Accurate except for the “instead” part. Road maintenance comes from local taxes, whereas military aid comes from federal taxes.

Are you certain it’s actually safe? There was a recent attack in which multiple Steam publisher accounts were hijacked to spread malware.

As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.

Yeah but the main issue is that I don’t want there to be a Downloads directory in my home.

Even worse, many components will ignore the XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR var so even if you manually change it to $HOME/downloads (lower-case) it will often break things.

a game I made in 1995

a game someone else made in 1995 which was later hostilely acquired by EA only to see it immediately fire all staff and shutter the studio

FTFY

This is a joke: Fun thing: players don’t trust a smooth loading bar. The stutters and pauses show you that the load is ‘biting’. I’ve worked on games where we artificially faked it.

Article: the above is not a joke

Maybe we should fix the insanity that is US copyright law.

Veritasium has really gone down hill. I honestly think it started when he did the video on “clickbait” and actually realized how much more lucrative it was to make shittier clickbaity content than make straightforward science content.

It went from “here’s why magnetism is just electric field + relativity” to “I buried myself in cement - you won’t believe what happens!”

He’s technically correct - if you bleed fast enough for long enough, you won’t get infected by anything that needs a live host to grow.

“Backwards compatibility” is a totally different thing from “cross compatibility”. Of course proprietary software is going to be less cross-compatible.

When SETI decides to stop blasting your videos into deep space.

Figure 1: Human discovers that hosting a web service for hundreds of thousands of users is expensive.

Let’s walk though the flow a typical user would experience:

1. Search “join mastodon”, find joinmastodon.org
2. Click “create account”…

SERVERS: Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider—we call them servers—that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon.

3. 95% of users will bail at this point.
4. Scroll down to the instance search UX.
5. Too many options. Do I want “all regions” or should I pick my own region? Do I want “all topics” or “general”? 95% of remaining users will bail.
6. Pick mastodon.social, sign up.
7. Confirmation email takes 12 minutes to arrive. 95% of remaining users will bail.
8. Confirm email, log in. Click search.

Search or paste URL

9. Wtf does that even mean? Try entering “William Shatner”. No results. Try “Taylor Swift”. Top result is @taylorswift13@hello.2heng.xin wtf?
10. Go back, click “see what’s trending”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
11. Go back, click “find people to follow”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
12. Close site, 95% of users will who get here will never return.