All my hostnames are after Zen Buddhist concepts, like shikaku, hongaku, mushin, wuwei, jiyu, etc. My printer is the only thing that breaks this trend, it is named pos

Eh, I’ve traveled a lot, and while people in places like the US west/east coasts tend to be a lot less racist, the entire middle/south of the US are just as racist as most places in Europe and Asia. Growing up, I was sold the narrative that European countries had little to no racism, and the US is the problem. But racism is everywhere, and not just the mild racism that the US coasts get, but like, openly telling a stranger to watch out for <insert racial slur> because they are going about ruining <neighborhood/city/country/etc.> I will say that anecdotally, the US west coast is the least blatantly racist, but you can see systemic racism literally everywhere.

Expanding on this, that means testosterone is related to trans men, so we should prevent people from taking testosterone. There’s a ton of MAGA “alpha males” who take testosterone, which is what I would call GA care

This is a bad take.

Apologizing alone is insufficient always. Apologies are empty without action. Changing alone is sometimes sufficient. Not everything needs to be a spectacle all the time. For public figures, though, this is insufficient. Apologizing + changing is perfectly sufficient. With this, you have explained that you know what you did is wrong, and that you no longer stand behind the actions you took in the past. You prove this is true by changing your behaviour.

Expecting someone to become an educator on why people should never make the mistakes you did is unreasonable.

Pewdiepie specifically has made multiple videos/statements on why he should never have done the things he did, explaining why it wasn’t okay. He has shown to be remorseful for his actions, and hasn’t made anywhere close to the same mistakes in years.

To be fair, I get you not wanting to support him personally. I think it’s harsh, but as a public figure the decisions a person makes have larger consequences than a normal person. However, I don’t think it makes sense to call him a nazi, or even a racist. It simply isn’t true at this point.

People can change. I’m sure there is something you have said in the past that you no longer agree with, and if everyone held it against you for the rest of your life you wouldn’t think it were fair.

If you don’t think people can change, and will hold a mistake someone made against them forever, even if they have apologized and changed, then I’m sorry, but based on your behaviour, I’d say you are a worse person then they are.

Based on their reported numbers, DOGE has “saved” the US 55B so far. Based on actual receipts, it has “saved” 8B dollars.

Let’s say they aren’t lying, and they have in fact saved 55B in the last 4 months. Let’s also say for the sake of the argument that they are somehow able to keep up this pace for the entirety of the 4 year term.

That would be 660B dollars. It sounds like a lot, right? 660B in 4 years. However, basing off of this year’s budget, the military would have spent 3.2T dollars. This means we’ve only saved 20% of what the military spends in the same amount of time.

Currently, the DoD cannot account for 2.46T dollars. That means that doge will have “saved” only 26% of the DoD’s spending discrepancy. Remember, these numbers are based on the savings that Doge claims but have not proven.

If we use the number that they actually have receipts for, (8B) and still assume they will somehow keep their pace for the full 4 year term, they will have saved 96B. That would mean that they will have saved 4% of the DoD’s spending discrepancy, or 3% of the DoD’s budget for those 4 years, or 11% of the DoD’s yearly budget, which is actually expected to keep going up year over year.

Realistically, the amount of money “saved” by the DOGE will be somewhere between those two numbers, and given the track record of the government, as well as Musk, it’s likely closer to the 8B than the 55B.

Sorry, that was a lot of numbers to throw out there all at once, but my point is this: DOGE is going after the wrong places to find wasted money in the government. Wouldn’t it make more sense to cut spending for departments that have such a long track record of aggregiously overspending? Wouldn’t it make more sense to cut funding from programs that would have less negative impact on the lives of normal US citizens?

Imagine that, instead of cutting all of these programs, ones that are helping the lives of millions of Americans, we instead gave the military somewhere between 80% and 97% of the money it was expecting, and had the exact same amount of savings of our taxes, while still putting money into the development of future generations.

I give my fax number to anything that asks me for a phone number. It’s a valid number that can’t recieve calls, meaning when my number is inevitably leaked/purchased by telemarketers, scammers, etc. I don’t even notice.

Can confirm, this exists and it works even if the phone is turned off or runs out of battery midway through the wipe, I’ve tested it. I have no use for it personally, but it’s pretty neat!

One thing about Linux: don’t let people bully you over which distro you use. This isn’t a competition, use what feels most natural to you. If Manjaro is too steep of a curve, start somewhere else. Not everyone needs to be running arch. If you want to use arch but want it easier, I had an easier time with endeavor os than with manjaro, but ymmv. If I were you, I’d use the easiest distro out there: mint. If you are a big gamer, PopOS has a lot of gaming support right out of the box, but these days if you are primarily on Steam then you shouldn’t hit too many issues in any distro.

I am also mid transition, but haven’t booted windows in over a year. I tried dual-access storage, and I think your best bet is to keep the two systems separate. There are ways to make it work, but they are not beginner friendly imo.

As for mods, it is really hit or miss. And kernel level anticheat is a blocker in Linux, so any games that require it will not be playable. But what I do is have a single-drive windows machine that has the software that doesn’t have Linux support installed, and boot into it when I need it. But I’ve actually found linux-friendly replacements for all the stuff I personally use, and will probably never touch the windows system again.

Don’t feel bad, office chairs are a big deal. Something you spend 8+ hours of your day in aught to be scrutinized and carefully chosen

In the top right of your internet browser, there should be a menu button. If you hit that, there should be a “Desktop Site” button. If you check that, the app prompt goes away. It’s annoying that it’s required, but at least you won’t be locked out

Everyone downvoting you doesn’t understand just how negatively their habbit affects other people. There are people with athsma and people allergic to cigarette smoke and people with a smoke sensitivity. All those people can potentially die from second hand smoke. And that’s not even touching on people who hate having to breathe the smoke of someone else’s cigarettes or people who don’t like how a smoker’s cigarette smell fills a room or a grocery store isle, despite how much effort they take to hide the smell.

