She’s also been a firm advocate for Epstein’s victims and has repeatedly called for releasing the Epstein files.

She believes the worst conpiracy theories and she’s a terrible bigot, but the difference between her and her peers is that she actually believes the things she says she believes. She’s not just grifting for profit. She ran on a platform of being against child sexual abuse, and she’s still against child sexual abuse.

This is somewhat less notable, as it’s the usual Republican “but this affects ME now”, but she is actually different from the other Republicans in Congress because she has principles that she sticks to. Many of them are horrible principles, but they’re principles nonetheless.

If you like facts then you should know that “Autist” Is a rather controversial term in the autistic community, with many finding it dehumanising, and with a significant proportion of those who use it themselves doing so to “reclaim” it in an n-word-like “it’s okay when i say it, but not when you say it” way.

And if you really do have an autistic daughter, then you might want to do some internal reflection on why you think being “surrounded by […] autists” Is negative enough to use as an insult. Those kinds of attitudes can have negative impacts on children and can lead to internalised ableism. And if it’s not the kind of attitude you would show around her, then it’s worth asking yourself why not.

Outer Wilds. Easily the most profoundly moving experience I’ve ever had from playing a video game. And it does such a good job of starting off - and even remaining, to a degree - a fun, light-hearted story.

If there’s anybody reading this who’s interested in the game, let me say a couple of things.

1. Go in as spoiler-free as possible. The entire progression system is based on acquiring knowledge, and a lot of the power of the game comes from discovering everything for yourself, in your own way.

2. Don’t treat it like a game. Instead put yourselves in the shoes of your character. See something that you think looks cool? Go and look at it. Don’t think “well, I should probably finish this area first…” Explore. Learn. Decide for yourself what your priority is.

Loads of games call themselves open world, but are actually quite on rails. One trigger at the beginning of the game aside, Outer Wilds really is open world. One reason why watching other people play it is so much fun is that everybody really does have a completely different experience while playing it. One person will do something as the first thing they do, then someone else will do the same thing when they’re 80% of the way through. And the game is so well-designed that both ways is equally rewarding.

Sorry, I tend to evangelise for this game a lot because it is, as I said above, a genuinely profound and moving experience.

Okay. Note the quotation marks.

Oh she absolutely did. Just like she did the “i never said Hermione *wasn’t * Black” thing, despite having described her cheeks as “pink” on more than one occasion.

But that’s not what the people i was quoting mean. They’re doing the “straight, white, cis, man is the default, and anything deviating from that needs an explicit in-universe explanation”.

There was a thing that did the rounds a while back which was variations on “what race are you? White or political?”, “what’s your sexuality? Straight or political?”, etc.

it’s basically that. Straight guy? Fine. Gay guy? “But what’s the *reason *he’s gay? How is it relevant to the plot?”

Note the quotation marks

Yes, i was explaining why the same isn’t true in the UK, but that that also doesn’t mean that we can just sit back and relax like it isn’t a possibility down the road

Me neither. That’s why i put it in quotes to make it clear i was aping stupid objections.

Brexit isn‘t really relevant to the UK. ATM Reform, the most far-right party, is polling very well. As in „would become the ruling party if an election were called today“ well. They‘re also starting to get defectors from the hertofore bigger right-wing party (whose leader literally just said at the party conference that the UK should have it‘s own ICE squads doing what the US one is).

Some of the fearmongering is overwrought - especially the characterisation of Labour as being equivalent because they are acting in some utterly reprehesible ways in a stupid and doomed effort to court Reform voters - but it‘s a threat that should be taken seriously.

The good news is that the next election is 4 years away. If Trump fails in that time, or if the US gets so unahamdedly fascist that even the most denialist person can‘t deny it and it seriously harms the US on the international stage, then perhaps the British right-wing politicians will fall out of love with trying to ape Trump and the punters will see the warning signs and quietly shift back leftwards (or will crawl back in their holes in an atmosphere of „actually it isn‘t okay to say that out loud“).

