I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.

Mine (early LCD model) has “Made in China” on the label, which even if most of the parts are made elsewhere, if final assembly is in China, that’s the tariff rate that will apply.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the SteamDeck doubles or triples in price before long. We already knew Valve wasn’t making much, if anything, on them, and with a 245% tariff, I kinda doubt they’ll just eat that.

If nothing else we should move all the current (over)investment in AI companies into carbon-free energy production for a few years. The fact that we essentially have coal-powered AI (along with other fossil fuels) is ridiculously stupid and silly - and way less steampunk than it sounds like it should be.

Technically this is already the law (in the US at least). And while Churches are generally careful about not donating, the rallying thing gets bent quite often. Arguments I’ve heard are generally of “free speech” and/or “churches are above the law, and we shouldn’t bind God to the laws of man.” Occasionally there are high-profile cases where the IRS does go after a church for boldly breaking the law, but it’s rare.

But what qualifies as social media? We can all probably agree that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc. count, but what about say Discord or WhatsApp? How about browsing older forums (like open ones where you don’t need an account to read them)? What about news articles or blogs with a comment section? Is a wiki social media? Depending on how you define it, the majority of the internet could be considered social media.

Plus there are plenty of sites that just won’t ever bother to try to comply. For example, I live in one of the more stupid states in the US that has required age verification for porn sites, PornHub has complied by just blocking their site in the state with a notice that they won’t implement a system like that for privacy reasons. But they and their sister sites are the only ones I’ve seen that have bothered to make any changes. The same will inevitably happen with social media. You’re just going to push kids to shadier corners of the internet that don’t care about laws, and they’re gonna end up radicalized by nazis, or taken advantage of in worse ways.

The whole problem is parents who don’t want to be parents and tell their kids they can’t have a smartphone. And I get that the dumbphone market is kinda limited, and that some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to. But trying to fix this problem by changing the internet is never going to work. The only way to fix the problem is to have a spine and make appropriate changes IRL - like banning smartphones for underaged kids in school, or show your full distopian side and prosecute parents who let their kids use social media.

Yeah, check lists in Notes could really use some improvement for sure. Honestly, just now looking through the Github for the Android Nextcloud Notes app it looks like there’s a good deal of technical debt that has been stacking up over time from trying to bring more modern features to what started as a minimal text-only notes app.

There is a way to enable “grid view” in the app settings for the more post-it view that shows the first part of the contents, but doesn’t seem to show on notes with markdown formatting, so anything with a list doesn’t show a preview.

This is the tune I thought of (apologies for linking a YT short, but it was the only version I could find)

There’s also a longer YT Music version here, but I’m not sure if it’s a premium thing or not.

How much do you think we could crowdfund to buy out some foreign prisons and turn them into revolving doors that the US government pays to take prisoners, and then just lets them go. Unfortunately, I’m sure I’m not the first person with this idea, except the others with the idea are human traffickers who want slave labor.

Alternatively, we steal Elon’s dumb tunnel digger, and go put a basement door in some foreign prisons now.

The “timebomb” wasn’t only because he didn’t like Debian’s release policy, it was because Debian users kept reporting already patched bugs on xscreensaver’s upstream issue tracker that were only broken on the old versions Debian kept insisting they ship with because they have an insane “older is more stable” mentality.

Also, he wrote more than xscreensaver. He was an original dev of Netscape, was a huge advocate for them open-sourcing the code, and founder of Mozilla.org (both coming up with the name and registering the domain - although he’s not exactly a huge fan of modern Mozilla). It’s pretty safe to say that the open internet would not exist in the way it does today without him.

Yes, he’s an opinionated “old man” at this point, and nobody is going to agree with everything he says. But as opinionated old men go, there are far worse out there - like Richard Stallman for example.

The Nextcloud Notes app for Android does have a couple of widgets (note list and an individual note), is there widget that is missing?

Yeah, right after the election, we all had a few days of reckoning with ourselves in realizing what we allowed to happen, and realizing that maybe the US really is just like this. And then a whole bunch of people, turned their own guilt around on trans people, and people who were against funding a genocide, and the concept of “woke,” blamed them for the loss, and convinced themselves that they aren’t responsible for what happens now.

And to Americans, I know that there are limits to what we can do when Trump has majority support of every branch of our Government, and we’re rightfully scared of what they’ll try to do to dissenters. I know how strong the temptation is to sit back and smugly watch the FAFO roll in. But we also need to be loudly rejecting this whenever we can, otherwise we’re going to normalize it for a generation. I know it’s gonna be difficult. I have some family members who are in the cult, and I don’t know if I can talk them out of it. But sitting around waiting for my parents and grandparents to wake up on their own, or pass away isn’t a good plan either.

Wasn’t there a limit on how much of an extension Trump could grant? I’m having difficulty finding articles about the first extension he gave them, but for some reason I was thinking that he legally only had the power to give them 90 total days of extension. Not that Trump cares, and not like he’s following any laws about limits on his power.

I do agree that Trump managed to destroy the image of the US in a few months, he’s not actually the sole reason. It’s the ~33% of the population that voted for him again that really destroyed the image of the US.

The world has known for a while that Americans are dumb, but the fact that we not only let him run for president again, but let him get elected again is the real loss of trust. We (in the broad sense, probably not any of us actually in this thread) voted for a felon, and as far as anyone can tell democratically elected a man who had already made us the laughing stock of the world in the past. They graciously forgave us once, and then not only did we not change, we doubled down on crazy. We’re a democracy, we’re all also a bit responsible for the destruction of our reputation by allowing this to happen and continue. Even those of us who have never voted for Trump.

Considering USAID was instrumental in the ending of Apartheid, it would not surprise me if that’s part of his plan already.

Honestly considering his just-announced 24% tarrifs on Japan right after this price came out, I would not be surprised if we get more of a price jump before release.

Based on their current management model of “desks on wheels” they’d probably be most comfortable becoming a worker-owned coop. I know I’m in dreamland, but it would be amazing if they could go that direction when Gabe is gone.

For what it’s worth, Epic Games sold Bandcamp to Songtradr in 2023. It’s still an American company, and probably isn’t meaningfully better than Epic, but at least they haven’t totally tanked the platform yet either.

The ado is the commotion/activity/fuss that is unnecessary. So “without further ado” is just another way of saying “without any more unnecessary fuss [let’s get down to the important business we’re all here for]”

Also bombing Yemen is a presidential tradition that every president in the past 25 years has done. Yes, Trump probably bombed them more in his first term than all his predecessors combined, but no matter what kind of president is in office, American’s are very normalized to hearing that the president bombed Yemen. And because they are generally just periodic attacks, it gets hard to keep up the push to get the government to stop because the answer is always “well, we’re done now anyway, national security reasons, bla bla bla.”

So instead Americans vote for candidates who say they’re going to get us out of foreign wars, which Trump knows to do on the campaign trail, and he talks about it more than any other candidate and people keep believing him, even though he’s lied before.