1bluepixel

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Yep. There’s a tendency to single out China’s bad behavior for stuff other world powers (including the U.S. for sure) also do.

A great example is China’s meddling in Canadian politics these last few years. An ex-RCMP official pointed out that a lot of other countries do it, including allies. He singled out Russia and India, but also the U.S. (I mean, how could the U.S. not try to influence their neighbors’ politics.)

But China makes the headlines, every single time.

Made the switch to Aegis a little while back. I like it a lot.

Haha, he nearly passes out when he realizes he crashed the game. That kid is amazing.

Anyone who expected Starfield to win Most Innovative Gameplay, are you offering divination services to the public?

It was an easy call to make. Steam Awards are voted by the public, so it’s all about name recognition.

The other finalists in that category were Shadow of Doubt, Contraband Police, Remnant II, and Your Only Move Is Hustle. Of all these, I had heard about Starfield and Remnant II.

I’m sure some of these games are awesome and I want to check them out by virtue of being finalists, but it was pretty clear Starfield was gonna win on brand recognition alone.

Steam Awards, like any publicly-voted award, is a name recognition contest.

I tried this exact scenario and didn’t see any difference in load times. I’m using an ad blocker and it’s definitely sluggish, but switching to a Chrome user agent made no difference.

It’s certainly more portable than a flamberge or partisan.

“Meng did nothing wrong, let her go with a quiet whisper not to come back”

That was absolutely not my read on it here. It’s describing a realpolitik situation where Canada is on shaky legal grounds since they are not a signatory to a foreign embargo, and thus overreach their strict legal obligations to please an ally. The suggestion of letting Meng go isn’t about her being right or wrong; it’s about what’s the savviest move Canada could have made here that would have neither pissed off China nor the U.S.

Simply refusing to act on behest of the Trump Administration and giving plausible deniability why isn’t defying them. It’s a neutral political move. The consequence of not doing so is what we’ve since experienced: deteriorating relations with a major foreign power with no gains in return with the ally we tried to suck up to.

the rest was just tooting China’s horn

Is that what we’re calling reporting on facts that don’t completely feed the “China bad” narrative, now?

Linux users truly are the vegans of the tech world.

Not disputing your main point, but they fired CEO John Riccitiello over this.

Bold of the media to assume Space X is gonna get anywhere near Mars any time soon.

That counterpart, according to Ortis, briefed him about a “storefront” that was being created to attract criminal targets to an online encryption service. A storefront, said Ortis, is a fake business or entity, either online or bricks-and-mortar, set up by police or intelligence agencies.

The plan was to have criminals use the storefront — an online end-to-end encryption service called Tutanota — to allow authorities to collect intelligence about them.

Wait, WHAT?

Romania is the most enthusiastic supporter of the EU and is on an economic growth spurt right now. But sure, keep treating them like second-class Europeans until they start waxing nostalgic about the days they had a friend in Russia. See how that works out.

Bulgaria is already well on that path.

It also reminds me of crypto. Lots of people made money from it, but the reason why the technology persists has more to do with the perceived potential of it rather than its actual usefulness today.

There are a lot of challenges with AI (or, more accurately, LLMs) that may or may not be inherent to the technology. And if issues cannot be solved, we may end up with a flawed technology that, we are told, is just about to finally mature enough for mainstream use. Just like crypto.

To be fair, though, AI already has some very clear use cases, while crypto is still mostly looking for a problem to fix.

We gatekeeping liking the Fediverse now?

I wouldn’t say we speak in people’s faces, but we make comments to each other about random stuff. I would never say something rude about somebody in their faces, but my spouse might go, “Can we go back to the hotel, I really need to take a shit” or something silly and unfiltered like that.

My spouse and I lived in a bunch of countries over the years. We speak Quebec French, English, and Spanish, as well as a smattering of Chinese, Bulgarian, Korean, and a few odds and ends here and there.

We basically speak whatever we think people around us won’t understand. Very colloquial Quebec French in non-French-speaking countries, Chinese around white people, Bulgarian around non-white people, or even a cryptic mix of everything when we’re not completely sure.

We figure anyone who understands is probably someone we want to know… Hasn’t happened very often, but it does happen. So far we weren’t saying anything overly embarrassing when we got caught, but we sure as hell have no filter between us because of this!