It’s also really bad for political optics.

It’s as bad as or worse than (according to the people treating it as a political issue) low birth rates. (From a human perspective it’s much worse).

So if you can suppress discussion of it, you don’t have to talk about solving the “problem” as frequently, you can downplay it, and you can shift blame to nebulous, faceless things like “social media” or “bullying” (both of which are real things and real concerns, but not things most places are willing to earnestly address politically, so in practically they function as a fits-all “evil” that allows redirection from the real problem, which includes things like lack of agency and security.)

If the U.S., for example, had a true grasp on the scope of this issue across all age groups, I think our political landscape would look a lot different. Despite being an issue across all age groups, each age group tends to stratify their discourse to be primarily amongst themselves, so online silencing becomes a ridiculously powerful tool in downplaying the issue, because there’s already a semi-natural cultural isolation in place for discourse in general.

We’ve seen the effectiveness of this silencing tactic when it comes to avoiding discussion of the problem for decades in one particular subset of humanity who, historically speaking, frequently seems to have regular horrible tragic mishaps while “cleaning their guns”.

Thank you for the clarification

My first question, working only with the headline and the first paragraph of the post was “I wonder if I can flash this to a smart TV I currently own?” I was excited. Maybe we’d finally made progress and I could have something superior to my early experiments with serviio some 10+ years ago.

Then I got to here and stopped caring because this makes it worse than any Roku in my book:

This project uses various open-source components like Plasma Bigscreen, Mycroft AI, LibCEC

Why does it have AI in it?

Five minutes?

I’m assuming from combining ingredients to putting in the oven?

How?

Got a recipe?

Use it without telemetry Use it without mandatory notifications that turn themselves back on if you turn them off Use it without file grouping by date if I so choose

There’s a giant list of configuration options they took away from 10 to 11 and more that they keep making more and more difficult to find, and this trend has been going on since aero was introduced in xp.

Some of us liked the power user options in win2k and feel they should have been expanded, not removed.

I just figured he was trying to save Wikipedia from getting axed by those in power in some countries who are pushing back very hard against anything that has sentences containing both “Israel” and “genocide” in it.

We’ve hit such staggeringly outrageous levels of “forced propaganda” in the U.S. (people getting fired from their jobs for speaking I’ll of a dead guy?) that if I was Jimmy, I’d be worried about the whole thing going away if it catches the eye of the wrong person at the wrong time. I don’t agree with what he’s doing for whatever reason, but the fact is that while Cloudflare may be able to survive 2.2 whattabytes[sic] per second, Wikipedia will not.

The Official Walter Simonson Page’s post

Aug 6, 2015

Star Wars 53 cover. Pen and India ink. 10 x 15. 1981.

I posted this cover because it represents something to me of the fun of comics back in the day. Maybe this sort of thing is still being done. No idea. But this issue of Star Wars began life as an issue of John Carter of Mars penciled by Carmine Infantino. :-) That title was canceled with an issue unpublished. And Marvel, in an effort to save a few bucks, mandated that the issue should be turned into a Star Wars story. It actually became two issues of Star Wars. I don’t remember if the John Carter story was two issues or if we merely stretched it out in order to convert the issue into an acceptable SW story.

The basic idea was to use as many of the JC pages as possible with as few changes as possible. Some extra pages had to be done and some panels altered to a greater or lesser degree to get everything to fit together. That was my job, along with the covers.

Chris Claremont wrote the issues and, I presume, wrote the original JC story. I’ve forgotten. I don’t know that it was the best way to make comics, but it was an interesting intellectual puzzle to try to solve in a readeable fashion. And it was the second time I got to do something like that. I’d helped Steven Grant convert an issue of Tarzan into a couple of Battlestar Galacticas a little earlier. It was fun, challenging, interesting and curious to do, whatever the final outcome.

I chose this cover because the issues had these giant stormtroopers in them, stormtroopers that I presume never appeared in any Star Wars stuff again. And we had giant stormtroopers in the issue in the first place because they were converted Tharks. ;-)

What’s the thing Elon does where he keeps his head lower, but looks up at the most extreme angle-of-eyeballs he can?

AND it doesn’t matter WHAT the other airport let you do because what they let you do has everything to do with THEIR policies and scanner capabilities and whatever CURRENT airport you’re in follows a policy written with the equipment THEY have in mind.

Airport A lets you keep your laptop in the bag because their scanner is powerful enough to see through circuitboards and batteries to tell whether there’s C4 or whatever wedged in there or not, airport B has a “laptops out of bags and power it on for me please” because the scanner in airport B can’t see through all the semi-precious metals in the circuitboards and battery plates, but they’re pretty sure you can’t wedge enough C4 or whatever in there between the scan-blocking parts to do anything and still be able to turn the thing on.

But airport B does know what airport A does or has and it doesn’t matter because they don’t have it.

