“Don’t eat five all at once because you will see the devil, and he will rip your heart out through your kneecaps.”

I’m a big fan of the maxim that how people talk about furries tells you a LOT about how deep their progressive ideals actually run.

There are way too many self proclaimed leftists who either want to or feel compelled to reflexively shit on furries, because they’re the designated punching bags that it’s OK to mock. This, despite the fact that furries aren’t harming anyone.

I don’t get furry kinks. I don’t get spending thousands of dollars on a fursuit. I don’t get the fursona thing. I do know enough to know that for most furries it’s not a kink, furry porn is only consumed by a very small subset of the community, and a lot of self-identified furries probably can’t afford a fursuit.

But most of all, I know they’re not hurting anyone. So who the fuck cares what they do with their time and money, or how they get off, or fucking whatever? It’s none of my god damn business.

I hope every furry is having a good time, and I hope you all get an abundance of head pats.

And I wish that the so-called leftists who keep punching down on them would find someone actually worth shitting on to be mean to instead.

Like Nazis. It’s always good to be mean to Nazis.

Are you somehow under the impression that Public Citizen were responsible for Harris’ nomination?

In other news, foxes think there should be fewer fences around chicken coops.

Companies release free products to bring people into their ecosystem. If your company is already using Workstation Player, and now they’re looking for a Type 1 hypervisor, it makes sense to seriously consider ESXi. The idea especially is that you get smaller companies hooked on your free products early and then as they grow they buy more of your stuff rather than reconfigure their whole setup. You also get IT enthusiasts and home users to adopt, which gets you name recognition and builds familiarity. Then in the workplace those same users look to your brand as one to trust.

For VMware, the problem is that they recently made a huge volley of deeply anti-consumer moves - basically told all their small customers to fuck off, and told their big customers to prepare to get fucked - and it really did not go the way they’d hoped. Turns out when you’re competing in a space where KVM, Hyper-V and XCP all exist, it’s actually not that difficult for customers to leave. So they did.

This won’t directly help their bottom line but it’s presumably a sacrifice play to salvage their brand somewhat. Turns out when you tell people to fuck off, they tend to do just that.

At least they’re digging in and fighting. That’s a hell of a lot better than giving up.

Wait, what?

OK, help me understand your reasoning here.

People refuse to vote for Harris, because it would betray their principals to support the Dems when they refuse to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide (which it is).

They do this, despite knowing that this will help Trump win, who will actively encourage Israel’s genocide, as opposed to the current Dem position of trying to (fairly ineffectively) somewhat temper it.

This is very much an example of what Ian is talking about in his video. (Typically) White progressive activists choosing their own principles over what will actually be most beneficial for the people they claim to be advocating for. The Dems are ultimately the better option for Palestinians, small though the difference may be.

But you seem to be arguing that actually the real villain here is some random commenter calling those people out for doing exactly that. And that said commentor is actually the one guilty of choosing principles over effective advocacy.

Do I have that right?

Being compared to Everett True is the greatest compliment I have ever been given, and am honour of which I am in no way worthy.

You know what? Sure, fuck it, why not? I don’t even have a problem with OpenAI getting billions of dollars to do R&D on LLMs. They might actually turn out to have some practical applications, maybe.

My problem is that OpenAI basically stopped doing real R&D the moment ChatGPT became a product, because now all their money goes into their ridiculous backend server costs and putting increasingly silly layers of lipstick on a pig so that they can get one more round of investment funding.

AI is a really important area of technology to study, and I’m all in favour of giving money to the people actually studying it. But that sure as shit ain’t Sam Altman and his band of carnival barkers.

It’s been proven that even small amounts of synthetic data injected into a training set quickly leads to a phenomenon termed “model collapse”, though I prefer the term “Hapsburg AI” (not mine).

Basically, this is the kind of thing you announce you’re doing because it will hopefully get you one more round of investment funding while Sam Altman finishes working out how to fake his death.

Translation: “We told everyone we could turn glorified autocomplete into artificial general intelligence and then they gave us a bunch of money for that, so now we actually have to try to deliver something and we’ve got no idea how.”

Sorry, what I meant by that is that individual voters either vote for one or the other. I wasn’t referring to the overall state of who actually wins. But I get that that wasn’t clear at all from how I phrased it.

Victory? What victory? He’s going to cut off all support and present Ukraine with a choice between handing Russia half of their country now, or all of it in a year’s time. And Putin will say “Good doggy” and pat his head just like he so desperately wants.

Won’t do any good. Legal age of consent in Japan is 13.

The thing about Alberta is that they consistently elect the most hardcore right wing crazies in all of Canada.

And they also consistently elect genuinely progressive, openly socialist governments of the kind you imagine Bernie Sanders might run.

There are no middle of the road centrists in 'Berta. You’re either a frothing mouthed “Jewish Space Lasers” kind of crazy, or you’re a proud union member ready to give everyone UBI and free education.

The latter tend to be found more in the cities, as always.

Unfortunately the former seem to have the edge overall in elections.

So, politically, it’s definitely not a great environment, but culturally you’d actually find a lot of like minded folks there. The problem is that right now you’d probably spend your time hanging out with those like minded folks grumbling about your QAnon premier as she sells off the entire healthcare system and deletes sex education from schools.

He won’t actually, like, listen to them. But he’ll be in the room when they’re happening. Sometimes. If he didn’t decide to play golf instead.

Also I really think the key thing to pay attention to here is “multiyear period”. As in, it takes years for companies to reconstruct their entire production and supply chain. Imposing harsh tariffs on goods made outside the US could theoretically boost domestic production, but only if there’s actually the skills and infrastructure available domestically to make that cost-effective… And even then, the gains would take years to decades to realise. And Trump sure as shit isn’t making the kinds of education and infrastructure investments needed to actually make any of that worthwhile.

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First thing that comes to mind is Warframe. It’s a co-op third person looter-shooter, with full crossplay, so you can all party up across your platforms. It’s all very controller friendly, with lots of shotguns, SMGs, melee weapons and space magic that are all really forgiving of imprecise aim. It cares less about twitch reflexes and more about movement.

The scifi setting and “space ninja” aesthetic may or may not be to your taste, although I promise if you take the time really sink into the world it’s actually one of the most refreshingly different and unique scifi settings out there. There’s a lot of weirdness, but as you dig deeper into the story that weirdness all makes sense. And, like, it’s the good kind of weird if you get me? Stuff that makes you go “Holy fuck I want to know what the deal with that is!”

It does have a lot of MMO elements, so it can get grindy at times, but in my experience it’s a really solid game for hanging out and chilling on Discord together. Plus the game itself is free, with no paid DLC or add-ons, and for an adult with an income a few bucks here and there skips a LOT of grind, especially if you check out the third party market website where players will sell you a lot of the rare drops you’ll want for less than a dollar.

Added bonus, it’s made by the original developers of Unreal Tournament, Digital Extremes (there are actually a bunch of UT references squirelled away in the game).

Easily one of the most braindead takes I’ve seen.

“Oh but he didn’t mention voter fraud.”

Yeah, because he won. There’s no value in questioning the ref’s call when it’s in your favour.