Just wanted to recommend Luanti (formerly Minetest). Got the whole family playing at the same time eventually, and so I spun a server we can always join individually or together. It’s been really fun, didn’t think I’d like the genre, but it’s pretty zen when it needs to be, yet can have action and exploration too. Especially when trying to watch over and guard the little ones that get a little panicky at times and don’t have the best eye-hand coordination with a keyboard and a touchpad.

I’m out of touch here, what happened? No longer use it, but have some previously stored data there, should I do a purge? Is it dead or did they transition to something profit-driven and questionable?

I just want to say, you’ll be much better off if you forget about the points and try to ignore them. Taking all this to heart with such intensity will only stress you, since you can’t decide how others perceive you and your takes.

Just chill, participate and enjoy. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Now that the election is out of the way, maybe I can continue talking about this. I held my tongue during the past months, but I think now is a good time to think about this result.

While the result is unfortunate and disappointing, there are sides to it that aren’t all that bad. They pushed towards the right, pandering, and now the voters told them that this isn’t a winning strategy. I think it helps setting them straight for the future.

I think you put it very aptly. Of course it would’ve been best if Harris had won, but at least now we can think about it from a neutral perspective: Had she won despite all the right-pandering and genocide-enabling stances, it would either send the message that pandering to the right works, and the progressives are, indeed, either too small a group to listen to in the future too, or too much of pussies to listen to in the future, too — they’ll toe the line no matter what kind of shitty positions you take.

At least now they know that a change is needed. It’s almost unthinkable to lose to such a weird fascist populist that barely behaves cohesively. They did, by ignoring the progressives. That means something. At least it ought to.

Things don’t often change unless things hurt. If doing shitty things keeps working, nothing changes. But when things hurt, it opens some eyes at least. Forces re-evaluation on everyone’s part.

But that being said, this fucking sucks. Despite all the reasoning we can do to make it feel a bit better, this really should not have happened.

This is funnily something actually taught at (at least some) Russian troll farms. Confuse the conversations and revert to thin, barely applicable accusations of logical fallacies or other kinds of “rules” of supposedly civil discussion. But this certain sense of “civil discussion” where some misguided sense of self-perceived (and sadly, almost always unfounded) logical superiority prompts one to be as confusing as this comment here, claiming to have a point, which the other supposedly does not, while elevating the fact that they themselves already claimed not to have found a source for their outlandish and confusing prior claim, to be some sort of bonus point to “win” the argument with. All this, without a hint of self-consciousness or admittance that their very original comment was equally or more pointless, if this is how points would be decided according to their view. And the importance put in virtual brownie points that prompts them to go to the trouble of amending their initial, ill-received comment to with an edit explicitly stating that they laugh at the downvoters, while being obviously hurt and unnecessarily heavily affected by it…

It’s so weirdly confusing and recognizable that this must be a cultural thing. A long time ago I knew some academics/students from Russia, and they all seemed similarly interested in some logical “winning” even in just normal discussions, in this certain way that is just uncanny. Self-importance and the persistence with misguided logical superiority despite having clearly themselves made an oopsie in the first place, seems to be something of a cultural difference in this specific flavor.

Of course this is done everywhere, the whole self-importance and all (as demonstrated by yours truly!), but not in this one specific uncanny way.

Well, you actually begin with a good example of another outlandish claim. They are right? I don’t suppose you can back that up? If not, that’s just an unbacked claim. Outlandish, of course, is subjective, but I’d say it sure is just that.

The one you claim is outlandish, is, indeed, outlandish. I agree with your point that this is what the ruling class would do, if we remove this thought experiment from any context and real-life bounds. They 100% would. If they knew they’d get away with it.

I don’t believe they would, in reality, though, get away with it.

So while that point is logical in a detached sense, it still is as outlandish as everything else.

Edit: What’s up with this .ee instance by the way? Has anyone else noticed that a lot of commenters and comments like this happen to be from there? Contrarians, completely weird takes, oddly common “I’m a leftist, BUT…” comments, and a lot of third party voters and enthusiasts. I’ve noted it earlier but this finally made it hit. Does anyone know some context that they’d have time and energy to share?

Anecdotal, and not a woman personally, but I’ve had a similar experience from days long gone; ultimately we ended up trying out different toys and the sucking sort of vibrator with lower settings was what got her past the “block”, but it was via masturbation. We’d only move it to our together time after she got comfortable with the sensation and desensitized, as she described it. In our part of the world the main brand name for this kind of toy was “satisfyer”, not sure if that is global though.

After a while it all just clicked and it became something more familiar to me too, with fingers and tongue (though she did still prefer sucking over licking, which for me as a young man back then was new, but very much a priceless enlightenment and a much appreciated skill I later had time to hone more) ultimately joining in and it all becoming something more familiar to my less experienced younger self.

What I’ve learnt since though, is that everyone is so wildly different, that just simply masturbating together, or learning to, if the other party/parties aren’t experienced there, has been key to lasting mutual satisfaction. And people and their needs/wants change over time, that’s also important to keep in mind. And masturbation is the thing that naturally reflects that. Just talk, talk, talk, and then experiment. Try and keep an open mind, and try to be accommodating. Change and new things take time. Try your best not to get frustrated or load too much expectations into the process. And try and understand the other party/parties are the ones having a harder time coming to terms with the fact that they could not meet your initial expectations. They have a lot of pressure due to this, though it’ll ultimately be mutually beneficial.

