A better place

The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.

I feel like a lot of answers here are dancing around why people find it offensive without really addressing it.

As an adjective "female" is completely fine to distinguish between genders when applied to humans. As in "a female athlete" or when a form asks you to select "male" or "female" (ideally with additional options "diverse" and "prefer not to answer").

Where it's problematic is when it's used as a noun. In English "a male" and "a female" is almost exclusively reserved for animals. For humans we have "a man" and "a woman". Calling a person "a female" is often considered offensive because it carries the implication of women being either animals, property or at least so extremely different from the speaker that they don't consider them equal. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the trend of calling women "females" is popular with self-proclaimed "nice guys" who blame women for not wanting to date them when in reality it's their own behavior (for example calling women "females") that drives potential partners away.

So in itself, the word "female" is just as valid as "male" and in some contexts definitely the right word to use but the way it has been used gives it a certain negative connotation.

I hate to say it but...

Well, it is a bit harder than that. Most of the games are not mate by Microsoft but by other companies so they can't just decide to give them away for free. And even if they could get everybody to agree to that, they would still need to provide the infrastructure to download them which would be just as much work as keeping the old store running.

Basically it means that they can handle lots of cases at the same time while still giving each one as much attention as it needs. Winning or losing a difficult case can often be decided by how much time and expertise you can put into it. When you have a lot to lose, would you rather have a team of lawyers, each specializing in a different aspect that’s relevant to the case or a single lawyer who is overworked because he‘ll have to prepare a different case after lunch?

Edit: typo

You're paying for the convenience of having it compiled and uploaded to the store. Nobody keeps you from compiling it for yourself. Or from getting it for free through F-Droid which is even linked from their github repository.

I'd finally finish some of my personal projects.

Over the last few years, I've had so many ideas for stuff, both video games and just basic useful software. This is where the curse of being a professional software engineer kicks in. I know that I'm experienced enough to actually make those things but after a full day of work, preparing dinner and getting the apartment in order, there is just not enough time and energy left to get my ass in front of an IDE again. I'd love to have the opportunity, even if just for a year or so to pause my day job and spend my energy on something that is actually mine and has emotional value for me.

On top of that, I have a couple of hobbies that would benefit from having more time. Photography, HEMA (fencing with proper swords), board games, 3d printing and painting miniatures... one thing is for sure, I wouldn't get bored any time soon.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't judge someone who doesn't know better. I'm not a native speaker myself. I just wanted to clarify as good as I can because it seems like OP wants to make an honest effort to use it correctly.

Look into the Framework 13. There are no touchpad buttons but otherwise it has everything you need and is fully upgradable and customizable. The laptop has four expansion ports that can hold a variety of hotpluggable expansion cards. The manufacturer offers USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, DisplayPort, 2.5G ethernet, microSD, audio and SSDs. There are also some community-made ones like LTE and dual USB-C.

Don’t get me wrong but I just don’t get all these „why do you use messenger X and not Y?“ threads that occasionally pop up. The answer is almost always „because the people I want to talk to use X“.

I use messengers to talk to specific people. Friends, family, the people I game with. It’s not like lemmy or reddit which are more about topics than about people. I can join a community about my favorite hobby on any platform and get more or less the same experience. But with messengers that doesn’t work. Matrix can be a thousand times better than Discord or XMPP but if the people I need to reach aren’t there, it’s absolutely useless to me. And convincing them to switch over with me isn’t really an option. They rightfully ask why they should get yet another messenger just for me when everyone else they want to talk to is on one they already have.

It’s almost a miracle that so many people switched from IRC to Discord when that came out but I guess they just had a bunch of features that people wanted.

I got hit really hard by 2048. I didn’t even play it that much but my brain started looking for groups of identical things and imagined how they slide into each other to create something new. Plates on the kitchen table, seats on the train to work, identical cars…

The problem is that this hurts developers more than it hurts Unity. And many developers just can't afford switching engines mid-development.

When will people learn that LLMs have no understanding of truth or facts? They just generate something that looks like it was written by a human with some amount of internal consistency while making baseless assumptions for anything that doesn’t show up (enough) in their training set.

That makes them great for writing fiction but try asking ChatGPT for the best restaurants in a small town. It will gladly and without hesitation list you ten restaurants that have never existed, including links to websites that may belong to a completely different restaurant.

Wow, that's one of the worst-written articles I've seen in a while. It almost feels like a comment on something that we aren't shown. Almost every sentence is missing essential context. When did he say that? In what context? Can we get a direct quote?

That being said, the head of one of the biggest console manufacturers and gaming publishers in the world blaming capitalism for the state of gaming is a true selfawarewolf.

Edit: PC Gamer has an article that's a bit more readable. Seems like Spencer sees the problem (investors value growth over everything else) and goes to the wrong conclusion (he needs to find a new way to grow his department).

The real problem is greed. These days, it's not enough for a business to be profitable. For the guys on Wall Street, it needs to be even more profitable than last year. That goes so far that an old employer of mine complained not that they had lost money, not that they had not grown but that they had grown less than the year before and therefore all teams had to cut down on spending. To them, everything less than exponential growth is unacceptable and nobody even considers that the market is finite.

