BananaTrifleViolin

@BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social
0 Post – 173 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

And the commanding officer only tried to stop them when they heard the last victim asking for help and realised it was in hebrew.

Seems the IDF shoots first and asks questions later. This is what's happened to unarmed jewish hostages, who were shirtless, holding a white shirt on a stick which is the universal sign of surrender. What about the million people living in gaza coming up against this? Holy fuck.

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I get where you're coming from but I think you're overstating the impact in this day and age. If this had been 1995 it'd be a big deal. Now it's rediculously easy to install any alternative you like for free.

Libre Office is an entire free fully features office suite.

I'm less bothered about removing WordPad than I am about Microsoft advertising and pre-installing it's products in Windows - they force Edge on people, they push OneDrive and preinstall a preview of Office. That's the real problem - not losing WordPad.

At one point Anti-Trust / Anti-monopoly regulators globally punished Microsoft for pushing Internet Explorer to consumers and for a long time in Europe had to offer a choice of Browsers to download on new Windows installs. Now it's allowed to get away with abusing it's dominant position to force it's products on consumers.

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Sorry but there is a lot of bizarre takes in this thread. I work in healthcare - the issue here is she LEFT you during a procedure to deal with another patient after comencing your procedure. What!? What other patient - she had already started a procedure on you and had anaethetised you and then left the room? And then by the time she came back and continued the procedure she got to the point where she couldn't provide any more anaesthetic?

The whole thing sounds like a mess. If for example she is running multiple rooms at the same time then that is frankly bad practice and greed.

Your friend's feedback that you "made the dentist feel threatened" is also bizarre. You're the one in the dentist chair, mouth open while someone is approaching your with drills and metal work. If she felt "threatened" then she should have abandoned the procedure completely - not leave and come back. Patients can be very anxious and tense - thats normal and either you know how to deal with it or you don't. As a health care professional on the occasions you can't deal with it, then you don't proceed - stop, make it safe and get someone else to do it. This was an elective procedure to fix a crown - why on earth would she then proceed with a procedure after having felt "threatened" - it doesn't make sense.

That dental practice sounds like a joke to be honest. Either your dentist is inappropriately treating multiple patients at the same time or she is indecisive - feeling threatened, walking off for safety but then coming back and completeing the procedure makes no sense and just made everything worse. You're hardly going to be less tense with this dentist after that experience.

Find another dentist.

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So big mistake here: NAC is not harmless. It does have side effects and it also has toxicity at high doses.

It has not been studied in long term use orally or IV, it's main use bomg short term use for paracetamol overdose treatment. Inhalation is more studied but it is not absorbed into the body in the same way.

We think it is safe but we haven't actually done human trials to be sure. What we have found in mice is that high doses can cause lung and heart damage and also when it comes to alcohol it is protective if taken before alcohol consumption BUT it amplifies the toxicity to the liver if about 4 hours taken after alcohol. All of this is summarised on the Wikipedia page which looks to be good quality.

Overall it may be a useful drug but don't take it off label or self medicating. Medicine is littered with unexpected effects of drugs that only came out once it was too late. Thalidomide is a good example - a "wonder drug" for nausea used in pregnancy that was not tested and caused horrific birth defects which only became evident when it was too late.

Your body is not a lab, be careful experimenting with supposedly "safe" drugs.

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I don't understand? You can download Dosbox and Dosbox-X in desktop mode and add them to Steam like other apps. Why do you need a website?

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Incase you still don't, it's referencing a late 80s to mid 90s sitcom Married with Children. It's surprisingly good. Katey Segal who voices Leela played one of the main characters, Peggy.

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It's disturbing that there isn't a good process for removing judges at the end of their career. Being "nudged towards retirement" by family after you are beyond your ability to perform the job is appalling. It's the arrogance of presiding over other people's lives through legal cases until you decide you don't want to anymore rather than whether you should that's so bad. What about all the citizens getting suboptimal legal judgements?

Yeah I found the article a bizarre read. It talks about ActovityPub and Mastodon but fails to mention the fediverse at all. Instead it talks about the "pluriverse", some random new term pulled from some paper, and paints a vision of people spread across various commercial social media platforms.

