I know times are hard, but you could build/find a PC for <$300 that doesn’t run that badly. Hell, even a ~$150-200 tablet would be way better than that.

This. YouTube is extremely helpful for anyone who can’t afford to take their stuff to a repair service or hire someone to fix something at their home. Just a few months ago, I thought my washer was done for, but it turned out to be a super simple fix that no website mentioned except for a super obscure YouTube video with only a couple hundred views. Saved me hundreds of dollars. There’s countless other anecdotes like that over the years.

This is what sucks so much about Google’s monopoly. I truly wish a cooperative of governments and/or academia created a publicly funded alternative as well as hosting an archive of YouTube on it. It would of course need to be administered by a non-partisan committee made up of representatives from multiple countries that had numerous safeguards against governmental political censorship. Hoping for a grassroots alternative is a lost cause, as the hosting and administrative expenses are just way too cost prohibitive, so publicly funded is the only solution I can see as being plausible

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Munchausen, oof… brutal, sorry you had to endure that as a kid. My wife is a children’s therapist, specializing in play therapy for traumatized kids. It’s definitely opened my eyes to how much misery in society could be dramatically reduced by simple early intervention in young children. So many problems in adulthood are rooted in untreated trauma. Anyway, I hope you’re doing well now, despite having to go through that gauntlet of a mentally unwell parent as a kid.

Also, very much agree that these places should absolutely be nationally outlawed.

Some states absolutely have cracked down on these types of places, as they were notoriously used for conversion therapy, among other terrible purposes. I definitely went to one of these places when I was a rebellious teenager, but I was fortunate in only having to go on the weekends during the day. I was also fortunate that the place had some oversight by my state, as I quickly learned that all their “punishments” could easily be defeated by simply refusing to participate (e.g. refusing to run laps, clean the gym floor with a toothbrush, etc). I lasted maybe 3 weekends there before they kicked me out of their “program.”

That was 20+ years ago, and it still kind of blows my mind that those places exist. Therapy and supportive parents will “correct” rebellious behaviors 90+% of the time.

Try using the extension that can spoof what browser you’re using. Last year, Firefox was being hindered by YouTube until I downloaded that and made it think I was using a Chrome browser.

I mean, I agree with the rage and intent. But, under your system, there’s no balance of power, heh. That system would be corrupted in a few years vs the couple hundred it took to fully corrupt the current setup.

But I 100% agree that the time for being delicate to these extremists is long fucking past and their leaders all deserve the firing squad.

Ahh, good to know. It’s hard to keep up with their constitutional crises blitzkrieg.

Not to mention that both the SCOTUS and other courts have ordered this administration to cease deporting people without due process, which they’ve unsurprisingly have gone on to ignore.

Especially when both that city’s mayor and state governor explicitly do not want those troops there.

Oh for sure, and I did enjoy some of the side content and thought some of the optional quest stories were good. When I say smaller scale, I think a game like Expedition 33 nailed the balance of having plenty of side/extra content that’s fun to do while also ensuring that completionists don’t go mad from trying to hunt down everything.

Regardless, I agree with you on everything you said; it all boils down to preferences :)

I thought the core of GW: Tokyo was pretty good, but it suffered from far too much open world bloat. I’d love to see them revisit that world, but it’d be great if they made it focused on a smaller scale. Just my two cents, anyway.

Or, like my old, late cat (RIP buddy 😞), they hate most humans and other animals. Once he warmed up to you, he would absolutely get lonely without his favorites around. Didn’t care if our dog was around or not, despite our dog being sad for awhile after he died.

Pretty much, haha. The amount of elitism among some Linux users is quite potent.

Just to clarify, properly trained and handled drug and bomb sniffing dogs do actually have quite a high accuracy rate. However, in the hands of shitty police officers… sigh.

You’re being downvoted, but it’s true. Will it further enable lazy/dumb people to continue being lazy/dumb? Absolutely. But summarizing notes, generating boilerplate emails or script blocks, etc. was never deep, rigorous thinking to begin with. People literally said the same thing about handheld calculators, word processors, etc. Will some methods/techniques become esoteric as more and more mundane tasks are automated away? Almost certainly. Is that inherently a bad thing? Not in the majority of cases, in my opinion.

And before anyone chimes in with students abusing this tech and thus not becoming properly educated: All this means, is that various methods for gauging whether a student has achieved the baseline in any given subject will need to be implemented, e.g. proctored hand-written exams, homework structured in such a way that AI cannot easily do it, etc.

You just equip em, if I recall correctly. I didn’t try it myself, but it definitely is possible:

https://www.reddit.com/r/avowed/comments/1iso0q2/psa_dual_wielding_pistols/

You still have to attack using LT (on controller) to get the offhand pistol to shoot.

We have to do this ourselves in the government for every decommissioned server/appliance/end user device. We have to fill out paperwork for every single storage drive we destroy, and we can only destroy them using approved destruction tools (e.g. specific degaussers, drive shredders/crushers, etc). Appliances can be kind of a pain, though. It can be tricky sometimes finding all the writable memory in things like switches and routers. But, nothing is worse than storage arrays… destroying hundreds of drives is incredibly tedious.

It’s terrifying, honestly. As sociology, psychology, and neurology research becomes more and more understood, feels like it enables governments to become more and more effective at mass manipulation.

The worst part is, there’s barely anything that can be done to combat it. The general population can’t be assed to give up the worst offending platforms that enable it (e.g. Twitter, Meta, TikTok, etc), despite the plethora of warnings that have been issued over the last 10+ years. The one sliver of hope is the youngest generation not using those platforms because, “those are for old people,” but it’s just a matter of time for the next “cool” social platform becomes just as corrupted/infested.

100% this. Our local cable company, a subsidiary of Spectrum, refused to lay fiber to anywhere but our core metro centers and even then, only to businesses. It wasn’t until our metros collectively agreed to subsidize another, smaller ISP to come in and lay fiber to every neighborhood across the region (I live somewhere that has like 6 cities all closely clumped together). The monopoly cable company sued for years trying to block it. They allllmost succeeded, too, until a state appeals court finally overturned their injunction. Now we finally have competition and it’s glorious. I pay less than half what I did before and get twice the speed.