We can just do this.

outlaws anonymous communication by requiring every citizen to verify their age before accessing a service

This is likely to be the case in practice, but technologically, it does not have to be the case.

If the age verifiers (which IMO should be the governments themselves^[1], but could also be a private third-party, as long as it’s not the same as the social media company) only ever receive a blinded token representing the user, verify the user’s age, and then the user brings that token back to the social media site, unblind it, and present them the signed token, there is no way for the age verifier to track which sites a person visits, and no way for the sites to have any detail about who their users are (other than what they already have).

Do they prioritize the data at the beginning now?

I remember my bittorrent client having an option to do that even back in like 2010, though I never used it to actually stream, because my Internet wasn’t good enough.

As others have said, Nebula is pretty great. Much more limited in content, since creators are invite-only, and they curate for high quality creators. But it’s growing quite quickly and has a wide variety of content from leftist cultural video essays, to music analysis, to urbanism, film criticism, science, original films, game shows, and more.

There are a couple of centrist creators on there that I personally avoid, but most creators are centre-left to leftist, and I don’t think there’s anyone I would explicitly describe as right-wing.

It’s subscription only, but extremely affordable at $36/year or $6/month if you sign up through a creator’s invite code, and I think they promised grandfathered pricing if they raise the price in the future. You can see their library without an account at https://nebula.tv/explore/videos. Or ask any more questions you might have at !nebula@lemmy.world.

Yeah Nebula is for sure the best with the volume and variety of content they have. But there are also many creators/groups creating their own independent platforms. The NZ-based videogame sketch creators Viva la Dirt League have Viva+, the ancient tech podcast/vodcast company This Week in Tech has Club TWiT, and probably most successfully the former CollegeHumor is now focusing on improv comedy as Dropout, among others.

I assume many of these are probably white labelled Patreon (or similar) services, or possibly a front-end site with white-labelled Vimeo for serving videos, rather than building their own infrastructure from scratch. But as far as the viewer is concerned those technical details don’t matter.

Kinda like pirating a movie these days

Not really. More like pirating a movie in 2012. These days, there are excellent-quality pirate streaming services, there’s the ability to stream videos over bittorrent (if there are enough seeds), and probably other options I’m not thinking of that make pirated video more accessible than ever.

It’s also possible, not having seen the videos in question, that they simply did violate YouTube’s rules regarding graphic content. YouTube has had a terrible record of banning important content despite its societal value because of rigid adherence to ill-thought-out content policies. AI takes that problem and turns it up to 11.

A friendly reminder that cars are still highly destructive, whether powered by petrol, battery, or hydrogen, and whether driven by a human or automation. The only real environmentally, economically, and socially responsible solution is to drastically reduce the amount of trips made by car, by introducing road diets and modal filters, by having mixed-use medium or higher density zoning, by building high quality safe separated bike paths, and good quality, frequent, affordable public transport.

Also, keep your pets on your property. If there’s no way to keep them from leaving your yard, keep them inside. It’s better for them (they live longer on average, even if you control for the increased likelihood of getting run over) and for the environment.

I’m not sure what “piece linked” you’re talking about, since none of the parent comments of this comment actually have a link in them.

This is the first time I’ve ever heard of FUTO, but I did read their statement about open source and it sounds pretty good to me. I actually think they’re capitulating a little bit too much by deciding not to call it open source anymore. As far as I’m concerned, if the source is available and anyone can contribute, that’s open source. I don’t particularly care whether or not it’s free for Google to incorporate it into their increasingly-enshitified products or not.

Creative Commons (an org to which FUTO says they have donated) doesn’t like their licences being used for software, presumably for finicky technical legal reasons. But if you imagine the broad spirit of their licences applying to software, all the main CC licences would be open source in my opinion. All combinations of Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike, and No Derivatives, as well as CC0 respect the important elements of open source.

Yup, sounds great to me. I could see a world in which it becomes a bad thing because they try to enforce it by pulling a Google and blocking users from installing extensions that aren’t through their official add-on store, but as it is, it’s hard to see any reasonable criticism.

Ludo? I haven’t played that since I was a tiny kid! I can’t say I remember much about how it’s played.

Fun fact: nothing justifies genocide. Nothing.

