A work can have multiple meanings, even unintended meanings. It can even have no intended meaning.

Its creators define its intended meaning, if any. Valid interpretations can create other meaning from it.

Yep, crack economics. Give product out for free until they’re dependent, then exploit them.

its own little isolated forum

Well, biggest Lemmy* instance at the time by a big amount.

Yeah, this matches my experience as a lemmy.ml onlooker. People in the federated instances were mostly used to more diplomatic answers from the .ml socialists, or at worst one of the three tactless accounts of the mostly-fine Lemmygrad crowd, then bam, suddenly they could barely make a liberal take without ten Hexbears telling them off, and inevitably a few just badposting or PPB like they would to a liberal tourist trying to set up camp on hexbear.net. These rudeposts were a small percent but the scale of Hexbear accounts and the sudden arrival made people notice, cry “Russian Bots”, all that stuff. To go from one or two accounts making political rants to an oversized PPB in reply to a “normal” post is a big jump for a community, Hexbear was considered a malicious troll instance by many. (citation: the site taglines)

If anyone does, make sure to check out guides like https://specificsuggestions.com/ (use filters)

I’ve found that when I’m deciding to try out something creative or artistic, I start to look for techniques in other people’s works when I might otherwise just be enjoying them on a surface level. Anyone can look at a work and say if it’s pretty or not, if it seems well-designed, how it makes you feel, but when you start to ask how an artist does that, you quickly discover techniques that you may be able to apply to your own art, your own writing. You can even look at a list of techniques [1] and then start to identify when creators are using them, and how to use them effectively. The more you experience and the more you think about it, the more understanding and the more tools you have at your fingertips. And by forcing yourself to get into D&D, you’re throwing yourself into a game that will help you develop that variety of skills, and probably into a scene where plenty of people know enough of those skills that you can rapidly learn from them, see what they do brilliantly and see what they could do better.

As for games, I admit I haven’t tried many of them but the Explorable Explanations I have tried are great, particularly the ones by Nicky Case (Parable of the Polygons , the Evolution of Trust , the Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds). I’d call these short games even though they lean strongly towards elements of education and simulation.

Rat

and the only thing that can stop them is violence at this point

There are a range of effective violent and non-violent resistance tactics. The important part is understanding that violent tactics will inevitably be necessary to complement the non-violent tactics. Violence alone doesn’t work - look at the anarchists around the 1900s who assassinated a range of kings and police chiefs.

And there’s no winning against a military force like the US.

There are plenty of countries which have resisted US military invasion. They’ve faced atrocities and been left with horrific scars, but nonetheless this view of the mighty US military as unbeatable is repeatedly contradicted by its history. And a civil war would provide a different dynamic, so it’s a bit of a mystery in my opinion. Obviously not advocating for that, and believe it or not the (whole) military is not an inevitable opponent.

Just in case anyone needs to hear it, EVs are still cars. Perhaps an improvement, but not a solution.

From their post, I’d assume they’re looking for both.

Yeah, anyone looking to try Protonmail should be aware of how lock-in it can be if you’re on the free account. Maybe things have changed since, but I couldn’t set up email forwarding or bring my own client, and only noticed it when I was about to change provider.

Since this question is asking “should”, I think it’s fine to answer with a rational but radical answer:

• People can be useful to society even if they aren’t employed in our current economies. Retired people may not have jobs, but often still perform productive or necessary labor, like maintenance, artistic contributions, child care, historical preservation. When someone isn’t working for money, they still often voluntarily work for society!
• I believe that, generally speaking, it’s within society’s best interest, even just from an economic standpoint, to support these people even if they aren’t formally employable.
• Looking at most capitalist countries, overproduction is normal. Usable property remains empty just because an owner wants more money for their investment. Perfectly edible food is systematically thrown in bins rather than given to hungry people for free, or rejected by stores because it doesn’t look perfect (like an oddly shaped carrot). Clothes are thrown out once they’re “unfashionable”.

We have all the resources needed to support everyone, and it wouldn’t take much extra effort from a determined government to get those resources where they need to go. There’s no reason why unemployed people should be left to starve and freeze simply because they don’t have enough income. In our society, the scarcity of basic needs is artificial (‘artificial scarcity’).

