Go onto TikTok or Reddit (verboten, I know). Gen Z is currently going wild on how cooked and ruined Alpha already are.

They also have very strong opinions on what good child rearing looks like despite making up a huge portion of the child free ideology.

I generally dislike broad generational… uh generalizations. However, trends are undeniable. And as Z ages they appear to be going through Boomerification. I think that’s why so many public freakouts on service workers happen with them. Millennials have the opposite reputation, of bending over backwards to be overly polite.

Edit: to say that I’ve never seen a generation publicly express nostalgia as hard and young as Z. My older Alpha kids are sort of up there with their friends, too, but Gen Z just seems like they are retreating into a false past which never really existed as they remember it because the world is so shit.

Yes generally, but it can be very cheap. Some places sell block accounts which let you pay a one time fee for a set amount of data. Black Friday deals are coming up, and you an usually get amazing deals (1TB for under $5, able to be purchased multiple times, or subscriptions which work out to a couple dollars/euros a month).

The other thing you’d need is an indexer. Some are free, but for the best experience you’d want to pay for acess to a private indexer. Usually a few bucks as well, almost all of the big ones run sales this time of the year.

For subtitles: there are several solutions. Jellyfin (and Plex) support finding subtitles that you either download with a tool like Bazarr, or via Jellyfin/Plex’s own interface. Bazarr auto downloads them based on your parameters you give it though.

For me, it is the mindless reptition or task accomplishment. Showers work well because I don’t have to think about what I’m doing, which frees my mind up for something else. There’s no rush, there’s plenty of soothing ambiance, and it just works. I find doing chores around the house can trigger the same type of state. Putting dishes away lets my mind wander and problem solve. So does putting away laundry, dusting, sweeping, stuff like that. I usually need to wear earbuds and play an ambient noise to help me along.

But showers are still the best. You hit the nail on the head in your description about why it works. I think the key is anything relaxing, but not too relaxing such that you get drowsy.

Well, Hamas specifically has rejected a 2 state solution twice in recent history. Their official stance is to not negotiate for it and instead kill all jews and end the state of Israel. There’s no chance at peace til Hamas is gone, rightwing Israeli government is gone, and Iran’s nutjob religious class no longer control the state and export its cancer around the world.

So you agree with the IDF in that targeting civilians is self defense?

Or are we playing pedantic games again where we try to rationalize bad things by wearing victimized status one moment while murdering children the next? Maybe the IDF and Hamas are both responsible. Hamas aren’t freedom fighters like my fellow lefties are making them out to be. They want a theonomic system. And they have one.

This is literally the reason Apple changes the bubble color. iMessage is encrypted by default and uses normal data instead of MMS. That’s the indicator.

This entire spiel about bubble color envy is ridiculous. Features are the separation. The media will whip things up with their sample size of a handful of cherry picked anecdotes. But almost every teen has an iPhone and uses iMessage in the USA. Apple has over 80% of that market.

What Google wants is for Apple to implement Google’s proprietary RCS implementation, not RCS proper. Because RCS proper lacks a lot of features that people take for granted with iMessage. That is presumably one reason Google forked it and requires it to run through their proprietary middleware.

Edit: Don’t get me wrong. I would love for an open standard to overtake the proprietary bits from both Apple and Google. But Google is disingenuous here. They are complaining because, despite their efforts, they can’t crack the market. Teens aren’t bitting for Android. iMessage has network effect going on, so Google is trying to crack that open since they can’t get a compelling overall product and ecosystem for a valuable demographic.

I’d rather there be open standards. But that means Google RCS has to change as well.

deleted by creator

I’m so happy to see someone else is finally talking about this. RCS, as implemented by Google, is distinct from the actual open RCS standard. Google added a proprietary middle layer which is how they get features working which RCS doesn’t support.

And that proprietary middle layer (Jibe being part of it) is why there aren’t a million third party RCS clients out there. Google must give API access. They are gatekeepers. And they only share keys with strategic partners (Samsung being one of them, telcos with their own app like Verizon used to have being another).

But in the end Google did what Google does best: fragmented a product. And now Google holds the leash for RCS proper. I bet Apple isn’t too keen to route all customer data through Google servers even when encrypted. Because it’s another piece that Apple doesn’t control.

I’m going to guess they wouldn’t kill the men and then rape, murder, and dismember the women and children on video to post it in celebration.

But maybe I’m wrong. With reductionism, anything is justifiable.

