my owl language.

Is 'my owl language' the language you're learning using Duolingo? Or is it a typo and you meant 'my own language'? It's interesting because normally I'd assume the latter, but in the context of this thread, the former makes some weird sense.

It's 10% of users using Steam Input, not all steam users.

Valve mentioned that daily controller use has jumped to 15% from around 5% since 2018, and that around 42% of these sessions use Steam Input.

Nobody's being censored. Anyone can go to lemmygrad and read their content. They're not even being deplatformed - nobody's preventing them from posting anything their instance allows on that instance. It's closer to curation than censorship... instances are free to curate the content they host. If you don't like the curation of a given instance, just move to a different one.

Did you play Dark Messiah of Might and Magic? This looks very reminiscent of that; the trailer looked very similar in style, lots of focus on the first-person animations, physics manipulation (e.g. kicking enemies off cliffs), the same sort of combat style.

It played more or less exactly like it looked, and for its time, it was fantastic - truly innovative and fresh feeling. With that in mind, I really hope that's what they're using as inspiration here, and that they capture that same game feel.

My kid was quite small for his age when he was in little league, and he was awful at baseball - I think he maybe got 2 or 3 hits the entire time he was playing, but because he was so small, he had a really tiny strike zone, and he pretty quickly realized that if he just never swung at anything, he'd get on base every single time. It was kind of funny, in a sad kind of way.

I'm responding to your implication that actions in protest that get people talking about the issue are inherently valuable and worth taking. To make the point that that is not the case, I am using an extreme example to demonstrate a scenario where your statement is (I hope) objectively false.

I think I clearly stated my counter-point, which is that just because we're talking about it doesn't mean it is an effective or worthwhile form of protest to be engaged in.

I'm not really sure where you're confused here.

If I went and shot someone in the name of Gaza awareness, and painted these messages on the sidewalk using their blood, that would be getting talked about, too. Point being, there's effective forms of protest that we still shouldn't be using.

So, you are right that admins imposing defederation unilaterally is an authoritarian action in line with things the North Korea or other repressive governments have done, though obviously far less severe due to the lack of violent enforcement behind it.

What? It's nothing like that at all. Your instance isn't a country; you aren't stuck there. You can go wherever you want. You can read content on multiple instances.

It's more akin to CNN deciding not to run a story that Newsmax is covering. You can have more than one source for your news.

I think you have a point here, although I think the issue is less with defederation itself, which is an important tool to manage conflict between instances, but rather with the lack of democratic governance in instances themselves.

Instances are run by individuals, who in turn have the power to run those instances as they see fit. If you dislike how a particular instance is being run, move to a different one, it's as simple as that.

One could also simply move to another country if desired.

That's nowhere near as easy for the majority of people - especially those in authoritarian countries - as you're making it out to be.

North Korean defectors are North Korean people who left North Korea to become citizens in a new country. In North Korea, it is against the law to leave North Korea without permission. North Koreans are also not allowed to change their own citizenship, so anyone born a North Korean must also die a North Korean. The punishment for leaving North Korea without permission is extremely harsh. People who are caught are usually sent a prison camp or put to death in public. Like many other crimes in North Korea, illegally leaving the country may not only punish the accused, but also his or her family up to three generations.

The fact that there I can choose which authoritarian system I want to be under means little when they are all quite similar. I don’t know of any instances that have such democratic governance. They are all run by their admins as they see fit. It would be like choosing if I want to live in North Korea or Nazi Germany. Sure, they might be different in some ways, but I don’t have a real voice in decisions either way.

Anyone can start an instance. Make your own, and federate with whomever you want. Nobody's stopping you.

Alternately, maybe it's the case that doing something bad to bring attention to another bad thing isn't okay just because the thing you're trying to bring attention to is worse.

I actually support the protests where they're throwing soup on paintings or whatever. Those paintings don't really matter, but some people sure think they do, and it's effective to get a dialog going. Libraries are a public good, one of the few we really have left. It's like ransacking a food bank to draw attention to starving people in Gaza; it's not helping the cause they ostensibly care about, but it is hurting others.

I’m not sure why you’re giving a history lesson when I already acknowledged that point in the comment you are replying to.

