I’m not talking about Valve giving things back to us. I’m talking about the fact the owners of the company get money simply by owning the company. They take money they didn’t work for. Even if the company isn’t manipulative or scummy, they’re enriching people who don’t deserve it.

And benevolent capitalism

Are you lost? I’m responding to the previous comment

People should be able to live where they want, and any government that demands participation must provide equal services to everyone.

I’m guessing the reason for most things forcing you to use an app is less because of data harvesting, and more because it increases repeated use.

When you have to go to your browser and remember to check a website it’s harder to create a habit. If you have an icon flashing on your home screen every day it’s much easier to remember to go to their site. Sure you can “Add to Home screen” functionality, but average users don’t even know that exists.

It also feels like a bespoke app is more “professional” than a website, despite many apps secretly just being a website anyway.

That said, they are definitely harvesting your data. I just don’t think that’s the main reason for most apps.

It’s easier to build, but much less efficient to operate

I personally think the biggest driving factor in the rural/city divide that causes rural populations to skew conservative is services.

Rural communities are criminally underserviced. It makes sense why from a logistical view. When people are gathered in small areas, they are easy to provide services to. It’s much easier to provide quality power, plumbing, roads, essential services, and prettyich everything to high density areas. It’s more effective to service cities.

It’s hard to provide reliable services to rural areas. With everyone spread out so much, you need longer wires, longer roads, longer pipes, more people, more everything. So it makes sense to allocate less to these areas. But it’s also horrific.

These are people. It makes perfect sense why rural communities distrust and resent government, and oppose increased spending on social services. They don’t see the benefits. They see money being spent on things they can’t use. Then manipulative politicians swoop in and tell them that these services are bad.

The solution is to suck it up and give everyone equal access to services. Spend more money on rural communities, even if it’s less efficient. Because they are people and deserve roads and hospitals and internet equivalent to cities.

Even when capitalism serves customers well, it still takes the work of people who make things, and gives it to people who own things

I dunno, there some necessary context here. I think Requiem for a Dream is a better movie then Iron Man, but I sure as hell wouldn’t pick it as the only movie I’m ever going to watch again.

TLDR: number of possible passwords is x^y where x is the size of your alphabet and y is the password length. Increasing y is better than increasing x.

It’s not immediately obvious, but it is pretty straightforward math. It has to do with password length vs alphabet size.

Let’s look at an 8 letter lowercase only password. Each time you increase the minimum length, you increase the maximum number of passwords by 26 (the number of letters in the alphabet). So it would be 26x26x26x26x26x26x26x26 or 26^8 which is 208,827,064,576. This is a lot of passwords, but pretty easy for a computer to brute force.

Let’s add the ! symbol. This means there are 27 options or 27^8. The total number of passwords is now 282,429,536,481. A bigger number, but not by much.

If we only have lowercase letters but increase it to 9 letters long, then it increases to 26^9 which equals 5,429,503,678,976. We’ve jumped from millions of passwords to billions with passwords only 1 character more.

If you allow all symbols and numbers, but also increase minimum length, you get the best of both without creating difficult to remember passwords.

This of course ignores the primary way people get past passwords: by asking the user for their password. It also ignores that an intruder is going to check the most common passwords and not just try them all. Adding numbers and symbols doesn’t really change the most common passwords though, since dragon just turns into Dragon1!

Has Penny Arcade always been this hideous?

It’s revenge and nothing else

So we saw the hilarious attempt to nominate McCarthy last time, but what happens if they boot him out and refuse to vote in a speaker for a much longer time? Is there any kind of mechanism in case it’s deadlocked indefinitely?

I recommend the video “In Search of a Flat Earth” by Dan Olson, aka Folding Ideas

Oh wow. A truely stunning achievement for this small indie studio.

You don’t think voting demographics would change radically if people could go out and vote on legislation directly instead of a bribed politician voting for them?

Representative Democracy*

Bethesda can’t even get ladders working in their engine, and y’all were expecting seamless atmospheric re-entry?

All software is now AI. The sensor that tells your fridge to turn off when it’s cold enough? Well that makes a decision of some kind, so AI. The cook timer on your microwave? AI. Your thermostat? Definitely AI.

Coming from someone living in a “Western” country that genocided the native population (guess which one!) that will either not admit it, will say “that’s what happens in war,” or just start screaming incoherently, this is incorrect.