I'm willing to be surprised by it, but I'm not optimistic for Starfield. What I've seen of it so far looks mainly like they grafted chunks of No Man's Sky onto a Bethesda Fallout game and are trying hard to pitch it as The Next Big Thing. Frankly, I'd much rather have the next mainline Elder Scrolls game instead, but at this rate I'm going to be 40 before I get to play a sequel to a game that came out in my 20s.

Along the lines of @AnonStoleMyPants -- the trouble with longtermism and effective altruism generally is that, unlike more established religion, it's become en vogue specifically amongst the billionaire class, specifically because it's essentially just a permission structure for them to hoard stacks of cash and prioritize the hypothetical needs of their preferred utopian vision of the future over the actual needs of the present. Religions tend to have a mechanism (tithing, zakat, mitzvah, dana, etc.) for redistributing wealth from the well-off members of the faith towards the needy in an immediate way. Said mechanism may often be suborned by the religious elite or unenforced by some sects, but at least it's there.

Unlike those religions, effective altruism specifically encourages wealthy people to keep their wealth to themselves, so that they can use their billionaire galaxy brains to more effectively direct that capital towards long-term good. If, as they see it, Mars colonies tomorrow will help more people than healthcare or UBI or solar farms will today, then they have not just a desire, but a moral obligation to spend their money designing Mars rockets instead of paying more taxes or building green infrastructure. And if having a longtermist in charge of said Mars colony will more effectively safeguard the future of those colonists, then by golly, they have a moral obligation to become the autocratic monarch of Mars! All the dirty poors desperate for help today aren't worth the resources relative to the net good possible by securing that utopian future they imagine.

I have no issue at all with utility bots (AutoMod-style assistants, summarizers, unit conversion aids, RemindMe!, etc.) and honestly, novelty comment bots don't bother me much either as long as they're not drowning out actual conversation. I'm less tolerant of bots posting links and content, though.

I'm fond of Cheeto Benito myself.

I think this is a more cynical view than can be supported by facts in evidence. For sure, in Ye Olden Days when the parties weren't actually all that far apart, there was some level of building up a bogeyman to get out the base while everybody was friendly behind closed doors. But especially in the era of Trump, I think most congressional Democrats (leftwards of Machin and Sinema, at least) are genuinely afraid of what a second Trump turn would mean for the country, not least because it would likely mean a practical end to democratic processes at the federal level. Hard to benefit from the bogeyman when the bogeyman has made your presence in politics impossible-to-illegal.

I mean, who's to say that the plot of STEINS;GATE isn't real and ~~SERN~~ CERN isn't about to unravel the fabric of reality with time travel paradoxes?

Does it, though? In the past the argument was that aggregators like Google were stealing site traffic by showing large excepts or summaries of the articles they linked to, and I could understand that, but the new Canadian law seems like it wants to attach a fee to simply showing a hyperlink. That's fundamentally contrary to the way that the Internet was designed to work, and as the examples of blocking in the article demonstrate, it seems to confuse who is providing value to who in this specific instance. I take issue with the big platforms co-opting the open Internet, but penalizing them for showing links off their sites to news organizations seems to be the exact wrong thing to do about it.

On the contrary, I've long been of the opinion that anyone can claim their slice of the American Dream, just as long as they aren't too picky about who they carve it out of. There doesn't even need to be risk, per se, just some ambition, enough intelligence to know the limits of you can get away with, and a complete lack of shame.

I spent a fair portion of my youth on unthreaded forums and I kinda miss the way that discussion could ramble and sidebar conversations would spawn within posts and weave in and out of the main topic. With threaded/tree-format forums, individual conversations are easier to follow, but you get far enough down any one branch of a conversation and it's just two people arguing without any moderating input from the rest of the group.

There's nothing wrong with COTS equipment like the Camping World light that's been made much fun of. The controller either, at least in principle, though the idea of using this battery-powered wireless device specifically is maybe not smart. But the fact that the guy who built it is bragging about them as if he's pulled one over on Big Bathyscaphe should have been a red flag about the quality and safety factors built into the rest of the thing.

Toyota's efforts to win on merit instead of by default continue to be cursed for no readily-apparent reason...

Really good race overall, and portends well for the future of LMH/LMdH as a category. A different manufacturer on each step of the podium, even Peugeot was legitimately leading for a while, and the Caddies were in the hunt the whole way through. Porsche still seems to have some teething problems to work through.

/. for me. Pass the aspirin...