Yeah, and this is why being an informed voter is so difficult. There was one initiative on my ballot that was worded like “create funding for programs to reduce homelessness.” Sounds nice, right? Sounds progressive? Sounds like something I’d want, for sure!

After googling it, it was basically just giving tons of money to cops… So that the cops can buy new tactical gear, to march into homeless camps like jackboots and beat the shit out of homeless people while torching all of their stuff. But sure, it’s “reducing homelessness.” I guess if we tear down the homeless camps and violently chase all of the homeless people out of town, there are no more homeless people? That’s how it works, right?

It would require capturing a zygote.

Did you mean capturing a gamete? As in, a viable sperm cell or egg? Which proves that the individual is biologically capable of producing those gametes, which means they are capable of producing viable offspring?

Because capturing a zygote (a viable egg that has been successfully fertilized by a viable sperm cell, but hasn’t yet implanted itself on the uterine wall to become an embryo) would require a woman to have a fertilized egg. And I feel like requiring impregnation just to confirm sex is a little… Impractical?

It would mean positively identifying males would be impossible, because they’re not capable of carrying a zygote at all. That that’s before we even get into the whole “in order to confirm an elementary school girl is biologically female so she can compete, the doctor would first need to impregnate her to create a zygote” thing.

Yup, I’m sure China is over the moon. A lot of his decisions have basically just boiled down to “hand {soft power} directly to China.” Because the slimy sack doesn’t understand the concept of long-term planning and soft power. Hell, he doesn’t even understand quarterly business planning, because he bankrupts every business he gets his tiny mitts on.

Yes, it specifically affects the OpenSSH/Alpine/musl interaction. It’s a vulnerability in how Alpine/OpenSSH interfaces with musl, and allows anyone who can reach your SSH port to instantly log into a passwordless account by entering over 256 characters into the password field.

The vuln is nicknamed *sshole, if you want to search it. Because it only works on passwordless accounts, (meaning it has a * in the password field). And the most common use-case for passwordless accounts is because you’re using cert-based authentication instead. Thus the warnings that if you’re using cert-only SSH, you’re most likely vulnerable.

Let’s not forget the displaced populations who inevitably get forced out of their homes whenever billionaires want more land to build a new country club. It’s like looking at where the government typically chooses to invoke imminent domain to build new highways. It’s almost always low income populations (or up-and-coming BIPOC neighborhoods that are getting too successful) that get forced to relocate.

Yeah, I already have more games in my Steam library than I could conceivably play in my lifetime. Like if I sat down and properly worked through my +2500 game backlog, it would keep me busy for decades. And all of them can be booted on modern hardware.

And that’s before we even dive into emulation and retro consoles. I love my Steam Deck, because it’s actually a fantastic (albeit, overpowered) handheld emulator. Hell, even my iPad is an emulator these days, and I keep a PS5 controller in my bag just in case I want to connect it and boot up a game during my breaks. Being able to just pick up and play the old classics whenever I want is nice. I would consider one of those dedicated handheld emulators, but I really don’t have a need since I already have two ways to easily emulate in my bag.

Technically, it could go below 1¢ each. Imagine being able to buy 1000 coins for a dollar.

No, there was an SSH vulnerability discovered a day or two ago, which allows anyone to bypass the certificate check during authentication. So if your SSH is configured to only use a certificate, (not cert and password) then anyone can log into your shit.

Probably the same way Unity feels about their game engine being associated with awful low budget shovelware games. The game engine was popular with low budget games because you can use the engine for free… But you have to display the “Made with Unity” splash screen for a few seconds as your game boots up. And notably, you can pay a licensing fee to remove that splash screen requirement. Basically the drug dealer special: Get the newbie game devs familiar with the engine for free, then charge the publishers to use the engine that their employees all already know.

The issue (which Unity didn’t initially foresee when they wrote their licensing terms) is that all of the shovelware games used Unity for free, and all of them had the big “Made with Unity” splash. So Unity very quickly became associated with super low effort shovelware games.

I feel like breaking Trump’s proclamations should be enshrined as tradition. Every future president finds one of Trump’s orders, and ceremoniously violates it on Inauguration Day. Even if the proclamation has already been torn down by multiple prior presidents, they do it on ceremony, as a symbolic “never again will the country stoop to this level” reminder.

