From the MS website:
Recall utilizes Windows Copilot Runtime to help you find anything you’ve seen on your PC. Search using any clues you remember or use the timeline to scroll through your past activity, including apps, documents, and websites.
A "feature" coming to Windows 11. Essentially a keylogger on steroids... Powered by AI of course, because what isn't these days.
I get where you're coming from... but when the alternative is mask-off clerical fascism, it ain't a hard fuckin' choice.
Voting democrat is just plain harm reduction at this point, as laughable as that feels to say given present circumstances... But this shit show is what we're stuck with unless we can somehow convince the feckless bastards to implement a better system than first-past-the-post, so other parties actually stand a chance.
It won't happen, but neither will convincing over half of the population to vote third-party; and abstaining, while principled, only yields more voting power to Y'all Qaeda.
True.
I could maybe see an argument being made in favor of having these kinds of security measures for the first month after release to protect sales, since it's usually the period in which most sales are secured; devs do need a sustainable income after all. But that would also necessitate ignoring the potential performance degradation resulting in a poor first experience for players, and many publishers just leave it in for the lifetime of a game, which is a disaster waiting to happen (as seen here).
Overall, I think piracy is mostly a pricing issue above all else. With AAA titles getting increasingly more expensive and being released in broken states, it's not surprising that people don't want to spend $70 on a game that they might end up hating and opt to "demo" the game first. Refund policies can help alleviate the issue, but are hardly a silver bullet, with games inserting tons of fluff at the beginning to ensure you exceed the playtime threshold.
Either deliver the games you promise, or price them according to what's actually there, and I'm sure the majority of gamers would be content in paying full price. DRM only serves to increase friction for the honest people paying for your games.
But writing off the behavior of abusive women (or even well-meaning women with problematic behavior) as a factor is just as problematic as people assuming it’s all the fault of women.
Not saying I disagree, or that you're wrong; all people are capable of doing shitty things. But I'm curious what kind of abusive behavior you're alluding to here... the prompt posed in the original post?
While I typically don't like the prospect of sweeping generalizations, it seems to me that women have tried to convey these ideas "the nice way" for decades, and it has either fallen on deaf ears, or been met with intense scrutiny by people either maliciously or ignorantly missing the entire point. It's understandable why there's some vitriol in the way things are presented today.
[...] and that impacts both men and women, deeply.
100%, we're stronger as a society if men and women can find a way to work together to deal with the litany of other issues we're facing. But it's going to be hard to do that without first addressing the elephant in the room, which is that women feel unsafe in society as a direct consequence of the actions of men.
I mean, I feel like that goes a lot deeper than some perceived slight by women...
Entertainment, and subsequently our culture, has crafted this notion that if you're kind to a woman, she's obligated to be your girlfriend or fuck you, and when it doesn't pan out like that in reality; young men are justifiably depressed and angry, just... at the entirely wrong thing. This is further expounded by the ever growing disconnect by people in general, a lot of young people feel lonelier than ever and end up turning to shit like dating apps, which are inherently superficial and not a good way to build authentic relationships. Failure on these platforms can lead to young men feeling like they aren't "good enough", and when a grifter like Tate comes along to tell them that it's actually just the women that are the problem, it's an easy dose of copium to ingest.
Suicide is a multi-faceted issue, and while the struggle to find meaningful relationships is certainly a contributor, I'd wager that the general sense of hopelessness, lack of opportunity, and increasingly fewer prospects for the future are far bigger factors to many young adults going through higher education or entering the workforce.
Already addressed this in another comment, just read the next sentence I wrote...
They're not comparable for a variety of reasons, even if you account for population; I kept both in, with that caveat, because they make two distinct points. And my "conclusion" was really only in respect to the violent crime statistics presented.
Now obviously, people don’t go traipsing into bear country every day, and we’re constantly around other humans, among a litany of other differences like population, motivation, or intelligence; so the stats on their own aren’t truly comparable.
Literally just had to read one more sentence, my guy. The point of bringing up the stats wasn't to compare them directly, rather I looked both up out of curiosity, and individually I think they make distinct points. The first being that bears aren't necessarily dangerous as we portray them to be, and the second being that men are more dangerous than we're willing to admit.
As a dude, I used to have the same knee-jerk reaction to these kinds of discussions: "Well I'm not dangerous, and none of the men I'm friends/family with are dangerous, so this must just be some man-hating tirade perpetrated by ignorant people".
