Ask Science
If the sun was dried up or put out and was a rock how much would it weigh?
kbal
9 hours ago
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100%
Not many rocks don't have some oxygen atoms in them, so I chose to include all the astronomical "metals" in my estimate. Interesting to see how little difference it makes.
Ask Science
If the sun was dried up or put out and was a rock how much would it weigh?
kbal
9 hours ago
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100%
Most of the sun is hydrogen and helium, which is not the kind of stuff that rocks are made of. Wikipedia says that 0.0122 of it is heavier elements, which might more often be found in rocks, so if we imagine it'd be possible to make one big rock out of all that somehow, its mass would be 1.2% that of the sun = 2.4 * 10^28 kg, or 4000 times more than Earth.
Science Memes
10 years
kbal
9 hours ago
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100%
It's stairs we didn't have before 2014. Everyone just used ladders.
kbal
12 hours ago
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75%
Comic strip: Makes fun of American neo-nazis.
Nuanced opinion: Some of my friends look kind of like that guy. Are you calling me a nazi? Okay then, let's go, time for a civil war.
Linux Gaming
Proton 9.0-3 released
kbal
12 hours ago
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100%
Added a warning that appears in Proton Log for systems that have low file descriptor limit
I'm glad to see that. There are reasons why debian didn't choose to increase their default limit beyond 256, but some games require it and if you happen to find one it can be tricky to figure out what went wrong.
Privacy
Social media companies engaged in 'vast surveillance,' FTC finds, calling status quo 'unacceptable'
kbal
12 hours ago
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100%
What they need to do: Ban the practice of showing ads to people based on surveillance data, for a start.
What they will do: Demand that more data be collected to determine which users are children and therefore worthy of protection.
Linux
kbal
1 day ago
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100%
I took notes for the benefit of anyone who doesn't like their info in video form. My attempt to summarize what Linus says:
He enjoys the arguments, it's nice that Rust has livened up the discussion. It shows that people care.
It's more contentious than it should be sometimes with religious overtones reminiscent of vi versus emacs. Some like it, some don't, and that's okay.
Too early to see if Rust in the kernel ultimately fails or succeeds, that will take time, but he's optimistic about it.
The kernel is not normal C. They use tools that enforce rules that are not part of the language, including memory safety infrastructure. This has been incrementally added over a long time, which is what allowed people to do it without the kind of outcry that the Rust efforts produce by trying to change things more quickly.
There aren't many languages that can deal with system issues, so unless you want to use assembler it's going to be C, C-like, or Rust. So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust.
If you make your own he's looking forward to seeing it.
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
Senate Vote Tomorrow Could Give Helping Hand To Patent Trolls.
kbal
2 days ago
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100%
If most pirates are the kind who sail around drinking rum and chasing booty, patent trolls are the kind of pirates who blow a big hole in the side of a supertanker to steal a few barrels of oil and let the rest drain into the ocean.
michellerempelgarner.substack.com
> > > As opposed to Bill C-63, which pushes [age verification bullshit] far into the future and behind closed doors through an opaque regulatory process, our new Conservative legislation will directly legislate [age verification bullshit] that online operators must adhere to. > >
Collapse
kbal
2 days ago
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100%
Engineering is a grand name for dumping a big load of iron sulphates into the ocean to see what happens.
kbal
2 days ago
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66%
It might contribute in some small aesthetic way to deterring them, which seems a much better ambition.
kbal
2 days ago
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100%
Europe
kbal
2 days ago
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100%
We must have Faith in the Economy. Faith comes from budget discipline, and prosperity through the word of the Market. Verily, I say unto you, whatsoever ye shall ask the Market shall provide. Or do you not know that the sinful will not inherit the benefits of Prosperity? Neither subsidies, nor spending, nor taxes on stock buybacks, nor maatschappelijke diensttijd, will please the Economy. Submit yourselves therefore to the Free Market.
kbal
2 days ago
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100%
If that is a big problem, one alternative is to get a post office box.
kbal
2 days ago
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100%
2017 and 2021 it stayed mostly stable at 190 million users
Interesting that they almost managed to stop the decline for a few years there. In 2024 after the recent string of nonsensical decisions it's down to 158 million.
kbal
2 days ago
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91%
Mozilla 2012: We're winning the browser war and saving the web. You're welcome.
Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?
Mozilla 2021: Through inclusiveness and the power of positive thinking we will facilitate leadership towards in-depth studies of what we can do to improve social media.
