As a privacy-valuing PC gamer, I’m afraid that’s a bad idea. As great as GOG’s way of doing things is/was, I need to transition away from Windows more than I need to transition away from Steam. I’m sorry, but as of 2025 Steam is less evil than Microsoft.

Yeah, sounds like you had awful digital hygiene. Not that it helps to have good digital hygeine like I did. All it takes is the majority of people’s opinions becoming sufficiently extremist for your life to be irrevocably ruined.

Unfortunately, emailing people won’t actually get your data removed. They are supposed to, legally speaking, but they have already sold your data to those who maliciously make use of it. That’s the only reason they let that law be in place, because once they sold data, the new owner is not obligated to delete their copies of that data. And they sell this data multiple times, meaning there are now countless owners of data about your personal history. Not just for advertising, either. It is increasingly obvious it’s being used to sway elections. If you value democracy, get an ad-blocker and refuse to disable it for any reason.

Whoops, you’re right. Sorry, my Canadian is showing. Tbf, American politics has always been a necessary thing to know about here.

Anyone think it’s weird the Republicans would choose an animal associated with Africa and the Indian subcontinent?

And people wonder why I hate our species. Thanks for confirming it, I’m going to go get hit by a freight train because we are doomed.

And both of you are being fucking assholes on the internet. This is what I hate the Fediverse userbase for, shit like this. Ffs, shut up!

Fact is, Windows is being purposefully turned into a surveillance tool. Fact is, Linux sucks.

The former is undeniable, and EVERYONE should be using Linux because of that.

The latter is true because it took me TWO DAYS to set up Linux Arch and most people who own a desktop PC are professionals using it for work who don’t have two days to set up an OS or search for one that has minimal setup.

But let’s assume Arch Linux is being used for the other main Windows use, for gaming. If that’s the case, buying one means you value time more than money, and if you’re building a gaming PC, you value getting what you asked for over ideology.

Any other Linux OS is subpar for gaming except in niche scenarios where you’ll be on Steam and only Steam.

In short, we’re fucked. We can’t use Windows or Linux. Fuck Microsoft, fuck Trump, and fuck both of you. GO AWAY.

Oddly, GPS is something I trust more than modern alternatives. GPS might be USAF’s doing, but they specifically made it open use and self-locating. While modern smartphones, unfortunately, have a shitton of snooping with GPS, the concept requires no such transmission: Your GPS device triangulates it’s own position based on the signal strength of the orbiting satellites, and displays a marker on a map.

Meanwhile, several American corporate competitors exist that, and the Chinese GPS-ish system also, requires internet to determine location based on data that should remain private.

Well, it’s exactly that in technical terms, yes. Somehow, “complementary games included (subject to limited-time redeemability on a monthly basis) each month you subscribe” is not as marketable from Amazon as from Humble Bundle. Privacy is becoming serious business now that things outside the gaming industry are becoming… a game of chance? Eh, whatever, I’m not here for politics and this seems like an okay way to buy GOG titles.

The Broligarchy: “Everything.”

Me: Squints Pours glowing demon tanning lotion on ground

Trump: “You dare dispute my rule?! And you would have these… mongrels… come here to die?”

Open Source Metaverse online. Launching Anti-StarLink missiles…

Warning. FOSS Metaverse alternative launch detected.

The Broligarchy: “This was not how it was supposed to be…”

Me: “Times change. But war, war never changes.”

…

“We will never be slaves. But we WILL be online. For the Open Source Metaverse we deserve!”

Anyway, hopefully that’s the real future in some sense. The metaverse is, technologically, in a state resembling 1995’s World Wide Web. We can stop the changes that made social media happen the first time, but that comes at a grave cost of it’s own… Zero tolerance for interference with the FOSS paradigm. This means no censorship even for the most vile of content, and no government authority over online activity ever again. It also means we have less than 150 years to become immortal because having children inherently puts kids at risk of sexual exploitation, so everyone - literally everyone - must be made infertile permanently to make that impossible.

Life extension is actually plausible, and omnispermicide would make denying it a war crime. That is the only fix I can see, but all of you would never pay it. That is why I stopped writing; every goddamn story and society at large championed “anti-escapism” in 2017 and onwards, and I will NEVER forgive you all for that. Fuck reality. I Have No Truth and I Must Dream. I want to die because I hate you all.

You missed a category.

Child Safety

It is impossible to prevent information taken without the approval of society at large from being uploaded online, as privacy is guaranteed. This means CSAM is a regular occurrence. Tracking or blocking the content based on any factor whatsoever is impossible.

This includes information most people are not comfortable with being held back only by the potential of a NSFW tag and censor.

While your child is no longer liable to become a disposaperson officially, as they would in a world without privacy, children find themselves completely insulated from society as black market trade of human slaves rapidly grows, with children sadly fetching a higher price and becoming regular targets for kidnappings.

Unable to keep up with the inevitable arms race, parents become increasingly desperate. The need for privacy, now a liability, either collapses to pressure or doubles down.

If it caves to political pressure, congratulations. Your children are doomed to be disposapeople. I agree, a world with no privacy is a dystopia and that will happen if a backlash is successful.

If it doesn’t, society moves to reclassify children as slaves because no effort is able to protect the naive even if their naivety is just innocence that arises from lack of adult traits. The black market is either too powerful to stop, or the very same cause of it’s existence guarantees that absolute privacy means potential normalization of the sexual exploitation of children to an amount proportionate to the efforts made to stop the exploitation.

Oh, and politicians will still buy your kidnapped kids to be slaves on a private island because humans can’t be trusted as individuals any more than corporations, government or religion.