Either it's a blind spot In their research or an agenda so deliberate omission, but regardless it seems strange to talk about the disintegration of social media and even Mastodon but not what Mastodon is a part of.

But I agree the general themes are there - it's basically talking about the impact of enshittification but without using the term.

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Yeah this is exactly right; an inability to separate their own political stance from their professional role. For the law firm, there is also a lack of insight and common sense around wading into such a controversial and difficult issue in such a way.

This is the text from their newsletter:

Hi y'all.

This week, I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination. Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance. Instead…

I condemn the violence of apartheid. I condemn the violence of settler colonialism. I condemn the violence of military occupation. I condemn the violence of dispossession and stolen homes. I condemn the violence of trapping thousands in an open-air prison. I condemn the violence of collective punishment. I condemn the violence of phosphorous bombs. I condemn the violence of the United States military-industrial complex. >I condemn the violence of obfuscating genocide as a "complex issue.” I condemn the violence in labeling oppressed people as "animals." I condemn the violence in removing historical context. I condemn the violence of silence.

Palestine will be free.

Your SBA President,
Ryna

This was in the NYU LAW Student Bar Association's SBA Weekly newsletter.

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You can use any browser you want, just be aware of what the downsides are when you do.

The issue with Chrome and Chromium based broswers is the power that Google exerts over the internet via the Blink engine. Although other companies use the same technology, Google controls it and shapes it for it's own commerical gains.

The other big alternative is also proprietary with Apple's Sarfari and WebKit ecosystem.

Vivaldi is a nice browser but it is still run by a private company and it still monetises you to an extent. In vivaldi's case it is currently fairly inocuous - they have referral deals with search engines for the default search, and deals with companies for default bookmarks. But it seems to be currently a more trustworthy browser. Ultimately though, it is part of the Blink ecosystem and supports Google's increasing domination of the browser engine space.

Mozilla and Firefox remains the only truly independent browser, run in a not-for-profit and fully open source way, on the Gecko engine. It's existance helps maintain the neutral aspects of the Web - instead of sites being designed for one browser, it encourages web site and services to be truly standards compliant. Firefox monetise users in a similar way to Vivaldi but that money is used to actually maintain and develop Gecko and other Mozilla technologies, while Vivaldi use that money to maintain Vivaldi the company - they don't need to fund most of Blink as it's made available by Google.

But no one is obliged to support Firefox or open technologies. It's a personal choice what browser you use and there are many valid reasons beyond open standards to chose a browser. I use Firefox for multiple reasons; I genuinely like it and am used to it, but I actually also use Vivaldi and even Chrome on occasions (sometimes to view crapily designed ad heavy or tracking sites without having to disable lots of privacy extensions etc in firefox to make it work; I use Chrome as a bog standard sandbox when I want to dump crap sites out of my main browser but still want to quickly view it for whatever reason).

Pick a browser you like and don't feel guilty if that happens to be chrome based.

Almost the whole of black Friday is a nonsense. The only things worth buying are things you would have bought anyway but know are on discount.

Many items prices go up for a period before black Friday so they can then be discounted, and manufacturers even have cheaper versions of models of their products that they supply to discount chains and companies like Amazon for black Friday.

The only things I'd buy on sale are items I'm watching via camelcamelcamel which have hit discount, or software on discount. There are a few specific items I need to buy that I might buy if they're genuinely on discount but most of the stuff thrust in your face during the sales is cheap tat or lies.

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Sounds like the journalist didn't understand the memo.

The key messages that I'm seeing flagged up are that they did find a method which basically involves former trump supporters giving their reasons for disavowing him, and that trumps share of the vote dropped 4 points where they ran ads versus a 5 point growth where they did not. That's a 9 point swing against trump by running ads - that sounds pretty effective.

That they found things that don't work are also positives as it means they've refining their method. We remain early in the primary process nota single vote has been cast yet and there are still 3 months until the the first vote.

The problem is a 9 ppoitn swing against a candidate doesn't mean much when there isn't a viable alternative for that to benefit. What they really need is a candidate to coalesce republican opposition behind. At the moment none of the candidates seem up to it.

