Coming soon:
Assassin’s Creed: Long March

Which, might not be the worst game ever. The politics of it would be interesting though.

Never try to catch a falling knife.

This is great, but the Senate seats up for election in 2026 make the Democrats winning a majority really, really tough. The current Senate is 53 Republicans, 43 Democrats and 2 Independents who caucus with Democrats. This means that the Democrats need to net +4 seats to gain control of the Senate. Sure, it’s possible but the map doesn’t look good.

For example, the Democrats best pickup opportunity is likely Susan Collins’s seat in Maine. Despite Maine leaning Democrat in statewide elections, this is a rodeo Collins knows very, very well. Democrats have been trying to knock her off for several cycles and yet she’s still here. Maybe this will be the year. But, if this is the best opportunity for Democrats, we aren’t off to a good start.

North Carolina is an open seat, which helps some. But, the State has consistently voted Republican in Statewide elections (and went for Trump by ~3 points in 2024). A large enough blue wave could overcome that, but it’s already an uphill battle. And things only get worse from here.

Next up is Ohio, which Trump won by ~11 points. We aren’t talking super-hard MAGA land there, but Democrat friendly, it ain’t. This is the state which gave us Vice President JD Vance as a Senator. The election here is for the remainder of Vance’s term. Hope may spring eternal, but there is a really sketchy looking reality hiding around the next corner with a sock full of pennies.

That takes us on to Iowa. This state was Trump +13 in 2024. Sure, some farmers may be pissed off about the tariffs, but enough to put a Democrat in the Senate? This seems to fall into the “time to put the bong down and reconnect with reality” territory. I mean, it’s always possible. With a really well calibrated Democratic candidate, the GOP picking a really flawed candidate and really poor economic conditions, maybe. But I wouldn’t be betting the farm on Democrats picking this one up.

And then we need to consider defense. Jon Ossof is up for re-election in Georgia. Georgia went for Trump by ~2 points. Not a large margin, but enough that Osoff isn’t a shoe-in. And Michigan (Trump +1) is an open seat election. The previous Senator (Gary Peters) was a Democrat, so there is certainly hope, but again this isn’t a certain thing. If either of those seats are lost, Democrats are then looking at Texas (Trump +14. Also, it’s fucking Texas).

I’m all for a Democratic Congress. But their chances in the Senate look pretty bleak.

They are still legal tender, the Mint just isn’t producing them anymore. If things stay that way, eventually they will just become rarer and rarer until no one really sees them anymore (we stopped caring about them decades ago). Why bother with some convoluted, expensive plan to do anything about them? It’s really a problem that will solve itself for the cost of someone a bank occasionally delivering a bag of them to the Mint as they do with any currency which is old and should be taken out of circulation.

For the ones they own or have a contract with, probably. However, there are two problems with that.

1. It will do fuck all for the AI models which are just scraping the internet and which have no contractual agreements with the blog (e.g. all the big ones).
2. It’s a fixing a problem the blog hosting platform created. They likely have a data sharing agreement with some organizations to make the scraping easy for those organizations (e.g. direct content database access). So, they are like the mob, offering you “protection” so long as you pay them not to break your shit.

Sadly, no. CSV files can deal with embedded commas via quoting or escaping. Given that most of the dumps are going to be put together and consumed via common libraries (e.g.python’s csv module), that’s all going to happen automagically.

What you are trying to do is called P2V, for Physical to Virtual. VMWare used to have tools specifically for this. I haven’t used them in a decade or more, but they likely still work. That should let you spin up the virtual system in VMWare Player (I’d test this before wiping the drive) and you can likely convert the resulting VM to other formats (e.g. VirtualBox). Again, test it out before wiping the drive, nothing sucks like discovering you lost data because you just had to rush things.

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AWS seems to be cratering as well: https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

And Google, why not?

