Onihikage

Good.

Why are you all so upset? These stock buybacks don’t pay for themselves, you know!

God I hate the stock market.

I was in your shoes for ages, but HeliBoard has predictions and other languages out of the box. Voice transcription works if you have FUTO Voice Input. Gesture typing uses a swypelibs binary extracted from Gapps; you just have to download it manually since the app never requests network access (instructions are on the Github page). I started using it today and some of its features actually seem to work better for me than Gboard, like the swipe gestures on delete or space, and it has at least a few more features I’m pretty sure Gboard doesn’t. Give it a look at least.

Net Neutrality is about not policing content online. That’s kind of its whole thing:

These net neutrality policies ensured you can go where you want and do what you want online without your broadband provider making choices for you. They made clear your broadband provider should not have the right to block websites, slow services, or censor online content. These policies were court tested and approved. They were wildly popular. In fact, studies show that 80 percent of the public support the FCC’s net neutrality policies and opposed their repeal.

The closest we get to online censorship is obscenity laws, which one might think applies to porn, but obscenity is actually defined much more narrowly than just “content designed to arouse”. Obscenity is basically stuff that even Hugh Hefner would find offensive, stuff the average adult would find deeply repulsive and abhorrent (not just a little bit, the exact language is “patently offensive”). Adult content in general (obscenity & indecency) is banned from broadcast media during daytime hours to keep kids from seeing it; subscription-based services are exempt from such rules, which presumably means that the adults who pay for the subscription are supposed to be the ones preventing kids from using it to view adult material, if such is possible. I expect this is why anything which does manage to qualify as obscene is typically very hard to get to unless you really want to see it, so nobody who might report it ever actually finds it.

It’s worth mentioning that obscenity laws apply whether Net Neutrality is a thing or not, so having it will be a net reduction in the avenues through which content may be censored or policed. Now if only they’d ban ISPs from selling your data to brokers…

VPN subscriptions about to explode.

Naturally, they’ll try to ban VPNs next.

It’s very disappointing to see someone come to a post about a game bundle to support Palestine only to uncritically surface claims from a site with a blatant pro-Israel, pro-Zionism bias. Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing. Zionism is a sect of Judaism characterized by an extreme ethnic nationalist doctrine (with expected bedfellows). NGO Monitor repeats the utter nonsense that being Anti-Zionist or Anti-Israel is somehow anti-Semitic. It’s not - the earliest anti-Zionists were Jews. The idea that being against or critical of Zionism is the same as being racist against Jews is an absurd fiction pushed by Zionist foreign policy in order to insulate Israel from all forms of criticism; sadly, it seems to be working. In any case, I’m not inclined to believe one word printed by NGO Monitor where Israel or Palestine are involved.

Blog commenter Frank Wilhoit made a now somewhat famous assertion that the human default for nearly all of history has been conservatism, which he defined as follows:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

He then defined anti-conservatism as opposition to this way of thinking, so that would be to ensure the neutrality of the law and the equality of all peoples, races, and nationalities, which certainly sounds left-wing in our current culture. It would demand that a legal system which protects the powerful (in-groups) while punishing the marginalized (out-groups), or systematically burdens some groups more than others, be corrected or abolished.

Yeah, we only have to look at the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon to see what they consider an antitrust problem:

[…] Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance.

That isn’t what we see from Valve - in fact it’s the opposite, as Valve’s strategy with Steam is simply to provide the best service and be the gold standard. The competition is almost always compared unfavorably to Steam, because gamers know how it feels to use a mature platform that isn’t trying to abuse them.

Valve has even taken some steps that wind up increasing competition in adjacent markets, such as operating systems (Proton has contributed significantly to Linux popularity) and even handheld game devices (Steam Deck set off an arms race when electronics manufacturers realized Nintendo is asleep at the wheel). Steam is as pro-consumer as it gets, with the exception of GOG and possibly itch.

Trucks and trains serve different purposes. If you want to get a mountain of stuff from the shipyard to distribution centers, trains are a great way to do that. If you want to get stuff from the distribution center to individual stores within a 200-mile radius, now you’re talking trucks, and a lot of their destinations will be much closer than 200 miles, meaning even plug-in hybrid trucks would often be able to make trips without using any fuel.

Edison Motors has already proven hybrid retrofit trucks can be inexpensive, less complicated, and far more fuel-efficient than traditional diesel trucks while burning cleaner and offering a huge amount of all-speed torque to the wheels and even more energy efficiency from regenerative braking, so truckers really don’t have a leg to stand on here if they’re against moving the industry forward. If any of the naysayers actually used a hybrid truck and saw the relatively low cost to retrofit compared to a new truck, and the lower total cost of ownership, they wouldn’t want to go back.

They’re more than fine with it, the Bits N’ Bricks podcast (part of LEGO Gaming) actually had Baraklava (the Manic Miners dev) on for an episode about the history of Rock Raiders which included a section on remakes, including Manic Miners, so they outright drew attention to it. Very cool people over there at the LEGO Group.

With a set of mods natively supported by the game through mod.io, you can get as many as 8 people in a spacerig (lobby) without the game crashing, and in theory up to 16 if they join after the drop pod has landed. I’d recommend the following set of mods if you go that route:

• Mod Hub
• More Players Balanced
• Alternate Player List UI
• Dynamic Nitra Costs
• Swarm Control (optional)

Downside of this method is you have to log into mod.io through your Steam account, and I’d personally be too paranoid to do that at an internet cafe, but it would get y’all down to 1-2 parallel games. In addition, if you turn up swarm sizes, the game basically becomes Starship Troopers: Space Dwarf Edition.

To save folks time looking for it, that video is More Lanes are (Still) a Bad Thing: Nebula link | YouTube link

Probably a local credit union, provided it’s FDIC insured and has decent terms of membership. Most credit unions aren’t in the business of spying on the people that own them, their purpose is just to manage their clients’ money and facilitate spending.

I think most would consider democracy to be the single issue to vote on. When one candidate has repeatedly said he’d be a dictator “for one day, and then stop” and actively argues in court that the position he’s running for is immune to the rule of law, I’m voting in whatever way is most likely to result in his defeat. As much as I complain about the candidates and the shitty voting system, I cannot compromise on the right to vote.

My understanding is that Biden is trying to be the angel on Israel’s shoulder because if he condemns them publicly then he loses the political capital to influence them at all. It’s a kind of good cop/bad cop routine on an international scale.

We keep saying that blocking ads is a security feature, and it keeps being true.

At first blush, that sounds really complicated for the voter to understand what happens to their ballot. Potentially delegating part of their vote to one of the candidates? That’s going to be a hard sell. Sure, the direct mechanics for voting seems simple, but the system that ballot would go into feels unlikely to lead to better satisfaction than STAR, and might even lead to less informed voters. Even reading your link several times, I’m still not sure I correctly understand how the delegated votes are supposed to work, because I keep going back to “Why would anyone want that?”

My takeaway is either what we value in a democratic voting system is significantly different in some key area, or I don’t understand how the delegation in DYN is supposed to work, but I suspect it’s the former. I’m not a political scientist or a voting system enthusiast though, I just happen to like STAR.

STAR voting offers the same benefit of “vote for as many as you want” without Approval Voting’s drawback of being unable to rank your preferences. I have yet to find a better method. It is, of course, miles better than IRV, both in complexity to the voter (rate candidates 0-5 stars) and simplicity of tallying the result (two steps).

The title does need updated, but I suspect it was accurate at the time of posting 23 hours ago. The article appears to have been updated at least twice, based on the URL.