Citi Bank took my parents’ home and thus any inheritance the family had coming. So one can theoretically go murder those executives’ children as compensation and be morally right, yes? Or is putting in more identifiable terms highlighting how insane that logic actually is?

Native Americans can invade American preschools and cut the throats of all the toddlers similar to what Hamas has uploaded to the internet with Israeli kids, yes?

Don’t you see the slippery slope and immoral position you hold here?

Bad people love to wear the mantle of victim because it justifies all the evil shit they do.

Exactly. I’m a far-leftist, and I’m as disgusted with leftist hot takes the same way I was when poor old defenseless Russia invaded Ukraine and started murdering their children.

I’ve blocked and purged so many leftist creators in 24 hours it is unreal. Spreading legit anti-Semitic (really anti-Jew) conspiracy theories (“curious how nobody stopped it” and the like). Reframing these terrorists as freedom fighters like you said. Blaming this on the U.S. somehow (because we made Iran do this via Hamas as proxy; but Iran has clean hands don’t worry they are just another oppressed peoples).

Far too many leftists, like their right wing nut counterparts, are contrarians at heart. This is what happens when political ideology becomes a personality trait; it becomes akin to a religion.

So thoroughly disgusted by it all. Bad enough what’s happening over there in Israel and Palestine right now; bad enough with all the innocent lives being lost; but then to justify industrial grade rape and murder of men, women, and children? And cheer Palestinians on as they record, edit, and upload their barbarity?

I’d like to believe that a lot of it are disinformation ops, but the sad reality is probably that a fair number of people have nothing left to live for because their lives are shit so the world burning down for others isn’t such a big deal for them.

Ha, I completely didn’t pick up how my post could be read that way. And you’re right! I meant more about people being creepy and not letting a dad and daughter go unbothered for Halloween.

People really need to stop this celebrity obsession. He’s a dad trick or treating with his daughter a few years ago. It is beyond ridiculous that people not only tolerate this, but cheer it on.

Mastodon often feels to me more like Facebook for software developers

I wish. I’ve tried to curate mine as such.

My mastodon feed is awash in spam from authors hucking their LLM generated stories. Constantly. And random low viewer count streamers spamming hashtags every hour 24/7.

It’s crazy how much LinkedIn-like sociopathy is out there right now. Makes sense given the huge spike in new accounts we’ve had in the last month.

Citations Needed had a mini series where they discussed why this happened. The US government will give material support to movie and game studios in exchange for some creative control over the content. That’s why so many movies with military equipment in it are rabidly pro-war; the studios don’t get access to the real equipment without the government’s support, and they don’t sign off on extremely critical scripts.

COD and similar games don’t just pop out of a void and still strive for some semblance of realism. That is a huge selling point after all. So the government gets involved, even if in little ways. Same way China gets to censor movies, either by omission or fundamentally changing things, around the world.

Interesting to see if this reverses the beginning stages of some EU countries pushing back against supporting Ukraine (specifically Poland, which was a shocker for me). I’m sure that bit was all very real Politik what with their elections coming up and domestic issues to handle… but still. The U.S. is one bad election away from permitting expansive war in Europe. And some European countries are seemingly tiring of Ukraine taking the hits for them?

A tale as old as time. Rightists aren’t original, which is why their media/comedians/movies/music/religions are terrible.

Fascists cannot grow without co-opting leftist language. So yes, very worried.

Edit: not related to this shitpost. People here seriously need to watch Prager’s content. They twist our shit up with their crazy.

Candidates actually can and do control PACs… up to a certain point. For example, the entire reason that Mike Huckabee keeps running for offices he knows he will never get past the very, very early primary stage, is because he can get his PAC funded and he can enrich himself and his family. Did you know that Mike Huckabee pays his children six figures a year for “roles” they hold in his PAC? That includes now-governor (barf) Sarah Huckabee-Sanders.

Trump took it to the extreme, though. But it is completely normal and legal. It is why PACs were always a bullshit proposition. It is also why people hold off so long on officially declaring candidacy and actually filing the paperwork until the deadline because that starts the clock as to when they can no longer directly personally control PACs and directly profit off of them.

Yeah this is typical Microsoft looking at ways to force people up the price ladder. They did it with Power Platform in very obvious ways. They have completely gutted things like Power Apps and Power Automate by making almost all functions non-delegable… unless you are a paying a premium on top of a premium for costly dataverses in which case more than like 7 functions are magically delegable again. But then there are the pay-per-user/pay-per-use connections to access your own data, even if you host it yourself as an enterprise.

They should’ve been broken up in the late 90s.