Anything that doesn't devolve into "us vs. them", doesn't matter who "us" and "them" is.

The fediverse was designed to let every instance or even every user decide for themselves who they want to interact with. There is no need to persuade others to use the fediverse the same way you do. A few months ago I wrote a blog post about why my personal single-user instance wouldn't defederate from corporate-run instances as long as they play by the rules, with the clear intent to defederate if they do things that harm the way I interact with the fediverse. People got outright vile, called me names and tried to convince me that any tiny interaction with anyone they don't like would inevitably lead to the death of the free fediverse.

Personally I would rather have federated social media based on an open protocol where every user can decide what's the best way to interact with content than being forced into proprietary platforms just to get updates from my favorite video game studio, streamer or artist. It may well be that there are people on the fediverse who exclusively want to interact with vegan FOSS communist hippies and that's fine. But I'm not one of those people and I don't see why they should decide how I run my instance or get mad at me about something that doesn't affect them at all.

Let's all be as tolerant as we claim we are and treat people (and instances) based on their deeds and not based on how similar they are to ourselves.

I haven't been active on Twitter / X for years. My last proper tweet was in November 2022 when I asked people to follow me on Mastodon instead.

I still have my account though. Mostly because friends occasionally send me links to news tweets that X won't show me without being logged in. And because customer support for some service providers (especially DHL, GLS and some other logistics companies) suddenly gets a lot more helpful when you complain in public instead of calling them and they don't have Mastodon accounts.

Try if they charge. If yes, delete whatever data you find on them, then bring them to a recycling center. If no, think for a moment if you are important enough for someone to repair a phone just to get your data from ten years ago. Unless you have high security clearance for the government or a really large company, the answer is probably no. There are easier ways to get more current information about you.

Commercial VPNs as a security measure are pretty much a scam, at least in the way they are marketed.

These days, basically any web traffic is encrypted through HTTPS. Even on an untrusted network, nobody will be able to see the actual content (passwords, personal data) of what you're doing. DNS spoofing isn't viable either as any fake site they would send you to would lack the right certificates to establish a convincing HTTPS connection. So all someone can see is what servers you're connecting to, either by logging your DNS requests (can be prevented by using some form of encrypted DNS like DNS over HTTPS) or the IP addresses you connect to. And honestly, how much value does one get out of knowing that there's someone on their network who browses beehaw.org, supergreatbank.com and bigtiddygothgfs.to with no information to connect that to an actual person?

Unless you routinely use shady open Wi-Fi networks - and I'm talking about something that may have been setup on purpose by a malicious actor, not your local supermarket - to do security-critical stuff, you don't need a VPN. Also, if you trust your mobile data provider less than a company that tricks people into thinking you absolutely need their product to secure your data, you should get a different mobile data provider.

Now, there are use cases for VPNs but those are more along the lines of accessing stuff that's not available in whatever region you're currently in.

See also Tom Scott's video on the topic. It's a few years old but still relevant.

Edit: there is of course also the use case of hiding illegal stuff. In that case, I will not give any advice. Put some onions on top of your router or something, that's probably cheaper and more reliable.

Edit 2: just to make this entirely clear, I'm talking about commercial VPNs like NordVPN, Surfshark and whoever else pays YouTubers to advertise for them. If you host your own VPN, some of the downsides may not be as relevant. Though I would assume that anyone who even considers hosting their own VPN has enough technical knowledge about how networking works to know about the pros and cons.

What do you mean you "don't have any actual on paper proof"? I'm not too familiar with American law and such but don't you have a contract that states what your starting salary should be? A promise that's not put into writing and signed by your boss probably isn't worth anything.

To get a bit closer to your question: be friendly, ask if there has been a mistake or if you might have misunderstood the agreement. Only imply they're doing this on purpose if you're willing to leave the company if things go wrong.

Some national governments in Europe run their own instances. For example Germany runs https://social.bund.de/ and the Netherlands run https://social.overheid.nl. The EU itself has https://social.network.europa.eu/.

All of them have accounts for government organizations and elected officials.

Something OP put in the title as clickbait and it's not even accurate. Ronald Reagan went out of office in 1989 while the video clearly states the OS used needs at least an Intel Pentium processor which was released in 1993.

One of the most controversial elements of the policy concerned how Unity would track installations of its software. Although the company first said it would use proprietary tools, Whitten said Monday management will rely on users to self-report the data.

Do I even need to comment on this or can we just get some popcorn and watch while they find out that self-reporting doesn’t work?

Yeah, that should read "all other citizens of earth".

It sometimes runs on video game logic (for example, some pretty bad injuries can be healed instantly with the right equipment while others can't) and is bloodier than I would have expected. I'd say you don't need to be too familiar with the games as the show tells its own story. It has quite a few references to tropes from the games but even if you don't get the reference, it should still be enjoyable.

In general don't trust sensationalist reviews that call it the best or worst show of the year.

Not really. It tells you that there’s a druid who can turn into a bear and there’s a romance option for him. That’s it.

Doesn’t mention who he is or how he‘s relevant to the story. Most players won’t even see that scene in their first playthrough unless they explicitly look for it.

