Quoting: dibzFixing freedom of speech on Twitter? How so?

About the only things that come to mind are Trump and COVID misinformation type stuff being blocked/censored.

I am familiar with a person who grumbles often that they were banned from Twitter for life for calling some senator a "twatwaffle".

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Quoting: KithopReminder that 'Mastodon' is not a single site, it's a software stack using a W3C protocol (ActivityPub [External Link]), so the flagship/example mastodon.social site isn't any more 'Mastodon' than Yahoo Mail or GMail is all of 'E-mail' (though lots of people don't make that distinction in the latter case either).

Not just people. I work for a university, so my email address is for the university's email server (just like the old days). I've been booking some hotel rooms lately; on booking.com when I enter my email address, it turns red and has a warning that my email address is probably wrong, do I want to change it and did I mean @gmail.com not what I actually typed? Luckily it doesn't enforce its ignorance, but it's still annoying.

Incidentally I too stay off social media; the closest I come is, um, conversations on GoL. That's sort of sociable, right?

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Quoting: GuestI didn't realize that twitter was a cornerstone of democracy until now /s last time I checked Jamiroquai was using it to spread false information./s

Not sure if Twitter is a cornerstone of democracy, but to be fair I'm pretty sure all cornerstones of democracy get used to spread false information, starting with print newspapers, moving on to political speeches and leaders' debates . . .

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Quoting: Cyba.CowboyOut of curiosity, what is the main advantage of Wayland over X11 or vice-versa?

Far as I can tell, right now the two are comparable. There are still some things X11 does better because it's mature and then some and so lots of corner cases have been worked out, little paper cuts taken care of. And, there are some things Wayland does better because X11 was never designed with the scenarios in mind, which can be important if they're relevant to you but quite likely they're not. For instance, in theory I believe Wayland has less trouble with multiple monitors, although I'm not sure it's true in practice yet.

The real reason to switch to Wayland, though, is that the X11 developers are the Wayland developers and they are not interested in continuing to do much with X11, which they consider an obsolete technology that has run its course and can't really deal with modern approaches to displays. I've read some of the technical reasons why and they made sense at the time but they don't stick in my head real well--in the end, if the X11 developers consider X11 obsolete, I'm willing to believe them. Given that, it is probably best if as much of Linux moves over to Wayland as possible, as soon as possible, so things can move forward already.

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Sweeney Todd in Space!

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Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: anewsonSeen this game a lot on Twitch lately, but had no idea what was going on. Enjoyed the writeup, thanks. Just me or are there a lot of Mars games coming out lately? Red Planet Farming and Planet Crafter come to mind.

Cheers! That does seem to be the case. There's also Ad Astra Per Aspera, which came out in 2020.

Say, Philadelphus, you look kind of different. I could swear you used to be a lot more green, and less anthropomorphic.

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Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: ElectricPrismAlso, while Portal 2 dwarfs Portal 1 in popularity and review score, I am one of the few holding fast that Portal 1 was superior. If they do undertake a Portal 3 I would like for them to return to the calculated cold mechanical sociopathic GlaDOS inspired by System Shock's Shodan instead of the Portal 2 one which just "called you fat" and used other low-blow humor. Everything else about Portal 2 was phenomenal except they got the personality profile on GlaDOS slightly wrong. Wrong enough to hit a nerve.

Well, the last 30 seconds of the ending of Portal 2 offers a prime opportunity to recalibrate GLaDOS's personality a bit… :whistle:

But, I mean, I get the difficulty Valve is in here. Portal had a final boss fight where you take personality cores off the boss. Portal 2 had a final boss fight where you put personality cores on the boss. Where could they possibly go from here?? :tongue:

Hot-swap personality cores? :wink:

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I was not expecting a DLC about vassals to interest me, but there's some cool stuff there.

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: iiariHaving been on Arch based distros a number of years now, I can't believe in 2022 there are still distros like Mint and I'm guessing Elementary where full reinstalls are necessary for version upgrades? Wow....

Well, that was rude. Shall I diss Arch now?

Agreed, reading it again, my post does come across as snarky and baity. I regret posting it, and apologize. In that moment, though, not following Mint regularly, I was just honestly (but poorly) expressing my genuine surprise that the update issue is still a thing. That was one one of the reasons that I left Mint what feels like ages ago after two or three bad update episodes. I loved it and donated regularly. A shame, as obviously there's a lot of dedication and skill behind Mint....

I have to admit I agree it's a bit much that it's taken Mint this long to start tackling the upgrade issue. It's about the only thing that annoys me about Mint.
Mind you, to be fair, it probably takes no more time to reinstall Mint like 5 times than to install Arch once.

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Quoting: const

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GuestI quite enjoyed Wheel of Time, and was reminded of it recently from the "tv" series adaptation (which I also enjoyed). Not yet read any of the books.

I'm opinionated about fantasy books, and Wheel of Time is no exception.
IMO, the first one is really very good, although it should be noted that the plot is very much Lord of the Rings reheated. In the second, it starts to bring you into the wider Wheel of Time universe, which has tons of interesting stuff. It's also very good. In the third, you get more of that, lots of cool weird magic stuff, lots of plot complication, lots of local colour of various sorts.
But some of the series' problems start to become noticeable around the third book; I started noticing that most of the characters were jerks, and some of the jerky things they did, the author didn't seem to notice they were being jerks. This was sort of even more so with the female characters. As complications piled on top of complication, the action started to slow down. As power levels stacked up, Jordan kept having to come up with ways to top that. Somewhere in there a new group of antagonists showed up whose defining cultural feature was indulging in squicky mind-control torture porn using these pain-conditioning leash things.
By the fifth or sixth book, I realized pretty much nothing was happening over the course of a many-hundred-page novel and I gave up. I feel like Jordan was a victim of his own success--the first couple of books sold like crazy, so someone, whether he himself or the publisher, decided he could do no wrong and didn't edit him.

I would not agree. First, I don't think characters are jerks. They have values and twists, some very opposing to mine, yet a lot of them grew close to me. There's also a ton of character development in the series and sometimes layers over layers of behavior. I very much enjoyed that part.

I did not find the character development as deep as all that. There was a lot of stuff happening character-wise, a lot of conflict and introspection and personal failure . . . I just don't think it really added up to depth. At a certain point, I realized that the good guys (except for the main guy himself) were mostly as busy bickering, backbiting and betraying each other as the big time villains who were specifically portrayed as manifesting their evil natures via internal treachery. Pretty much everything considered so nasty it was a hallmark of villainy, up to and including those torture-porn magic enslavement leashes, was soon done/used by the good guys. It's just, when a viewpoint character does it and is angsty about it, it's character development, whereas if a villain does it they're just being a dick. So it didn't exactly feel like they were jerks while you were reading it . . . unless you looked at their behaviour with some moral consistency.

I also found the magical arms race got kind of old. One "jumping the shark" moment for me was when I realized that after introducing "balefire", this terrible power that didn't just kill people but erased them from reality so they'd never return and in some sense never existed and, if overused, could potentially cause reality itself to fall apart . . . it almost immediately became the "go-to" way of offing bad guys, and dangers to reality quickly stopped being mentioned. From portentous to cheap and banal in nothing flat. No doubt something even bigger time than balefire was soon introduced, in books later than the ones I got to. This kind of thing isn't subtle worldbuilding, it's just powergaming.

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