I think we also experienced a few unusually high number of school shootings for a few years around 2016, and the media probably reports them less because Trump has taken up all of the media spotlight.
I seem to remember noting about a decade ago that we had a very high number of school shootings in the first 6 months of a year, and doing the math out it was something like 1.5 a month. I definitely remember talking to people about how crazy it was that we had one basically every few weeks.
This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It's how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.
Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.
If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.
It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a "family computer" system, not a game console.
Step 1: Ban "assault rifles" (no clear definition so specifics will vary greatly from place to place)
Step 2:??
Step 3: Mental health crisis, economic crisis, and various other underlying causes of gun violence are solved
Not to say that guns aren't an issue. They are, but this is no different than arming the police with military surplus munitions and vehicles instead of decriminalizing drug use, improving social security programs and education, etc. It does nothing to actually address the issue - especially since these gun laws never actually target the guns most frequently used in gun violence/crime (pistols), and are never followed up by any step 2.
It's security theater to look like they're doing something to address the issue.
I think it's more accurate to say that the majority of people are indifferent to AI and that businesses are caught up in the hype of cheap genAI being good enough to replace specialized workers for specific fields like graphic design.
People use it for certain things that they lack skills in or don't want to spend effort on but seem to generally see a lot of it as a solution looking for a problem and resent how it's being forced into everything. Similar to the resentment towards cars moving to put everything on giant touchscreens. The last time I bought a car I was talking to the salesman about how I had no interest in the newer cars with the giant screens and he said that practically everybody that came in said the same thing and that car manufacturers are pivoting back to physical controls because nobody wants the touchscreens. Enough people would rather buy 10+ year old cars than newer models because of the lack of physical controls that it's forcing car companies to reconsider their push for touchscreens for everything.
Cell phone companies were quaking in their boots (okay, not really, but you know what I mean) over the fact that even in their own polling they were finding that 50% of users either didn't use AI features or didn't find them useful in their day to day phone usage and 30% found it actively made their user experience worse. 20% positive feedback is not a good sign for a healthy market with potential for growth.
Add in that kids are conflating AI with low-quality and false information. Literally using the term AI when they don't believe something like the way we used to use Photoshopped or "fake news," and using "slop" liberally and frequently.
Even experts in various industries seem to have a weird paradoxical opinion on AI despite being pro AI. There's been consistent polling that has shown that experts say that AI is good enough to replace people in any given field except for their field of expertise, where it's too unreliable to ever be able to do the job. It doesn't matter what the field is, the opinion is the same.
It's probably safe to say that people don't really care one way or another about AI, but dislike the companies involved in the AI bubble.
Gabe the GOAT Newell
By 2003, I believe EA and Microsoft had also implemented CD Keys with a limited number of uses, usually 5 or so. If they hadn't by then, it would be by 2010 at the absolute latest.
The war on secondhand sales of games and software had been going on since CD Keys themselves were introduced in the 90s, and probably in some other format in the 80s that I'm not aware of. Digital marketplaces were just the next logical step in the fight and the carrot of convenience for people to sacrifice their sense of ownership.
I think this is why Steam is well-loved today and why people say that they keep winning by doing nothing. When Steam came out, everybody hated it. You gave up ownership of your games and the online aspect was obnoxious with early 2000s internet. But they continued to add features of convenience - friends lists, achievements, stable servers for all kinds of games (like indie games), modding support and tools, the ability to download patches in the background, a user score/review system, frequent sales, etc. And now, Steam has so many features that it's become a positive feature for a game in people's minds while so much of the competition only has the lack of ownership and forcing people to download their launcher to offer.
In a comment on another post about this the other day, I saw someone claim that they had to resort to CCleaner to remove Chrome off of their system after this update. Chrome wouldn't let them uninstall the browser manually.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know, I haven't used Chrome in a while and I'm not gonna install it just to try (or ever again - I like my ad blockers, thank you very much). But, with the current state of the software landscape, it wouldn't surprise me if it were true.
I mean, they were at one point urging their admins to "take over other instances and kick out all the non-communists," so...
Plus, there's a reason that Blahaj defederated them. Toxic people will be toxic.
Even before renewables/green energy, we've had problems with surplus power in the grid. It's actually one of the biggest issues for infrastructure to solve in moving away from fossil fuels. We simply don't have the storage capacity, and nobody has any real plan or path toward a solution as of yet, as far as I know.
For probably a century or so now, power companies have been paying manufacturing industries to run their heaviest equipment with nothing in them just to bleed extra power out of the grids during lows in demand because power stations can't change their outputs fast enough, especially things like nuclear energy. Even stuff like coal or natural gas plants have a spool up or down time that can't keep pace with the changes in demand.
