Where I live in the northern Rockies, -40°F is common enough that you kinda forget about it. But it’s also a college town. And every year we get a bunch of incoming students who treat the extreme cold like some sort of game or a challenge to their masculinity.
Same with driving. There’s a reason why the regional natives fastidiously use our turn signals and give a ton of space to cars in front of us. Because each of us has gotten into a fender bender by not doing that.
Seriously. Treat the cold with respect. It can debilitate you in just a few minutes.
Some of us do care.
A product directly bankrolled by Peter Thiel? A project, not concerned about blocking ads but rather making sure that it’s their ads that you see?
If you’re on iOS. Maybe the EU will bail you out and force Apple to allow other web engines.
If you’re on Android, Firefox works perfectly well and Fennec is a fine fork.
If you’re on anything else, Librewolf is fork of Firefox without all of the Pocket and other privacy hostile default settings.
I have to disagree (but won’t downvote!)
AI porn is creepy. In multiple ways!
But it’s also a natural evolution of what we’ve been doing as a species since before we were a species.
Does imagining a different partner while having sex or masturbating count? I would imagine most people would say, “no”.
How about if somebody draws a crude stick figure of somebody they met on the street? Unless you’re Randall Munroe, this is probably harmless too.
Now a highly skilled portrait artist paints a near replica of somebody he knows, but has never seen in the nude. They never mention their friend by name, but the output is lifelike and unmistakably them.
Maybe a digital artist finds a few social media pictures of a person and decided to test drive Krita and manipulates them into appearing nude.
Or, and this happened to me quite recently, you find your porn doppelganger. My spouse found mine and it ruined her alone time. And they really did look just like me! Taking that a step further, is it illegal to find somebody’s doppelganger and to dress them up so that they look more like their double?
Like you, I don’t want people like this in my life. But it feels like this is one of those slippery slopes that turns out to be an actual slippery slope.
You can’t make it illegal without some serious downstream effects.
If you did, the servers will just get hosted in an Eastern European country that is happy to lulwat at American warrants.
I don’t have any answers, just more Devil’s advocate-esque questions. If there was a way to make it illegal without any collateral damage, I’d be proudly behind you leading the charge. I just can’t imagine a situation where it wouldn’t get abused, a’la the DMCA.
My own head cannon is that she never actually loved him but was convinced by Obi Wan to play the role to perhaps act as a stabilizing influence.
But soon she discovers that her erstwhile side piece is a psychotic man-child with the powers of a minor god. Now things have spiraled out of her control. There’s a legitimate fear that, it rejected, Anakin could become unhinged and lose control.
After a few years in a loveless marriage she found herself pregnant and, like in a lot of actual abusive marriages, latches onto that as a means of preserving a relationship that should have been allowed to mercifully die.
This is the only way I can reconcile the terrible performance from an otherwise exemplary actress. She was playing the part of a woman playing a part.
My own anthropological pet theory.
Dunbar’s number is the concept that a person can only have so many meaningful relationships. Another way of thinking about it is that we, as a species, feel most comfortable in tribes with a certain number of people.
Which makes sense. I hated, hated the little rednecky town that I grew up in. But when I moved to a larger city, the first few weeks were spent overcoming the loneliness of not knowing everybody around me.
What massive online social media does is essentially short circuit the behavior that we developed when we began urbanizing.
Now a person can be a member of twenty tribes without ever needing to leave their homes. If we are, in fact, only capable of a finite number of close friendships then every close relationship that you have online is energy that won’t be spent on a physical one.
True story: I left Facebook in 2016. I had been miserable but didn’t even think to relate the two. About a month after I jumped ship I got adopted by a group of fellow nerds nearing midlife. We hang out at least twice per week. Pub trivia, bowling, hiking. Those interactions are so much more meaningful than anything you can get on social media. By our nature, humans crave physical company.
Social media isn’t going to “break” us. But, if nothing changes, it will further dramatically alter society.
Gotta mention Pop_OS! as a fantastic beginner distro. My 72 year old mother refuses to use anything else. It’s simple, has automated backups and disaster recovery, and installs non-free drivers for graphics cards.
I don’t personally use it since it doesn’t yet support Wayland and my gaming rig has a HiDPI screen and X11 doesn’t support fractional scaling. Or per screen scaling.
I’m legally obligated to inform you that I run Arch.
The DLC was incredible.
Mayor Burt “fucking” Reynolds.