I mean, Nestlé killed hundreds of thousands in impoverished countries. I think the Oracle service APIs can’t be that bad, though I’m sure they would be if it made Larry Ellison $50.

Your description of the sound just got me making a bunch of seal sounds by myself. Congrats!

Also Trump literally illegally kidnapped a head of state to the U.S. And we’re supposed to pretend the first thing they did was not simply… Move the murderer somewhere out of state where they couldn’t reach him even if they tried (which they won’t because no blue state has the balls to meaningfully stand up to Trump)?

I mean, realistically that guy could twerk in front of the Minnesota Capitol with some ICE buddies to back him up and giant sign saying “I did it” and Minnesota still wouldn’t do shit.

“State’s rights” are exactly like the “2A rights”. They only serve conservatives, whom the law protects but does not bind.

This is not just me being salty BTW. I am trying to get across the point to anyone reading this that if your plan to bring back U.S. Democracy relies on the Constitution playing in your favor, you’ve already lost.

No-one is immune from propaganda. And those awful books promote quite a few bad messages. Well firstly they promote criminally bad writing. But besides that, they work very hard to make a lot of oppressive power structures sound cool, whimsical, and aspiring to the uncritical reader. From the police institution to the prison complex to the famously abusive English boarding school system to the literal ethnostate to slavery somehow, and I haven’t gone over the half of it.

It truly feels like every other bit worldbuilding that Rowling put in sounds whimsical on the surface but makes you go “wait, the implications are truly terrible!” when you think about it for more than two seconds. Except she clearly did not think most of it through; she literally just thought “race of jewish caricatures who want nothing out of life besides being bankers” is good and whimsical worldbuilding… And somehow got away with it.

It’s impossible to quantify or prove but these books have had the most cultural impact out of any modern book franchise, and I don’t see how the systemic normalization of so many awful things to uncritical children and teenagers can balance out the joy and whimsy that people got out of them (especially when there is so much better written teen/YA fiction out there).

Shifting the Overton Window in the way that those books did is some insidious type shit that actually does matter quite a bit more than most people realize. New hot take: I think the bigots are correct to get big mad at Queer representation in media because it moves the Overton Window the other way and that actually impacts bigots long-term. In a very real sense a trans actor in a movie is a concrete and real step towards the de-legitimization of bigoted views. And HP is very much doing the opposite of that every time it touches on any kind of social subject.

The work itself is definitely a fascist pre-cursor. The whole “Wizarding society” thing is the mythical ethnostate from which everyone else must be excluded to avoid violence. That fact is so central to Rowling’s beliefs that it’s barely a theme in the books, just straight up a fundamental fact about the world barely worth commenting on. And even though HP is pretty sanitized wannabe liberal slop, she still manage to slip in some very racist stuff (slavery allegory about slaves being happy, “Cho Chang”, the Irish boy who constantly blows shit up, etc.).

I do believe that Rowling herself is not a very intelligent person (the quality of her writing is proof enough) and has incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance from trying to fit in with the liberals who made her successful, while holding some incredibly backwards view on many social topics. You’re right that she’s not a fascist per se, because she doesn’t have fascism’s consistent belief in self-ideology. At the same time much of her political activism has been so enabling to open fascists that it begs the question: does the label matter? Is the sheep who opens the gate to the wolf not, in its own way, a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Are U.S. Republicans not fascists just because they are more concerned about their own self-interest than any alliance to ideology?

What pisses me off is that you’re 100 % correct but most of it is unintentional on Rowling’s part. She’s a fascist reactionary and she just, for the most part, enthusiastically described her perfect little ideal society.

Everyone is in their place, the good guys work very hard to maintain the existing social order, and the people at the bottom are there because that is in their very nature and really they just like it that way and attempting to elevate them is futile. Textbook fascism and all of it is presented completely deadpan because this is Rowling’s genuine beliefs.

Hot take: HP’s popularity is responsible for more societal ills than pretty much any other book in print. Almost no-one engages with it critically even amongst the crowd that outwardly disagrees with Rowling’s more recent political activism. Fuuuuck that license.

That’s just because it’s dry by nature. Monitor your indoors humidity and adjust accordingly with a humidifier.

The sun is just a particularly angry cloud.

I’ve certainly not seen anyone frothing at the mouth about it in the francosphere. It’s a non-subject, we just updated our textbooks and moved on. Whereas in English-speaking media even reasonable actors mentioning Pluto in passing will pointedly remark on its status one way or another. Americans won’t admit it but the only reason that’s a thing is chauvinism.

It’s funny how being bilingual one spots a lot of small semantic or cultural differences that amount to large paradigm shifts between languages. Like how most French people were taught the hydrocution myth (swimming after a meal supposedly being deadly), older Koreans believe fans to be dangerous to use while sleeping, and English speakers associate vanilla flavour with blandness because of the (English-specific) synonym even though the flavor itself is very powerful and no less overused than e.g. strawberry flavoring.