Automation is seen as a bad thing, a threat, because workers in society are threatened with starvation if they don’t have the income needed for food, shelter, medicine and perhaps basic luxuries. But if our political economy were first-and-foremost based around society’s needs instead of profiting, and therefore we used our modern technology to automate the production of these basic needs and distribute them, then suddenly automation would mean free time and easier labor!

xcancel is just one Nitter instance (just like lemmy.ml is one Lemmy instance). I recommend sharing the load around to other working instances, or better yet, as Avatar of Vengeance mentioned, use the LibRedirect browser extension which automates this for a huge range of other websites.

The simplistic ‘left-right’ spectrum isn’t particularly useful when it comes to something as complex and location-specific as politics, left-right is really just vibes in the end. You’re on the right path by comparing policies, and it helps to understand the different contexts they’re in (e.g. US red scare culture), along with the similarities you mentioned.

I think this exercise could be fun and deepen you/our understanding of politics, but at the end of the day, different cities have different material conditions (circumstances) which means the same policy may make sense in one environment but not the other. I think an insightful exercise would be to compare the DSA to your country’s main demsoc parties (PvdA/GL?) and figure out the main differences and why they’re different.

I don’t see the point in trivializing a serious, potentially life-threatening allergy just because another tick-borne disease (also prevalent in the same country) is worse. Plenty of excellent reasons to complain about the US and its citizens, but this post is pointless and petty.

I wonder if it was a romance scam.

There was a person last year going around to websites posting a whole bunch of hastily-made .onion single-page scam websites that essentially just say “Pay $10 to this bitcoin address for the service”. They’d post a series of links, like:

Facebook hacking:

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14h3kjfu4.onion/

Love potion spell

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14hfspopd.onion/

Mystery box

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14fine9ffewh.onion/

[…]

Not only are many of these scam services played out and pretty obvious, like pretending they will hack facebook accounts for $25, and not only were many others ridiculous like a love potion spell, satanic spells, a “mystery box” that you pay $10 to find out what’s in it, but their shotgun approach of listing them all in a single post makes it obvious how fake and desperate it is. I’d be amazed if anyone fell for it, but they kept hand-posting these for months until site owners manually blocked them.

Here are three variants of Linux Mint with different Desktop Environments: (click their example image to make it larger)

• Linux Mint (Cinnamon Edition) - the default, I’d use that until you have a reason not to
• Linux Mint (MATE Edition)
• Linux Mint (XFCE Edition)

All of those are Linux Mint, they use pretty much the same core tools under the hood, but the desktop environments change how you engage with them. Mostly the way things look, the way you organize programs on your screen, and the default apps (like which text editor it comes with by default). This can change your experience a lot, I think Cinnamon looks nice and is smooth, while MATE and XFCE are more lightweight and might be better for older computers or if you don’t like something about Cinnamon.

Now, those are all somewhat similar, they have a program start menu in the bottom left, a taskbar on the bottom, the basics are familiar. There are some (not officially supported by Mint) which are more different, like GNOME (Ubuntu’s desktop default) which has a different app launcher instead of a start menu and a different way of switching between programs. Then, as others mentioned, some people choose to not even install a pre-designed Desktop Environment and only install some of the more core components of a DE, like the Window Manager. People who really love the keyboard might use a tiling window manager, these tend to make you think “wow, this person’s a hacker”, where they’ll rapidly switch between programs using keyboard controls, with the window manager automatically shifting and dividing new windows so that they tile together to fill the screen. Loosely speaking, the opposite of a tiling window manager is a floating window manager, where windows just float and you move them around with your mouse, just like Windows (well, apart from the tiling options in more recent Windows versions when you can drag a window into the corner and it tiles to fill the screen.) I think the “best of both worlds” midpoint is a dynamic WM? I’m not sure. hyprland is an example of that.

I haven’t given it a try yet, I’ll have to give it a read.

Looking at Nature Index’s lists of top institutions, Chinese institutions hold:

• 2022: 4 of top 10 [#1, 8, 9, 10]
• 2023: 6 of top 10 [#1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10]
• 2024: 7 of top 10 [#1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10]
• 2025: 8 of top 10 [#1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10]

It’s a pretty clear, rapid rise in China becoming the main contributor to their database, and given the US political situation and academics famously being poached by China and Europe, I don’t think Harvard will retain that #2 position for even another year.