Mozilla 2024: Running a small mastodon instance is just too hard, we give up.
github.com
If you routinely start [#steam](https://fedia.io/tag/steam) in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.
Firefox
Throwback: 2019 Mozilla-affiliated group asks how to build a queerer CreepAI: a "non-committal sexting bot" emerges.
kbal
3 days ago
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100%
Do you remember the first time you were aroused by language?
I do! Hadn't thought about it in at least twenty years. Thanks for the reminder, creepy chatbot that inspired this post. Thinking that an LLM could develop "its own sense of desire" was naive and seems ridiculous today, but I suppose their intentions were honorable as well as erotic.
Privacy
Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior' | Business Insider India
kbal
4 days ago
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90%
1984 was written in 1948, after fascists had already demonstrated that capitalism is quite compatible with totalitarianism.
Privacy
Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior' | Business Insider India
kbal
4 days ago
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100%
Larry "privacy is dead, get over it" Ellison.
Technology
Why we need an AI safety hotline.
kbal
4 days ago
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100%
Typical call to the AI safety hotline:
Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don't trust it at all, I'm worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me...
Fediverse
Threads makes it easier to evangelize the open social web with a new direct link feature | TechCrunch
kbal
4 days ago
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71%
It is a fair position in the sense that it's technically within their legal rights to do whatever the fuck they want, but it is a feeble sham compared to the full and well-behaved fedi interoperability they should've had from the start since that was how it was sold from to their users from the beginning.
If they some day get there, I would still be open to considering federating with it. For now "it’s an ongoing process" as they carefully tweak things to find out how far they can go with the strictly limited access to the outside world they allow, while still keeping all their users captive.
If you were a threads user, you'd be unable to reply to this even if you did somehow see it. I welcome any of them to do so and prove me wrong.
Linux Gaming
Microsoft Windows kernel changes don't suddenly mean big things for Linux gaming
kbal
5 days ago
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97%
It's interesting to see that Linux has gotten popular enough that a few of the most user-hostile devs are going out of their way specifically to stop people using it. Other than ignorance it's unclear what their motivations could be. I for one will remember the names of the studios that do it and try my best never to buy or talk about their games.
Science Memes
Horseshoe crabs be like
kbal
5 days ago
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100%
It makes sense. I just wasn't sure how likely it would be for species to evolve in significant ways over a long time without obvious changes to the shape of their fossils. Difficult to spot evolution happens a lot, apparently:
Cryptic, or sibling, species are discrete species that are difficult, or sometimes impossible, to distinguish morphologically and thus have been incorrectly classified as a single taxon. Cryptic species are found from the poles to the Equator and in all major terrestrial and aquatic taxonomic groups [2, 3]. For example, a recent meta-analysis yielded 2,207 articles reporting cryptic species in all metazoan phyla and classes, including 996 new species in insects, 267 in mammals, 151 in fishes and 94 in birds [2].
Science Memes
Horseshoe crabs be like
kbal
5 days ago
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93%
Doesn't it? It doesn't seem obvious either way. Are you an actual paleontologist, or just guessing?
kbal
5 days ago
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100%
Aside from not wanting to rely on the same one as everyone else in the world, setting up port forwarding on proton looks unreasonably complicated.
kbal
5 days ago
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100%
Currently on Azire. There aren't many left and I wanted to support one of the slightly less well-known ones. It works well enough.
kbal
5 days ago
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100%
You've got to keep the airlines running, though. How could we burn such enormous amounts of fossil fuels for ever and ever without them?
kbal
6 days ago
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100%
In my years of using mullvad (before they took away port forwarding) I found probably half a dozen websites that blocked me based on that but it may be more common now. Often I found it was easy to get around it using Tor. Some of the smaller and better-run sites might fix the problem if you report it to them through the proper channels.
Free and Open Source Software
The Unexpected Opposition to Free Software Advocacy
kbal
6 days ago
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100%
It does not require compromising your free software ideals
By which of course I mean what I think of as free software ideals, which I've come to understand in large part through the teachings of Richard Stallman even though I'm not personally such an idealist as he is. He Sometimes he even goes so far as to recommend people to services with non-free software on the server side, so long as it requires only free software on systems that the user controls. Your standards may differ. But anyway, if you had to quit fedi because someone set up a fediverse/telegram bridge I think it would not be a practical way to live. Where you draw the line is of course up to you, but I wouldn't expect many people to follow you that far from the usual FOSS positions.