But then you dig into the statistics, and you start talking to the women in your life about their lived experience, and you realize that far too many of us are fucking animals. The prospect of bringing a daughter into a world that not only ignores an obvious issue, but actively shames the people who are victimized and try to speak out against it, is terrifying. Do I always agree with the way women present their criticism? No, a portion of it does veer into senseless hate. But that doesn't mean that what they're saying on the whole is bullshit.
Bear, easily.
A couple minutes of searching the web, you'll find some variance in the stats, but the general notion is that bears don't seem to be as dangerous as we portray them to be. The data aggregated here suggests that there were 48 fatalities in North America, in the span of 17 years. A few other places claim there have only been around ~180 bear fatalities in NA since the late 1700s, but I couldn't find any definitive sources, so take those with a grain of salt.
Bear in mind, this factoid isn't something we can stack up against men to answer this question, we don't encounter bears with the same frequency or density that we do people, nor do bears have the same nature or motivations as humans, but it's something I found along the way that I thought was interesting, and at least lends some credence to the idea that if you leave a bear the fuck alone, it will probably leave you the fuck alone.
On the back of that detour, I did a separate search, looking at the latest murder statistics I could find in the US. (Again, forgetting the bear stuff, making a different point here)
Personally, I found the data disturbing, 10,335 murders perpetrated by men in a single year, 7x that of women. Other violent crimes like rape are also tracked, albeit without offender sex, of which there were 122,822 in the same year; in a relatively "safe" country. If you look at it in relation to the entire population of ~328 million (at the time) you may be inclined to say "it's not that many" or "it's just a minority of men" (duh), but fellas... as someone with a dick and balls like you, I've never sat down and thought to myself "You know what sounds great right now? A good raping.", and I'm sure the majority of you haven't either, 1,000 rapes a year is too many, Nearing 123,000 is fucking egregious.
When I look at numbers like that, it's apparent to me that people are capable of being selfish, violent, motherfuckers in ways that some random bear in the forest never could. And unfortunately, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of that violence. If you take offense to that fact, and aren't an awful person yourself, then you need to wake the fuck up and take a look around. No one's accusing you specifically of being a rapist or a murderer, but there's a non-negligible trend here, and an uncomfortable truth that has yet to be sufficiently addressed; and that's the whole point of this thought experiment in the first place.
Edit 2
After receiving a few comments with similar criticisms, and after some additional reflection on what I initially wrote, I reworded and reorganized a solid chunk of this post to, I hope, clarify what my views are, include additional context, and ensure that people are clear that the two points of data (ie. bear fatalities and murder rates) are not intended to be compared, but rather they individually address separate statements I've seen echoed throughout this thread. My position hasn't changed, the conclusion hasn't changed, but hopefully this comes off a bit less inflammatory and more intellectually honest than before, it's not my intention to mislead anyone; just to get the cogs turning.
Probably because they do, at least in the realm of dietary choices. Choosing to slaughter billions of sentient creatures every year for food and accessorization, when the majority of us have an abundance of other options, is morally fucked... and this is coming from somebody who eats meat with some frequency.
Just because we like it, or because it's easier, or because it's "tradition" doesn't mean it's morally righteous, it just means we're selfish assholes 💀
When people lash out at vegans it always seems to boil down to some degree of cognitive dissonance... Eat meat and revel in the immorality if you so desire, no one's stopping you; but don't fucking lie to yourself, and don't get butthurt when someone holds a mirror up to your face. The loss of life, environmental impact, and the effects on our own health is enough justification to argue in favor of veganism, vegetarianism, or some other alternative that doesn't result in needless harm.
I switched to NixOS full-time after dual-booting Void for some time, and I couldn't be happier to get away from Microsoft's bullshit.
My only gripe is that I do a lot of audio production, and virtually none of the big names in the audio plugin space make Linux builds, despite the most common framework (JUCE) having Linux support out of the box.
Yabridge & WINE do a decent job of filling the gap, but using iLok protected plugins can be a bitch and a half, and unfortunately iLok is everywhere... Oh how I long for audio developers to start taking Linux seriously.
Yeah, kinda beating a dead horse here, but it's giving "2024, Year of the Linux Desktop, inadvertently sponsored by Microsoft."