The fight to keep AI out of your daily life is a losing one so long as Windows remains the defacto standard. Switching to Linux is becoming more important and easier to do every month. Do it before Microsoft literally steals your voice.

IggyMaid@iggymaid.bsky.social · last wk.

If you're a streamer on windows 11 check your audio input settings for your mic as there's now an AI powered "Audio enhancement" section that defaults to on which can interfere with your microphone audio if you're already processing your audio via OBS filters or other software

The end of WWII was clearly an absolute event if we're still misattributing beliefs to centuries old traditions, when in reality so much of our culture that's "always been that way" was actually just what Boomers grew up with. "Generations of my family have-" Just 2 of them. It's been 2 generations.

Kindness costs nothing, and it means everything.

Eve Hawthorne ΘΔ@evehawthorne.bsky.social · 2w ago

Kindness and justice are the two virtues I tell myself to most embody on the regular, so it pleases me to see them as my most represented here

I appreciate that the scroll wheel on a mouse is a great place to put the third click button, but it frustrates me to no end that it generates endless unintended inputs, especially on gaming mice that also let you tilt the scroll wheel.

There really is no such thing as a well-adjusted D&D group. One of my party members insists that there's no such thing as a fight that does not drop loot, so our DM is now permanently cursed with the knowledge of how many ways there are to skin, carve, dress, and/or milk various magical creatures.

Some people will never see optimism as coming from anything other than naïveté, but that won't stop me either. Cynicism never makes my life better, so instead I found people who do, and guys, there's so many out there. They're *everywhere*! You can tell them your name! I have over 120 friends 💙

punkitt ‼️🧣@punkitt.bsky.social · 11mo ago

its tough out there but so am i

If you care about truth, you need to be able to recognize "The algorithms recently figured out what type of content gets a reaction out of me" because of how often it manifests under the guise of "I'm worried about the recent trend of <things I see happening>" or other similarly confident statements

What Elon Husk is telling MilliChad here is he thinks the last gay bar in town needs more straight bros betting on sports.

The Verge@theverge.com · 3w ago

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

Remember that time Larian took the most popular features in the character creator and made the "average" character and it was TV's most forgettable extra? Nobody actually played Mr. Default Guy; he's the reference point we differentiate from to make them interesting. Real people are like that too.

It's so easy these days to look back at history and lament all the lessons that we've learned but are now backsliding on, all the mistakes we should have stopped making as a society. But we can't just wallow in those feelings. Remember to face forward, and punch today's Nazis for tomorrow's sake.

Hoo boy, my central nervous system is upset today.

The world is very loud today

had this pulled up for my freelancing guide how topical indeed

Brielle 💖@briellebear.bsky.social · last mo.

I really hate the “I don’t owe anyone anything” mentality because we actually owe each other and this planet a lot. You don’t have to be selfless all the time or burn yourself out but you should be kind and helpful and compassionate to the best of your ability. We need to care about each other more

Out of all the cataclysms we suffer, pandemics alone deny us our most important coping mechanism: each other. To gather, to seek comfort in each other's company, becomes deadly--a vector of the disaster, rather than shelter from it. And yes, that very obviously fucks with you.

Ash B@bookofoak.bsky.social · 4w ago

Pre-Covid, I always thought the 1918 flu memories were just overshadowed by WWI. But now, it’s clearly something about pandemics that just do things to collective memory. I don’t know whether this is unique to modernity but it‘s clear that humans react differently to this type of trauma.

the unceasing psychosexual obsession rich assholes have with considering themselves the underdog in a society that, 9999 times out of 10,000, serves solely their interests and material comforts, if harnessed, could provide unlimited clean energy and usher in an unprecedented era of economicstability

Freakbeat Takeshi@fullykrausened.bsky.social · 4w ago

We're assembling a team of the weirdest looking think tank ghouls to fight the communist menace.

The lie machines are shredding the very sources we could use to catch them lying. Literature is literally being pulped to make a caricature of itself, a papier maché made of rare books sculpted to validate the anti-intellectual resentments of rich psychopaths who never matured past middle school.

Dr. Erika Graham-Goering@jeanneologist.bsky.social · 4w ago

'Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.'

Why do the people who have the most impact on their subordinates' lives get to most selectively insulate themselves from consequences but not rewards? Why is going from a highly trained technical job to one of coordination and social skills considered a promotion? Why do managers even get paid more?

Days since a pickup truck has tried to run me over because they didnt see me: FUCKING 0

Ppl w/o magic like to tell you what to do with yours. Don’t let them.

Opinions are like assholes. They accumulate more and more as you get older.

There is no safe way to use Win11. Microsoft doesn't just have your IP, they have staggering amounts of info on every network you access, and can trace your internet activity through VPNs. And the American Govt can just demand Microsoft silently hand over data on anyone for any reason.

T. Williams@xstylus.bsky.social · last mo.

If you're even a _tiny_ bit into security and privacy, pay attention to this one. A court filing in a case against cyberhacker Peter Stokes revealed Microsoft's GDID embedded in EVERY Win11 install provided the FBI the ability to trace his PC across VPNs(!!) & proxies(!!) across three countries.

my absolute favorite math fact is that: 13,532,385,396,179 = 13 ⋅ 53^2 ⋅ 3853 ⋅ 96179 its decimal representation includes the same digits, in order, as its own prime factorization.

Boy I sure do love being woken up early every 3 days by the nonstop two stroke engines of lawnmowers and weedwhackers maintaining all this garbage suburban bluegrass and then checking again 5 hours later to find they're still fucking going

Another industrial ugly morning Grandfather screaming at the wall We're packed like lemmings into tiny metal boxes We can't hear anything at all The doomer only scrolls into the distance He knows that something somewhere has to break

JKR and her new org apparently helped get the new Amnesty International report on how TERF organizations destroy lives taken down from their site. Well, guess what? The Streisand Effect is real. Here's the entire report in a thread. Read it. Share it.

Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · last mo.

Amnesty International put out a major report documenting the influence of UK based anti trans gender critical organizations and their funding. Within hours, GC groups threatened defamation lawsuits and Amnesty was forced to pull it down. Proving the point they're anti rights. Anyways, here it is.

Man, if I had been just a handful of years older and more politically aware of what was going on in the 90s, I might've noticed how wildly fucked up it was that one of Rowling's more prominent & memorable side characters in Harry Potter was an Irish kid who's prone to explosions.

The only thing the government is responsive to anymore is loyalty. There's Trump and his Epstein class buddies. There's the Loyalists who are awarded an elevated class. There's the Enemy, anyone who dislikes or tries to stop them. And the rest of us are suspects until we declare which side we're on.

dell cameron@dell.bsky.social · 2mo ago

NEW: The ICE office that customarily probes employee misconduct is being refocused to investigate ICE critics, opening hundreds of "doxing and threat" cases and subpoenaing tech companies to unmask anonymous posters. Detention facility inspections, meanwhile, are plummeting. by @regret.bsky.social

So there's more than just the law of large numbers fueling extremes in discourse these days. It's bad enough that the internet makes you have to shout to be heard, but it's also only natural to push harder when you see no results. Polarization is the fault of CEOs & congress completely ignoring us.