It’s a real catch-22. The ability to spin up new servers leads to plenty run by your run-of-the-mill person with some knowledge about hosting. The downside is that it’s inherently unstable due to relying on your run-of-the-mill person with some knowledge about hosting to maintain a social media server, and it’s always easier to destroy than it is to create.

Each time a server goes down, there’s some percentage of users and communities that won’t return due to the effort of relocating and starting all over. Why go through the effort of finding a new server, especially one run the way you want, and start over when the same thing could happen within a month. It’s like when a Discord server disappears, but your account gets deleted every time as well.

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process in which voluntary behaviors are modified by association with the addition (or removal) of reward or aversive stimuli. The frequency or duration of the behavior may increase through reinforcement or decrease through punishment or extinction.

Don’t worry, you’re not pissing in my Cheerios or anything, I just always end up in one of those “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!” rants whenever they pull the “ghost gun” nonsense.

It’s like how it’s illegal in Mass to own a suppressor unless you’re a cop or military, then you can buy as many as you want. Like…it reduces recoil a little and reduces the noise from permanent hearing loss to temporary hearing damage, it’s not gonna make a gun silent. Movie magic quiet is only possible with very particular sub-sonic rounds of a specific caliber. You want silent? You put a suppressor on an air rifle. Dead silent and completely legal to put a suppressor on in all 50 states because it’s not a gun, despite being just as dangerous at close ranges.

Edit: Also, these laws are often supported by firearms manufacturers because it benefits them to prevent people from being able to go elsewhere, like making aftermarket car parts illegal or forcing people to get their service done at a car dealership.

This is how you do it. You create clear and direct laws that specify what isn’t okay. New Hampshire banned all billboards. I believe Vietnam recently banned all ads longer than 15 seconds online. These make it absolutely clear what is and isn’t okay, and leave no wiggle room for companies to try to circumvent the laws on technicalities.

Personally, I’d consider it a declaration of war.

They have metal internal components just like almost every 3d printed gun does. There are some things that you just need metal for, like springs. The vast majority of 3d printed guns are actually guns purchased from a gun store and then modified with the equivalent of handmade after-market parts.

In order to be undetectable by metal detectors, you would have to keep the amount of metal in them to about that of a pair of glasses. So basically a firing pin and that’s about it. I think a break action firing chamber would probably set it off like a big belt buckle would, and no recoil or magazine springs mean that it would have to be a single shot weapon with a manual reload - some kind of break action. And no barrel liner or a metal barrel at all, nor metal bullet casings. A shotgun shell might be able to make it through because of their mostly plastic shell with a copper back about the size of a quarter, but that’s gonna be about it.

It’s really not the issue that politicians and the media make it out to be. It’s just fear mongering.

Next time you talk to him, suggest that he pick up some of those over the ear noise cancelling headphones. You don’t even have to have them turned on, but the size of them makes taking them off such a visible hassle that it seems to discourage a lot of those kinds of people. And the rest you can ignore and pretend that you couldn’t hear them because you had the noise cancelling on.

They probably misconstrued “pick-up artists aside” as being very specifically about literal “pick-up artists” rather than as a generalized hitting on someone in public thing.

I do agree with them, though, in that it’s very culturally dependent on how okay it is. I remember from a long time ago now one of those “kids today are always glued to their phones” memes where somebody just responded with a photo of a commuter rail car from the 50s where every single person in the photo was reading the newspaper, and I have a similar story from my dad about my grandfather: My grandfather worked in NYC for over 20 years and he commuted by train. During those commutes, he sat next to the same man, twice a day - on the way there and on the way back - for years, and only once in at least a decade did they ever speak to each other. “Are you finished reading that?” Those were the 5 words that man spoke to my grandfather, who handed him the paper he had finished reading, and they never exchanged another word again. I don’t think they ever even looked at each other.

I would also add that it’s a very extroverted thing to do, and not in the sense of social anxiety or something, but in the sense that introverted people burn mental and emotional energy in social interaction, and by trying to engage with a stranger in a random conversation, you might be using up the spoons they have that day. I’ll talk to random people in public as well, but I keep it to one-off statements that people can either leave be or reciprocate with if they want. A joke about the traffic in trying to navigate the grocery store, that sort of thing. I’m very good at talking with people, I learned it from working a service industry job as a teen, to the point where I was basically the public face of a company, but I find it EXHAUSTING to do. I’m an introvert, pure and simple, and social interaction simply takes energy to do. At the end of the day, all I want to do is isolate myself so I can recharge and unwind.

Plus, there’s the whole “women having to handle a man” aspect. Women have to treat men differently and behave differently to protect themselves when interacting with men (ones they don’t know in particular), and so a random stranger trying to start up a conversation is A Situation that they have to analyze. It goes back to the “women would prefer to be in the woods with a bear” thing. Women would rather a random bear try to start a conversation with them in public, or something.

So…step 2 is figuring out how many cells are needed to run DOOM on wetware?

You beat me to it. I saw a post probably almost 20 years ago by a kid on Facebook talking about how he got banned from a Young Republicans Facebook group for giving this answer. His reasoning was: it’s a carpenter’s tool, not a weapon, and used to help people and improve the community. Kid actually read the Bible and got hate for it.

