::: spoiler Edit: Text transcription Encrypting save games

Why?

Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.

But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life. No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.

:::

I'm pretty sure some of the newer ChatGPT-like products (the consumer-facing interface, not the raw LLM) do in fact do this. They try to detect certain types of inputs (i.e. math problems or requesting the current weather) and convert it to an API request to some other service and return the result instead of a LLM output. Frankly it comes across to me as an attempt to make the "AI" seem smarter than it really is by covering up its weaknesses.

25% of the people who were censored or deplatformed in Germany due to accusations of antisemitism in the past year were Jewish

https://www.dw.com/en/when-germany-targets-jewish-artists-as-antisemitic/a-70180570

Getting revenge after his mother wasted all of their savings on the Trump NFTs.

Robots with small and intricate parts, especially those working in dirty environments, famously never need cleaning or maintenance.

The article is here: https://archive.ph/tv9km (CW for death, description of horrible injuries, and suicide)

The children shot by IDF soldiers is only a part of it, there's a lot more.

I'm reminded of the Henry Cuellar situation, where the Democratic leadership decided to support the anti-abortion blue dog who was also taking bribes from Azerbaijan (so basically the original Eric Adams) against a primary challenge from a progressive candidate, and he ultimately won the primary by less than 300 votes. And they wonder why nobody believes them when they say they're "the most progressive presidency since FDR".

And he says he “wouldn’t even think about” buying again from luxury brands like “Burberry or Louis Vuitton”.

You live in the country that probably manufactured them in the first place. You can buy a knock-off which is just as good for a fraction of the cost.

By the calculation of the Aristide administration in 2004, the French indemnity extracted between $22 and $40 billion from the national treasury.

By the late nineteenth century, 80 percent of Haiti’s wealth was devoted to serving external debts, first to France and then to financial institutions in Germany — and, most notably, the United States. By the turn of the century, the relatively independent and sovereign Haiti had become entangled in a web of debt held by American financial firms.

https://jacobin.com/2017/01/haiti-reparations-france-slavery-colonialism-debt/

Kamala calling Trump a landlord

Somehow that game is considered more woke than the game with actual gay marriage.

I thought the one on the right was Pence and I was confused because I thought he had fallen out of favor (until I realized that it was RFK).

According to the Oklahoma State Department of Education website, the teacher who assigned the paper was Erich Richter, a football coach at SHS who has his emergency certification in English that expired on June 30, 2024.

Prior to teaching, Richter ran for Tulsa County sheriff but was disqualified due to embezzling funds from Taco Bueno, according to The Frontier.

Beyond parody

There was an article a while back about hospitals run by Catholic organizations that would ban doctors from offering services that violate religious rules (i.e. abortion and contraception), even if the doctors do not personally hold those beliefs. While it's probably not the case with all Catholic-coded hospitals, it's still something to be aware of. They may also pressure non-Catholic hospitals into accepting these rules as they formed mergers with them, so it's a potential issue even for hospitals that don't seem like it.

I have never heard of a muslim, hindu or buddhist hospital in "the west" though these of course exist elsewhere.

Jewish hospitals in the US were founded in large part because many other hospitals would refuse to employ Jewish doctors or treat Jewish patients in the past. I would imagine that there aren't hospitals specifically for other religions in the US because they are an even smaller minority and there hasn't been an explicit need to the same extent.

I remember some hysteria being spread about pro-Palestinian protesters wearing face masks, hence the rhetoric around "criminal" and "dangerous" people wearing masks to conceal their identity (given that left-wing college students are more likely to wear them for health reasons anyways). Probably not the main reason but I think there's an element of that.

Extremely critical support to the engineers who made US warships touchscreen-controlled.

Conservatives: "Western values are under attack!"

Also conservatives: "NOOOOO how dare you celebrate one of the foundational events of Western liberalism!!!"

This unlimited customization dangerously blurs the boundaries of gender and sex, and, especially considering the predominantly young player base of Minecraft, can be very confusing in terms of gender. One of these confused young people is my son, now 21 years old, who, it turns out, had been using the default "girl" skin of Minecraft, often shown in marketing alongside a more fitting masculine character. While this is not concerning on its own, having done so since the age of 11 will surely have contributed to his gender confusion.

Most games have some form of gender customization/selection at this point. How are you supposed to stop someone from choosing an "incorrect" gender? By requiring a genital scan or something?

Also the "girl" skin is pretty clearly intended to be gender-neutral and is based on a real-life man.

Sabine Karin Doris Hossenfelder (born 18 September 1976)

In July 1977, a senior scientist of Exxon, James Black reported to the company's executives that there was a general scientific agreement at that time that the burning of fossil fuels was the most likely manner in which mankind was influencing global climate change.

Exxon's research confirming the existence of manmade climate change is almost as old as you are.