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You can make zips using 7Zip. I use 7zip and send Zips to other people, but use 7z compression for my own files. Zip files are more ubiquitous and readily opened by most OS; certainly Windows opens them natively, and I assume MacOs does.

Of course it also depends what you're sending. I wouldn't send secure files in just a zip even with encryption due to zips flaws. I would use 7z eoth encryption as a minimum, and more secure methods depending on how valuable the data is.

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That's an interesting take on FOSS - that's it's a free buggier alternative to "mainstream" software?

Linux is ubiquitous across many devices (you won't even know you're using it) and servers yet it's all based on FOSS. There isn't an alternative for many of those usage cases.

Browsers like Firefox are FOSS. The alternative is not less buggy, but it is less private and sells you to advertisers. But even propriety software like Chrome is based off an open FOSS codebase from Chromium.

Other software has no better alternatives. Look at VLC (for video), OBS (for streaming and video capture), Calibre (for eBook library management). There are arguably all the best in their class and they all FOSS, and that is just scratching the surface.

Tools like WINE are FOSS only but they are revolutionising gaming having been repurposed into the Steam decknfor example.

Eveb the software that might be characterised as "alternatives" to thebincumbant proprietary software servers a major purpose. GIMP (alternative to Photoshop) and Libre Office (alternative to MS office) are free but also now increasingly important do not require any online subscriptions and data sharing with big corporation. For many people that's hugely important - why pay money and subscriptions for things you can get for free at high quality?

FOSS is a huge ecosystem of software, all of it free to use, change and share.

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Interesting that while there is only 2 instead of 3 in a pack, the total weight has gone down only 22% (from 255g to 200g, instead of 170g if the weight dropped by a third/33%). So the actual salmon pieces may be bigger?

This is still shrinkflation but there has probably also been previous hidden shrinkflation in the individual salmon pieces too and that bit has been slightly undone.

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I think the article summarises the problem well; we have a conflict between big tech and regulation but at the same time the regulatory side is driven by ignorance and arrogance.

I'm in favour of regulating the tech sector to enable competition, but I am definitely not in favour of the nonsense draconian snooping powers the UK government wants to have in the name of "protecting children". There is a right wing obsession with the use of tech to enable child abuse; some of that is valid but it is also paired with extreme ignorance of how technology and encryption works. Basically you have secure encryption or you have nothing. Anything with a backdoor into it is by definition not encrypted or secure.

There are plenty of ways of protecting children - the problem is not encryption, the problem is a failure of social services, schools, parents and families to protect children from abuse. Breaking encryption entirely in the UK will be a marginal benefit in making it easier to catch a few individuals after the abuse has taken place, at the cost of the polticial freedom and personal privacy of nearly 70m people as well as severe damage to the UKs place in the Tech sector.

The tech industry hasn't allowed China unfettered access to their systems (encrypted comms giants have largely exited China or been banned there); exiting the UK to protect the global norm would be an easy choice. The real concern is if crazy ignorant rightwingers in the US follow the lead of the ignorant rightwingers in the UK driving this nonsense.

As a doctor, we would work and hour more or less depending on the shift changed. Im paid a supplement to work out of hours rather than by the hour, so we'd just suck it up of working an extra hour and be happy if we worked less.

If you're paid hourly then you'd be paid for the time you worked.

But shift starts and finishes were unchanged, it was just the length that got altered.

No it depends on how you interpret it. Apple may have legitimate reasons for technical differences between the different versions of Safari. The issue would be if Apple is claiming they are more different than they really are to say they don't count as one when calculating market share.to.determine whether regulation applies.

Mozilla Forefpx has different versions for Android, and Desktop. So does Chrome. But in terms of marketshare generally people class them as one browser.

Yeah I agree Tumblr is a good example of the mistakes Reddit is likely to make.

Yahoo started the mess with Tumblr by trying to contain "NSFW" content both by restricting access for users and making it harder for content makers. Then Verizon took over and they banned it outright in some bizarre moralising. Ultimately its very hard to keep shareholders and advertisers happy - for advertisers it's difficult to guarentee their ads wot appears next to nsfw content. Their focus wasn't they users, it was their shareholders and customers - the advertisers they were seeing their users to.