It's because, despite claiming to have acknowledged the problem, you're still making such an incredible false equivalency - comparing joining a new Lemmy instance to moving out of an authoritarian country - that you either completely misunderstand what you're talking about, or you're arguing in bad faith.

Sure, I theoretically could create my own instance, but then I would have the same problem as current instance admins, even those who are sympathetic to these ideas, as I suspect Lemmy.world and my own are. That there is no structure within Lemmy to enable collective decisions to be made or executed, and I would need to build them from scratch.

You'd have full control over your instance, and could, if you built up a community, use any online voting method you wanted - of which there are plenty - to poll your userbase and gather their opinions.

However, ultimately, you'd be the one paying for the instance, and doing the work to set it up and keep it updated and running. What would you do if you attracted a userbase that had views that were completely counter to your own? What if you attracted the alt-right crowd, and what got voted into place was all hate-speech, nazi rhetoric, and intolerance? (I assume you disagree with these things...) Would you continue paying for and hosting the instance, just because that's what was democratically decided, even though it's no longer an instance that you want to participate in? Could anyone really fault you for not wanting to do that?

A better method might be for you to make clear your own opinions - either via a post explaining them, or via a pre-defined federation / defederation plan - and let people join your instance who agreed with those decisions. Which, incidentally, is how most instances currently operate.

I mentioned democratic decision-making around defederation but it’s likely other changes will be needed as well.

Be the change you want to see in the world. You don't have to code in an integrated solution; all you'd have to do is set up an online poll, listing all of the other instances up for consideration (such a list can be pretty easily obtained - for example from https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list ), run a new poll on regular intervals, say, every 2 months, and let anyone who is interested vote. Then, you update the defederation list based on the results of the poll.

However, I think you'll quickly run into the other problems I outlined which, unfortunately, can't really be changed. You could require everyone who's participating in the voting to also be contributing time or money to run the server, except that then you're operating a plutocracy, not a democracy, so most likely, you'll need to be giving up your time and money to make your desired server administration a reality.

Not trying to dredge this all up again or restart this conversation, but I thought you might like to know... I went and watched some of the videos and read some of the accounts you've referenced (none of which I'd seen previously), and I can safely say that you've at least in part changed my view on this insofar as it applies to his intentions that day. Thanks for taking the time to discuss it.

Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members' libraries, even if they are online playing another game. If your family library has multiple copies of a game, multiple members of the family can play that game at the same time.

Well this is exceptionally exciting. This potentially solves 100% of my complaints with Family Sharing as it exists currently.

What? What kind of heathen doesn't have a pair of heavy duty work gloves for showering? Am I the only civilized one among us?!

“Why do you seek to deny [the right to an abortion] to other women?” Clark pressed.

“Let me, let me — I don’t, I don’t,” Holtorf replied.

“You have voted to restrict abortion access,” Clark shot back.

“And I have. And I’m a pro-life person. I think you should try to choose life every time. But there are exceptions. And there are times when you need abortion. Abortion is a medical procedure,” declared Holtorf.

There are exceptions, like when it's inconvenient for the rich and powerful. Other people should (be compelled by law to) choose life every time.

I used to work in CS for a cell phone provider. The most memorable call I had from that experience was a woman who spent over an hour yelling at me because her daughter had ordered a $1200 phone upgrade without permission. She was absolutely sure that it was illegal for us to charge her for that, because her daughter was not authorized to use her card, and because her daughter was under 18.

She didn't want to return the phone, because she didn't want her daughter to hate her. She just didn't want us to charge her for it.

“During World War II, Churchill told the United States, ‘give us the tools, we'll do the job.’ And I say, give us the tools and we'll finish the job a lot faster,” Netanyahu said in the video.

Yeah, that's what we're afraid of, and exactly why we don't want to give you the weapons.

While I'm glad he was awarded the judgement, it's wild that an undercover cop gets 23.5 million, while tons of civilians are also beaten by police and receive much lesser judgements, if they're lucky enough to get anything at all...

35-year-old is a US army veteran and seventh-grade math teacher

Sounds like he'd be better than Trump by a mile.

I'm sure she's going to have an excellent working environment and management that really appreciates her.

