From the conclusion of the UN report you linked:

Serious human rights violations have been committed in XUAR in the context of the Government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-“extremism” strategies. The implementation of these strategies, and associated policies in XUAR has led to interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights. These patterns of restrictions are characterized by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities.

But this is all just whataboutism anyway. We can be against human rights violations regardless of who is doing it and whether they condemn each other.

Tip: you can use the WhatsApp web site for text messaging (I don’t think it works for audio/video?) and if you want to use it in a standalone window you can “install” it as a web app (in most browsers). It’ll use way less RAM running in your existing browser than running a separate electron instance.

No, catios are pretty common in Australia, but a lot of people do just let their cats roam outside too (at least here in NSW). I’m not sure why this was news, maybe because it’s quite elaborate, or they just needed more cute cat content.

Generally agree, but your idea that native games are safer than websites is backwards. Browsers are basically hardened sandboxes for running untrusted code. Even though steam does a good job of detecting and taking down malware it’s still downloading executables that run with full access to your system (unless you run steam in a sandbox of some kind). Playing games in a browser is no less safe than loading any other website.

Well, there’s a “no tip” button that is always there, and it’s entirely reasonable to press here in Australia

I wish this was real. I would 100% press this button every time.

Wow, you hated Gleba so much you went back in time a year to stop playing factory games?! (Space Age came out just under a year ago)

I loved Gleba because it makes you rethink how you build a factory to avoid stockpiling and storage and instead keep everything moving. If you’re struggling with it you can also just use bots a lot and it works pretty well. If you’re struggling with the enemies you just need to defend your pollution cloud and they basically don’t attack at all.

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a Borderlands spinoff shooter/RPG that’s co-op and happens to be free to claim on Epic games store this week. I haven’t played it yet but really enjoyed the Tiny Tina DLC for Borderlands 2.

It’s ok the BG3 patch isn’t out until next year. You’ve got at least a month to finish Factorio. You can do it if you use all that time you normally waste on non-Factorio things like sleeping!

Non-spoiler tip: you can alt+click just about anything in Factorio 2.0 and get more info on it. Good luck escaping Vulcanus!

they might have changed a little more than his tie colour. Here’s a side by side picture from an interview:

Yep, very little of the main page is links anymore.

The article actually does make an interesting argument that the web is becoming a legacy format in favour of generative AI and social media interaction, and takes this as an example of that trend.

Clickbait headline. What Google did was add a new tab for web results (only) in their search page, similar to images and news.

I do find it interesting/funny that Google felt the need to actually provide this, as a sort of acknowledgement that their main search “results” page is so full of random info boxes and generated content that people can’t find actual links anymore.

I moved to Australia years ago and I still feel the pain of missing feijoas. They exist here but not in a huge quantity like in NZ. Enjoy your harvest! 🤤

“to dwarf” means “to make look small by comparison”. So they’re saying the new scope will make the BG3 scope look small.

According to the page linked in the post above, overseas businesses selling in Australia are subject to the same rules. It does say the rules might be hard to enforce on overseas businesses though.

I would guess that Google uses a randomised rollout system to make changes affect a tiny % of users while they test it (common in big software companies). Changing your useragent might make you appear as a different client that’s not affected (yet). Source: I work in software and can guess.

Outer Wilds is not at all nihilistic but it definitely deals with some of the topics you’ve mentioned, so it might not be a good experience for you.

I absolutely adore the game but it can definitely trigger people. I hope you manage to reach a better head space one day so you can play it!

Google doesn’t make money directly from harvesting your data, they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data. So if you’re running an ad blocker then they aren’t making money from you (unless you pay them for stuff like subscriptions and apps). As ad blocking becomes more common they are definitely going to get more draconian to try to claw back that money (growth is infinite, profits must go up /s).

Also BTW Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average (looking at revenue and internet population) so they would never offer a $2/year ad block unless forced to by regulation.

As a non-American it’s crazy to me that there’s so little movement to get away from the broken FPPTP voting system. It locks you into a two-party system where you vote against a candidate you fear/despise rather than voting for one you actually agree with. Any vote for someone else is a wasted vote. There are plenty of better voting systems widely used around the world.

Obviously the two parties empowered by this system aren’t going to change it voluntarily. I don’t understand how there aren’t tons of petitions, protests, rioting, etc to try to force this to change.