It’s shitty and we should have standardized if we were going to do it all, but I’m betting some actuary somewhere has actual statistics on the semi-effectiveness of having differing policies and the confusion that sows.

On paper it’s probably theoretically harder plan around a system you don’t know, or something.

Wait, what?

Like, at the time? Or still?

In theory that means they have newer scanners.

I say in theory because for sanity’s sake I hope that’s the case, but I also know how they’ve historically worked thanks to the likes of Bruce Schneier.

This is based on the TYPE of scanner each checkpoint has and that frequently differs from airport to airport.

The problem is, most of THEM don’t even know that, so yeah, you appear mind-bogglingly stupid to them and they look needlessly arcane and possibly deliberately cruel and rude to you.

New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

or lost to the changing tastes of a new generation of media consumers

This is the part that just baffles me.

I rarely see anything but vitriol for anything anymore and it usually seems almost wholly unwarranted at the levels it’s offered at.

I’m beginning to think it’s not that people actually dislike the stuff that comes out, they’re just so programmed to nitpick EVERYTHING that they don’t remember how to enjoy something without finding fault. Or they don’t want to risk saying they liked something only to have someone call their very right to an opinion in question. Or… I don’t know. It well and truly confuses me.

This is the first complaint I’ve seen about any of the new Star Trek shows that didn’t use the word “Woke” as a pejorative term. I’m impressed and appreciative of your well-thought-out take on it.

You actually do have some decent points, but I’m still an unabashed fan of the new stuff, especially Discovery/SNW.

It IS different, in all of the ways you describe, but every new trek has been a stylistic departure from the previous ones in some way, shape , or form, and I’ve been taking the plot armor Mary sue-ing as one piece of that. (Something DS9 also has to a degree, but they definitely held to the “difficult moral choices” aspect in spite of it).

Thanks for your opinion and insight.

A few bad people who hate others because they think putting others down means they win picked a fight on the playground. They got other people on the playground to join them because they yelled the loudest and some kids thought that the louder you yelled, the more right you were. The people they were yelling about just wanted to be on the playground too, but the yelling people didn’t want them on the playground, so despite the fact that they didn’t want to, the people being yelled at played a competitive game against the people who were yelling.

After a long long long time (LOTS of sleeps) the yelling bad people won against the people they were yelling at.

The yelling people didn’t know what to do then. They only knew how to be angry and they couldn’t find anything else or anyone else to yell at and people were starting to leave their team because all the excitement was gone and there wasn’t a competitive game to play anymore.

So the bad yelling people panicked and started randomly picking other, smaller groups of people on the playground to yell about. They made up things about them and told lies.

It didn’t work at first, and they tried telling lies about lots of different groups of people one after another, and eventually they started picking on some people who were JUST different enough that some of their old yelling teammates who got bored and left believed those lies and joined the yelling again. There was SO much yelling and it was so much louder that it was impossible for anyone near the yelling people to hear the truth.

And that’s how we got from “abortion as an issue” to “trans people as an issue”.

So, for this, the easiest way I’ve found is to look at it in the following sort of way:

Using the example of coding, you can already USE software, think of that like knowing how to DRIVE a car. Start with learning how to REPAIR the car (GUI building block code).

Then learn how to MOD the car with a kit (high-level object-oriented, TYPED code with an IDE or editor that does stuff like auto complete, syntax highlighting, and has add-ins that assist in getting the typed code to completion).

Then learn how to create your own car mods from “scratch” (get to the point where you don’t necessarily NEED all those editor widgets to help code)

Then learn how the car functions at a base level and how all the various chemicals, heat, and aerodynamics, pistons, filters, etc interact to make the car function (interacting with and modifying OS-level code/low-level languages with things like hardware access instead of applications that run on the OS)

THEN worry about the various chemicals themselves create the energy needed to generate power for the car (firmware on top of circuits and chips like the CPU/GPU/PSU, storage controller boards, audio chips, and motherboard/bios)

THEN worry about the actual molecular interactions occurring in the batteries or fuel at the atomic level (binary electrical functions of the parts themselves, where 1’s and 0’s are just current on or current off).

Just because the binary is there at every stage doesn’t always mean that understanding how the bonds between the “atoms” operate is going to make you a better programmer UNTIL you understand what you’re trying to get those atoms to do and why.

For the briefest of moments, I thought this post was someone opening one of those packages of ea-nasir’s copper.

I would be doubled over laughing for a good ten minutes if I accidentally smacked some NPC and got “randi ke beej” yelled at me.

Agreed, that’s critical. That said, I periodically subscribe to all of those, and all of the ones I’ve tried in the last year on Firefox on Debian, have worked perfectly. If there’s any left that still don’t, I haven’t tried/encountered them.

That’s great news and it gives me a lot of hope.