What’s less funny is how when you point out such a difference some people get Big Mad about it because they can’t admit that some core belief from their childhood is actually a specific sociolinguistic quirk not shared by the rest of the world. People get tribal about the weirdest, most inconsequential shit.

“Just another action movie” but the guy up the comment chain is literally dozing off. Part one actually has very little action in it, most of it is packed landscape shots, politics, and lore dumping. Which is very accurate to the source material. If you dislike Villeneuve’s adaptation, I can only assume you did not love the Herbert books because he was incredibly faithful to the tone, especially for material that was thought to be impossible to adapt to the big screen.

Lynch’s stuff is simply not comparable because he said “fuck the source material” and just kinda did whatever came to him in some acid trip or other. Fine if that’s your thing but that’s not what Dune is - especially not the first few books.

Love my old precision, but my new latitude uses this Intel ipu6 bullshit with god-awful kernel support on Linux. No effort made from Intel or Dell on upstreaming. Onboard audio support only halfway works, webcam straight up doesn’t work in-tree, and power management is hilariously bad. Shit’s already awful on Windows, but on Linux I’m delighted if I get 90 minutes of runtime, and even when sleeping I only get maybe 8 hours before the battery empties.

Also don’t get me started on DisplayLink. The real thunderbolt docking stations work great though, love mine.

But I would never buy a Dell product I haven’t used before at work. My experience is literally 50/50 between “great, no notes” and “I would rather use anything else”.

I’m sure that pointing out the narrative’s glaringly obvious inconsistencies is going to land Russia in very hot water over the shoot down of that civilian airliner over Ukraine in 2014. Any day now. Any day now… Just one more “le epic debunk”…

Technically true but irrelevant.

A majority of Americans do not give a shit about Danemark and would not lift their pinky to help one of their staunchest allies. That is true.

MAGA is a (large) minority. That is also true.

This is all enabled by a very sizeable chunk of Americans being literally mentally unable to conceptualize people outside their village as living, breathing, fully conscious people deserving of love and safety. They are colloquially known as “non-voters”.

People in here acting like Hegseth is being stupider than he is.

This is not about Kelly. Kelly may win a lawsuit, or more likely will settle, or some terrible extrajudicial fate may befall him.

Regardless, the message sent is crystal clear: none of the US military riff-raff can afford Kelly’s lawyers. If you are employed by the U.S. military, you either unconditionally act as Supreme Leader D.J. Trump’s personal militia in all matters up to and including shooting down peaceful protesters, or you spend the rest of your life in the brig, because the rule of law does not exist anymore.

Hegseth knows it, the military officers know it, the SCotUS loves it, the MSM pretends otherwise. That’s the state of affairs and Hegseth is merely making it clear for the crayon eaters in the back.

I’d love to be proven wrong, but on the short list of potential good outcomes for 2026, the U.S. military taking a stand against tyranny is nowhere in there.

Compared to which alternative?

We know exactly what they are doing already. Watching the trains go by to Dachau saying “better them than me”. Watching their sons and daughters go to war saying “well I’m not really political”.

Feckless cowards. They bear full responsibility for the current situation yet you can’t count on them to do anything they aren’t made to do.

So half your country won’t be moaning and denouncing and overall being sad next time and assassination attempt is made against Trump, right?

… Right anakin?

Yeah, right.

The American people have unfortunately been stumped by the fact that using guns against the state has been made illegal and moreover is actually quite a dangerous and unpopular thing to do.

Somehow this little factoid didn’t manage to pierce their unbelievably thick skulls when they were moaning about their “constitutional rights”.

The attack vector of convincing users to do stuff exists regardless of whether a niche GUI exists somewhere to do <the thing>. The only proper defense against social engineering is a) training and b) following the least privilege principle (which neither Windows or traditional Linux desktop’s permission model properly, as the current user in either case has full permissions to retrieve extremely sensitive credentials such as browser cookies without interaction).

Trying to defend against this from the perspective of de-normalizing the CLI is like defending against drunk driving by adding a bittering agent to Guiness beer exclusively.

As for clipboard highjacking, I am well aware, which is why any decent modern terminal emulator should a) strip escape codes by default and b) support bracketed-paste, to prevent immediate execution of a pasted command. If yours does not, please consider switching to a safer alternative (such as kitty).

The kind of person who blindly runs commands also blindly runs any .exe or .bat they download from github which is not any better.

Of course in an ideal world there’d be a perfect GUI for everything, and we’ve gotten a lot better at that in the last few years. But it’s not like windows is lacking in things that are only configurable through CLI or the registry (which is even more opaque). I’m not saying Linux is perfect, just pointing out the hypocrisy.