Linux Gaming
After having run Windows on my desktop for years (as I thought it was necessary for gaming), I decided to take the plunge to try out Linux again...
kbal
6 days ago
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100%
You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client
ohhhh so that's how normal people do it. I sort of felt stupid for not figuring out the easy way when I wrote an overly-complicated shell script for it.
Free and Open Source Software
The Unexpected Opposition to Free Software Advocacy
kbal
6 days ago
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100%
I don't think even RMS himself would refuse to participate in something on the grounds that Telegram users are also able to do so. It does not require compromising your free software ideals. By all means point out to them that you believe them to be doing something wrong, but the method you've chosen to try and get them to change their ways seems very likely to be ineffective and also counterproductive. It does further divide the community, even if others have already done even worse.
Free and Open Source Software
The Unexpected Opposition to Free Software Advocacy
kbal
6 days ago
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100%
It looks like you are more of an xmpp advocate than a free software advocate. If you want to join a matrix room and it's too burdensome to do so through your xmpp client, then use a matrix client for that. Without some much better reasons for doing so, setting up a competing xmpp room is not a reasonable alternative.
UK Politics
Protest against space radar dishes plan
kbal
6 days ago
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100%
While I could imagine reasons to protest against "space radar dishes" it seems that these radar dishes are to be situated down on the ground. They already have nuclear weapons, you know. It's probably okay if they have radar too.
kbal
7 days ago
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100%
Hi vegans! I'm not really inclined to go anywhere near c/vegan while you're working all this stuff out so while you're here let me just take this opportunity to say I admire your diet and stuff. Glad you're around, hope it goes well.
kbal
7 days ago
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100%
... not that I especially trust Monero much; not even as much as Tor. What I object to is the tendency to be too quick to go ahead with the assumption that it probably has been broken even in the total absence (such as in this thread so far) of any evidence to demonstrate that.
It's the same misguided instinct that leads people to believe that all encryption is futile, that the NSA already knows all the keys no matter what we do. It's not really true. It is true they can easily compromise the security and privacy of any one of us normal people they choose to single out, but for those of us who don't practise unreasonably strict op-sec the point of choosing secure and private modes of communication (including monero if your sense of morality allows for the use of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency) is not to protect one target against all possible threat models. And it's not only to protect against lesser threats. Much of the time the most important thing is to contribute to the effort to make it impossible for anyone to systematically spy on the whole world all at once. Nobody should have that power.
kbal
7 days ago
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75%
Well then, what specific research do you have suggesting that monero has been broken? After all it is not in any way a "black box". The algorithm is well known.
kbal
7 days ago
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100%
I too don't know much about monero specifically, however:
Parallel construction is still a thing, yes. But so is spreading the false idea that everything is already compromised so there's no point trying to defend yourself.
Technology
Can AI talk us out of conspiracy theory rabbit holes?
kbal
7 days ago
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100%
... I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.
I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who've learned that it's necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.
kbal
7 days ago
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100%
I still have a laptop with Windows on it. Dual boot works for me. I only need Windows once in a blue moon, don't want it using up any of my attention or the computer's resources the rest of the time.
forums.online-go.com
> > > Not only did Ichiriki win the finals, he won it 3-0! I love it that a Japanese top player was finally able to win the most prestigious international go title (for the first time actually), after decades of Japanese pros having a reputation of not really being a match anymore for Korean and Chinese pros. I enjoyed watching this review Michael Chen 1p AGA made about all the games in the match: That video is more than 2 hours long, but it’s not boring at all ... > >
https://github.com/Abev08/VolumeControlExtension That's two longstanding items on my firefox wishlist taken care of by an extension: Actual working volume controls on the built-in media player, and a volume control for other crappy web players that don't have them. #firefox
phase 1: Don't care about diet. phase 2: Try to lose weight. phase 3: Don't care at all about diet. phase 4: Ascetic diet of mostly rice and peanuts. phase 5: Vitamin A deficiency. phase 6 (current): Carefully fine-tuned diet designed with nutrition calculator. I can't explain it, that's just how it went.