Reddit is making the same mistakes. It forgets it is nothing more than a host for content. The users make the content, the users moderate the content and the users want the content. The users are the entire value of the company. When you start messing around with that to monetise it and to keep shareholders and advertisers happy you're on a road to self destruction. Reddit thinks the content it hosts has value - it does but that content mostly has value when it's current and if you lose the users you lose the content.

Power users including many moderators seem to be the first out the door. Those are amongst some the highest value users in terms of generating and maintaining content on the site. It started a couple of years ago when Reddit started banning whole communities - some of that made sense, particularly more extreme communities but I suspect NSFW content will be next.

Ultimately there is cognitive disonnance in social media. Banning NSFW content to "protect children" and to make it easier for keeping advertisers happy seems like an "easy" choice, but ultimately adult users don't want to be stuck in censorship black zones, restricted by over zealous rules and rule keeps or frustrated by being caught up in the unintended consequences. Reddit is a site for adults, made by its users - damage that and you don't have a website.

This is the problem with believing too much in models. A model can show you anything you want - it's output is only as good as the parameters and algorithms you set it.

Modelling the climate in the next 50-100 years is already extremely difficult and fraught with inaccuracies but we have lots of models and data to extrapolate from, so we do have a crude idea where we're going. But we can't model next years weather with accuracy, just the base trend. Crucially important warning for climate change but limited otherwise.

Modelling out to 250 million years is basically a crock of shit. The tectonic movements are predictable and gross predictions that a pangea arrangement might be warmer may have some validity but modelling the climate and evolution and status of mammals is pure conjecture.

Good thing about modelling that far is you will never have see you model's accuracy being tested. Publish a paper, play into current fears around climate change with an irrelevant prediction about 250million years away, get an article published in the New York times and egos massaged all round.

This doesn't make sense. It's more likely we'll pack more into a high end device then say goodbye to them in tasks like gaming.

Computing power has been constantly improving for decades and miniaturisation is part of that. I have desktop PCs at work in small form factors that are more powerful than the gaming PC I used to have 10 years ago. It's impressive how far things have come.

However at the top end bleeding edge in CPUs,.GPUs and APUs high powered kit needs more space for very good reasons. One is cooling - if you want to push any chip to its limits then you'll get heat, so you need space to cool it. The vast majority of the space in my desktop is for fans and airflow. Even the vast majority of the bulk of my graphics card is actually space for cooling.

The second is scale - in a small form factor device you cram as much as you can get in, and these days you can get a lot in a small space. But in my desktop gaming tower I'm not constrained such limits. So I have space for a high quality power supply unit, a spacious motherboard with a wealth of options for expansions, a large graphics card so I can have a cutting edge chip and keep it cool, space for multiple storage devices, and also lots and lots of fans, a cooling system for the CPU.

Yes, in 5 years a smaller device will be more capable for today's games. But the cutting edge will also have moved on and you'll still need a cutting edge large form factor device for the really bleeding edge stuff. Just as now - a gaming laptop or a games console is powerful but they have hard upper limits. A large form factor device is where you go for high end experiences such as the highest end graphics and now increasingly high fidelity VR.

The exceptions to that are certain computing tasks don't need anything like high end any more (like office software, web browsing, 4k movies), other tasks largely don't (like video editing) so big desktops are becoming more niche in the sense that high end gaming is their main use for many homes users. That's been a long running trend, and not related to APUs.

The other exception is cloud streaming of gaming and offloading processing into the cloud. In my opinion that is what will really bring an end to needing large form factor devices. We're not quite there but I suspec that will that really pushes form factors down, rather than APUs etc.

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Yeah, "stupid" is not defined around average intelligence. This whole panel is an example of a straw man fallacy to undermine someone saying "people are stupid".

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This is an interesting concept but doesn't seem like it has long term legs.

It depends on what you mean by open source and also even eBook reader (I'm assuming eInk), but if people want open source e-readers I would say flashing existing reader hardware with open source operating systems would be the way to go. However I'm not sure if there is much motivation to do that.