Even this isn’t a foolproof solution, because you can still find them on third-party instances that federate with both yours and .ml

I actually suspect that her sudden flip helped El-Sayed, by preventing any protest voters who were still allied with her. Just like the Bernie protest voters who refused to vote for Hillary, but were then shocked and dismayed when Trump won. Her coming out and endorsing the republican immediately killed any desire to protest-vote, and ensured that the entire party was allied behind El-Sayed.

I don’t think it was a make-or-break situation. But it definitely contributed to him winning by such a large margin that there’s no room for his opponent to cry for a recount.

I just bought a refurbished HP EliteDesk for ~$400, and it’s much better than a pi in basically every metric except power draw. If those things are actually retailing at $385, it’s legitimately time to start treating the used/refurbished market as the new standard.

9 year old me (casually scrolling on 4chan) would agree. I still remember accidentally stumbling across my first beheading video. The early (largely unmoderated) internet was like the Wild West.

I fully believe that modern video games are the primary cause of murder-hobos. Video games have functionally trained modern players to only interact with the world in very specific ways. If your video game character only has three actions, and all three of them are some form of attack, you’ll inevitably end up using those attacks to interact with the world.

Video games have basically trained players to follow a very specific set of rules: See a barrier to progression? Try your primary action (usually an attack) on it, and see what happens. If it breaks, you were correct. If you bonk, try your second action, (again, usually an attack). Then your third. Etc… By the rules of the game, if you’re meant to get past the barrier, one of your pre-determined actions will get you past it. So you as a player are taught to just throw things at the barrier and see what sticks.

And the barrier can be any number of things. An enemy to defeat, a cracked wall to smash, a door to lockpick, a grapple point to swing across, a giant spider web that will burn away when you use a fire attack, etc… All of them are just barriers to progression on the player’s trek from A to Z. And every barrier (if it is intended to be passable) will have some sort of corresponding key. It may be a literal key you need to find somewhere in the world, (like in a Zelda game, with a locked door needing a Small Key to pass), but it may also be a more symbolic “key”. A grapple point needing a grapple to pass a large gap, a chunk of ice needing a fire attack to melt, a molten pit of lava that you need an ice attack to solidify, a small gap that you need to transform/shrink to fit through, etc… But as long as you as the player have collected the correct “key” for the barrier, you can pass.

And the issue with translating that to a tabletop session is that the DM doesn’t lay out any specific corresponding key for a given barrier, (unless it’s something literal, like a vault door requiring a special magical key). It is usually left open to the player to decide how they want to approach a given situation. The DM sets up the scenario, and then leaves the players to approach it however they see fit. And when the players encounter a barrier, they fall right back into that video game mentality: Check your character sheet for potential keys, and start throwing things at the barrier to see what sticks… And almost all of the “keys” they find are some form of offensive or defensive combat ability. Because the character sheet isn’t going to list the mundane things that anybody can do. It only lists the special things that your specific character can do.

Let’s say you encounter a guard in front of a door. You check your character sheet, and see a LOT of ways to approach the situation. 95% of them are some sort of combat ability. Your character sheet often doesn’t directly list things like “walk up and politely introduce yourself”, “bribe guard”, or “attempt to intimidate the guard” as direct actions. Because those are things that any character can do without needing a special action for them. Sure, the game has ability checks set up for those kinds of options, (in D&D’s case, Persuasion to talk or bribe your way past, Intimidation to try and get the guard to back down, Deception to try and lie your way past, etc…) but they aren’t directly listed as special actions on your sheet. They’re just “soft” actions that any character can attempt.

So what happens is the player sees a barrier (a guard), looks for a corresponding key on their character sheet, (their list of special actions) and sees a lot of combat abilities that their specific character has earned. Unless you’re specifically playing as a Face character, you often don’t have any social actions listed on your character sheet. So they do the video game thing. They start picking actions to throw at the barrier, to see if they work. Because video game logic dictates that if you’re meant to pass this barrier, (the guard), you should have a key for it (your actions and abilities).

All of this means the party sees a guard, then the barbarian immediately goes “I try to hit them with my +1 battle axe.” The DM sighs, because the guard would have simply let them past if they had tried talking. The guard already had orders to let the party pass, because they’re on a mission for the duke and need to interrogate the prisoner being held here. The duke anticipated this, and alerted the local guards to expect the party. But now they’re in combat, because the barbarian already rolled his dice and celebrated his Nat 20, before the DM could even say anything in response. There were plenty of other options available, but many of them were “soft” options (like talking) that aren’t listed on your character sheet. But the barbarian has “Multi Attack” listed right at the top of their available actions, so that was the first key they tried on the barrier.

