I don’t have an opinion about Hasan one way or another. Influencer culture (and broadly celebrity culture), and the phenomenon of people using influencers and social media in lieu of news, is disturbing and influencers only have power because we give it to them.

I wish fewer people would opt to empower celebrities via attention and worship, followed by disappointment and scorn when their actions come into conflict with their brand image. They’re just people, and we never knew them, not really.

So true. Infrastructure issues aside, car insurance companies are horrible and need to be taken down a peg. I hate being legally required to buy insurance on a beater car I’ve already paid off because American health insurance is terrible and has shifted responsibility in collision-related healthcare to car owners.

If OP lives outside of England or the European Union, Fairbuds might not be worth it because the company won’t send replacement parts overseas. Which is a shame, because if I were ever to upgrade to Bluetooth, it would be the Fairbuds XL.

I have the DT 770 Pro X and love them. Not only extremely durable, but super comfy after hours of wearing them. The company sells some replacement parts, and they work with a third-party company in America to do more complicated repairs.

That being said, the 770 and 990 aren’t very portable at all, so that’s something to consider. I use a pair of Shure IEMs when I’m away from home. The OEM hard carrying case for the 770 does have a caribiner clip, so you could get around space constraints by clipping it to a backpack or travel bag.

This problem won’t stop until law enforcement starts treating deepfakes of minors as possession of child pornography with all the legal ramifications that come with it. Young boys need to understand that their actions have consequences.

In the meantime, no one under 18 should be on social media. I wish AI, deepfakes or in general, could just be illegal, but laws aren’t catching up and people are being victimized.

Isn’t this already covered with extensions, though?

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In America, even if you live in a city with good public transit, there’s frequently no way to get from one city to another. Greyhound routes are extremely limited, Amtrak seems to just loop around major metropolitan cities extremely slowly, and the price of a rental car has gotten out of control after COVID.

So even if you live in a city with strong infrastructure, you still have to buy a car unless you’re willing to be stuck in that city 99.9% of the time.

Sometime in my lifetime, I’d like to see America catch up with the rest of the world.

Individual Christians are okay, but I don’t approve of their immoral lifestyles.

Thanks for the info! In my case, the companies in questions haven’t been in the news for trans-exclusive practices, and they don’t have a full list of organizations they send money to. They just list that they’re either “women-owned” or “female-owned,” which is a red flag for me with the companies being in the UK specifically. Am I being paranoid or would it be good to be cautious?

Also, do you know if anyone’s made a list of UK companies that have been exposed to avoid for future reference?

Folks on r/goodyearwelt and r/nps_solovair have been saying for the past couple years that Solovair’s quality has gone downhill. It could just be a vocal minority who have had bad experiences, but that might be the explanation. Because that’s a really short amount of time for the soles to wear out on a pair of Solovairs.

I observe Yule, but overall I have good associations with Christmas since most of the people I’m close to celebrate it. I know it justifiably gets a bad rap as a consumer and religious holiday; the “war on Christmas” stuff in America is just exhausting. For me it’s just a way to spend time with the people I love and enjoy delicious baked goods. I enjoy the sentimentality of the gift-exchange aspect of the holiday when it’s not overdone, there’s a few Christmas songs that are really catchy, and I read Gift of the Magi every year because it’s adorable.

But that’s about as far as I take it. I was never brought up believing in Santa Claus, and I hated the long sermons I was dragged to as a kid. I think if no one in my life observed Christmas, it would just be another day for me, honestly.

Ultima, if it counts, are some of my favorite games of all time. In particular, I love Ultima 1’s bite-sized first-person dungeons that you do in between overworld exploration – the rewards you get versus the time spent make them a retro dopamine hit. Ultima 4 has you going through first-person tailor-made around eight thematic moral vices. Since the stat-boosting orbs of virtue you’d find at the end of the dungeon respawned, I had fun going back in and further boosting my stats.

Daggerfall is my favorite Elder Scrolls game. People complain that the dungeons are labyrinthine and take hours to finish, but I absolutely love that (with QoL mods). I tend to roll up non-magic characters who are good at climbing, and I feel like a proper Tomb Raider-esque explorer.

I’ve been gradually working through the old Might and Magic games. I really enjoy the “scavenger hunt” gameplay loop of that series with how you’re given riddles in the environment to figure out where to go next. I just wish they were a little shorter, so I get the feeling that The Bard’s Tale trilogy will be even more up my alley when I get to them.

I did try Wizardry 1-5, minus 4, and found them all really repetitive, even for the time they came out. You just kill a wizard and draw maps and there’s not much else going on with it. I’d love to try the later games someday, though.

For modern games, I haven’t played Etrian Odyssey yet, but I did play The Dark Spire on DS, from the same developers, and loved the dark tone and horror-esque art direction.

Maybe I’ve just had bad experiences. After my Blackberry finally gave out, my next phone didn’t have a headphone jack, and I couldn’t find an adapter that was reliable.

It’s so bizarre that all the user-repairable phone startups are refusing to put in a headphone jack. Like, the entire point is to limit e-waste, so why are they expecting me to throw out my wired headphones to buy Bluetooth ones or get an adapter that will stop working in a year?

I hope they also make a larger screened device, I am tired of the smaller 6.3 inch screens. I’d love for them to make a 6.7 inch screen phone (also make it international version with a lot of carrier compatibility for maximum adoption potential).

That’s really interesting. I’m kind of over here hoping for a good Linux phone that’s like 4 inches, like the iPod Touch used to be. I hope we get more large and small phones though, as long as they’re not stock Android.

In America in 2025, I’d say they’re right*. Flock has cameras all over cities, Palantir has scary face recognition data that iirc uses social media info up to a decade old, DOGE made a database of everyone’s social security information that other bureaus probably have access to, ICE uses Israeli spyware that bypasses end-to-end-encryption, and state governments are trying to push VPN bans and ID checks to use web services. On the federal level, both MAGA and Democrats are pro-surveillance, so you can’t just vote this out, not completely. You also can’t vote with your wallet since the most dangerous surveillance tools exist at the infrastructure level. We’re one step away from turning into China.

*By and large, there’s nothing Americans can do about those things other than protest, normalize pro-privacy rhetoric, try not to support privacy-invading consumer services, and call local- and state-level elected leaders when new anti-privacy legislation is introduced.

In most cases, privacy efforts can help for some use cases, but there is no perfect threat model anymore, and it’s mostly a symbolic act of protest these days, which is useful. Lemmy is the only social media I use these days, Linux is my daily and only driver, I’m boycotting tech oligarchs like Google, and I gravitate toward privacy-focused products and services. We need an active privacy advocacy bloc that will support causes and alternative technologies if we ever want things to get better, if not today than in the future.

One big thing people can still do is evade targeted ads. I probably have an ad profile stored somewhere, but I use adblock and enough FOSS apps that I haven’t gotten targeted ad in years.

My Thinkpad T480s was $200 and is very repairable.

I know? They were speaking metaphorically and so was I?

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