Not sure I’m with you on the China not spreading their influence. It’s been exactly what they have been doing in Africa and the Middle East. This has been going on for a long while (close to 10 years) and seems to be working.

https://odi.org/en/insights/why-china-is-seeking-greater-presence-in-africa-the-strategy-behind-its-financial-deals

https://ecfr.eu/publication/east-meets-middle-chinas-blossoming-relationship-with-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae/

This. On top of being obvious at a glance, your file names and folder names sort nicely if use this format.

Man, I’m glad themes of guillotines are popping up.

No, we are hopefully past needing this in this era and can get back on track without major violence. But I keep feeling like we’re heading towards a point where we will have in desperation to pull out the guillotines once again.

This does not look real. I can’t put my finger as to why. It looks like good CGI but the lighting off the robot does not feel perfect.

The problem is you still fail drug tests for work or for certain medications (like adderall) when consuming THCA. I’m lucky and my job doesn’t test and I know when my doctor will test me. But it’s not a comfortable feeling knowing it could be used against you in a bunch of scenarios.

Playing the will this bite me game with a drug most of us agree should just be legal by now sucks.

This seems pretty typical. Feels like Leaders only have one lever to pull. Things are going badly? Let’s ReOrg, that’ll fix it.

Instead of doing the smart thing and identifying smart individuals within the company and putting them all in group letting them solution.

My guess is the outcome of this will be google having an unofficial marriage with gambling companies as they are the last customers to pay for Ads and see a big positive result

Anyone know how subs and bit donations work on the campaign finance side? This feels like some weird gray area where supporters can give money to a politician. I guess it’s not that different than selling assassination sneakers. But something smells weird to me

lol I’m not sure who’s side to take here. I tried kagi and I can’t personally justify the cost. The free trial is hard to use because I perform a ton of searches in a day and I keep thinking “I should save free trial searches for a good use case”.

Also, not hard to believe a company would stick the privacy sticker all over their product and turn around and make money off my personal data.

But those “harassment” emails from the Kagi Owner/CEO to me read like a business person with a passion not understanding where these accusations come from. After reading part of that chain, I came out with the feeling that “Lori” just wanted to write some click baity stuff and didn’t really care to dig any deeper. Yes, AI products by a company right now implies they will use your data to train or sell a dataset to some other company. But I don’t see any damming evidence here, just assumptions.

If Kagi is serious about their privacy mission then they should release a clear ToS and a legally binding statement that they will not use our data or meta data for anything.

I’ve not logged in on my Reddit account since that big group boycott and switching to Lemmy.

If Reddit didn’t hold some specific info for certain video games or just a much larger group participating in Tech/Selfhosted subreddits, I’d rarely have to visit the website.

Honestly, to me the Reddit demise was happening organically anyway. For a lot of weirdly specific topics, Discord has become a good alternative.

Now just don’t get me started on Discord and how it will eventually have to better monetize the platform and ruin that too. Wish Matrix had a soundboard for voice chat 😢

It’s almost odd how rare this attitude is nowadays. I remember being excited for the next Blizzard Games release back in the day because you always heard them talk about quality over meeting arbitrary deadlines.

I get that being out there in the market early is important too. Investments need to pay a return with our current economic model. I just keep thinking of all the games that could have used a little more ripening and they likely would have been a lot more successful instead of losing the studio money.

Came here to say that if you like this concept, Peter Hamilton has a book series called Commonwealth Saga in the science fiction category that is excellent. Lots of pseudoscience from early 2000s in that series.

Shameless question. At this point I approach this entire presidency as a cash/power grab by the incumbent administration.

So from an investment perspective how would pleb like me, with my Roth and 401k, game these tariffs? Local industry might get a boost, but for the most part we (the USA) still won’t produce a lot of the goods being tariffed. So, do you just bet high on commodities and U.S reseller/retailers as the big winners 12 months into the administration? Asking for a friend that’s totally not me trying to make the best out of a potentially disastrous 4 years. Thank you,

Honest question as I’ve been pondering this (and not my orb 😞) recently and I’m not sure if my reasoning makes sense.

You mentioned day-traders making option plays. I can see how that could be used as a signal by the rest of the stock market. Does that have a bigger impact than, for a lack of a better term, mega investors? I’m not a huge investor. My holdings are primarily in ETFs. But I have some money in my portfolio to play around with.

To me it seems like my stocks are affected more by what berkshire hathaway does for example than actual consumer/investor sentiment. To the point where I’m wondering if unless we band together, like GME, we are primarily along for the ride. All while massive firms, insurance companies, tech companies and other large holdings managed by small number of individuals impact stock price a lot more and with that don’t have an insensitive to sell holdings they bet big on.

Was my favorite game for 2 years. Got into the esports and everything. Got super pumped at Blizcon 2018 when they said they are doubling down on the game and investing more into it. Bought a $100 year pass thing to help support the game.

Two weeks after Blizcon announcement thing, esports is canceled and most devs pulled from the game. I don’t think I ever felt that betrayed (I know that’s weird). I uninstalled the Blizzard client a few days later and left the Blizzard fandom.

Riot games is going down the same route “it feels” right now with League of Legends. I don’t think these companies understand that these games are not just games. They are these weird intersection of common interests for a friend group. Destroying that also destroys any interest in their IPs.

I can’t even get my InfoSec team to let us use all the features we already pay for in our M365 E5 license because they can’t figure out how to secure and govern it. Unfortunately nowadays bringing up great ideas that are open source to replace mediocre big tech products mostly gets laughed out of the room 😢

I don’t want to stream on Twitch, YouTube, or Kick. My audience is my group of close friends on discord. I’d rather not use the big platforms for multiple reasons. The main one being these platforms see everyone as numbers and have moved away from pretending to be customer focused and are all bottom line focused to a fault now.

So owncast. Quick webhook call to the discord servers announcing the stream started and people can watch me fail on League of Legends.

Side note, realize I said big platforms and discord is still in use. Moving friends off of discord is its own challenge. But I’ve been working on that.

Out of curiosity, since I’m out of the loop, what is the misogynistic discourse around the game or studio? Is it based on themes of the books/mythology the game is based on? Or is it some other thing the devs went too far with eastern culture wise?

Sorry if this is a repeat but I was just about to go to bed.

I suspect I’ve saved this image to use as a joke to my family multiple times over the years and never remembered to use it or that it exists until the next time someone posts it here

We just have to admit that the representative democracy system, in its current form, suffers from the same flaws as other systems. It’s done a great job at elevating people a bit, but we hit a new ceiling of how prosperous the average person is.

I really want the conversations to be more around iterating on representative democracy. In this day and age we should be able to have our voices/votes heard more on each topic.

I don’t think we’ll ever move on to the next step of human societal development until we stop concentrating power. Us picking a representative in the hopes that they will proxy vote for what we actually want them to vote for does not work.

My doctor is aware of my THC use. I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. I was essentially self medicating with THC to control some of the symptoms that come along with ADHD like anxiety. I could not start on adderall until I tested clean of THC. Took 2.5 months of being without THC and repeated trips to my doctors office and getting tested before I passed (the Amazon test strips were not as sensitive as the doctors office one).

Overall I’d pick adderall over THC any day. But the truth is both together is even better. Adderall during the day and THC (well THCA in my state) to wind down at night. It’s just lame to have to spend 2 months a year having to stop THC to finally feel like I’m happy the rest of the 10 months of the year.