It is a nice PR but for me I am not impressed. Rolex is also a non profit organization in Switzerland and and mostly help hiding there finance.

Okay but Rolex is Rolex. There are uncountably many non-profits, and many (most?) do good work. I don’t think Rolex is representative of your usual non profit.

So I’m not a fan of guns but, “marketing guns” is not per se illegal nor unique to video games. Yet the lawsuit separates out video games specifically. So I am not sure I agree that it’s less crazy at the end of the day.

So I did read the article, and… I’m not understanding a word you are saying. The families are suing a video game company for a gun in their video game. Also the article is not at all making the emphasis that you are making between marketing a specific game and video games writ large (the article kind of speaks to both of those at the same time and isn’t making any such distinction), so I don’t know what you are talking about. As far as the article is concerned this has everything to do with the fact that the gun was in a video game, and even Activisions statement in response was to defend themselves from the idea that their video game is a thing that pushing people to violence. So even Activision understands the lawsuit as tying their video game to violence.

I’m not saying I agree with the logic of the suit, but I literally have no idea what you think in the article separates out video games from the particular model of gun because that is just not a thing the article does at all.

My Puxl was from eBay.

To be honest, I don’t know much about how credit cards can be associated with phone hardware. I would think it could conceivably be tied to phone #s. In my case the phone is unlocked and it’s not an esim, which I understand we will all be moving too soon.

I wonder if it might have something to do with Google Pay or Apple Pay that ties hardware information to payments? And as for Esim, it might make it so that you can’t distinguish phones based on their physical sim card so it perhaps introduces a possibility of reliance on hardware.

But this is all speculation on my part. I just don’t know and I haven’t made whatever precautions would be needed.

That’s what I did!

This is not from Google. This is Extinction Rebellion registering a domain to prank Google, by speaking in their voice and resolving to stop funding climate deniers. It’s both a cheeky prank and a way to put pressure on Google to take accountability.

Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

Very good to know. After following your Github link, I found my way to the blog post that it looks like you are quoting:

https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/announcement/State-of-the-Pipe-2023/

NewPipe is a killer app I would say, with nearly Youtube Red level functionality in something that’s free and OSS. A bit afield from privacy, but you do get to access youtube stuff without logging in.

Syncthing is brilliant, although for me it has had a heck of a learning curve to keep straight. Might just be me though.

Exactly. For any proposed change, it’s going to run up against what I like to call Status Quo Extremism, which is a mindset that suggests that “But that would be different from the status quo” counts as a defeater argument against proposed changes.

The combination of incentives would, as you note, need to be driven by niche interests rather than attempting to reproduce the incentives of the top 0.01% of YouTube creators.

It is but there’s just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet

I don’t think anyone is proposing an overnight switch. You’ve got to take the long view. That said, I do think when it comes to federated activity pub style projects, Mastodon has gotten off the ground, Lemmy has exploded, pixel-fed seems to be doing pretty good, but the video stuff appears to be a tougher nut to crack.

Wait, what? I don’t think they were talking about piracy. They sound like they’re talking about something more like a C-Span type thing, envisioned as a YouTube alternative.

Perfectly stated! The moralizing story kind of serves as cover, as a complete blank check to excuse practically any behavior of the lender, without any limiting principle.

And there’s the rub. Sure, it’s a financed phone. It doesn’t follow that we have to suspend judgment on the means they resort to, to enforce their terms.

okay but still where is the nepotism? You’ve commented on the general hypothetical possibility of nepotism not having been dis-proven.

Being at Stanford in and of itself is not nepotism so it’s a pretty fair question to those of us who want words to mean things.

I just logged in to two smaller instances where I have accounts, anticapitalist.party and mastodon.xyz. I found them in one step and I could see their posts and replies on both of them.

Uh?? Is War & Peace not literary fiction? Also I think Diablo, arguably the most famous RPG game (for better or worse), is an action RPG.

Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain

What was there to figure out in your case?