We’re talking about leftists here. The #staged and #flaseflag ideas are conspiracy theories that the would-be assassin was actually planted by Trump to boost his campaign. These are theorized by people that don’t like Trump.

They claimed that the government was focusing on this one issue when really it was a small part of a much larger legislation. Whether it’s good or bad is a separate judgement.

This was part of an overall package including aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan.

Personally, I just find it really disappointing. This Tik Tok issue could have been an opportunity to improve privacy and reduce data collection across the board. Instead, it’s a surgical strike in order to not disrupt American tech companies doing the same thing.

What will happen is that Bytedance will sell the US Tik Tok to an American VC firm and it will continue data hoarding as before. This time, the US government will be getting the data instead of the CCP. I’d rather nobody got it.

This happens to me if I have my VPN on from my phone app.

I could not disagree more about Contact. I read the book first. I found it to be an incredibly realistic depiction of what contact with alien life might look like. The clashing of world powers, science, and religion are central themes. The movie slimmed down the story as you would expect, but they completely changed the message at the end. The book ends with Ellie finding actual evidence for some divine being which eliminates her conflict with faith. The world governments had already been forced to cooperate much more. Now with the final conflict resolved, it’s implied that humanity can move forward in a more unified direction. The movie has her just believe in God, more or less. The Christians were right…

When I worked in a factory, all the old country maintenance guys and techs were on tik Tok during their breaks.

This is where I disagree. I think a transparent, publicly run system to triangulate gunshots is actually a great idea. As long as the microphones are placed evenly throughout a city, they can instantly let police know where and when a gunshot happened.

However, with no way to publicly verify the fairness of the a private system, there’s only one way this could go.

In car circles, Miata owners often say that Miata stands for “Miata Is Always The Answer”

I think the 10 commandments are in Exodus which is also one of the books where God says exactly how you should own slaves. So that would be a weird one.

I’m a Wikipedia addict but I’m not complaining

in the USA atleast, crime is increasing

Source? I’m pretty sure there was an uptick during the pandemic but then it went down again.

Why do they want to step into what we are doing here?

I think there’s a much simpler explanation. Elon’s actions are causing users to want to leave the platform. Meta wants to pounce on this opportunity. ActivityPub is an established, open source protocol that allows Meta to quickly spin up a Twitter competitor. The federated nature means that Meta can reduce regulatory risk. At the same time, they can lobby for increased scrutiny of Twitter since it isn’t interroperable like Threads.

I have no idea if this is actually how Meta is strategizing. But what I definitely know is that Meta absolutely doesn’t consider federated social media a threat. They aren’t trying to squash us. They’re aimed at Twitter. If they make some change that degrades the experience for us, absolutely we should consider defederation. Until then, let’s try to make some converts out of Threads users.

The more I think about it, Warframe is a bad use case. What would give the NFT power would be the game recognizing it which is still a central authority. DE would be better served by implementing an API that the market could use to make trades.

I think the best use case for NFTs doesn’t really exist yet. The “NFTs don’t solve any problem” argument is limiting your imagination to problems that have already been solved. I think at some point a type of game or software will emerge with no central authority. Maybe a FOSS project with lots of popular forks or a connected network of games from different developers. In this environment, ownership of a digital asset may be something that’s good to transfer between instances or trade between users without having to get all the developers to agree on who gets to control the market.

It’s a little more than that. It’s a way of trustlessly proving ownership. Certainly, a company like Valve will be against NFTs because they benefit from having complete control over things like the CS skin market. But I also play Warframe. The main market is an unofficial third party web site which let’s you copy text into chat to organize a sale. It’s clunky. I think the Warframe trading situation would benefit from items being associated with an NFT so the third party service could actually make the trades rather than simply facilitate. DE benefits from trading being a bit awkward so people buy plat instead of trade for it, so that’ll never happen.

Overall, I suspect NFTs will be the most likely of the crypto ideas to actually find some real use cases. Not needing a central authority to verify ownership is too useful of an idea.

This is a very popular opinion

I kind of disagree but kind of don’t. I think most of modern urbanists don’t want cars banned, they just don’t want it to be the only practical way to get around.

Also, I’m a big gearhead. I like driving and working on cars. But I don’t like commuting in traffic, paying to keep a car out of necessity, finding parking, breakdowns. I feel so liberated and free when driving on a mountain road with the top down. I feel similarly free when I get drunk and walk home, get groceries on my bike, or read a book on the bus. I don’t think public transit is right for everyone. But I think having it as a good option alongside driving, walking, and cycling is just good city planning.

That probably would've been true even if they did follow through.

I’m surprised nobody has linked the Technology Connections video on this.

Better editorial and moderation transparency are good. I support that. I’m worried about the “mitigating emotional harm” part of the bill. This could mean that the fringes of society are allowed to use coded language and dog whistles but people aren’t allowed to call them out (for example). Information about transitioning could be deemed “emotionally harmful”. I’m skeptical about the government’s ability to define “emotionally harmful” content, especially in the current political climate. It seems too broad.