SSJ2Marx [he/him]

It’s a bit flexible nowadays because a lot of cars will let you leave the a/c on while you walk away with the keys.

Funny fact: google’s newest feature is also its best, but it’s kinda hidden and might not be available everywhere - it’s “web search”, which cuts out all the awful bullshit

We’re leftists and our site culture is pretty aggressive. Liberals are predisposed not to like us because of the first one, and we’re especially prone to arguing with them in the comments of their instances because of the second. This means we’re more well known and more disliked than we would be if we stayed in our corner.

The thing is that Rowling hadn’t really thought it through yet. Having the hero save a slave is pretty clearly heroic and good, and it’s a nice way to wrap up the Dobby story arc, but then the fans were all like “wait WHAT!? there’s slaves under Hogwarts!?” and she was forced to think it through, and it turns out JK’s pretty awful so the result of her thinking it through was to make it worse.

I do wonder how many people got hoodwinked by the film and then went to read the book only to be hit with an entire textbook of lectures from a libertarian.

Ready Player One I guess. There’s a big difference between seeing a fuckload of pop culture artifacts on screen and reading multiple pages of somebody rattling off their knowledge about them. The worst part is that RP1 doesn’t even really engage with the culture it utilizes in any kind of interesting way, it’s all just surface level references that you’d learn from reading Reddit comment sections where people quote memes at each other. The movie on the other hand kind of makes it work because the pop culture artifacts aren’t dwelled on, they’re used more like an aesthetic choice, while the main focus of the movie is on its paint-by-numbers plot.

edited out of the episode and then the user could also download said episode where ads are cut out of the final audio file

This is your problem, because you’re redistributing someone else’s work with the ads cut out, which isn’t sufficiently transformative to qualify for fair use. Sponsorblock is allowed because it doesn’t actually interfere with the video stream, it just tells your computer when to skip ahead using YouTube’s already-existing playback features - your app should work the same way, integrating into an existing podcast platform and skipping forward based on crowdsourced timestamps, then the only thing you’re providing are the timestamps, which don’t violate copyright.

I have no doubt that for a lot of reviewers the process is extremely wasteful. But for those who make a lot of videos, they’re leaving a lot on the table if they don’t make an effort to resell their stuff - and depending on where they live they could be leaving a lot on the table if they don’t recycle it.

The big ticket items get loaned out to reviewers as part of the company’s marketing campaign. Some reviewers are blacklisted from this process (or refuse to be part of it for ethical reasons) and have to beg, borrow, or buy from their contacts in the industry/community.

If a retro reviewer lives in your town, it’s possible that they’re single handedly keeping multiple secondhand tech stores afloat. Also, if you keep a sharp eye on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace (easy if you’re doing it as part of your job) then you’ll see interesting tech appear there literally all the time.

Really prolific reviewers will do regular auctions of things that have piled up. This practice is common but they gotta be careful, as we saw when it got Linus Tech Tips into pretty hot water a few months ago when they sold something they had promised to return.

If you have a production team, then you can have people who spend their time listing and shipping out unneeded items - not to mention that people will tend to just take things that aren’t being used if they lie around long enough. On the other hand smaller reviewers tend to get big collections because they run out of people to give things to and selling stuff takes time away from video production.

Vietnam was embargoed until the 90s, and dropping it basically allowed the soft power of the US to do it’s thing. 'Nam isn’t really an ally of the US, they consider themselves neutral, but they’re undeniably very friendly. I suspect that a generation of trade and tourism could do the same to our relationship with Cuba and might result in softening attitudes among Cuban-Americans as they reestablish contact with their families and reconcile lingering animosity from the revolution.

I think this would also work for the DPRK, Iran, and others. Trade is really nice and children are rarely willing to carry the grudges of their parents.

Gambling I guess? Although I count cards so it’s not quite the same, but I can’t exactly explain to the people around me that I’m an advantage player when I start throwing fistfulls of cash at the dealer…

I live near a few military bases, so enough to overrun the guardhouses and evict all the troops currently inside. I would need like 100,000 clones (one of the bases is pretty big).

Does the power clone any equipment I’m carrying? If yes then I can get a single military uniform and a box of ammo before I start - if not the initial attack will have to be a human wave that captures an armory at least.

Once I’m rolling I will unironically do the “enemy at the gates” thing by having twice as many clones as I have rifles. If the man in front of you dies, clone yourself and pick up his weapon!

If you’re in America, I wouldn’t worry about the Chinese Government spying on you, and be much more worried about the American government doing it, since they can actually use what they find to prosecute you for crimes real or imagined.

But while it is true that you could get forced into using it by social pressure, my post is about how I really don’t think that the tech has the potential for the kind of mass adoption that would create those conditions. You could be forced to use it by your job, but then when you’re not working you can take it off - compare that to the cell phone in your pocket, which they can already use to call you back into work at all hours of the day, the emails they use to get you to give them free labor outside of working hours, and the other ways in which corporations have gotten their fingers into our off time I just don’t see this as a breakthrough or a new threshold being crossed in any way.

I do a lot of creative writing. Remember that what you write doesn’t have to be “good” in order to be worth the time you spent doing it.

I’m not sure if you would classify this as a “social media platform”, but imagine a federated MMO. Each server could specify its own rules for things like XP and drops, allow or disallow mods among its playerbase, or even have custom items and quests - but in certain areas (ie “in town”) all of this stuff would be disabled so that players from multiple different servers could all interact. You could choose a server based on whether you like a high pop or a low pop experience, temporarily try other servers out by partying up with someone from it, major guilds could run their own servers with their own events and stuff, and so on. Admins would want to defederate from poorly-moderated servers, servers with cheaters or with mods/rules that they think disrupt the experience they’re after, or whatever other reason.

AFAIK there’s some strides being made here, like I think there are see-through LCD screens that work in the lab but aren’t mass production ready, so I can see the “final form” of this being a pair of glasses with the ability to put stuff in front of your eyes and all of the actual processing is done remotely by your phone.

…but even then, I think that lands the tech somewhere in the neighborhood of headphones, not the smartphone itself.

This is like the Segway

looks at “hover” boards and e-unicycles The Segway is a bad example here, because it was really just ahead of its time.

I think that, in practice, putting a headset on is a big ask for most people. Phones caught on because they’re extremely convenient, almost everyone had a use case that was improved by a smartphone, and once they had it in their pocket it was a short hop to using the phone for other things as well. A headset though? Maybe if it was as unobtrusive as regular glasses, people would put up with it - but even then, regular glasses are so annoying that many people use contact lenses instead. So if you want to put any kind of technology on people’s head and keep it there all day, that’s where your benchmark has to be set, not way up in the same size category as a motorcycle helmet.