Also I’ve noted that it’s so easy to fall prey to thinking that you’re the one giving or somehow “improving” their life here, but this is, in fact, your need that needs to get satisfied. You want her to feel things she does not currently. It’s not a bad thing, this is how life is when you share it with someone, but do not think you are being the giving party here. This is your need, which she either chooses to accommodate and figure out together, or not. And you might best start accepting that this experiment might not lead anywhere, and that you might have to change your expectations accordingly.

Can you honestly claim not to have recognized the long, ongoing conservative Christian effort to reach a similar state?

In addition, there have been these studies released (not so sure how well established, so take this with a grain of salt) lately, indicating a correlation with increased perceived efficiency/productivity, but also a strongly linked decrease in actual efficiency/productivity, when using LLMs for dev work.

After some initial excitement, I’ve dialed back using them to zero, and my contributions have been on the increase. I think it just feels good to spitball, which translates to heightened sense of excitement while working. But it’s really just much faster and convenient to do the boring stuff with snippets and templates etc, if not as exciting. We’ve been doing pair programming lately with humans, and while that’s slower and less efficient too, seems to contribute towards rise in quality and less problems in code review later, while also providing the spitballing side. In a much better format, I think, too, though I guess that’s subjective.

As a young(er), morbidly curious and then still fairly naive dumbass, I went and clicked on some questionable link on a Reddit thread, and was introduced to something known as “Funky Town”.

That shit set me straight pretty well, been avoiding everything even remotely suspiciously feeling it might be or explicitly is gore-related, but the imagery alone still haunts me to this day, not to mention all the other stuff like imagining how any of the people involved must feel, both emotionally and physically.

I debated mentioning this by name for a fair bit, but I think this thread is specifically for this kind of thing, so I’ll leave it. Anyone clicking here is expecting horrifying things, so it won’t catch anyone off guard. But I STRONGLY RECOMMEND NOBODY GOES LOOKING FOR THIS SPECIFIC THING. You will not get it out from behind your eyes. Seriously.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though. You can assume them stupid, but nobody would use these forms of media if they viewed them the same. It’s just world moving on and leaving us greybeards behind, muttering about how stupid the new things are. Like the generation of our parents did for our interests, and theirs before them, and theirs before them, and so on.

Was replying more in the general, not specifically to you, but yeah. I’m a musician too myself, and have a wide range of other creatives in my inner circle, and this whole copyright topic is extremely hard. But I think we mostly can ignore that aspect when we consider the moral side as-is. A lot less complicated that way. Again, more in the general sense for all the comments in this post, sorry to drop it all here.

It’s one thing to just do a similar melody by accident, and entirely another to ask the artist if you could use the melody, get explicitly denied, then go on and use that melody anyway, changing a single less relevant note in there.

I think everyone gets this distinction innately, we just get caught up in the copyright law aspect of this, which I’m not claiming isn’t relevant. It’s just Musk being a clear scumbag, whichever way you lean on the lawfulness side of it.

Edit: What I mean to say is, it’s fairly clearly morally corrupted and wrong, but it’s not so immediately clear to accept as such in this reality, where declaring so might have consequences beyond this instance.

As far as I’m aware, most of the “dangerous” lua api (io/network etc) is blocked and only available to mods during the startup phase, and not otherwise during runtime.

But I’m sure there are workarounds. For one, I’ve written mods with rust for it, and you can require and then call any dynamic library through lua, with all of the io and networking you’d want, as long as it is brought in during the init phase. And the mods that do access the “dangerous” api, have to be explicitly given rights to do so (but again, by the server, not the clients) in the config before it works.

It’s not that bad for the most cases, as long as you trust the server. If playing single player, you personally control which mods get the secure environment access, so at that point it’s entirely your own fault, if you get exploited.

Just answering your question. No matter how dystopian, it is the reality we live in.

I can’t see the benefit, what am I missing?

I would assume that since this whole thing is more or less a result of left-ish policy, and the opponent in the scenario is the far-right platform formerly known as Twitter, lead by the aspiring far-right icon Musk, the right-wingers would more likely opt to complain, cry several rivers and eventually turn to alternatives catered specifically for them (not even sure which ones are still alive after former tweetyplace took the crown) instead.

Haven’t done a vibe check on bluesky, but I assume it almost has to be more tolerant and potentially more progressive-ish than the old nazibirdhouse. If you lean towards the far right, why choose that, if alternatives exist?

And even if not, that seems just inflammatory and way more easily harnessed for huge propaganda wins for Putin & co, as opposed to suffocating like hitting refineries, airfields or other similarly painful and impactful but also further-from-the-everyday-people’s-minds-and-eyes targets.

Probably for the same reasons a lot of us humans are drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco. And eating intense amounts of sugar.

This seems like the most sane take.

A computer can do a lot. But if you give the computer to a regular fish instead of a regular human, that’s just a regular fish next to a computer. Not very useful.