I’ll add, not me personally, but I do know two people who had a similar arrangement. I don’t know the precise details of the reasons, but I believe it had something to do with dysfunctional parents or finances. In both of those cases, the couple are now happily married and well-integrated into the broader extended family.

There are two separate issues with lootboxes.

First, children. Porn games (and videos) have never been marketed at children. Lootboxes have. It’s not an age-gating issue, it’s an issue of actively promoting gambling for children. Games with gambling elements should be illegal to sell or market to children, and platforms can back this up with parental controls tools, without the need for any privacy-invading ID or facial recognition.

The second is relevant to adults. General things around lootboxes being exploitative bad game design, regardless of the audience. You don’t have to support banning it to be able to say it’s really shitty. Personally, I would advocate very strict reporting on odds of success, and mandate the implementation of self-exclusion features, the same as the law requires (at least here in Australia) for casinos.

“hmm so these women abandon their ‘motherly’ duties of raising children and staying in the home

More than that! When Lucy is turned into a vampire, she feeds on children. She turns into the very opposite of the motherly feminine ideal. The same is true of Dracula’s brides, who feed on a baby in one of the early chapters. Dracula, by contrast, feeds on adults. He shows an interest in Jonathan (bisexual? Eww, that’s not natural!—side note, Stoker himself was likely bi) but most of his attention is focused on women like Lucy and Mina. The expectation of a gentleman being a chivalrous protector of ladies is inverted.

There’s also the fact that Lucy, who early in the book expresses her wish to marry all three of the men who proposed to her:

Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?

It’s the very sexually-forward woman who ends up succumbing to vampirism and being killed for it. But not before receiving the bodily fluids from all three of those propositioners—plus van Helsing. The sexual undertones of the blood transfusions are hardly subtle, but this also ties into another major theme of the book, which is how powerful modern science and technology can be as a tool to defeat strange unnatural superstition.

We’ve recently been doing a Dracula bookclub over at !vampires@lemmy.zip, reading through each diary entry/letter/newspaper clipping on the day it is set. We are, as we speak, amid the section between when Lucy has died and arisen as a vampire, but before she has her final death at the hands of the crew of light. In fact, as soon as I’m done with this thread I’m gonna go and do today’s reading, and I think that might be Lucy’s last. edit: I was wrong. Lucy unlives for another night…or two…

Provided it’s got a decent narrator, audiobooks are like literal bedtime stories

One of my favourite books I’ve literally only read on audiobook. I don’t love ebooks, and this book is out of print with second-hand copies going for $200+ online, so audiobook is basically the only option. It’s not the same experience as reading with your eyes, but it’s still a great way to get the story.

Automattic’s CEO seems to be saying that this is a bug. Apparently people who previously paid for the app should not be getting ads. I’m extremely sceptical about this, given that customer service on both email and their forums are pretty adamantly saying the opposite, but this is a space worth keeping an eye on.

I’ve followed this probably closer than the average gamer, but I still wouldn’t say I’ve followed it very closely.

The sense I get is that once TCR took it over, they moved the game in a direction that allows less personalisation in terms of roleplay. You’re no longer playing some newly-embraced nobody, you’re playing a hundred-year-old character with a very specific backstory. But it’s honestly still not completely clear. I’ll be interested to see feedback from people after its release.

My experience is that on Reddit it replaces the comment with [unavailable], similar to [removed] when a mod removes it, or [deleted] when they delete it themselves.

And that on Lemmy, it depends on client. On lemmy-ui (the default web client), it sometimes shows up as that “1 more reply” option, but when you click it, it never loads in. On Jerboa, it says something along the lines of “unable to retrieve this comment”.

Both of those are what happens when you come across a comment from a person who blocked you in the wild. It may or may not be different when it’s in your inbox.

I’ve been blocked by at least one person on Lemmy, for reasons that I honestly have no idea, and have come across this in the wild a couple of times, including opening something I originally found on my computer in Jerboa to double-check, as well as opening up incognito where I’m logged out and therefore not blocked.

Also replying to @MagicShel@lemmy.zip, @wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com

If you block someone, you don’t see their replies

On both Reddit and Lemmy, blocking someone prevents them from replying. It prevents them from even seeing your final word*

* sort of. Depending on exactly where and how they look.