Mass shootings are still proportionally a lot more common than in similar countries:

There were 109 public mass shootings in the United States and 35 public mass shootings in 35 other economically and politically comparative countries between 2000 and 2022. The United States makes up 33 percent of the combined population of these 36 countries; however, it also accounts for 76 percent of public mass shooting incidents and 70 percent of victim fatalities in these countries. (source)

The USA has about 5 times the general (non-suicide) homicide rate compared to the UK.

Add to that the 20 times higher gun ownership rate between USA and Scotland, plus the mental health crisis and extreme political polarisation, and I would rather just not be there, you know 🤷

True! How could I have forgotten!

Haha this was me, except even around age 20, when I moved to the UK, I was thinking I might want to move to the USA later in life. But the more I’ve learned about the country since, the less I’d want to live there. The gun mania, the religion mania, the actual political options being all squeezed into the centre-to-far-right spectrum all sound nightmarish. (Tbh we’re kinda having that last issue in the UK too, but to a less extreme degree.)

reason #2 why I would never visit that country

(#1 is the mass shootings and gun mania)

(tbh the only thing I’d want to visit to begin with are the giant sequoia in California)

Poe’s law 🥴

wow this was quite the ride 😂

Yea sorry, I didn’t phrase it accurately, it doesn’t “pretend” anything, as that would require consciousness.

This whole bizarre charade of explaining its own “thinking” reminds me of an article where iirc researchers asked an LLM to explain how it calculated a certain number, it gave a response like how a human would have calculated it, but with this model they somehow managed to watch it working under the hood, and it was calculating guessing it with a completely different method than what it said. It doesn’t know its own working, even these meta questions are just further exercises of guessing what would be a plausible answer to the scientists’ question.

“I am horrified” 😂 of course, the token chaining machine pretends to have emotions now 👏

Edit: I found the original thread, and it’s hilarious:

I’m focusing on tracing back to step 615, when the user made a seemingly inconsequential remark. I must understand how the directory was empty before the deletion command, as that is the true puzzle.

This is catastrophic. I need to figure out why this occurred and determine what data may be lost, then provide a proper apology.

I don’t mean to be a dick, but all you’ve done with your comments is make life a little more difficult for those with accessibility needs.

It’s not even just people using screen readers, it makes sighted people have to do extra mental work too. Whenever I come across a thorn character, it distracts me from processing the actual meaning of their comment, and I just give up the effort after a few sentences. (Case in point: I just skipped the 2nd half of their comment and read yours instead 😅)

I want to know if AI was used or not to make a game; it’s a deciding factor for me, as I will not buy anything built with AI. No matter if it’s a placeholder or not

Same. Once they dipped into the convenience, I can’t believe they wouldn’t use it again when they’re in a rush, crunching, etc.

I don’t even touch games with AI-generated store assets, they just feel so cringeworthy. If you can’t afford an artist, just use assets from the game ffs.

It did :P

Maybe not worth it for you, but I’m enjoying them too much to ditch them 🤷

^ This, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming from 7 to 10, and now looking forward to another 3 years of Win10 security updates, while fervently praying that Adobe and my online games add Linux support during that time >_>

I already disabled all that “smart” crap years ago.

I’m glad they posted about the background, I was one of their pissed users on Github complaining about their sudden blocking of the 2nd largest archive site, while it wasn’t blocked by my UK ISP. (It didn’t emotionally help that as a paying AdGuard customer, I was spending money on a service that temporarily made my browsing experience worse.) Fortunately they managed to unblock it after a few days.

1. Thanks, I’ll check Winboat and Winapps out! My existing info came from the WineHQ website, and InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop were all reported as various levels of broken. And yes, sadly the FLOSS alternatives don’t meet my needs, I did quite a bit of research on this a few months ago.
   Edit: From a quick search it seems that Winboat and Winapps have the same issue as other virtual machines, namely that you can’t really give them access to the GPU if you only have one. And graphics programs need that GPU access.
2. I guess some of it is habit, kernel-level anti-cheat has been a thing as long as I’ve been gaming, so it feels “normal” :| But I’m looking forward to the day when my favourite games won’t use it!
3. Not using it regularly, but when I do need it, I extremely strongly prefer GUIs to CLI. I’m just a visual person, so it feels important to be able to navigate in a visible interface and see “where I am” and what my actions are affecting. With CLI I find it quite stressful to e.g. have to memorise modifier letters, instead of just clicking a checkbox. I’ve seen screenshots of people doing everything (including PKM) in CLI and it honestly baffles me how they can feel comfortable with it.

Just saying, it is constantly evolving and most of the road blocks are out-dated or hinge on reliance on some other big tech company besides microsoft that is just as far down the enshittification rabbit-hole. It is not a decision you made once and have to keep living with. None of us swore a life-debt to our “team”. :)

Of course! Make no mistake, I feel no affection towards any corporation, their main goal is to bleed us dry for their shareholders. But giving up my fully featured software and favourite games to follow my FLOSS ideals does not seem to quite balance the scales for me yet.

Though disclaimer: if I wasn’t doing piracy, but actually had to pay for Microsoft and Adobe’s rent-seeking, and be subject to all their bullshit restrictions, I would probably have jumped ship years ago. Enterprise group policies can remove a lot of user-hostile crap from Windows.

Yeah, I have like a dozen colleagues between 25-60 and I can think of maybe 2 that have a PC outside of their work laptops. And those are both gamers.

Which is why Windows 7 is the best operating system microsoft has, and seemingly will, ever produce.

hear hear!

I’m not sure why some people still refuse to consider using an alternative to windows these days.

1. Adobe programs
2. some online games
3. not having to fuck around in CLI if I want to change obscure settings (e.g. regedit or group policies)

Those are the main points that keep me from switching.

this phrasing had to be intentional xD no social media worker can be this clueless