There are Android based eink ereaders available with more freedom than Kindle devices (Boox is an example) and you can side load free or open source reader software onto Kobo (maybe not Android Kindles though?), and you can load free books onto e-readers via software like Calibre. So you can read books in privacy outside the vendors ecosystem - it kinda reduces the imputus to build an open source ereader (hardware or OS).

I'd love to see a truly open source Eink device - particularly software wise. But I doubt the demand is enough. And this Open Source hardware solution seems a bit too cut back to fit the bill.

I think they want to be vendor neutral to reap the benefits regardless of where people bought the game (i.e. not be limited to steam workshop)

I'm more bothered by the Mods being for Console and PC. I worry that PC modding is going to be held back by the inherent limitations of modding on and for consoles.

I think a lot of it comes from schools, and in particular physical education and competitive sports. There is nothing wrong with competitive sports but the attitudes around it in schools can be so toxic, and in particular it can be used to create hierarchies. The idea of being good at sports and that being masculine was something I certainly experienced a lot at school. Also people who weren't as academic but thrived in sports were lauded.

My school had various sports teams and clubs, and fuck all academic activities. Sports aren't toxic but the attitudes around them can be, and particularly adults who feed in toxic attitudes and values around it.

Ultimately "live and let live" is all we can ask of anyone. If that is their attitude then they aren't a bigot. People are expecting too much of other people now - not embracing someone does not make someone a bigot.

Your starting position to me is honestly enough but unfortunately many people are way away from that. As a gay guy, I'd be happy with people just saying "do whatever you want want, just don't ask me to like it". The problem is too many people claim that with words but then actually act differently.

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I'd say the biggest reason is culture and identity. The threadiverse is small at present - about 120k - and the microblogverse is bigger - 8m - but still smaller than the Threads.net 70m already and potential 1bn if meta leverages instagram. Why would a smaller and growing new independent social media platform want to be swamped by a commercial tidal wave? There isn't really a benefit to the independent parts of the Fediverse.

It's better for the independent parts of the fediverse to grow organically, remain independent and grow it's own identity rather than disappear into useless oblivion.

Also if I understand it correctly, the Threads.net is a microblogging site so while they may both use ActivityPub, Lemmy does not support microblog content. For Lemmy, it would mainly be the Lemmy content appearing within Threads.net. Federating with Threads.net is more of an issue for Kbin (which does both Threadiverse and Microblogverse content) and Mastodon (which does Microblogverse content) - the content would be visible in both directions. So for Lemmy it might be a big influx of users so may be manageable, but for Kbin & Mastodon it may also be a flood of content which might not be mangeable. But correct me if I'm wrong on that.

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What was your dream about windows?

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I think you will find this conundrum on any software you switch to. FOSS is hard, and needs a big enough community of motivated people with the right skills to make a project successful. People are largely doing this work as hobbies; it's hard to fund such projects. Doable but hard.

The most obvious alternative to go for is the Reddit code base which was open source and has been forked as Saidit. This is the most likely place to find something mature enough and feature rich enough for what you may need but again whether things will progress is another conundrum as who else is maintaining or using that codebase?

Lemmy and any other project like Kbin will need people and work to get it where you want, not just suggestions and a list of requests. The problem is not a lack of interest in achieving what you want from Lemmy, it is realistically that it is a small project team with a big task on their hands and Beehaw are not it's only users.

Ultimately Lemmy may not be the software now to do what you want for your community. Federation may also not be the right thing for a community of your ethos. Maybe the simplest solution is complete defederation and build the community in an environment you can completely control, even with the limits Lemmy current provides with it's software. Come back to the fediverse when you feel the software matches the ambitions, but in the meantime build the community you want.

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I think defederating may be knee jerk at this stage? Beehaw seems to have defederated because they vet users and are worried about unvetted users flooding their service; that's a fundamental community position rather than a fediverse issue. In this case it's more about tags not being applied correctly and how to improve that process (e.g. automation based on server or community posted to).

Defederating or blocking specific instances/servers seems like it should be a last resort - e.g. if a service is lax about moderation or refuses to deal with issues then it makes sense.

Maybe he has dementia. We're just so used to him talking shit that he's getting away with it.

