Israel's entire edge in the tech sector is in lax regulation and a steady supply of experienced, amoral ex-military software engineers. Western entrepeneurs who would otherwise have had trouble finding willing professionals and maintaining legal cover for their adware, data mining, or cyberweapons startup in a home country more concerned with ethics and international relations flocked to Israel over the last couple decades and singlehandedly propped up the local economy.

In return, the US, for instance, gets to wash its hands of the whole affair and say they're not the ones selling spyware to the Saudis and other western-friendly authoritarian regimes, it's all out of their control, while American venture capital reaps the rewards of investments in Israeli companies.

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It's also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can't coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

PETA is funded by the meat and dairy industry to give animal welfare/rights activists the worst possible PR. It's hard to imagine doing much worse of a job at what they claim to be their goals.

A kitchen sink monster taming survival sandbox game with Pokemon-like cute creatures, a handful of reaaaaally familiar designs, edgy shock factor marketing featuring gun violence and animal abuse, and enough obviously Pokemon-inspired gameplay elements that Nintendo decided to bring out all the IP big guns, from copyright infringement down to bullshit mechanics patents and claims that mods don't count as prior art. (if a modder invents something, no they didn't, and a developer that puts the same feature in a game years later can sue anyone who imitates the mod, according to Nintendo.)

For years I lived right by the sea. I had plenty of alcohol and medications. the prevailing currents would've swept my body across the border into a hostile country, where no one who found it would've cared. I don't live to spare anyone else's feelings, not least those who would mourn me as dead for living the life I want to live. I live because I deserve it, I deserve my family's respect and care while we're both here, and I don't need anyone else's shame.

To live on solely for obligation and guilt isn't living at all, and anyone who wishes that on someone else just so they can remain a half-dead trophy they can congratulate themselves for "saving" can eat shit. If you're reading this and you need to hear something, keep going. Keep trying. We live in an insane world; sometimes you have to try the same thing over and over so you can get different results. Live another day and see what happens. Not for anyone else, but because it's a shame to miss out on this wild a ride.

This post honestly just pisses me off. Your life is worth living. Not your parents' child's life. Yours.

Always fascinating how upset people get about someone being slightly weird on the website for weird people.

Very little relation to capital-L Libertarians. Libertarian socialism is broadly socialism that seeks to replace the state with smaller-scale social structures and direct democracy that can satisfy everyone's needs equitably without the threat of violence or enforcement of property rights. Libertarianism is meant to protect capitalism from the state; libertarian socialism is meant to protect people from both the state and capitalism. I don't want to get into the details of leftist ideological micro-labels, but generally confusing anarchists with anarcho-capitalists is the quickest way to piss off both.

9 months is a typical direct transfer, using a traditional rocket engine whose thrust is so high you can basically treat it as infinite: accelerate up to your transfer speed in a few minutes and coast until you need to slow down in a similarly negligible amount of time. You need to set a lot of gas on fire in those few minutes, though. Electric propulsion is so low thrust that it can't put you on that kind of direct trajectory in one go, so the trip is more of a slow spiral around the sun with continuous thrust the whole way. The tradeoff for everything taking forever is unbelievable fuel savings, which is a surprisingly common occurrence in space travel.

I'm struck by how much contrast gets blasted into the shadows of every scene, reminiscent of the average RTX "remaster." Lighting is treated not as a tool for composing scenes and guiding attention, but as a dial to be turned toward "more gooder" wherever possible. Just make everything look like everything else; that's how you know the technology is getting Better.

This feels really sad to read through on some level. So much desperation for connection with someone and willingness to take the psychic-style tricks in good faith as her messages get not only repeated back to her, but rephrased in an obsequiously helpful tone! but I can't deny the willingness to get chatty about configuration details, private APIs, and what's on the second monitor as soon as the coding assistant gets into flirting mode is hilarious.

Truly, the tech industry seeks to close the gap not by increasing the capabilities of AI but by diminishing the capabilities and richness of human thought. Good luck to all girlthings in these trying times, and remember that a doll still means more to someone than a MAU tally for Anthropic.

I love how this is so close to a cogent critique of people literally just repeating racist jokes but using a word swap to make them acceptable, and then the "(whatever that means)" hits and it all falls into place.

how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer?

For years now, custom plugins have made public Minecraft servers much less "block building game" than "robust engine for MMOs that every kid with a computer already has the client for," and even though it's mostly against Mojang's TOS, all the kinds of monetization you'd expect have followed. When you hear "Minecraft server that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit," imagine "freemium PC game that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit" and you'll get roughly the right picture. Peer pressure-driven cosmetics, technically-TOS-violating-but-who-cares lootboxes, $500 "micro"transaction packages, anything they can get away with. It puts into perspective why you hear so much about Minecraft YouTubers running their own servers.