And I say video games are the primary cause of murder-hobos, because there are 100% players who are only interested in combat. If that’s the expectation going into a campaign, that’s fine. The DM and the rest of the party can plan for that accordingly. DM sets up a scenario with hostile creatures, and combat starts. The “plot” in a campaign like this is often just used to loosely tie the encounters together. And if that’s what everyone in the group is looking for, that’s great. You’ll all have a wonderful time. If you have an entire party of roll-players (as in, players who just want to roll their dice in combat) then it’s not inherently a bad thing that they’re murder-hobos. Because the DM will design the game world accordingly.

The issues arise when you have a mixed bag of some players (and the DM) wanting to roleplay and dive into a complex plot, while one or two roll-players are just finding every opportunity to make attack rolls. And those roll-players inevitably end up dragging the entire party into combat, even when the party Face could have easily talked their way through an encounter (or at least acted as a distraction long enough to set the rest of the party up for a surprise attack) instead.

Dems need to actually keep that in the news cycle too. Establishment dems definitely have a “people don’t want us to brag” mentality, but it means that republicans are really good at auto-fellation in comparison. Congress needs to keep putting wildly popular legislation on his desk, and every single time he vetoes it, they need to raise hell.

Every single bill he vetoes should be a branding iron on his flabby pale ass. Forcibly brand him as the president who vetoed universal healthcare, livable minimum wage, guaranteed paid maternity/paternity leave, etc… Don’t let the news cycle (and voters) forget why the gridlock is occurring.

Sure, but OP was asking for curated collections, and the above commenter pointed at MAM as an example. And MAM is specifically purging their curated collections, so I thought it was funny that MAM was the go-to response.

Texas has been red for over three decades. The state was a key part of the Southern Strategy, because packing the 5th circuit court of appeals with conservative judges was a big part in overthrowing longstanding liberal legislation.

Texas provides a direct pipeline to the 5th circuit, and they also needed to pack a local district court too. So all of the legislation they hate can get litigated in that district court, seen by a batshit crazy conservative judge, and get a batshit crazy conservative ruling. And then any appeals will go to the 5th circuit court of appeals, where it will land in front of another batshit crazy federal judge. And when that batshit crazy federal judge makes a batshit crazy ruling, it goes into effect nationwide unless the SCOTUS overturns it.

Seriously, basically every time you see some kind of “federal judge overturns the every person gets a free puppy and our farts all magically smell like cotton candy law, and reinstates the livestream puppies getting fed into the Puppy Masher 9000 and we all have uncontrollable diarrhea law instead” type of news story, it’s coming out of the 5th circuit court of appeals.

Texas got hit hard by conservative propaganda as a result, because it has been instrumental as a weapon for conservatives to overturn liberal legislation. Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of progress.

We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings, because they used Claude to get through their physics classes.

Skill atrophy is absolutely a concern, even if we continue teaching the fundamentals. Because without that higher level knowledge, there is nobody to check for hallucinations.

The desktop calculator is an amazing tool for people who do a lot of math, but those people still know how to do the math. AI is fundamentally changing that, because it is directing users on how to do the work, not simply taking in {a}+{b} and returning {c}. It is a user going “hey chatbot how do I find the difference between {a} and {b}?” Then the AI confidently (and incorrectly) goes “Oh all we need to do is {a}+{b} to give us the result {c}.” But if the user already doesn’t know how to find a difference, they won’t notice that the AI is incorrect.

And that is obviously a small example, but apply it to larger problems like calculating thermal expansion requirements for a suspended walkway. Calculating maximum wattage ratings for a circuit. Calculating maximum weight ratings for a highway overpass or bridge. Calculating medicine dosage based on a patient’s body weight and an interactive drug.

Any one of these could lead to disaster if done incorrectly. And the issue with AI is that it will happily hold your hand through the entire process, while confidently being incorrect the whole time.

But I don't need to share those credentials with anyone.

Yeah, I like BitWarden because it makes sharing passwords very easy. My wife and I have a few shared accounts, and have a family vault set up. So anything we want to share just gets transferred into the family vault, and we can both easily access it. And since it even supports TOTP, we can have those directly on the shared accounts without needing to bug each other with the “hey I’m trying to log into {x}, send me your Google Authenticator code” song and dance.