If they think there’s even a small chance, they will make the move, because they know if they don’t, even if that woman likes them, she will never ever make the first move.

Or in my case, I find out after the fact that she wanted me to make a move, and I was continuously dismissing her hints because I didn’t want to be creepy and/or ruin a good friendship if I was misreading the situation. My best friend of like 4 years ended up pissed when I started dating someone new, because she had been hoping I would ask her out. Like bitch, why didn’t you say that when I was single?

The given reason is that people are innocent until proven guilty, and the DOJ doesn’t want to create witch-hunts just because someone was mentioned in passing. For instance, Robin Williams is mentioned in an email chain, but only because he refused to visit the island. But if you only hear the first part of that statement, you may be inclined to start a witch-hunt against Robin Williams.

But the most straightforward reason is a coverup. That’s pretty much the only way to actually justify the massive amounts of redactions. As time has gone on and more evidence has mounted, it has become increasingly clear that the given reason is bogus.

If something smells like a duck, it could be a duck, but it could also be a goose, or a chicken, or a swan, or any other number of things that smell like ducks… But if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, has feathers like a duck, has flippers like a duck, has a flat bill like a duck, and quacks like a duck? We can only reasonably conclude that it’s a duck.

I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.

I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.

Here’s a reminder that packing the 5th circuit court of appeals with batshit conservative judges was a key step in the Southern Strategy. There’s also a county in Texas that only has enough of a population for two judges, and they made sure both of those are also batshit conservative. So any time they want to get a batshit conservative ruling, they just file it in that one specific county in Texas. And then Texas appeals go to the 5th circuit. And any circuit rulings are applied nationally (due to lower courts using precedent to set cases) unless it goes all the way to the SCOTUS. And with the current SCOTUS, they can simply refuse to see the case, and the 5th circuit ruling will stand.

Lots of times, the court cases are obviously staged. There have been cases where a plaintiff didn’t even realize they were named in a case that ruled for/against them, because the PAC that actually filed the case simply used their name to be able to file it in that county.

Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.

I’m currently researching Matrix Synapse, to see if it would be worth the hassle to self-host a server.

And this is why generic EULAs should be heavily regulated, and allowed to be negotiated like any other contract. Allow me to pencil in a “you’ll allow me to uniquely watermark the scan of my ID so it can be traced back to this specific request, and agree to pay me $500M if that scan is ever included in a data breach or sold to additional third-party vendors” clause.

Oh, Discord doesn’t want to agree to that? Gee, if the company is deleting everything immediately and there’s no risk of a leak/intentional sale, what’s the harm in including it? How’s the saying go? Something about “if you have nothing to hide”?

It heavily depends on your instance, fwiw. .world tends to lean closer to Reddit in terms of moderation. And then .ml leans the other direction, and heavily moderates in favor of communism.

Audiobooks mostly, and I know it’s not the same

FWIW, studies have found that reading and speech activate different language regions of the brain… But oddly enough, audiobooks activate the reading parts of the brain, not just the speech parts. So it may be more similar than you’d initially think.

I finally got my AudioBookShelf instance up and running last year, around March. In those remaining 7 months, I “read” (listened to) over 50 books. I used to be a voracious reader as a child. But at some point I lost the spark, as finding time to read got harder and harder. Audiobooks have reignited that love for reading, in a way I can’t even put into words.

I find myself looking forward to my daily commute, because it means I can listen to another two or three chapters in the car. I’ve even started taking the longer route home (which is technically more fuel efficient, but adds like 10 minutes to my commute) because I don’t mind the extra time in the car. I find myself wanting to wash the dishes or fold the laundry, because I can have my earbuds in while I work.

I still doomscroll on YouTube shorts or Instagram reels occasionally, but that doesn’t mean I have to give up long form content like reading. They fill two entirely separate niches.

It’s both, but the honey trap provides both motivation for the traffickers and it means everyone involved should be considered compromised by foreign states. If it were only a pedo ring, it would be bad but that’s pretty much where the conspiracy would stop.

But with a verified honey trap, it needs to be assumed that the named people are now (and have been) acting on behalf of a hostile foreign nation who has mountains of blackmail on them. And reframing those implicated peoples’ motivations from “they’re just seeking power for themselves” to “they’re aiding a hostile foreign nation” shifts things from “selfish and power-hungry” to outright “high treason”.

Home Assistant is entirely self-hosted. No third-party required. It can run in a container or on a raspberry pi, but it’s typically easiest (and most functional) when you use a dedicated Home Assistant Green. It connects to Zigbee, Matter, etc via USB adapters. Or if your devices are networked (instead of using a hub), it can often find them directly on your network via local device discovery. It integrates with Alexa really well, so you wouldn’t need to immediately ditch your existing smart speakers.

If you really want to get fancy, you can even set up a local machine to do local LLM processing for self-hosted smart speakers.

I personally started using it after my smart light provider (Sengled) had a few extended outages. There was no communication from the company, and lots of people were speculating that they had gone kaput. It was literally cheaper to just get the HA Green and a Zigbee dongle, and set that up (instead of replacing all of my lights with a different brand). And since it’s entirely self-hosted, it even keeps working when my internet goes out during storms.

