Man, I still really struggle to understand​ how we can reliably age-gate anything on the Internet without sacrificing privacy for everyone.

IRL you can just show your govt issued ID, but there’s virtually zero privacy risk doing so. Bouncers don’t register ID scans, typically, and they’re just one person. The govt doesn’t know you went to that club or drank at that one bar, unless they’re actively surveilling you.

But if I needed to identify myself as an adult online, simply by virtue of how digital systems work, that probably requires checking against a govt database, and that database will keep logs, and now Trump knows I went to Pornhub, and likely also exactly what I watched or searched for.

Maybe I’m dumb, but I really don’t know any way around this sort of thing.

I remember reading a Haidt article for an ethics class in grad school. The analysis felt… underwhelming? It’s been too long to remember the article, but I think it was something about the “morality” of conservatives being not worse but different than liberals (limited to the US, iirc). I just remember reading it and going… yeah conservative morality functions differently. It’s also just demonstrably worse, though, even based on what the article was focusing on?

That class was weird though. Mostly just a bunch of folks going,“yeah well this is what I care about” and disagreeing with each other with seemingly no intention whatsoever to try and evaluate or engage with one another.

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can’t remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I’ll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there’s a verse that basically goes, “blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks.” And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God’s explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. “Know thine enemy, right?” So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely “rational” arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

I think JRPGs do focus on choice, but usually more in terms of the gameplay and deep combat systems with weird synergies to discover. Story-wise… yeah definitely more linear.

Here’s an important bit from the actual journal article abstract

This lower literacy-greater receptivity link is not explained by differences in perceptions of AI’s capability, ethicality, or feared impact on humanity. Instead, this link occurs because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes.

It then goes on to say you should target ads for AI to people who don’t know anytime about AI, since they’ll see it as magical and buy in. Kinda gross, if you ask me.

Comparisons to users on other social media networks would be useful, yeah.

I don’t think I ever learned how to properly source information from primary works until college. I didn’t really get it until grad school.

Kinda the same for the scientific method. In high school it was just a thing you learn and memorize, but barely ever applied, if at all, in the actual curriculum. I wish it had been impressed upon me at a much earlier stage of my life why the scientific method is so useful and how it led to the sheer boom in our knowledge as a species. Like, they do tell us… but we didn’t really get it. I’ve heard others had better teachers… But it really would be better if the system didn’t have to rely on winning the teacher lottery.

For anyone else who was unfamiliar:

Linear economy is a system in which people buy a product, use it, and then throw it away. The term linear refers to the straight progression that a product can follow, with a beginning, a middle and an end. There is no thought along the line regarding recycling or reuse. (per https://www.eib.org/en/stories/linear-economy-recycling#%3A~%3Atext=Linear+economy+is+a+system%2Cline+regarding+recycling+or+reuse.)

Or giving yourself ulcers

Cash has an identifier on it, but unlike a check that identifier doesn’t identify you.

That’s what I was thinking. Wasn’t that the point?

And that, everybody, is literally not the correct usage of “enshittification”.

Jk, but for real though, it’s not a direct synonym for “degraded” or “gets worse”. It’s more specific than that.

Plus, “literally” now literally has an alternative definition in the dictionary meaning “figuratively”. So y’know, maybe get over the needless linguistic prescriptivism.

Like most FOSS projects… they’re awful at promoting what they actually do on their website front page, instead focusing on FOSS buzzwords. It’s unfortunately a thing.

It’s vector art. You can design all sorts of things. App layouts, website design, logo design, basically anything that is visual and will need to scale up and down without loss of detail.

I feel the same about Krita. I used it for about a year of hobbyist drawing, and I just never could get comfortable using it.

Clip Studio Paint came out with 3.0, and after some deliberation I decided to pay for the update. Felt like coming home. I’ve done more art in two weeks than I’ve done in nearly a year of using Krita.

Intent may not be relevant for your example, but a lot of US law does have different crimes and levels of criminality that depend on intent.

For example, if I kill someone on accident, that’s usually categorized as manslaughter. If I kill someone on purpose, that might be murder. Depending on how much premeditation went into, it might be murder in the first degree, which comes with the most severe punishments.

I blocked hexbear not because of their political beliefs, but because they would fucking ruin entire content sections by being super annoying.

I’m also glad to see your comment not triggering the same brigading behavior I used to see a lot more often.

“rule 34 of Linux desktop configuration”

You… want to fuck Linux desktop configs?

I suppose community building, detached from geography, is bound to be done primarily by highly motivated advocates.

Maybe that’s pessimistic, I dunno.

Okay?