Act 1: It started with some fun little quests to introduce you to the narrative style. The fights were too hard, so I improved my character stats until I could handle them. It's not easy to know when there's no choice but to go along with whatever is suggested, and when you can do something else, but I guess I got it more or less right. Act 2: A nice meaty dungeon crawl. My efforts to make my character stronger paid off, the difficulty was just right. Act 3: Holy shit it's too hard suddenly. One does not level up quickly in my version of Skyrim, maybe that's why. At one point there's an option that suggests you can skip the whole thing, but I didn't take it and would guess it probably isn't so easy. I had to resort to stealth archery and I didn't bring a lot of arrows. Some horror game stuff of a kind I don't normally enjoy, but it was well-executed. It was a pretty long slog. Act 4: Okay we're in Dark Souls now. Except the boss fights are even longer. I had a legendary weapon, shiny superhero armour, lots of magic resistance, a good healing spell, all the equipment a skyrim paladin could want, and yet even some of the non-boss fights took a lot of time and effort. Hit, dodge, run, heal, repeat. Forever. To be fair I do have the difficulty settings turned up pretty high. I wandered around lost for a very long time. Some of the battles were epic. There was only one area I had a really hard time with: There doesn't seem to be any resisting the tentacle attacks so they were pretty much instant death. The ending was quite good and made it all seem worthwhile.
Today is the 97th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.
If anyone has a debian/windows dual-boot laptop and has been waiting until Microsoft's secureboot surprise is defused before booting into Windows, and you don't want to wait any longer, what you need is shim-signed_1.39+15.7-1_amd64.deb from bookworm-proposed-updates.
> The problems on this site were created using neural nets to automatically extract positions for each rank from high-level games where the neural net thought the next move would be instinctive for a pro but might be educational or non-obvious for players of that rank. Trying to get back into the game a little, and I've just noticed that https://neuralnetgoproblems.com/ is still online! Whole-board positions from real games, asks you to predict the next move. It's really good if you enjoy that sort of thing.
Well here's a linux modding tip: Turn off ESYNC and FSYNC when running DynDOLOD. If it randomly goes wrong in the middle of its hour-long run, that could be the problem.
First time since March 2023!
Feeling the need to urinate, I went in to the appropriate room and found the big black cauldron that people are meant to piss in on the floor next to a fireplace. As I got going I noticed that the room wasn't empty, and that I was standing right next to a table for two where a man and his wife were trying to eat dinner. "Excuse me sir, didn't see you there" I apologized. They looked unhappy. As I continued, everyone else in the restaurant turned to look at me. As if I was the one doing something weird.
Here are some mods I can recommend that directly affect game balance, feel free to suggest more. For the most part I've listed only things that directly affect the basic variables in simple ways, not including survival mode stuff, combat overhauls, perk tree changes, the paraglider, and many other things that obviously do also affect game balance but aren't only about that. *[Skyrim Skill Uncapper for SE and AE](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/82558) - Adjust rate of level up for each skill individually. I like level-ups to be way slower than the base game, like 10 times slower, but with skills where tedious grinding is already the only way to train them left closer to normal but contributing less to character level advancement. Enjoy being level 1 for a meaningful amount of time. *[Armor Rating Overhaul](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/95507) - Makes early-game armour not completely useless. Getting some should be the priority it normally is in such games. The base game armor rating algorithm seems weirdly broken, any of this mod's options is better. *[Yet Another Difficulty Mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/80224) - Adjust damage dealt/damage taken, optionally changing it automatically as you advance. In my current game it's set to start with 1.0/2.0 at level 1 and smoothly progress to 0.5/5.0 at level 30 (compared to 0.25/3.0 for default legendary mode) and so far that seems good. *[Extra Encounters Reborn](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/25504) - Encounter more problems when wandering around the world. *[High Level Enemies](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/3231) - Make those you encounter more dangerous. Many of the people and animals who live only to murder passing strangers scale to higher levels than previously possible. *[NPC Regen Nerfed](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/79665) - Taking away their infinite magicka supply makes things a little easier. *[Simple No Health Regen](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/66911) - If you don't go full survival mode, maybe at least have no health regen. *[Smart NPC Potions](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/40102) - They might use two or three healing potions during a fight. Also they might poison you. *[Maxsu Combat Escape](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/72901) - When fights are actually difficult you might want to be able to run away without that stupid ogre continuing to be angry at you forever from the far side of a mountain. *[Simply Better Movement Speeds](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/130) - My current choice of movement speed mod. *[Encounter Zones Unlocked](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/19608) - Probably helps if you're going to have a playthrough that goes on for a while.
Squardle is the best one. There's something of a learning curve. It looks intimidating at first. Once you get the hang of it though, it's just right. It's given me a few minutes of word game entertainment every morning for the past year. I may not know much, but I know all the five-letter words now.