Location: ~87% of respondents are from Canada

As others mentioned, this would be an interesting data point to validate. I’m not familiar with the server side of Lemmy, but does the server provide any logs which could be used with GeoIP to get a sense of the relative number of connections from different countries? While there is likely to be some misreporting due to VPN usage and the like, it’s likely to be a low enough number of connections to be ignored as “noise” in the data. Depending on the VPNs in question, it may also be possible to run down many of the IP addresses which are VPNs in the connections logs and report “VPN user” as a distinct category. This would also be interesting to see broken out by instance (e.g. what countries are hitting lemmy.world versus lemmy.ml versus lemmy.ca etc.).

All that said, thank you for sharing. These sorts of exercises can be interesting to understand what a population looks like.

My bet is on it never getting completed. It’s going to be a running grift over the next few years. There will be delay after delay after delay with multiple “independent” contractors rolling through to deal with whatever the current delay is. Those contractors will be chosen via a competitive bid process,. The company bidding the highest kickbacks to Trump being awarded the contract. At the end of the Trump administration, anything actually constructed on the grounds will need to be torn down due to engineering failures, and multitudes of bugs planted by foreign spy agencies.

It’s not just speed, CGNAT is a near complete “fuck you” to self-hosting. You can work around it with a VPN endpoint “in the cloud”, but that still means you are reliant on someone else’s computer.

If the goal is stability, I would have likely started with an immutable OS. This creates certain assurances for the base OS to be in a known good state.
With that base, I’d tend towards:
Flatpak > Container > AppImage

My reasoning for this being:

1. Installing software should not effect the base OS (nor can it with an immutable OS). Changes to the base OS and system libraries are a major source of instability and dependency hell. So, everything should be self contained.
2. Installing one software package should not effect another software package. This is basically pushing software towards being immutable as well. The install of Software Package 1, should have no way to bork Software Package 2. Hence the need for isolating those packages as flatpaks, AppImages or containers.
3. Software should be updated (even on Linux, install your fucking updates). This is why I have Flatpak at the top of the list, it has a built in mechanism for updating. Container images can be made to update reasonably automatically, but have risks. By using something like docker-compose and having services tied to the “:latest” tag, images would auto-update. However, its possible to have stacks where a breaking change is made in one service before another service is able to deal with it. So, I tend to tag things to specific versions and update those manually. Finally, while I really like AppImages, updating them is 100% manual.

This leaves the question of apt packages or doing installs via make. And the answer is: don’t do that. If there is not a flatpak, appimage, or pre-made container, make your own container. Docker files are really simple. Sure, they can get super complex and do some amazing stuff. You don’t need that for a single software package. Make simple, reasonable choices and keep all the craziness of that software package walled off from everything else.

An economy is really just a way to distribute finite resources in a world with infinite wants. Even the most egalitarian of systems is going to require deciding who gets something and who doesn’t (winner and losers). It’s perfectly valid to be frustrated by being on the “doesn’t” end of that equation. And we (US and other Western Democracies) could certainly do a lot more to shift some of the resources away from the few who are hording a lot of them, even without a radical “tear the system down” approach. The difficulty is the political will to do so.

Unfortunately, mustering political will for a collective good, which may come with some individual losses can be a tough sell. Especially when large parts of a population are comfortable. Not only do you have to convince people that the collective good is an overall good for them, you also have to convince them that the individual losses either won’t effect them or will be mitigated by the upsides of the collective good. And given peoples’ tendency to over emphasize the short term risks over the long term risks, this can be especially hard. But, that doesn’t mean you should give up, just that you need to sharpen your arguments and find ways to convince more people that things can be better for them, if they are willing to take that step.

If everyone bought the dip, the dip would end. Stock prices are only loosely tied to reality. They are more strongly tied to the perception that a stock’s price will increase. So, if people started pouring money into stocks (or other assets) the price of those stocks would naturally rise as they become more scarce and sellers demand a higher price for them. Assuming the reasons for the dip remain, it would just result in the inflation of another bubble.