I think also we‘ll need the Your party to definitively collapse so as not to split the vote on the left and for Starmer himself to resign and someone like Andy Burnham to take over (although he‘s just flubbed that one) in order to make Labour electable again.

Or there‘s the other option of Labour actually introducing something like proportional representation before the next election and thereby limiting the power of a party like Reform.

Point is, there are ways out of this mess, and there‘s time for it to happen. And we‘re definitely not where the US is, and the idea of a NeoNazi coalition seems far-fetched even under a potential Farage leadership. But at the same time, there is definitely cause for serious concern here in the UK, because there are definitely those in power or near power who would very much like to be where Trump is now.

„But what‘s the plot reason for them being gay? I don‘t mind gay people being in something, but if there‘s not a reason for it, then it‘s just pandering!“

One of the hopes for a Labour government was that they would roll back the restrictions on our right to protest…

I was brought in as a contractor for a week at a private school once here in the UK. The food was okay but on the nicer/posher end of „nothing special“. But what did strike me was that between two periods one of the girls felt peckish so just wandered in to the kitchen and made herself cheese on toast. Nobody treated that like it was anything unusual.

Thank you

They‘re probably okay with the price because the number of private users will dwarf the commercial users.

As for businesses shutting it down - any business which is using it has already bought the hype. They‘re not using it because it‘s actually effective. They‘re much more likely to crack down on workers than they are to ban AI all together.

I do agree that it won‘t work out in the end, not because this particular strategy is stupid, but because the products don‘t work and no strategy could work.

And there‘s still no compelling use-case for the average consumer. Coders and scientists? Can be. But most people don‘t really have a use for it in most situations, even in business contexts. It‘s mostly a solution in search of a problem, and even then it‘s so unreliable that even things trying to sell you it as a solution have to add the disclaimer that you shouldn‘t use it for anything that‘s remotely important.

So even if the costs were markedly less than they are, there‘s still no real path to profitability because there‘s no real call for it.

The only use I‘ve found as a consumer is using something like Perplexity as a search engine. And that‘s not a testament to how good Perplexity is, but instead a testament to how bad other search engines have become. Perplexity just avoids things like SEO and is mostly quite good at finding sources which aren‘t themselves AI-generated.

And…I really see a near future in which AI-SEO becomes a thing and Perplexity et. al. become just as useless as google.

You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.

You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.

Yeah, Irfanview is what I use too. Easy to set up, quick & light, and it‘s actually my go-to for converting a picture into a different format.

Yes, I agree. I‘ve long said that Greene (and Boebert) are what you get when someone who actually believes this shit gets into power.

I don‘t follow this stuff closely enough to know how this article fits into her history, but the Epstein stuff is completely consistent. And, while I don‘t agree with 99% of her principles, it actually shows her to be more principled than most of Trump‘s followers, who were fully against paedophilia when Pizzagate was a thing, but who now seem to think that it‘s no big deal and that every man would fuck a pre-teen if given the opportunity to do so.

Maybe Musk should ask them for some tips on how to do this effectively?

That, and he doesn‘t make them feel stupid.

There‘s a lot of power in telling people „yes, you can say that out loud now“. But there‘s also a lot of power in not playing the same game as anybody else. There‘s power in being the guy who doesn‘t watch what he says because he‘s a politician.

Here in the UK we have a similar politician in Nigel Farage - far right, and very much able to speak to people on the level of „I‘m not like all those stuffy politicians, I‘m an ordinary bloke just like you“.

It‘s not true for him, either, and I find him equally repulsive, but I can‘t deny that they‘re both effective at making people think „he‘s one of us!“ And it‘s not that other politicians don‘t try, at least here in the UK, which is why you‘ll find endless photo opportunities of them doing things like drinking a pint in a pub. But those always seem fake and hollow.

I see Farage and Trump described as „charismatic“. I don‘t think that‘s quite the right word, because that suggests a sort of charm, I think. But I can understand on an intellectual level why some people find them appealing.