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TBH, it wasn't that far outside of the basic corporate Dem playbook. Incredibly stupid and definitely lost her the election, for sure, but Dems have been "courting the moderate Republican" (is this "moderate Republican" in the room with us right now?) since Clinton left office - if not longer. It was the most strange and open version of it I've ever seen, but I wonder how much of it was her doing and how much was pushed by the party and the party's campaign managers. Practically all the party ever talks about is how they have to reach across the aisle and convince conservatives to vote for them. We saw it with Hillary as well. They alienated the leftist vote and their own voters to push more conservative policies and lost themselves the election.
Kamala and Walz had a goldmine when they started calling Republicans weird, and they suddenly stopped like 8 days later. If that wasn't the party muzzling them, I don't know what is.
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To be fair, they did specify right-wing Lemmy instances, not right-wingers in general, and I can't think of any instances that would meet that definition off the top of my head.
But Hexbear definitely has a reputation as some of the worst of the worst of the normal instances. Blahaj defederated from them despite Ada trying to get the trans communities of both instances connected because of the harassment, brigading, and outright transphobia Hexbear inflicted on Blahaj users for not being the right kind of leftists. You can still find the community discussions on the topic in the general instance posts. They even tried to claim that Blahaj was being transphobic to them. You know, the LGBTQ instance created and ran to be a space for trans people and others first and foremost.
Hexbear is also known to have at least once tried to convince their mods to "take over other instances and ban all the non-communists."
I believe that at this point if you were to download the stuff to spin up your own instance, Hexbear is on the list of instances that are defederated by default because so many instances have defederated them because of their behavior.
No? I agree with you on the radar. This other comment was simply about repeatedly stating that "the US is not the whole world." Nobody ever said that it was or implied some kind of US-centric worldview/behavior. The other commenter merely stated who the regulatory body is who would be involved in yelling at you for turning on the radar equivalent of a fog horn if you were in the US, probably because those are the laws and regulations that they're familiar with.
Near something important? Yeah, you're most likely getting a hasty visit from the local MPs. But outside of those areas, you're going to get chewed out by a government branch like the FCC in the US or the ANFR in France.
But saying that isn't me saying that "France is the whole world" or something. I just happen to know what part of the French government is involved in regulating radio frequencies in the country.
Living near military installations would be the big exception. I live probably about 20 miles from a massive radar facility that can track planes from across the Atlantic ocean, and doing anything within the area to set something like that off would probably have the MPs knocking on your door long before anybody else. I think even flying drones above a certain height isn't allowed for miles around.
They never implied that the US is the whole world. They merely mentioned what I assume is the regulatory body that they're familiar with.
If I said that the regulatory body who would be knocking on your door in France is ANFR (L'agence nationale des fréquence), would you complain about how France isn't the whole world?
I get that we're all sick of American-centrism, but that was a really benign comment. They have no way of knowing what your country's regulatory agency is offhand.
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This is also the second time that he's tried this. The first time was during his previous term, and though he was forced to reopen everything by the courts, the fact that he sold some of the federal land to (I think) oil companies was never acted upon, despite it being illegal to sell public land to corporate interests.
I stand for the rights of the people. I hold no loyalty to any party or country. But I wouldn't expect any other kind of comment from an ml user.
That's incorrect. The Dems first ran the sitting President who vowed that he would not run a second time and waffled about for an extended period before saying he was running, and then waffled about some more before dropping out due to the extremely tepid voter opinion on his running and the Dems declaring that they weren't going to hold a primary and appointed Kamala as the candidate.
She was already a contested candidate with very mixed opinions on her track record, plus general discontent with the party leadership, and that was before the Democrats gagged her and her running mate when they found the most effective political campaign move they could ever possibly use against Republicans when they called them "weird," and then the Dems shot the campaign's legs off when they started dragging around conservatives to speak at campaign rallies. In places where they had people like Cheney speak, the Dems dropped a full 3-5% in the polls afterwards compared to before the campaign speeches.
Kamala herself definitely played a part in it, as did sexism, but truthfully the Democrats, like with Hillary, looked a gift horse in the mouth and started sifting through the pile of horse shit behind it for "moderate conservatives." I bet if they had run a candidate like AOC and, you know, actually appealed to their base instead of avoiding talking about the things that their voters cared about, things would've been rather different. But they'll never willingly run an actual progressive, so we'll never know.
This got me thinking: How is this any different from the ending of the books?
Harry becomes a magic-cop and goes on to uphold the draconian institutions that enforce goblin slavery and Muggle oppression/classism.
You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.