I wonder if that's why he's avoiding the debates?

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Self Driving Cars - were getting used to the idea because of the half baked stuff that's already here but it's realistic this will make it mainstream in the coming years

"Cure" for cancer - the rapid progress in immunotherapy drugs is making more and more cancers realistically treatable. Cancers.are still terrible conditions but it does feel realistic that we are moving towards a "cure". After that it'll be a focus on preventing and reducing the horrible side effects of treating cancers.

Regrowing organs - this also seems increasingly realistic. We're already routinely regrowing people's immune systems for some conditions (autologus ransplants - where the donor is also the recipient). We're also increasingly growing different types of tissues and organs in lab experoments. It's looking plausible although hard to say when it'll become mainstream.

AI - I'm not convinced this one is on its way. What I mean is true General AI. What is labelled AI now is nowhere near General AI; it's sophisticated and impressive but also limited and deeply flawed. We're in an era of hype to drive up share prices but the actual technology is error strewn and is essentially a remix engine for human generated creativity. I'm not convinced true General AI is on its way because at the moment they don't understand how the current AI systems work. It's unlikely you can proceed from what we have to full general AI stumbling around in the dark or by shear luck. Not impossible, but unlikely. I think the current methods will more likely hit a brick wall in prpgress - they are useful tools but may be an illusion when it comes to full AI.

Normally the vice president wouldn't get this kind of attention. She's getting this attention because Biden is so old, and he is standing again for election. Vice President is a bizarre non-job in the US system but also very important because of its potential.

Kamala Harris is being attacked because there is a serious chance she will be President.

On the one hand she is being attacked and undermined because she's a woman and she's black. But on the other hand it is an election and it's right to think about the vice president, and particularly one who may actually be President.

If I was laid off by a company I wouldn't go back unless I had no other choice. If a company didn't see your value previously and now it supposedly does, what is to say it will not change again in the future and fire you again? A lot of companies do a last-in first-out approach and are cyclical about hiring and firing to please shareholders. That's where these tech companies are at now.

Also who wants the potential of a CV where you were laid off twice by the same company? It'd be like them taking your CV and wiping their arse with it before handing to back to you as security escorts you out of the building.

Don't go backwards, keep moving forward.

It's not immovable, it's just locked so you don't accidentally move it by clicking and dragging. Try right locking on the bar in a blank area lower down - the right click menu should have an option for moving it.

Yeah it's a nonsense. Argentina and Turkey have atrocious economies, with inflation at crazy levels. Turkey's is at 60% and Argentinas is at 143% currently, on a background of years of terrible economic decisions. Their local currencies are effectively trash so it makes absolute sense for Steam to move to dollars if they're going to continue bothering trading in those countries.

I'd go back and prevent the 11th Sept attacks.

The world would be a different place because so much happened as a knock on of that but at the same time it's hard to imagine what the world would be like. Probably very similar but also different in substantial ways.

Like obvious things like no war in Iraq or Afghanistan (at least not those wars), and less obvious things like how the attacks have reshaped liberal democracies like the US and Europe (for the worse imo), and how they empowered right wing politics in many countries (also bad imo).

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To be fair I think Polygon have misunderstood the email.

Calling it "second run Stadia PC RPG" implies Microsoft thought it was going to launch as a Stadia exclusive for it's first run. This was back in 2020 when Stadia was still a thing, and trying to sign up exclusives.

That doesn't mean Microsoft underestimated it, but that it thought it'd already have had a run on Stadia which would make it less likely to be an important title for Microsoft.

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Not strictly correct. Spotify pays out from its net revenues (revenues when billing costs and tax are removed) and it pays to the various industry rights holders who then distribute the money. There are lots of complex deals in place and big rights holders are likely to have better deals than ad hoc users, plus it's different in different countries.

The 70% figure is a PR thing Spotify pushes about as part of its constant battles with rights holders on exactly how much it will pay them. It's trying to claim most of the money goes to artists but it's opaque how much goes where.

Google Lens doesn't just translate text, it contextually searches based on what it sees and interprets in an image. The translation stuff is already built into the Android camera app; Lens is something more