Take a look back at the whole GameStop (GME) rollercoster. Large investors expected the stock to crater and began taking short positions. Retail investors saw the dip this was causing and bought the stock in droves, forcing the price up beyond anything it had any business being. Eventually, that bubble popped and the stock has settled to a more reasonable (if still higher) level.

No, a game should be what the devs decide to make. That said, it can cut off a part of the market. I’m another one of those folks who tends to avoid PvPvE games, without a dedicated PvE only side. This weekend’s Arc Raiders playtest was a good example. I read through the description on Steam and just decided, “na, I have better things to do with my time.” Unfortunately, those sorts of games tend to have a problem with griefers running about directly trying to ruin other peoples’ enjoyment. I’ll freely admit that I will never be as good as someone who is willing to put the hours into gear grinding, practice and map memorization in such a game. I just don’t enjoy that and that means I will always be at a severe disadvantage. So, why sped my time and money on such a game?

This can lead to problem for such games, unless they have a very large player base. The Dark Souls series was a good example, which has the in-built forced PvP system, though you can kinda avoid it for solo play. And it still has a large player base. But, I’d also point out some of the the controversy around the Seamless Co-op mod for Elden Ring. When it released, the PvP players were howling from the walls about how long it made invasion queues. Since Seamless Co-op meant that the players using it were removed from the official servers, the number of easy targets to invade went way, way down. It seemed like a lot of folks like to have co-op, without the risks of invasion.

As a longer answer to this, let me recommend two videos from Extra Credits:

• Bartle’s Taxonomy
• Balancing an MMO

These videos provide a way to think about players and how they interact with games and each other.

Because languages change over time and every once in a while someone comes along who insists they can “fix” the language by making a bunch of changes. They are probably right and the changes, if widely adopted, will probably make the language more sensible. However, since one of the common features of a living language is that it changes over time due to usage, oddities will start creeping back in. And the whole thing will need to start all over again.

Why can’t the U.S do the same, if Donald Trump is so bad?

We don’t have a legal mechanism for it. In the US Constitution, the people do not have a direct power of impeachment. As a Federalist system, the US Federal Government was designed as a government of governments. So, the power to impeaching the US President is given to Congress, not the people.

Impeachment is a two step process in the US. The House of Representatives (the larger of the two houses) is required to pass Articles of Impeachment which list the reasons for removal. Those are then taken up by the Senate (the smaller house) which tries the President and requires a 2/3 majority to convict the President.

While it’s easy to get a sense that everyone hates the US President, especially here on Lemmy, his popularity isn’t all that far behind previous US Presidents. Yes, he is net unpopular, but not so much that his removal is politically possible. His own party (Republicans) still supports him, and they hold majorities in both houses. As such, they are neither going to pass Articles of Impeachment, nor would they convict him (and most certainly not at the 2/3 level needed in the Senate).

Why are some Americans even supporting him?

The US is rather starkly divided, politically speaking, at the moment. And people will overlook a lot from the leaders of their own party, if it means keeping the other party out of power. Trump is the latest, and one of the more extreme examples of this. His claims that he could shoot someone and not lose any votes may be close to true. There was a special election in 2017 where the Republican candidate had credible allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor. This was for a Senate seat from Alabama, which one would normally expect to vote overwhelmingly Republican. Moore did end up losing, but is was closer than one would expect, when one of the candidates is likely a pedophile.

Again, if your only source of information about US politics comes from Lemmy, you’re getting a very skewed view. Yes, he’s not popular at the moment, but there is a large segment of the US population which agrees with him. And that means we’re kinda stuck with him until 2018.

Noting that EA had to take on nearly $20 billion in debt to finance the deal

A leveraged buyout, with the bought out company taking on all the debt, ya this is the death knell of EA. It’s going to suck for all the people who are employed by EA, but in the long term it is a way to get the company broken up.

That’s not fair, Trump’s FTC is constantly on the lookout for shady deals.
How else is he supposed to get in on the grift?