My reason for the bullet train and subway in particular is the nature of being on tracks as well as avoiding traffic (Windows bloat in my use of the concept).

Great for the average user because they don’t have to really understand any of the systems involved or anything, just pick a stop and off it goes, but if you try to go off the beaten path at all, you’ll probably find yourself having to work around the immutable nature pretty quickly. You can’t just go anywhere with it like you would a car.

There’s a program that I had installed that for some stupid reason doesn’t let you log out on the Linux version and it auto logins as well, so if you log into the wrong account like I did when I installed it, you have to delete the user data from it. In Bazzite, it turns out that you can’t just go into the folder and do it manually, you have to use a specific application that comes with Bazzite to delete user data from an application. A minor annoyance, but I did have to go off the rails a little to solve the issue compared to how I would’ve handled it on Windows.

Because the most common people complaining about Bluesky fall into 1 of 2 groups:

People upset that Bluesky isn’t tolerating their behavior (mostly Nazis and transphobes angry about the community not letting it become Truth Social 2 or allowing transphobes to harass users, but also certain leftist groups, much like the tankies here on Lemmy)

People upset that the infrastructure isn’t FOSS or some similar complaint about it not being enough (purity test behavior like in every comment section on Lemmy)

And people saying that Bluesky is an echo chamber tend to fall very heavily into group 1.

I dunno, my first thought for Bazzite after switching from Windows a couple of months ago was more like this:

And immutable distros in general would be like this:

Faster by far than getting stuck in Windows traffic and It Just Works™ to get you where you want to go, but it’s more difficult to go off the beaten path.

Cyberpunk is a genre first and foremost. A critique of capitalism set in a corporate dystopia with transhumanist themes.

A lot of the aesthetic is rooted in the culture of the time period that it was created in (the 80s). The cultural fear, more specifically. A time where American corporations, and by extension the US government and population, were afraid of the Japanese economic boom and saw a future where the dollar was replaced by the yen and Japanese supplanted English as the lingua franca of the world, Japanese culture was exported the way American culture is, and Americans started eating their meals with chopsticks instead of forks.

Didn’t they do this with an AI vending machine already and it started selling tungsten cubes at a massive loss?

Wrong, the purpose is to prevent people from not buying from a corporation - guns and otherwise. You can buy polymer guns right from the store.

Print the parts for a new printer on a cheap one, buy the hardware at a local hardware store or electronics store (or even strip the cheap one for most of the parts), and start printing in your favorite flavor of open source software. Or buy the printed pieces from someone or online and then buy and assemble the rest. That’s what they do with guns to circumvent some of the gun laws, because the not quite finished pieces are not legally considered a gun.

All this would do is make people buy printers the way that they buy guns, ironically. And it still won’t do anything about the so-called “ghost guns” anyway, because those are either legally bought guns with the serial number shaved off, or they’re garage guns like the one used to assassinate Shinzo Abe.

Except for the fact that this doesn’t put any pressure on anyone who wants a gun (those are still really easy to get in California, just not as easy as most other states). But those who benefit the most from this law are gun manufacturers, and not long after when this bill is extended to printing replacement parts for anything, all companies that charge inflated prices for repair parts or design their products to be unrepairable entirely.

What people who print “guns” are actually printing is gun furniture. Custom grips and the like, either for comfort/aesthetics or so they can take cheaper gun parts and use them to build a clone of a similar gun from a company that charges more. They still use legally purchased gun internals.

The gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was a Glock, legally purchased and one of the most ubiquitous pistols in the world, with a 3d printed grip on it. Every other part of that gun came from the manufacturer.

The gun used to kill Shinzo Abe, however, was made entirely out of simple materials readily available at any hardware store and is completely legal in all 50 states. Because a gun like that is considered a “garage gun” and those are legal under federal law because it’s essentially impossible to stop somebody from gluing together a pipe and a nail to strike the bullet with and fire it down the pipe barrel. But 3d printed gun parts don’t fall under the same regulations and those who stand to lose the most from people 3d printing are those who charge unreasonable prices.

You know who else would benefit from this law? Games Workshop, who sells many miniature figures for $40+ each, and a few for over one thousand dollars.

So you look for items in blank white cardboard boxes that only have a technical definition of the item contained inside?

Logos and packaging are advertising the product inside. Your friends recommending you a product is advertising that product. A company having a website is advertising. The grocery store advertising that an item is on sale is…advertising. It’s all advertising.

What we actually hate is intrusive and malicious advertising as well as false advertising. Like billboards. Fuck billboards.

You’re laboring under the impression that consumer protection laws mean anything in the US. They don’t. Unless it’s something absolutely egregious, then maybe they might get a slap on the wrist. Maybe.

Another perfect example is my buddy who was looking at digital watches yesterday. The same watch was $100 more expensive on Amazon than at Walmart, and Prime prices are often higher than if you don’t have Prime. I’ve also had Amazon completely lie to me about an item being on sale, claiming that it was 50% off on a Prime day sale, and then when I went and checked it the day after it turned out that it had been more like $5 off than the several hundred they claimed the sale would’ve saved. They marked it up wildly just to pretend that it was on sale. And they’re not the only ones to have been caught doing that. Plenty of other places have been caught doing the same thing, but since they’re big companies, unless you can get a settlement from a class action suit, nobody cares.