Spyke

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games

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Nintendo-owned titles excluded from Japan’s biggest speedrunning event after organizers were told they had to apply for permission for each game

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I'm doing my part by never exposing my kid to Nintendo and capturing all my kid's friends before they leave tablet gaming and convincing their parents to look into PC gaming and steam decks. It's an easy sell to their parents once I show steam's parental controls and how every game isn't full price all the time. Plus remote play makes the initial cost low if they have a computer. Their kid can just play my kid's games. I've already converted 6 kids. My kid just started first grade, so I expect to convert a lot more.

world

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Singapore hangs third person for drug offences in little over a week

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I don't know anything about Singapore besides what a friend who grew up there said. She came here to the US as an adult. Tried very hard to stay and worked very hard to bring her parents over to the US. Very confusing given that she had nothing but great things to say about the place and got very mad if I said that the US might be better in any small way. She had a lot of complaints about the US and many I found unfair even if many were totally fair.

So then I asked her: do you think that I a black woman could do what you did here in the US in Singapore. And she skipped over my question and continued her rant about how great Singapore is. That's all I personally need to know. Singapore probably is great, but only if you're the right kind of person, the acceptable person. I get the feeling that she and her family weren't those kinds of people and that's why she left and she's pulling her family here to the US.

news

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Biden launches ‘most affordable ever’ student loan repayment plan

To me, the biggest wins is that interest cannot overcome your payment. So many people have loans that are more than they started with. Holding steady isn't great, but it's still a massive step forward. The forgiveness rules do mean that effectively some people have to pay until death. There's no upper limit for forgiveness. More loans means longer payments. I was hoping for a cap help cool the cost of college because lenders would think twice with the interest cap and a known end of life.

games

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Google ending Steam for Chromebook support in 2026

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It's not good. Sometimes the only computer a kid has is a chromebook because their parents got it for them for school. I'm seeing more and people just don't have computers at all. PC isn't moving fluidly to the next generation as a result. I've told parents about steam deck hoping they'll pick that as their kid's game console, but it's not as easy as when I was a kid where you just had a computer anyway and it was about if it could play the game you wanted to play. With the indie scene that concern when away a lot, but now a lot of kids just don't have PCs

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Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

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Firefox literally used to be a significant browser before Chrome showed up. Users have to download Chrome. It's not like it default. It's just a matter of changing habits. They swapped from Firefox to Chrome they can back. They'll do it for thr same reason so many people left IE for Firefox: it sucked.

When ads get overbearing and scammy, your favorite neighbor IT guy will install Firefox for them or something and tell them to use it. A child or grandchild will do the same. So it has always been. That's how adblock even became so big. People didn't use it before.

Ads are so bad now, I actually went out of my way to install Firefox on my phone. My less technical relatives just refuse to use anything but apps.

world

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Third of Japan's 18-year-old women may never have children: study

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Let's just be simple about this: pensions and oth3r old age support. Who pays for those? Young people. If young people have to support a lot of old people, you're gonna have a bad time. Everyone. The young people have have larger amounts taken out of their pay and old people who get less support because there are just literally not enough resources. And because old people outnumber young people young are pressured more and more under democracy to give more to older people.

That is only one terrible thing from demographic collapse.

world

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China wants to ban clothes that 'hurt nation's feelings'

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Honestly, I feel the same about both: it's absurd. With France I get the "freedom from religion" spiel from some Frenchman, but it's veiled xenophobia to me. When you ban a kind of clothing but only for one group of people, that's basically the definition. Here, it's just fascism. At least the Chinese people are speaking out.

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*Permanently Deleted*

Education probably. Back in the day people didn't have any problem understanding that different forums had different capabilities. When MMOs were in full swing, people didn't have problems understanding what being on thr popular server during peak hours meant.

Everyone has just gotten too used to centralization with a lot of money behind it. Eventually people will adjust their expectations. Even if Meta's fediverse attempt takes off, there are always going to be niche communities that exist outside of those spheres, so if people want that, they'll have to move.

The point of the fediverse is having a choice. Some people are going to chose megacorp of the week's offering and that's okay as long a little pockets exist for when people get mad at the megacorp. Also federation leaves space for multiple dominant platforms in a way the current system doesn't.

In short, eventually some instances are going to be bankrolled either through a robust crowdcourcing effort or through being a company. That's okay. The purpose of the fediverse is to allow for smaller niche ideas to be able to breathe without having to adhere to one group's ideals. "If you don't like it, make your own" is a fair statement now

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Programming Languages

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Because it's inescapable. Web development is by far the most common type of programming work and even if you're a backend developer you tend to have to touch javascript at some point, so everyone knows the pain of javascript's foot guns and javascript has a lot.

The fact that it's mandatory to do your work invokes bitterness in people. For backend, you can kind of switch around until you find a language you like. For frontend, it's javascript or nothing at all.

Javascript as a language is very out of sync with other commonly used languages. Its footguns are very easy to run into. As a result you have a lot of rituals around just not shooting yourself in the foot. The rituals, libraries, and frameworks around avoiding Javascript's foot guns have been very shifting and changing. Of course, because the javascript ecosystem changes far faster than other languages, there are a lot of rakes for developers to step on to add to the naturally existing foot guns.

Javascript as a language probably shouldn't be the sole language of the internet for a variety of reasons. It's a very hateable language because of how easy it is for newbies to make new terrible code and how common it is. Until something like WASM takes off, the downpour of hate for javascript will continue.

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Are there any good jobs out there where you can show up, do your work, and then just leave when it's done?

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As someone in the field. I assure you, you do not work just a few hours and then go home. Software development take infinite time and any well run shop will definitely notice if you work a half day by your output vs others. IT is even worse since problems are basically constant.

I guess you can work at badly run shops, but enjoy being laid off and then failing to get a job eventually from having a stale resume.

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The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up—And They’re Horrified

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I have a 4 year old and I post a lot of pictures of my kid, but like privately. I use an app called tinybeans. You have to be explicitly invited. Grandma gets emails because she can't use apps. everyone is happy. My kid's pictures are hidden away from facebook and family members have to take much more active action to share her photos beyond themselves. And they know that means excommunication from the picture firehose, so they don't. That's how I've managed this. I mean... there's still a bunch of embarrassing stuff in there, but at least the only people who can see it are the people who were traditionally privy to embarrassing kid shit anyway.

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So, where do we go now?

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I'm sorry, were you actually around during the era that "flamewar" was coined. Making people mad on the internet has been around forever. It's just that now we're stupid enough to associate our internet personas with our real life ones. If people could have showed up to your door in the 90s they would have. They certainly threatened to. Tracking down people on 4chan used to be a past time in the early 00s. Perhaps we weren't on the same early internet.

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Biden and House Democrats hope to make curbing 'junk fees' a winning issue in 2024

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I'm pretty sure zoning laws are outside of the Fed reach. They can carrot and stick via funding requirements, but mediated expansion has shown that states can be very petty if they don't want to comply. I wouldn't want the feds to set the tempo for zoning anyway. They just can't be aware of every area's needs. It's not a one size fits all situation. I've seen housing go up fast and the result is just a shitshow because the infrastructure doesn't keep up with the growth. I've seen dead cities where nothing wad built and only the people who got there first could afford a place to live, so effectively you had to leave town for everything because no retail workers could afford to live nearby. There's a middle ground between the two and no way will the feds know how to rate limit how housing gets built anywhere. Housing to me is a local election problem because people don't vote in local elections and then when the problem gets too bad, only nimbys cam live and vote there. Those places always collapse eventually (unless the population is very well off, see: SF), but when people get a chance to move back in they gotta remember to vote for local people who align their values.