that screen is rather unnecessary to begin with: Just save the damn game and let me continue were I left of. Xbox has QuickResume, but a lot of other platforms still have nothing like it.
IMO it’s a good feature and it’s a good thing it’s required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.
This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.
I mean, better loading feedback would be better than an arbitrary “interactive within 1 second” blanket rule, leading to this whole “press button to continue” workaround.
That’s like a generator needing an earth rod, and the engineer putting an earth rod into a plant pot. Sure, the earth rod is there, and sunk to regulated depth in dirt… but it’s a plant pot.
Just make an accurate loading screen with accurate feedback.
Imo that’s still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.
I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn’t check if it was accepting feedback.
Neither of these things can be true, because they’ve been around since long before Microsoft got into the console game. I’m pretty sure Atari 2600 games had that prompt. I know NES games did.
Games must enter an interactive state that accepts player input within 20 seconds after the initial start-up sequence. If an animation or cinematic shown during the start-up sequence runs longer than 20 seconds, it must be skippable using the START button.
What earlier games were doing was very similar, but was done for different reasons. Arcade games had an attract mode that would show gameplay or intro cutscenes in a loop when the device wasn’t in active use and had an “Insert Coin” flashing to attract players. The normal game would only started once coin got inserted into the arcade machine. Early console games had that attract mode too, just “insert coin” replaced with a “press start”.
What makes the modern start screen different is that there is often no cutscene to skip, no gameplay to watch, it’s just a pointless screen before you go to the main menu.
Yes, but you’d have to get there in 20sec first, which in case of very elaborate main menus, might not always be the case. The start screen provides a safety buffer so that you never fail at this certification criteria, as all the loading time after the start screen doesn’t count.
I shit all over the manager (figuratively) in front of everybody after one of their outbursts.
Full disclosure: This was at a fast food restaurant I applied for a job at with the intent of fucking with 2 of the shittiest managers I’ve ever witnessed after stopping for a burger one time. Did it on a whim and it was quite a bit of fun. 10/10, would recommend. Plus, I got paid to do it.
I’m so disappointed in the fact that you didn’t literally shit over the manager. My disappointment is immesurable, and my day is ruined. (But the manager’s dignity would’ve been ruined if you did shit over him/her.)
I keep seeing this question pop up. “Why doesn’t [closed/proprietary technology] work well in Linux?”
This question should be asked at whoever makes said technology. You are their client, why don’t they support your operating system?
That responsibility should not fall on the shoulders of the thankless volunteers that do their best to create an awesome OS.
Alternatively you can buy one of the commercial distributions and become a client. Then you can ask your supplier why don’t they support that technology.
I agree! But it’s surprising that even Google doesn’t have a native app for Drive. There’s one for android, but not for Linux? I’m guessing it all boils down to number of users, but still…
Yeah yeah, AOSP and all that. Despite, Android is made primarily by Google to push Google products and most apps depend on Google services. For all intents and purposes, Android is a first party OS for Google.
Case in point, Mega.nz offers a native GUI client for Linux and went out of their way to also make a full command line client.
Support those services that don’t treat you like ass, y’know?
I’d rather want to know why we have 10 posts about twitter changing it’s name but the one post about grindr employees unionizing gets removed because it’s apparently not tech related
I didn’t say it was. I said refusing to vote for him is, albeit passively. Hate Biden all you want, but keep the objectively far worse guy out of power at all costs.
Yes, that is goofy. I don’t hate Biden as much as some, but I don’t particularly like him, either. Still voting for him or whoever else the Democrats dredge up to keep fascism at bay.
Tut‐tut, I see that Clinton’s electoral failure in spite of winning the popular vote hasn’t moved somebody’s faith in the pseudodemocracy. Let’s briefly review the circumstances, shall we?
Starting with the national elections of 2000:
Democrats have received more popular votes in 4 out of the past 5 presidential elections, yet only gained office 2 times. Despite winning the popular vote only once in the past 5 elections, a Republican has taken office 3 times.
Democrats have received 24 million more votes for Senate than Republicans, yet have held a majority in the Senate in only 3 out of the last 9 sessions, while Republicans have had a majority in 4 out of the past 9 sessions.
Democrats have received over 500,000 more votes for seats in the House of Representatives, yet have held a majority in that body for only 3 out of the past 9 sessions, while Republicans have held a majority in 6 of those sessions.
Trust me, an overglorified public opinion poll isn’t going to stop neofascism should the ruling class deem its institutionalization necessary. The Fascists ascended to power in the Kingdom of Italy and the Weimar Republic in spite of their want of votes.
To be fair, this is partly how I’ve been looking at it. In the event that power gets delegated to the VP, you want to know the right hand man isn’t an absolute crock of shit as well.
But surely even an old man suffering dementia is a better candidate than Trump.
The author of JSLint wrote:
"So I added one more line to my license, was that, “the Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” And thought: I’ve done my job!
/…/
Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company. I don’t want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I’ll just say their initials, “IBM,” saying that they want to use something that I wrote, 'cause I put this on everything I write now. They want to use something that I wrote and something that they wrote and they’re pretty sure they weren’t gonna use it for evil, but they couldn’t say for sure about their customers. So, could I give them a special license for that?
So, of course!
So I wrote back—this happened literally two weeks ago—I said, “I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.” "
Hmmm I would definitely dick them around for a few weeks with questions back like “What is the projected revenue in potentially using the software for evil?” And “is there any specific processes in your company to avoid evil acts?”
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