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

I lived in Japan when streaming was becoming a thing. Everything was region blocked, and DVDs were (and still are) horrendously overpriced for what you get.

I’m sure all of those programs are great, but in the modern world I can’t think of any reason why I wouldn’t ever just use VLC.

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.

Left that unchecked, I’ve got 16gb ram so I don’t think that was the issue

This is true of the consumer market, but the OP asked about governments, and 90% of government computers in China run Kylin or NeoKylin, with plans to consolidate the two into a single os. This follows the overall trend of China’s tech sector seeking to replace imports (and copied versions of foreign tech) with fully domestic alternatives.

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.

Joining the by far largest instance beats the entire purpose.

There’s kind of a tension here between Lemmy’s design and what makes most people join social media websites. Most people want the biggest, most centralized website.

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…

Even if WB pursues Erasure, we will Always have these games in our heart.

That sucks. I’ve found that 90% of stuff works fine in Linux, 5% works if you jury rig it enough, and 5% just straight up doesn’t work - and if that last 5% is needed for your job, then you’re SOL. For me the few things that don’t work are worth giving up because of how much I hate Windows’ spyware and adware, and all my work apps work fine in a browser window so I’ve never had to worry about that.

Vulpix?

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.