The funny part is that blue LEDs were historically the hardest to make. Engineers tried for years, but the shorter blue wavelength was elusive. But one Japanese dude managed to figure it out, and they exploded in popularity because they were the new futuristic thing. And now they’re actually one of the cheapest colors available, because every single manufacturer was rushing to jump on the bandwagon and has the equipment to make them. Sort of like the flatscreen TV crash in the early 2010’s, when TV prices suddenly crashed because every manufacturer was getting better and better at making the (historically very expensive) screen panels cheaply.

And to answer the question on why they’re so fucking bright, it’s because blue is a very short wavelength. It takes less power to produce shorter wavelengths. When you compare the relative brightness of two different colored LEDs, shorter wavelengths will be brighter. Like if you send 1 watt of power into two different LEDs, a blue LED will always be brighter than a red one (if everything else about them is the same). That’s why so many of the cheap RGB LED lights tend to be sort of blueish when they’re set to “white”. The “white” is just all of the individual diodes at 100% brightness, which means the blue tends to beat out the other colors.

But the engineers who design those things don’t stop to consider that a blue LED needs less power. They’re just checking the “has a power light” item off of their design punch list. They could undervolt the diode to make it dimmer, but that requires extra circuitry. Just get a diode that works on the same voltage as what you’re already using (probably 5v or 12v for a wall charger) and hook it up to the same voltage that you already have. And use a blue one because they’re the cheapest option. Congrats, you’ve just designed a charger that has a fucking blinding blue LED. The whole “people will want to use this in their bedroom in the dark” thing was never even a consideration.

This is also why red (and infrared) light is better at heating things up. Longer wavelengths carry more energy, which means they heat things up more when they come into contact. The wave takes more power to make, which means it is able to carry more energy to whatever you’re trying to make. Trying to design a blue heat lamp would be an exercise in frustration, because you’d be fighting physics. It’s also why the sky is blue during the day but sunsets are red. The blue light tends to get scattered by air molecules, (which is why the sky looks blue) but red light is able to punch through and reach the surface when the sun is at a steep angle (like during a sunset).

Yeah, my linked comment was actually in response to an earlier comment I made, basically saying “this app’s explosive rise in popularity feels astroturfed.” I caught a couple of downvotes for that original comment. But the more I tried using it, the worse it got. It will 100% contribute to the normalization of Nazi viewpoints.

Yup. Privatize profits, socialize losses. It’s the way the capitalist machine is able to keep grinding up orphans for the 1%.

Yeah, I tried to give it an honest shot. Made an account and opened the Discover page. The very first post was an antisemitic “the Jews are secretly running the world” conspiracy theory post. Whatever, it’s inevitable on an anti-censorship app. Not a great first impression, but I’m willing to shrug it off as a fluke.

Then three or four posts later, there was a blatant “Hitler was right about the Jews and the holocaust wasn’t enough” post, made by an account that was dedicated to glorifying Hitler. Again, this is on the Discover page for a brand new account. Meaning it’s what the algorithm is serving to users by default.

I made another comment about it (with screenshots) a day or two ago. Here is the link.

Yeah. Sort of like holding two ends of a chain and dragging it back and forth. Even if the chain isn’t traveling the full length, it’s still moving and you could still extract power from the system if you attached something to the middle of the chain.

More Epstein stuff. A document mentioned he was going to get his wife to start taking antibiotics because of an STI he picked up. The joke is that he wouldn’t want to tell her it was an STI, so he’d have to find some other way to justify the antibiotics.

My big concern right now is actually the fact that the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis. I suspect it will quickly fall prey to the Nazi Bar Problem. I gave the app a fair shot. Opened it up, and the very first post was a “the Jews are secretly running the world” post from an account named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews. It had a caricature of a Jew (big nose, long sideburns, and yarmulka) reaching out of a TV to steal a watcher’s brain.

Okay, not a great first impression, but that’s inevitable on a free speech app. Let’s keep scrolling. Three or four more posts down, and I was met with a “Hitler was right about the jews” post. Yikes. The fact that those were up front and center (on the default “Ranked” sort) for my brand new account was… Not a great sign.

Time will tell. I do hope it succeeds, because TikTok is clearly an awful choice. But it needs to succeed for the right reasons, and not just become a Nazi cesspit.

Edit: I just opened the app again after posting this comment, and the second post on my feed was a white pride “they’re trying to replace us/white genocide” (common white power talking point to recruit new members) post:

Edit 2: Looking at the account’s follower list, it looks like users are largely using the Palestinian genocide to justify Nazi imagery. Equating Israel’s actions with Jews in general. There are a few straight up Hitler glorification accounts on the follower list, which have “the Jews are genociding Palestine” types of posts right alongside 1488 posts, swastikas, and Nazi salutes. Here is a quick screenshot of some of the followers:

And here is a screenshot of how those followers are using the Palestinian genocide to justify the holocaust:

The upper post is a bunch of dead Palestinian kids and babies lined up in a row. The lower post is obvious. Both (re)posted by the same @HitlerTheHero account.

I mean, it’s charted #1 on social media on the app stores. It’s an explosive rise in popularity, but that’s not unheard of. If anything, I suspect that the popularity is manufactured. It’s likely some company running an astroturf campaign to capitalize on the fact that people are tired of TikTok’s censorship BS.

Yeah, I gave it a shot. I opened the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews are secretly ruling the world” conspiracy theory post from a user named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews… Okay, maybe a fluke. Not a great first impression, but let’s see what else the app has to offer. Then a few posts later there was a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post.

So yeah, it has definitely fallen prey to the Nazi Bar problem.