I can't help but feel like this is their endgame with these ridiculous laws. They're making their states so unpalatable to reasonable people that all the reasonable people leave. Everyone who remains are either "the poors" who can't afford to go (and who they work to disenfranchise as much as possible), or people who are just as far-right as they are, securing both their own seats and presidential election votes for their candidate.

Wow, spez is taking on The Verge now? He thinks he's a lot bigger deal than he really is...

Documentaries often include recreations of events, such as historical events that weren't filmed. It's usually noted as being a recreation or re-enactment. If AI-created images are used instead and are noted as being such, I don't really see the problem, assuming the images are curated to depict the scene accurately.

They claimed that the FTC never alerted them to any wrongdoing before filing the lawsuit, so how could they have known they were violating the law?

"The police never informed me I was doing anything illegal before arresting me, so how could I possibly have known?"

Ignorance of the law isn't a defense against breaking it in any other sector...

They asked for harmless pranks - this would cause murders.

Parachutes require pretty specific conditions to be able to use, and they require a fair amount of know-how. Expecting random passengers to be able to operate a parachute at all is basically a losing battle, and if you had people jumping out of planes that were on their way down, you'd have a lot more people dying (speculation but I'd wager money on it) than if they just stayed in the plane. Plus it'd be a horrible look for the airline - even worse than a plane crashing and killing everyone on it - if they had dead people raining down over cities and whatnot because they jumped and didn't properly deploy their chute, or deployed it too quickly, or didn't jump at the right time and got hit by the plane or any number of other possible problems.

Fighter jets and the like have ejection seats that specifically propel the pilot away from the plane before deploying the chute, and recreational (or military) planes that people are jumping from are designed for that purpose, and are moving a lot slower than commercial airliners. Opening the door on a plane to let people jump would cause more problems than keeping them on the plane. (People getting sucked out the door and the like.) Getting passengers safely clear of a plane that's going down unrecoverably would be basically impossible.

As many have pointed out on social media, having seen this footage, children were seated all around the couple that night, within viewing range of what they were up to.

You didn't even have to click through to the article, it was right in OP's summary. Come on.

America, if you’d vote for change, this wouldn’t be necessary. The US is the only developed country where this is commonplace.

In order for us to vote for change, change has to be on the ballot.

WEI’s goal is to make the web more private and safe The WEI experiment is part of a larger goal to keep the web safe and open

(Emphasis mine)

They contradict themselves in the span of 2 sentences. Great look, folks.

We used to pay our rent in 15-20 installments, one every day or two. The office of the apartment building we lived in was on the way to our apartment, so it wasn't any inconvenience for us to just drop a check in their drop box when we passed by, but I like to think it was mildly irritating for them to have to deal with the book-keeping. They asked us not to on multiple occasions but their only online option had a small "convenience charge" attached, so... No, thank you. I'd be happy to use it if they paid me a "convenience fee" for not making them process 20 checks every month.

It's telling that the people who push this narrative are the people whose jobs pay the most money for the least amount of actual work.

It's honestly embarrassing that our political landscape has been reduced to this.

“Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.” ― Richard Adams, Watership Down

That book does a really good job of presenting just how shitty humans are pretty much throughout, without coming across as being preachy or sanctimonious, and I like that.

You're acting like there's only two situations: The entire Fediverse defederates with them, or the entire Fediverse federates with them. That's not the case.

I, personally, do not want to interact with anyone using Threads, because Meta has a proven history of poor moderation and of manipulating the narrative for political gain on Facebook and I see no reason to think they won't do the same here. I am not the only one who holds this opinion. Those of us who feel this way can use instances that defederate with them, and have our way.

If you want to interact with them, you can maintain an account on an instance that does federate with them. You do not need to have a Threads account, nor does anyone else.

Bold of you to assume it was $24 and not $5.

If an "official act" is anything that happens while they're in office, Biden should just shoot Trump on his last day in office. Following this argument, he'd be immune to prosecution.

A denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future president with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office, and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents.

It's funny that this hasn't happened in 45 presidencies, yet his argument is that it's suddenly going to be a problem for every future president...

The 23-year-old recently purchased a condo in Streeterville as an investment, with plans to renovate the unit and either sell or rent it out.

That line right there tells you basically all you need to know about this person's opinion. "Doom spending" isn't what's keeping the vast majority of 23 year olds from purchasing a condo as an investment.