Israel’s entire edge in the tech sector is in lax regulation and a steady supply of experienced, amoral ex-military software engineers. Western entrepeneurs who would otherwise have had trouble finding willing professionals and maintaining legal cover for their adware, data mining, or cyberweapons startup in a home country more concerned with ethics and international relations flocked to Israel over the last couple decades and singlehandedly propped up the local economy.

In return, the US, for instance, gets to wash its hands of the whole affair and say they’re not the ones selling spyware to the Saudis and other western-friendly authoritarian regimes, it’s all out of their control, while American venture capital reaps the rewards of investments in Israeli companies.

It doesn’t have to be a full on quest marker HUD overlay, just being able to glance at a mirror of your phone’s map display in your peripheral vision without taking it out of your pocket would be great.

From what I understand, biological systems regulated by sex hormones require one or the other to work at all. For example, you get one pattern of post-puberty bone growth with estrogen, a different pattern with testosterone, and no bone growth at all if you have neither. These systems also have some counterbalancing factor, like your bones constantly being slowly dissolved to keep calcium in your bloodstream, so if you have no gonads and no supplementary hormones, you essentially speedrun osteoporosis over the course of a few years.

I’m not too clear on other effects, but a lot of things are downstream of “your bones slowly melt,” and lots of other parts of your body rely on sex hormones to regulate them and will have long-term issues without them.

I just think we have different definitions of what accountability looks like. Have a good day.

I’m glad you can get excited at the prospect of a handful of cabinet members getting fined a fraction of the millions they enriched themselves by and getting handed 12-month sentences to be commuted while the people they imprisoned for political gain spend years in concentration camps. Where are the presidents on this list, by the way?

How obsessed can people get with one inconsequential guy for being cringe on the internet?

There’s actually plenty of material to compare to, with a swath of Pal designs that are clearly original, in a similar style with similar inspirations. Then there are models with almost precisely the same silhouette and proportions as iconic Pokemon, which are frankly just worse designs for it, since the altered colors and markings clash with the original concept and result in a generally forgettable whole. They clearly had the skill and motivation to innovate more within their niche, but instead the game is half-full of what feel like hastily painted over placeholders.

• Segways
• 3D TVs
• steam-powered automobiles
• Lisp machines
• hovercraft
• supersonic airliners

A kitchen sink monster taming survival sandbox game with Pokemon-like cute creatures, a handful of reaaaaally familiar designs, edgy shock factor marketing featuring gun violence and animal abuse, and enough obviously Pokemon-inspired gameplay elements that Nintendo decided to bring out all the IP big guns, from copyright infringement down to bullshit mechanics patents and claims that mods don’t count as prior art. (if a modder invents something, no they didn’t, and a developer that puts the same feature in a game years later can sue anyone who imitates the mod, according to Nintendo.)

The USPS just got done ordering a custom-designed vehicle built from the ground up for efficient, safe, and comfortable package delivery. It doesn’t look like this.

iirc, they fell behind during COVID, the increased funding and facility expansions needed to actively push them back down into the chokepoint never got approved, and the trump administration would rather spend 10x more moving all the infrastructure up to the US-Mexico border than do anything that would help other countries “for free” (even though they already chip in).

Apparently the project got overwhelmed with LLM vulnerability reports, so the last person in the world who actually cared enough to keep maintaining it gave up and gave in to the spop himself.

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A lot of those reports are nonsense. There’s solid evidence that several dozen, maybe a hundred at most, people were killed by friendly fire, which tends to get exaggerated to “every single victim at the Nova festival was killed by helicopter strafing under the Hannibal Directive.” Neither side anticipated how easy the siege would be to break, and the resulting undisciplined bloodbath isn’t out of line with similar anticolonial revolts throughout history. I don’t think there’s any reason to jump to conspiracy theories to explain the results of the Israeli government getting lost in its militaristic hubris and dehumanization of Palestinians.

It would make a very apt metaphor for the machines as a social construct, fragments of billions of people’s subconscious thoughts combining to maintain the system that holds them captive.

I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. Who are “they,” and what is “that” in your initial reply?

So? That’s their problem. There are people who’d dance on my grave if I died tomorrow, too, and what they think has just as little bearing on my decision to keep living. Categorically irrelevant. You can’t show someone the beauty and joy of living by dragging them through shame. Worse still, pegging your self-worth to others’ suffering creates an implicit threshold, a thought stuck in the back of your mind: “What if the suffering I cause now is more than the momentary pain I’d cause by stopping?”

It feels good to tell people things like this. It’s one of the most awful things to hear.

For years I lived right by the sea. I had plenty of alcohol and medications. the prevailing currents would’ve swept my body across the border into a hostile country, where no one who found it would’ve cared. I don’t live to spare anyone else’s feelings, not least those who would mourn me as dead for living the life I want to live. I live because I deserve it, I deserve my family’s respect and care while we’re both here, and I don’t need anyone else’s shame.

To live on solely for obligation and guilt isn’t living at all, and anyone who wishes that on someone else just so they can remain a half-dead trophy they can congratulate themselves for “saving” can eat shit. If you’re reading this and you need to hear something, keep going. Keep trying. We live in an insane world; sometimes you have to try the same thing over and over so you can get different results. Live another day and see what happens. Not for anyone else, but because it’s a shame to miss out on this wild a ride.

This post honestly just pisses me off. Your life is worth living. Not your parents’ child’s life. Yours.

Who cares about whether it’ll benefit the business, the business owners want a place to park their car out front of their workplace, and it doesn’t matter who pays, how much, or if it’s in blood.

Always fascinating how upset people get about someone being slightly weird on the website for weird people.