I see what you mean, but I also believe that the value of places like Beehaw often lies in the intermediary stage before they become an institution or wither away and die.

Right now Beehaw is pretty close to the peak of what it can be. It’s the equivalent of a large online block party. If it gets bigger than this it will need to institionalize or wither away. What you’re asking is for it to institionalize sooner than is necessary, which is what will kill the feeling.

Beehaw has a lifespan to it, we should all recognize this now. Beehaw is great because it runs on good faith and trust. These are limited resources and they’ll run out eventually, either sell out or burn out.

The best way to approach it is to put into it what you get out of it, and stop putting into it when you stop getting value out of it.

Very happy with it. $400 MSRP feels right, I don’t think I would feel so positively if it was more. I’m on vacation right now and using it a lot to wind down in the evenings.

The Bible as lame as it is to say. Particularly Ecclesiastes and Job. Absolutely brilliant, beautiful, full of humanity.

No I do not think it is right to impose choice on others and I never said as much. I believe people ought to be free to waste money if they so see fit. But when it comes to the collective level, we ought to be subsidizing sustainable agriculture and not corn and beef as we (USA) currently do. I.E. when it comes to policy the policy should be directed towards incentivizing people towards sustainability. This doesn’t take away people’s free choice to eat beef, it just means they do so on their own dollar and not the governments.

This is just using a digital solution to an analog problem for no real gain in efficiency. In theoryland sure, you can replace books with ereaders and possibly save money. And at certain levels of education this works out, middle/high school. In earlier levels, there are two issues. One, kids break things. Cheaper to replace a book than an ereader. Two, kids associate the tablet form factor with entertainment. Kids rely a lot on symbols for interpreting the world. It’s hard to get them into education mode when the symbol on front of them puts them into entertainment mode. Books signify learning, it helps the kids get into the right headspace.

No, getting rid of smartphones in classrooms is the only way to actually teach critical thinking. Using devices in classrooms teaches kids that all the answers are on Google and that they don’t need to think, only search.

Google/wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool, but before you learn to use them you first need to be taught basics. The scientific method is the first things kids need to learn: how to observe the world around them, form ideas of how it works, test those ideas, change them based on further observation. This kind of reasoning is sabotages when the kid learns that if they just use Google they can get the answer without learning how to do the work.

Takes like yours generally come from a place of well-meaning but are far removed from the actual reality of the classroom. Kids need to learn first how to figure out information in the real world hands-on before they are introduced to the abstract digital world.

You actually can successfully ban devices in the classroom through a variety of methods.

I agree. Ideally everyone would be free to eat ribeye everyday. Unfortunately we live in the real world where that’s not possible. Cutting down meat consumption is the reasonable, economical choice. I still eat meat for sure, it tastes good. But in my daily life I’ve cut down significantly and saved money.

I use vanilla gnome. Dead simple, no nonsense, gets out of my way. Perfect DE for me.

One of the other interesting twin cities facts is that we have a very large theater scene, one of the biggest in the nation outside NYC.

You should think about Minneapolis. The winters are gnarly, but very few climate change related problems on the horizon, reasonable cost of living, one of the most bike friendly cities in the U.S.

Switched recently and using Nvidia. It’s a headache either way but I’ve had less issues with Wayland than x11.

I mean it’s still a soulless piece of corporate propaganda.

As a non-technical user, I think if you have a modicum of technical knowledge it’s easy to switch to Linux. But it still takes time and patience. I’m using Linux now on all of my devices (if you count Android as Linux). There is still a lot of idiosyncracy to the ecosystem but overall it’s usable. I’ve found Vanilla OS to be a great experience overall. I had some troubles with Pop_OS! On my Nvidia GPU, that was because it’s still using x11 and I use a 4k monitor with a 1080p monitor and needed fractional scaling. Haven’t had any issues on Vanilla OS because it uses Wayland. But boy, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on and why my apps were blurry and games weren’t displaying properly. Took a lot of googling and perseverance to figure it out, as I didn’t know what a display server.

Crickets are more sustainable than plants as a source of protein.

Friend of mine got bit by one of these and got alpha-gal syndrome. It’s completely wild. Definitely not the worst thing that’s ever happened but became unable to eat meat basically overnight.

What I dislike about these threads is that it always devolves into shitting on blue collar workers. Of course pickups are useless city cars but have you all ever met somebody from a town of 1,000 people where every single person works in a blue collar trade? These things do work that you can’t do in a different type of vehicle.

Threads like this are echo chambers of privilege. Maybe instead of shitting on tradespeople, shit on car and oil companies who enshittify the whole system.

Also pickups in 2023 that look like this are more powerful and more fuel efficient than more modest looking pickups from 90s or 00s. You may not like the aesthetics of it, but who fucking cares, you’re not driving it, you’re just the one judging someone else for having different taste.

Modern genres don’t really apply to ancient literature. Mythical, historical, symbolic and real are mixed and you’re expected to be reading or listening to the literature from within the tradition which would give you the context for knowing which is which.

Beowulf is myth, but also history. It has references and genealogy to real figures, but it is embedded within a myth that records the meaning of that history. It’s full of symbolic retelling of that history.

From your source:

With the exception of recently released blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales

Denuvo is used almost exclusively in exactly the scenario where the study supports the idea that piracy hurts sales. I don’t think the study helps your case.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue.

I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.

Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.

This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.

So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.

Because you didn’t make it. I’ll grant that western ideas about intellectual property are weird and inconsistent, but I’m taking it as a given that we hold that idea in common. If a writer writes something, that sequence of words in the order they wrote is their “property” and they get to determine who gets to see it.

I am cognizant that in this kind of space a lot of people probably won’t hold this view of intellectual property and there are good arguments as to why it shouldn’t exist at all. I suppose at this moment I’m not really in the mood to go down this rabbit hole, so forgive me if that is where you want to go.