And it’s a great line for the gun lobby. In a lot of ways, the NRA and gun manufacturers would prefer a Biden victory because gun sales spike when Democratic presidents get elected, as gun-nuts are certain every time it happens that this is the time, for real, that they’re “coming for our guns.” In other words, people panic buy rifles because they think a federal ban is coming. But the reality is that Dems will never push through sweeping anti-gun legislation because there are so many pro-2FA democrats out there that doing so would be ludicrously difficult and monumentally unpopular.

things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.

We have a word for these. It’s called “parasites.”

My favorite was the Chapo Traphouse subreddit because the image in this post describes the hosts and their relationship with their fans. Whenever the subreddit got banned and the hosts heard about it their response was “good, that was the right choice. We fully support the admins here and their banning of that subreddit.” The reddit fans were so salty.

Linux is really just the kernel the OS runs on. What people dislike are some of the stupid choices a distribution’s maintainers make. Like, Ubuntu used to be a great entry-level operating system for people who wanted to get into Linux but didn’t want to ditch all the things they understood from Windows or MacOS. It provided a level of comfort and ease of use. Which is great, and something the Linux community needs. But then Canonical started injecting snap package bloatware with everything and it’s just a mess. You have as little control over snap updates as you do Windows updates unless you completely disable the service, which is hardly trivial for a new user.

I think one of the things you’re saying, and which I might rephrase, is the idea that a generational cohort and the political landscape of a nation during a period of time, is the byproduct of a truly incomprehensible number of factors beyond any one person’s or any one group’s control. Also, no one group of people is a monolith. There are plenty of conservative millennials, and it looks like Gen Z is going to be more conservative than Millennials in a number of ways. As one person online I saw put it “the kids are puritan pilled.” And of course even that’s not true for all of them. We’re all products of the world in which we live and it’s easy to judge people harshly who came before you because the world as it is now seems to be worse than the world as you imagine it was. But our perception of time and history is also imperfect, and we selectively forget and remember the past.

The boomers started retiring 20 years ago. What they’re doing now is dying.

I’m convinced ageism (and to a lesser extent religious discrimination) is the last true bastion of bigotry. You’re not allowed to be homophobic, transphobic, or racist on the internet anymore. But if you call someone evil for the crime of being of voting age when Reagan got elected? No problemo.

I’ve always liked the term “institutional inertia.”

As opposed to what? It’s where the people they follow post. Why would they leave for somewhere that doesn’t have any content they care about? It’s like asking who the fuck is still on reddit. The answer is the enormous shitload of people who just want a steady feed of the same content they’ve always consumed.

Well, WoW also came out in 2004. If you were born the year it came out, you’d be old enough to vote by now. If you were 14 when it came out and started playing that year, then you would be 33 or 34 now. It’s an old game designed for a different world. Its player base will continue to age with it. I’d imagine in a few years the average player age will be over 30. Which is incredible, when you think about it. Most adults don’t have the time to really dedicate to video games anymore. You have work, family, and social obligations. That so many people that age still play WoW is a testament to its place in their lives. You could say for a lot of people it’s not just “a game,” it’s “their game.”

Not the guy you responded to initially, but according to one study the average WoW player’s age is 28, and 84% are male. So…yeah, at least a little surprising.

Why? Did he use a racial slur in his comment and I just didn’t see it?

This isn’t Elon’s hyperloop. It’s a company called Hyperloop One, predominately funded by Richard Branson.

No one reads the article, my guy. Everyone just assumes it’s Musk’s imbecilic project, when in reality it’s Branson’s imbecilic project.

Colleges don’t have external investors or are technically “owned” in the same way a business is. But they do functionally operate in the same way as profit based institutions. This is because the people who run them understand that industry connections can be immensely profitable. You help fudge some numbers or put out dubious research backing a particular industry and you might find yourself in a position in which you get paid to “consult” for those companies later on.

Extensively. Nobody has stickers on their laptops. Maybe that’s some “fresh out of college” shit.

I’ve never been in a corporate environment where stickers on laptops that weren’t branded for the company itself was considered acceptable or professional.

We both know the answer to that question. And boy howdy am I stoked for cars to get fully enshittified where you have to have a yearly subscription for the software that allows your tires to move, otherwise you functionally just bought a 45,000 dollar paperweight.

The article says

Aitana, a 25-year-old woman from Barcelona, is described by her creators as the first Spanish AI model, Euronews first reported.

Which means the article is stating that the model is an AI. The article goes on to compare this model to "Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year-old influencer, [who] created an AI version of herself that served as a virtual girlfriend to 1,000 men. Customers of CarynAI pay $1 per minute of time with the virtual Marjorie, which is described by her owners, Forever Voices, as an “extension of Caryn’s consciousness.”

Did no one read the article?

It seems like this isn’t even an AI model. They just had an AI create fake pictures of a person that doesn’t exist based on design specifications. Does this thing engage with users automatically, does it generate new “photos” on the fly and upload them? Like, what part of this is intelligent? Because if it’s not, the article is simply lying at worst, and wrong at best.