I was going to say Mana Khemia, but I think technically that may actually take place in the Atelier series universe. Best crafting-centered RPG imo.

It’s not wrong, though. Trump shattered the illusion/ laid bare the lie to the rest of the collective West, of the US being any kind of virtuous entity.

Even when we were bombing Iraqi kids daily in to assuage GWB’s ego, or drone striking Afghan farmers so Obama could claim we were ‘winning’ the GWOT, most Americans and Europeans really bought into this idea of the moral superiority of the Neoliberal World Order (the aforementioned “international order”), when it was only ever a veneer maintained to generate consent by citizens for the US and European governments to do as they liked.

Now Europe is beginning to feel the same fear of US aggression that the Global South has been feeling since the start of the Cold War, and lots of them are going to react accordingly. Hilariously, despite the author acknowledging that many Europeans see the US as a threat, the authors still seems to think this reaction is purely about confronting other threats, probably because they don’t want to admit we’re the baddies.

Clearly these soy-ldiers aren’t strong enough to defend us from IS (Islamic state) if they can’t even defend their own IS (immune systems)! What pan(demic)sies!

Cory Booker, no surprise there.

It will be interesting to see if this is just a prereq for certain models like Fable, or if they roll this out more widely.

It’s important to note that Cloudflare offers paid bot-blocking services.

I don’t doubt that a large amount of internet traffic is bot traffic, but CF’s CEO is not telling us this because they’re disappointed and outraged and want a change, they telling us this because they want to sell CDN + visitor filtering subscriptions.

Crazy, but it makes sense to re-invigorate the fanbase a bit before TW4 comes out (and maybe they’re even setting up villains for it?).

No, this is different. OpenCore refers to when part of an application is open source, but major functionality or components of the application itself are not.

ElasticSearch is this way, where the elasticsearch package itself is fully open source (AGPL), but you have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for its SIEM addon.

What OP is talking about wrt discord is not actually non-FOSS at all, it’s purely about the community (support, discussions, and documentation), nothing about the application itself.

Even the Steam integration does not change the status of the source code itself; OP could fork it and remove the Steam integration.

They may not have (publicly known) info sharing agreements with the US, but they’re not adversaries either. China is.

Get a VPS in Hong Kong. Set up your own point-to-point VPN (OpenVPN, wireguard tunnel) on it. Is the Chinese government spying on you via the VPS stack itself? Sure, probably. But they’ll laugh their assess off at a US govt. request to turn over that data.

This is an oversimplification that ends up being deceptive by coincidence, because hardware is supposed to drastically reduce in price as it becomes standardized and mass-produced, and game consoles and computers both did this.

That we’re now back to the point where a console costs nearly the same as the adjusted cost of the very first, hyper-niche, hyper-bespoke hardware units in the 80s, is a HUGE regression. Prices aren’t “in-line with” the Atari prices because that’s just how they scale, they’re there by chance as they spike upwards due to supply constraints driven by AI.

“Even though we’ve lost all engines and are in a nose dive, we’re currently at 300ft, which is in line with a normal landing approach altitude.”

I’m against AI art because that is going to be used to degrade not just the value of artists’ labor, but the actual art being viewed itself, because the people who will be choosing what looks “better” are the same marketing and business execs with no taste who have been turning out non-AI CGI slop for 15 years+. They’ll become a filter that slowly converges everything towards the im-14-and-this-is-cool Marvel-ification of media that we’re already wallowing in.

Just like how “Millennial Grey” was foisted onto us who cannot even afford to buy homes, and effectively blamed on us, AI Coke Bear will somehow end up being our “choice” of art too.

But this gotcha is nothing new; I remember people doing this to troll bozos who claimed they could spot photoshops back in the early 2000s. People playing the “I can spot AI because it’s so bad” aren’t being “blinded” by their anti-ai hatred or something, they just want a reason to play at being smart online. I guarantee you this is not the only thing they become instant “experts” in when there’s online controversies.

Ignoring that Bloom’s Taxonomy is outdated and disproven (not that it was ever based on empirical data)…

students are supposed to get to the application point in undergrad and that college is supposed to provide that practice

This hasn’t been true for a long time, ime; colleges have mostly been about laying foundations for years, ever since we moved to a gen-ed system that disfavored any kind of specialized learning at the cost of any usable skills (and since defunding and prison-ifying high schools made even gen-ed baselines not happen in practice). They’ve been having to make up for what kids aren’t getting in high school, but that also means that by the time they leave with an undergrad they have almost no experience of applying their knowledge to real-world-repevant problems.

It is not clear to me if democracy can survive a deregulated Internet. A deregulated Internet filled with LLMs that can perfectly impersonate human beings powered by unregulated corporations with zero ethical guidelines seems like a somewhat obvious problem.

Nah, no thanks. The idea that we have to allow government control of online spaces in order to a make them safer, rather than just government-ideology-aligned, is an insane thing to be believing in 2026.

Yeah, let’s have Trump’s FCC decide what is acceptable speech and what’s dangerous. Decide the ethical code that provides “sufficient justification to unleash it on the world”. I’m sure it won’t be “is it enriching conservatives or promoting our ideology?”.

Great plan.

You’re misunderstanding my position.

Right now, schools are not learning institutions that are trying but struggling to enrich kids. They’re a penal institution, punishing kids for being non-productive members of society, funneling many of them directly into military or prison, and actively making their lives worse than if they were sitting at home or hanging out with friends outside.

Every kid thinks that when they’re in school, but in most places they’re not correct; here they often are.

I think you can draw a pretty direct and causal line from the prison-ification of schools and increasing school shootings, NCLB being the instigating national change, but Republican anti-education policies in general being heavy contributors (and Red states are far worse than Blue states in this).

Bear in mind this is not some “school is bad” stance: there are actually a lot of schools numerically which are wonderful places of learning. Expensive private schools and high-income-neighborhood-servicing public schools don’t allow that kind of disruptive policing and aren’t looking for every opportunity to punish children as a show of dominance and teaching forced-submission. But numerically high does not equate to high percentage, and they’re a minuscule percent of the overall count of schools in America (115,000+).

So this is not a “don’t fix small problem until we fix big problem” issue. This is a “don’t pretend that these are students and not prisoners, and take away one of the few remaining joys most of them have”.

Taking away phones isn’t fixing a small problem, it’s making the bigger problem worse.

They’re being invaded.

Addiction usually forms around something that is used for escaping one’s problems. True here as well.

And yes, most people are unhappy in life, right now especially.

Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine…

In a just world, they’d be intervening to stop an ongoing invasion and occupation.

Hating work is not why adults look at their phones nor is it hating [commuting]

Um, ya sure about that?

Yes, phones are distracting, but distraction is entirely about competing levels of interest, and phones are more interesting than most people’s work or commute, and certainly than modern classrooms.