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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • So? What are those reasons?

    • “I don’t like either option”: pick the lesser evil or vote third party
    • “But Harris won’t stop the genocide in Palestine”: neither will Trump.
    • “My vote wouldn’t change anything”: it would. See OP.
    • “I can’t vote because I have to work”: vote by mail. Demand that elections are held on a Sunday or national holiday like in most other western democracies. (As an aside, I wonder why conservatives haven’t pushed for this yet. Voting on a Sunday and setting up polling stations next to churches would probably help them a lot)
    • “I can’t vote because I can’t physically get to a polling station (disabled, sick, too far)”: vote by mail
    • “I can’t vote because my state’s ruling party won’t let me”: you should be furious about this and do anything in your power to change this.

    Did I forget any? Probably. Enough to change the election outcome in the majority of states? Most certainly not.

    Yes, the US have some fucked up rules that make voting hard for some people and for that exact reason urgently need a voting system reform. Make voting easier and make changes that break the two party system.

    Honestly, here in Germany we’re infamous for still using fax machines for half our bureaucracy and even we manage to do it better than you. Here, elections are always on a Sunday when the vast majority of voters has the day off. Every elegible citizen gets a letter a couple of weeks before the election, informing them of their assigned polling station, based on their primary home address. If for any reason you can’t be at your assigned polling station on election day (you work on Sundays, are on vacation, whatever), requesting a mail-in ballot is as easy as going to a website and entering your address and a PIN from the letter. Alternatively you can request one by mail. If for any reason you don’t get that initial letter, figure out which polling station is the correct one for you (usually the closest one; ask your neighbors), show up on election day and show some government-issued ID. Done.






  • Honestly, this whole thing is a mess… first a countdown, then a website with basically no information and that’s only the start.

    More than 24 hours after signing up, I finally got an email with just about zero information:

    Hi @dfyx,

    We’re thrilled to welcome you to Loops.video!

    We’re in the process of onboarding all our new users, and we can’t wait for you to experience the magic of short looping video.

    Keep an eye out for another email from us later tonight or tomorrow (depending on when you signed up). It will have all the details you need to get started, including how to create your first Loop.

    Welcome to the Loops community!

    Regards, The Loops Team

    And from some random comment that dansup made on pixelfed I found out that this beta is only for Android. Apparently, iOS will come later and there is no info on a browser-based version. That info should have been on the website. Also, what about selfhosting? This is the fediverse after all…




  • Interestingly there are some videos that show what it’s like when it does work and it’s amazing (though still probably not worth thousands of dollars). That makes it even more frustrating when it doesn’t. It’s been a while since I watched Jenny‘s video but I think she made a point of that near the end.

    The hotel was so expensive in both development and upkeep that they had to have a high price and high capacity at the same time to still make a profit. In the end it was basically luck if the actors had time to interact with you and if they didn’t, you had to rely on the rather barebones automated stuff while still paying for the full experience.


  • I don’t think “boring” is the right word for Outlaws. It has much less of the repetitive stuff that has plagued Assassins Creed for years now and instead puts in stuff that’s less frequent but more memorable. I’ve played for about 10 hours so far and it’s been the most fun I’ve had with an open world game in a long time. The annoying stuff is mainly bugs (not too many for me so far) and quality of life stuff like infrequent save points. A few patches down the road this could still become game of the year material.


  • So far I was fortunate enough to not experience the weird AI bugs but that checkpoint system is sooo infuriating. There’s a side quest where you need to infiltrate a rather large imperial base on Toshara and even the tiniest misstep halfway through the quest will send you back outside the base. It’s 2024, my PS5 is powerful enough to just dump the whole world state from RAM to SSD within a second or two. Why can’t I save manually during a mission?

    Other than that, amazing game. It just feels like Star Wars in a way that nothing since KOTOR and Jedi Knight 2 did.









  • I came into this discussion from the technical perspective (of which I’ve done plenty of research, both in university and in my job) that commercial VPNs don’t do what most ads want you to think they do. Your ISP sees a lot less than they want you to think, VPNs use just the same encryption algorithms as everyone else and while public WiFi isn’t great security-wise it’s not as if anyone will read your bank password the second you connect. I still stand by those claims.

    Then, the discussion drifted towards who you’d rather trust with the things that aren’t encrypted (mostly DNS and connection metadata. Someone has claimed that many messengers are unencrypted but I think they have confused a lack of user-to-user encryption with user-to-server encryption), your ISP or some VPN provider. That’s the point where we diverged: as I had no need for a VPN myself (because of the reasons mentioned above), I had not researched individual VPN providers and was not aware that Mullvad apparently has a strong track record. For that I apologize. Still, in a thread that started out with someone not knowing if they need a VPN at all and most discussion has been very general, I would not assume that anyone who comments is familiar with a specific provider without them being named explicitly. Also, I’ve stated in at least three places that I was explicitly talking about VPN providers like NordVPN and Surfshark that are prominently (mis-)advertised. Those I still would not trust further than I can throw them.

    But I guess that’s online discussions. We’ve talked about two different things and took a while to notice. I’m thankful for the correction and I hope you can understand where I came from.


  • I checked and there is only a single comment that mentions Mullvad (other than yours that I’m replying to right now) that’s visible on my instance with no specific explanation why it’s better than other offers other than that you can pay with cash. If I’ve missed something, I promise you that it’s not in bad faith, it’s just that this distinction didn’t come through clearly.

    I hadn’t heard about Mullvad before today and a quick look at their website made it look not very different from the fear-mongering you see with the others. Only after your comment I noticed the Why Mullvad VPN link at the very bottom that explains what they do differently. I’m still skeptical about some of the claims and especially of audits that they themselves requested but I’m happy to see that there are providers that seem to be more trustworthy than the ones that are constantly shoved down our throats and I’m definitely happy to have learned something new.

    May I suggest that you write a top level comment that explains in detail why Mullvad is better than other services so OP (and others who stumble over this thread) has an easier time finding it?

    Edit: minor typos and grammar