Again

COMPARED TO CONSOLES? That’s basically paradise.

Modern, unhacked and unmodded Consoles are:

1. Completely locked down, not only do they not let you install applications not approved by the manufacturer, in reality you can ONLY buy them from the manufacturer and you pay a hefty tax for that “privilege”.

2. Feeding you ads and upsell attempts whenever you turn them on, as the UI has basically been redesigned to try to sell you more shit first and make getting to your actual games take a few extra steps

3. Any undesired feature in a console’s OS is something you just have to accept and move on. Powerusers killing Windows bloat with third party tools is a time-honoured tradition that goes back to Windows 3.11

I’m not saying Windows is good.

I’m saying that for someone coming from a PlayStation or a traditional XBoXSeXxxx (I love making jokes out of this name), this whitelabelled ROG Ally machine would feel like finally being able to breathe. Just for the fact that you can use more than one storefront and install applications from wherever you want.

Let me put it this way:

Linux is an anarchist commune. True freedom.

Windows is an American Style Capitalist Republic. Freedom*********** with a thousand asterisks more. BUT for someone coming from the North Korea that is playing on consoles (or using an iOS mobile device or…), it DOES feel like finally breathing free.

Honestly

As compared to consoles? Windows is pretty free.

The rumour going around, back then, was that Denuvo went under the table and paid crackers who had the ability to break their DRM to like – Stop doing that. And that this was the reason EMPRESS (actually insane woman) was the only person left who could crack it.

Of course, there is no way to prove that.

Mr. Beast

Twitter

I never used twitter, but even before Musk took over it was ALWAYS a fundamentally negative force. Whenever its name was cited it was some shit. People fighting and wishing each other dead.

Other social media all has that, but Twitter seems to be ONLY that

In terms of technology? Sure. There’s projects that are considered “Fediverse” and don’t use ActivityPub.

… But the more important question isn’t if it’s “Fediverse”. Sure it is. It’s a federated network. The important question is is it part of the Indie Web, since the Fediverse started as a smaller part of the bigger indie web movement, and then the answer is a big no, because it’s a VC-owned for-profit.

… It might have been kickboxing. I was half remembering him being some kind of sport-fighter.

Yeah before he was a Youth Pastor for the Church Of Misogyny (where jesus is replaced with EVEN MORE MISOGYNY) – He made his name as a competitive MMA fighter.

Yeah there is plenty to hate about Catholics too (hey, pedophilia) –

– But when it comes to like. Accepting reality and modernity? They are head, shoulders, and pectorals above the average Evangelical Church.

I was never banned on Reddit (did get the boot from like 3 subs but that was in 10 years of redditing) — but I manually purged my account when I left.

I think I already live in one of the places least likely to be involved in WW3

The countryside of Brazil

In the previous two World Wars Brazil only got involved because people pressured the president to do so, otherwise we could have just sat the entire thing out.

Like, life will get shittier here too, but it is VIOLENTLY unlikely that there will be any fighting in our soil or even a draft to send soldiers to the war. (and I aggressively doubt there will be any kind of nuke-related mutually assured destruction shenanigans. The elites don’t benefit from causing the apocalypse)

It might but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I’d be more concerned about what I call “the dumbot apocalypse”

Which is to say AI does accelerate the collapse of society. But it’s not because We Created God Only For He To Turn On Us ™ – It’s because some politician, drunk on hype fed to him by venture capitalists and techbros, puts an AI (and I mean these current AIs) in charge of something very important that by no means should be controlled by an AI, even if that AI WERE human level intelligence, and what we call AI right now is not even close – And then the inevitable ChatGPT Hallucination ™ takes place and the bot decides that a war with China is the only way to increase corporate profits for the next quarter or whatever. Humanity nukes itself, and maybe the humans pressing the button don’t even realise their orders come from an LLM.

… And then the machines immediately shut down, because even these pretend, toy AIs we have right now are straining the global power grids, so the micro-instant electricity production slips, they’ll drop like flies (Roko’s Basilisk MFs when a minor brownout takes out their ‘god’)

Why does he look like He’s wearing makeup to make himself whiter

Does it also contain the latest patches for my Autism?

Ah. I see that the Trump administration has managed to pull the same thing as the Bolsonaro administration did.

The country is Brazil.

If you are unfortunate enough to live in the favelas (aka: Very very poor in a big city), you’ll be under their thrall.

But the little secret is that… They end up being not that different from the government. They have their own ‘laws’, and if you follow them, you’ll be left alone. Their protection rackets become like taxes, except instead of going to jail for not paying, you’ll get tortured – And you might even benefit from them in a way.

A friend of mine tells a story about doing social work in a favela, and how after years of neglect from the government resulting in kids from the place not getting vaccinated, the local crimelord bought the vaccines with his own money and had his own paralell vaccination campaign for everyone that was properly paying their protection money. Hopefully you won’t catch a stray bullet when the illegal liege lord of your neighbourhood-fiefdom is at war with the police or another neighbourhood-fiefdom’s illegal lord for the umpteenth time that year.

If you are not in the favela…

… Well… If you buy weed from a dealer or borrow money from illegal lenders and don’t pay your bills, they’ll probably abduct you and break your legs.

If you do none of those things… You might get pickpocketed or mugged, but that is honestly the extent of interactions that I, a rich boy from the third world, have had with the criminal factions of my country. Muggings. Being threatened and told to hand over my phone (which I did, I’m not stupid). Having a gameboy swiped from my bag while at an anime con.

Inhabitant of a 3rd world country here

I don’t think “kidnapped and tortured by the government” is a thing we’ve done much of since the US stopped funding our far right dictatorship in the 80s (and the military immediately fucked off and ‘let democracy take its course’ when the funding dried up).

… Let us not speak of what our criminal factions get up to though.

I think they were trying to make a joke and failed

That’s great for you but I fucked up my hearing by listening to Linking Park on maximum volume in the cheapest Chinese earbuds a third world teenager’s allowance could buy circa 2006.

… And getting stuff from YouTube takes 3% less effort.

The poor quality solder thing is true, and is true of a lot of hardware of that time period.

Whether or not the towel reflow trick works, I don’t bloody know.