Now you know why I hate you all. No matter what, none of you care about any child and you never did. All you ever cared about was feeling like you were a good person for following society’s expectations.

The only way this ends is with Autosovereigncy, or in layman’s terms, “we have to build the UnMatrix - the Matrix but minus the people farming and with us able to create our own worlds in it - and trap ourselves in it permanently separated because reality is a monstrocity that should not be”. If that’s even possible. The fact it’s probably not means reality is predisposed to be as painful as possible no matter what we do and I refuse to let anyone delude themselves into forgetting that just so they can preach about whatever they consider a solution.

And no, this isn’t Nihilism or Misanthropy. Even a Nihilistic person is selfish. Misanthropes think machines or nature are better. I’m well beyond that. I’m an anti-ontonomist, I desire the cessation of existence. I don’t care anymore, as long as whatever happens kills everything, I am happy to light 10 more fires every time someone complains that Rome is burning.

Eh, I’ll take it if we’re talking about actual donkeys and not the Republican party of the US. Did you that, in lieu of a dog, a donkey is a perfect way to protect livestock?

I’m serious, a predator should think twice; A donkey can grab a cougar’s tail and literally beat it to death by using the wildcat as a living flail. Very protective.

That’s fair, just realize some of us are tired of online pessimism to such a degree that an AI - telling me there are in fact potential solutions and to keep trying - is actually good for our mental health. I only use Perplexity for research and musings that I sometimes post here to be discussed, not to completely replace human interaction on the Fediverse.

Didn’t realize how far back the feed was reaching because everything was limited to a handful of communities on my feed.

No disagreement here.

Fortunately, no. But they will probably eat the harmless giant grasshopper-things (wela) that also live in New Zealand backyards.

There’s also giant crickets in Africa, and several giant beetles in Japan. I swear I don’t remember where I learned all this, I’ve never even been to New Zealand or Australia or any of the other places (aside from South America).

Fair enough, but if you’re on the internet post-2017 looking to reduce your stress, you’re in the wrong parts of the internet. Find a forum that’s been around since well before then on your hobbies (niche hobbies like old fandoms tend to have the best results), other than that social media killed the internet.

If they did, this is a f-ing miracle. Imma do it next time I sign up for a service that doesn’t require confirmation emails to change the address (they’re rare but there’s a few, lemmy/kbin instances are sometimes among them).

What about “Our Lives Matter Too” (OTM2)? You’re trying to fight oppression, appealing to empathy should have been the first resort. I know it feels good to prove being black or dark-skinned doesn’t mean you need help, I’ve been there because I have autism and have encountered ableism from people who are supposed to be doctors or nurses, I’m just saying that once the few white people in the civil rights movement left, it lost steam because the opponent was more willing to get other people’s assistance (in bad ways, but they still succeeded and that should have been countered).

For what it’s worth, if a cop pointed a gun at a kid, I’d die to put myself between them before I let him pull the trigger, and if I would be too late, I’d f-ing kill the bastard. Fortunately, I’ve never met a cop willing to do that. I honestly hate it that your country has cops who are willing to do that in the open.

Isn’t that what they did? At least between consenting adults.

Technically, yes. And for a time, it was good.

Then Roe vs. Wade was overturned for no good reason and Trump stole the election last year. The (federal) laws towards gay/lesbian(/etc?) marriage hasn’t changed afaik, but it would surprise me if that is how it is in practice under Teflon Don.

Not bashing anyone, does LGBTQ as an acronym even matter as a whole for marriages as much as for self-expression and mental health? Not in a “LGBTQ is lesser” way, but think about it logically. Asexuals (well, aromantic asexuals) aren’t getting married, they don’t want to. Getting married as transgender should absolutely be legal and legitimate, it’s just that in a marriage, you’re either male or female or (in rare cases) hermaphroditic in a biological, body-focused sense, so your marriage can be gay or lesbian or straight but whether you started out as the gender you currently are should be irrelevant to marriage status as long as the government acknowledges you are your current gender regardless of if you changed your gender.

If you want to normalize this stuff, the best way to do it is to at least recognize nuance and definitions. There are edge cases, those can and should be considered legal too, but as a single asexual person with opinions that contradict both partisan political extremes, if it looks like a fashion statement instead of a call for peace or a demand for true equality, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Of course, now there are bigger issues. Probably better to force Trump off his throne and then never let up the pressure on improving from there.

I mean, you’re both kind of right. I’m no doctor but it seems like something doctors (good doctors, anyway) would seriously consider in regards to this. On the one hand, they’re leaving people to the wolves. On the other, there is nothing you can do in the US if it gets that far that will outweigh the good you can do elsewhere. But then, is that actually true? This isn’t the literal same as WWII, it’s just extremely similar, a pattern we are able to recognize this time around because it happened before and was well-documented. It’s possible that this time, leaving would in fact cause more harm than good. But if you have a family… Well, I can’t blame you for protecting your own kids over your patients and their kids, as long as you don’t throw someone else under the bus.

It’s complicated. When there’s that many variables, all you can do is trust your gut. No one can predict the future that well, if at all.

The giant spiders are Australian. I mean, it’s Australia, everything has two health bars. That said, there is a harmless but creepy-crawly-looking giant grasshopper-looking thing called a giant wētā that - like actual grasshoppers - likes to live in and lay its’ eggs in people’s backyards. Here, educate yourself!

If you hate bugs, I’d recommend heading to South America (make sure to check local political stability of each of the nations) and staying in a city, or heading to northern Canada and buying a tiny shack to ride this all out away from everyone else. Japan is a possibility but… fucking murder hornets. Literally in Tokyo suburbs.