Why didn't anyone tell me that [Papyrus Tweaks NG](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/77779) is mandatory once you have too many other mods? Too many being probably about four hundred in my case. Script lag was getting ridiculous and then it started locking up, and now suddenly with that one addition, it's smooth and solid again. With that I guess my personal version of Skyrim is pretty much done, or at least ready for play testing.
mullvad.net
Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt.
www.cigionline.org
This legislative triad would grant the government sweeping new powers to censor and censure, undermining privacy rights.
> Update available! This version is very old. Xscreensaver has apparently been checking for updates and is disappointed that it hasn't had one for 14 months because Debian is too stable. Can anyone recommend a linux screensaver which would work with xfce and can be trusted to never do that?
yewtu.be
> > > Oblivion remade in the Skyrim engine. Thats our goal. With our planned 2025 release date we’re showcasing gameplay systems, a part of the world map, a new city, Ayleid dungeons and much more. > > > > > Despite our progress, we can’t do this alone: we hope with your support to finish the final steps in completing Skyblivion. Does that sound like something you can do? Then please visit our website to apply: [https://www.skyblivion.com/volunteer/](https://www.skyblivion.com/volunteer/) > >
nexusmods.com is blaming their current outage on Fallout: > We are experiencing much more traffic than usual due to the popularity of the Fallout TV series [...] this extra traffic could cause a degraded experience across the website and our applications.
The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.
Well, I finally found out how to subscribe to c/baduk from here. Any baduk players still hanging around?
> you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock I loaded a page on reddit due to a search result and found out that I'm among the chosen few. Message sent yesterday. They must've gotten fewer takers than expected on the first round of invites if they're now offering shares to people who haven't posted, commented, voted, or done anything else on the site for the past 8 months.
gofundme.com
> > > Count Binface, intergalactic space warrior, democracy-lover, and croissant-price-cap crusader. > >
www.michaelgeist.ca
> > > The bill, which is the brainchild of Senator Julie Miville-Duchêne, was supported by the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP with a smattering of votes from backbench Liberal MPs (the cabinet voted against, signalling it is not supported by the government). The bill raises significant concerns with the prospect of government-backed censorship, mandated age verification to use search engines or social media, and a framework for court-ordered website blocking > > This bill passed second reading in the House of Commons. It is a serious threat. The age verification lobby is making its push, trying to bring this arrant nonsense to Canada before we and the rest of the world realise how little good and how much harm it can do.
When I look at https://fedia.io/all/newest right now there seems to be very little getting through today, with only 3 new threads in the past 10 hours. Edit: 4 now that I've posted this one, and now I notice that they're all from local users.
I agree with Pierre Poilievre: The next election should be about the carbon tax.
discourse.mozilla.org
Yet another popular extension has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It seems that its author might have requested its removal, but if so then even in that case the longstanding Mozilla policy of telling its users absolutely nothing about what happened applies. It happened a month ago but it took me this long to notice since the feature I like best only recently stopped working. It's the sort of thing that requires periodic updates to keep up with changes to the youtube UI. Does anyone know of another extension that can automatically resize the youtube player to fill the browser window? Or, for that matter, the invidious one?
I've spent most of my gaming time for the past year gradually applying more and more mods to Skyrim, and finally got around to trying Chanterelle last week. It doesn't have much in the way of quests or npc dialogue, but everything it does have is top quality. Lots of wilderness to explore, a couple of dungeons to crawl. Somehow the landscapes feel more realistic than most of Skyrim. Recommended for those who enjoy walking around in the woods. There are many wonders to discover. Next new game I'm going to try starting there.
www.nexusmods.com
It allows older versions of Skyrim to handle files with the new plugin version number. Removes any temptation I might've had to install the update any time soon. If you reverted to 1.6.640 for example and it was still crashing (as some reported) it's probably because they snuck a new .esl file in that you didn't notice, and this mod should fix that as well. Even if we never get another Elder Scrolls game worthy of its legacy, Skyrim modding will continue.
forums.nexusmods.com
In the unending quest to extract money from the mod scene, an update has arrived. Make sure to take a backup before you next launch the game from Steam. There's already a new release of SKSE but who knows what else might be freshly broken.
www.nexusmods.com
I've only just started my career as a bard, but playing the flute badly any time I want to is the most fun I've had in Skyrim for years. I don't know how much more there is to this mod, but I'm already sure it's among the best.