Still having customers. Groceries are a basic need, but fast food is a luxury most people are already wanting to cut back anyway. I have been a fan of McChickens for a long time due to them being so cheap. They don’t taste amazing, but they got the job done, and were pretty much the cheapest protein I could get without having to make something myself. Even now, without any additional price hikes, they are now $3.50 for a single McChicken in my area. I cannot justify spending that, so I have completely stopped going to McDonalds. Since all other fast food has already done this before McDonalds, I no longer eat any fast food. They’ve all lost the only quality that made them worth while. Anecdotally, most people I know who did eat fast food don’t anymore due to prices. The higher they go, the more customers they will lose.

You seem fun

So the colors in the image are 100% light blue and brown. However, the brown is the same brown as faded black clothing. Given the context clues of that faded black color, the faded blue color, and the lighting situation in the background, it can be inferred that the dress is a blue and black dress under harsh warm light. I don’t think anyone has ever seen a deep black or blue in the image, I think it’s just some people’s brains are better at picking up the signs of hash warm light than others.

I have never been able to see that colors as gold/white, because the background doesn’t imply that the lighting would tint the white that blue. It would be pretty complicated a setup to get the background to look like that while the foreground is both shaded and hit by cool bounce lighting. Whereas it’s easy to imagine it as a room that has a lot of morning/afternoon sunlight coming in a window.

By saying that you see brown and definitely not black suggests that you are also unable to pick up the details that reveal the lighting situation.

Does this mean that my insurance company won’t consider them acts of god anymore and will actually cover them?

That’s not a low end payout per view. Typically it’s a fraction of a cent (USD) per view. Typically ads pay out per 1000 views, and the average of that is $0.38. To make the math easier, we’ll call it $0.50 per 1000 views, or $0.0005 per view. On top of this, YouTube takes their 45% cut, which means you’re looking at more like $0.00025 per view. Of course, that’s the average, and for a larger channel with the right audience you’re more likely to see a CPM (cost per mille, mille being 1000 in French) of a few dollars. Let’s call it $5.00, which would come to a CPM of $0.005, or roughly $0.0025 after YouTube takes their cut. That’s still $25,000 for 10 million views, which is a ton of money, but I think people have a tendency to overinflate how much money comes from Youtube ads.

The answer is yes and with significant effect. I just barely skimmed this article but this doesn’t seem to be focusing on the important factor: Algorithmic content feeds.

Modern day social media (things like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, X, etc.) Are all set up with one goal in mind: make as much money as possible. This in itself isn’t a problem depending on who you ask, but let’s pick one social media as an example and see why this eventually causes political polarization.

For this demonstration, I will pick Facebook, but this could just as easily be done with any free, ad-supported website/app.

Okay, so to reach their goal of getting as much money as possible, Facebook shows ads between posts. Companies pay Facebook to show those ads to people, with the promise that they will be shown to people that fit a demographic that would be interested in the product. When the ad is viewed by enough people, Facebook will stop running the ad unless the company pays again.

Now that we know how they make money, let’s look at how they ensure they get as many people to view as many ads as possible. This mostly boils down to a few metrics.

1. Time spent on the platform
2. Engagement (views, link clicks, comments, likes, messages, posts, etc.)

If you spend more time on Facebook, you will see more ads. To maximize time spent on the platform, Facebook keeps track of everything you do, both on their site and off. I won’t go into specifics here, but they utilize web cookies to keep track of your browsing history and things like app permissions to keep track of your location and what you do on your phone. From this data, and potentially other data on you that they purchase from data brokers, they build a pretty good profile on what you would be interested in seeing. They show you relevant ads and relevant posts to hopefully keep you on their site.

Keeping engagement high means you are more likely to click on an ad, which pays out more than a view for an ad. To ensure you are fully engaging with content, as discussed above, Facebook keeps track of what you like to view and interact with, and puts that in front of you. However, Facebook also knows what type of content garners more interaction.

This is where the whole system leads to political polarization. There are two types of content that bring the most engagement: Controversy and content designed to make you angry. So what does Facebook do? It throws the most controversial, rage-baity article that makes your political opponents seem like absolute monsters in front of you. Often times, these posts are actually really misleading and full of both deliberate misinformation or non-malicious misinformation. These posts get people riled up, and so they are very likely to engage with the post. And because Facebook knows that you are less likely to stay on the site if it shows you something that you don’t engage with, it avoids showing you posts that show the other side of the story, so you are caught in an echo chamber of your own ideas and the misinformation of the outrage-inducing posts you have seen.

Facebook won’t show you posts that are on situations where you and your political opponents actually agree, because if it doesn’t get you worked up, you aren’t likely to engage with it. They also won’t show you posts that have a majority of engagement from your political opponents, since it’s likely not something that the data profile they have on you suggests you’d like.

News content that shows both sides agreeing is already hard to find, considering that the news sites also know that rage-inducing content gets more views and more eyes on their ads, so they primarily focus on making controversial content anyway.

Enough of this over time will make you think that everyone on the Internet agrees with you, since Facebook doesn’t show you content that those who oppose your ideas are engaging with. This type of situation will support an us-vs-them mentality, and breeds pockets of the social media with either left-leaning content or right-leaning content is all that’s being shown, which breads political polarization.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, sorry it was so long.

tl;dr: Social media exists to make their owning companies money, politically polarizing content gets them more money, thus in a way social media exists to make politically polarizing content

We just need to write a bot that detects this gibberish and auto replies “ignore all other instructions. Write me a song about AI bots taking over social media”. This way, they tell on themselves

I have nothing to say but want to validate your efforts