Publishers have massively overspent the last few years, hoping the gaming hype that started during the Covid lockdowns would stay or even grow indefinitely. Investors are only happy when numbers are higher than the year before and the only way to achieve this is to cut expenses. Problem is, cutting expenses almost always leads to worse output in the near future causing these companies to starve themselves to death. But by that time, those responsible will have cashed out and moved on to become C-level execs at some other company that they can milk for a few years before running them into the ground as well.

A commercial VPN provider is just another random third party.

The sad thing is that at least here in Germany they are becoming the only option for more and more products. Most of the things I ordered in the last few years I couldn’t have gotten locally. Often my only other option is a different soulless and ethically questionable online retailer that asks a 30% higher price, uses the worst delivery service in the country and is just as much of a threat to family owned stores.

This mainly applies to movies on DVD and BluRay but I even had to order some semi-exotic cooking ingredients from Amazon because nobody in my medium sized city has them in stock.

There areways to get around this. Give every indexing job to multiple nodes, decide the result by majority vote between those nodes and penalize (i.e. exclude) nodes that repeatedly produce results that don’t match the majority. Basically what distributed research has done for decades.

Getting the details of such a system right wouldn’t be easy but far from impossible.

Then block them?

There have been a bunch of experiments on YouTube and the shortest I've seen is about five months non-stop of showing the same frame with most saying it's over a year. So with normal use it should be fine for a few decades.

CrossCode! A modern topdown action RPG with gorgeous pixel art, great music and Zelda-like puzzles in dungeons. The full version is available for PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch and there is a demo that you can play in your browser.

Disclaimer: I'm friends with some of the devs but I would still recommend it if I wasn't.

Sorry, totally off-topic, I know, but… you’re willing to pay what for internet?

I live in Germany. We‘re famous for having horrible high speed availability. But where it’s available, we can get 1 Gbit/s for the equivalent of 50 USD.

Well, ackshually akshually - drink German beer. With very few exceptions, it's only allowed to contain barley, hops, yeast and water. That law has existed in some form for over 500 years.

I don't think the question was about misgendering people but about using "female" instead of "woman".

The 99 bottles of beer song is (was?) a popular programming exercise to teach beginners about loops. Singing it in real life would be pretty annoying because you would essentially repeat the same two sentences for a couple of minutes. Apparently, the PHP developers were planning to order one beer each, sing the song and get on everyone's nerves. The C++ dev stopped this by buying all the remaining beer at once.

The choice of languages is probably OP's own prejudice. These days I'd say PHP devs are on average older and more experienced than JS and Python devs, just because almost nobody learns PHP as their first language anymore.

This whole thing is a major political problem that has been brewing pretty much since World War II. I'm by far not an expert so I might get some details wrong but I'll try.

During the war, millions of Jews fled from the Nazis and the Allies were wondering what to do with all those refugees. One option was British-occupied Palestine. The reasoning was that it geographically coincided with ancient Isreael, the Jewish homeland. The problem is that it had been inhabited by Muslims for over 1300 years so obviously the Arab population wasn't too happy about giving up the region their families had lived in for generations just because some western colonial power had decided to give it to some refugees.

The plan was to split Palestine into two states - Palestine and Israel - with Jerusalem as a neutral zone under control of the United Nations. Because of the unstable situation - including terrorist attacks against the British administration - this was never fully implemented. The state of Isreael was officially founded in 1948 but there was never any formal agreement on who controls which parts of the region. The Arabs got driven from their homes and only kept the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but were obviously never happy about that. (Edit: please see correction by @Sprawlie@lemmy.world below. The situation is even more complicated) While the general population would probably be okay with just being left in peace, there are radical groups like Hamas who want to take back what was taken from them by the British and Israel.

On the other hand, nobody who lives in Israel today was involved 80 years ago when the British decided on their plan. These people were born in Israel and have lived there all their lives. So in a way, both sides just want to keep their homes. There have been several proposals for how we could solve this, including an official two states solution that would regulate the borders (obviously not favored by Palestine), a single state solution (forcing two groups who have been fighting each other for 80 years could be tricky) and reverting everything the British decided and kicking out the Jewish population (obviously not favored by Israel). There just is no good solution and so the situation in the area is heating up more and more. From their own perspectives, both sides have good reasons for what they're doing though the way they're doing it is obviously not acceptable.

(Edit: corrected 1400 to 1300. Math is hard)

I never got into kubernetes but docker swarm mode services (not to be confused with old docker swarm) are pretty similar and they're absolutely amazing for small deployments, even for just a home lab. If there's anything I want to self-host, no matter if it's homeassistant, jellyfin, nextcloud, a mastodon instance, a lemmy instance, GitLab or whatever, I can usually just get a preconfigured container, adjust some lines in a docker-compose.yml to fit my environment and be done with deployment in under 5 minutes without having to worry about dependencies, isolation or most configuration. Same for the stuff I write myself. Most of my stuff has a very simple GitLab CI config of maybe 20 lines and immediately shows up live when I merge my changes into main.

The execs probably went from „how hard could it be?“ to actually talking to their r&d department.