Sorry if this is a repeat but I was just about to go to bed.

I suspect I’ve saved this image to use as a joke to my family multiple times over the years and never remembered to use it or that it exists until the next time someone posts it here

Man. I know you are joking. But you are also saying the quiet part out loud that a lot of us are thinking.

Who would notice if a few compatible with Trump immigrants disappeared at the border? Would you believe their friends? Or would you just assume the cartels got to them?

That’s always my fear as a minority in the USA post 9/11. Due process seems somewhat gone now too. They could send me to Uganda and people around me (friends and neighbors) would probably assume I did something to deserve it or… not even notice.

This does not look real. I can’t put my finger as to why. It looks like good CGI but the lighting off the robot does not feel perfect.

Came here to say that if you like this concept, Peter Hamilton has a book series called Commonwealth Saga in the science fiction category that is excellent. Lots of pseudoscience from early 2000s in that series.

We just have to admit that the representative democracy system, in its current form, suffers from the same flaws as other systems. It’s done a great job at elevating people a bit, but we hit a new ceiling of how prosperous the average person is.

I really want the conversations to be more around iterating on representative democracy. In this day and age we should be able to have our voices/votes heard more on each topic.

I don’t think we’ll ever move on to the next step of human societal development until we stop concentrating power. Us picking a representative in the hopes that they will proxy vote for what we actually want them to vote for does not work.

I understand. But then how would others in the channel interact with my Soundboard and trigger it? Now I have to write a bot if I want others to interact with it. Have to write rules so people can submit their own sounds and manage the volume on each one of the sounds.

Also, discord soundboard does seem to somehow stream or play the soundboard item locally at a higher quality than what the voice channel provides (default for most discord voice channels is 64 kbps bit rate).

It seems you are pretty stuck on the soundboard as an individual feature instead of a sever feature that works regardless of me being around or participating on that server.

My argument was more around feature users now expect in a noIM platform. In my experience within my own life out of every 30 people or so, 1 or 2 will truly care about privacy and security. This is with having a career in IT, with some family members also in IT and most of my friends are IT or IT adjacent. Most people are looking for tools that provide with the richest set of features they can easily use while giving the users the semblance of privacy. So for a new platform to welcome them it has to be very feature complete with its competitors or offer something beyond the lost features the users truly value.

Came here to make sure people saw some comments about cashing out and waiting this out.

I’m selling.

The upside if somehow our trade partners fold and we get sweater trade deals is the market would see a bump. Doubt it would be huge and you would have time to buy back in and suffer a small loss of growth.

This downside if this backfires is the dollar becoming weaker and opening the door for other powers to insert themselves as the economic fintech lubricator. This could see the market tumble.

Yeah. Soon as I realized that at some point Discord either has to sell or IPO the platform was eventually going to deteriorate.

It’s already got some odd limitations. Character limits. Very tight file upload limit. And streaming limitations. But hey, Nitro/Boost fixes it.

Worse part? If most of the limitations were removed for the price of $1 or $2 a month it might be more acceptable (at least for me). $10 feels steep for nitro. When I see that price tag, it signals I might not be the target audience. Which is weird when I’m pretty sure I’m a subset of the target audience.

Yeah. I could simulate my own. But for the average pleb who already wary of trying unpopular applications, telling them they are “losing” features is usually a no go.

Discord has become this place where I hang with multiple different groups of people from work, personal life and random online acquaintances. We game, talk politics, plan family/kid events and often it’s the fastest way to get a hold of someone. The soundboard as silly as it is one of the many meming features and my friends are usually into meming on each other.

It’s to the point where when I propose to even my other Tech buddies that we spin up matrix or revolt server, one of them just offers to boost whatever server we’re on. People would rather pay than lose what they are used to using on Discord

I’ve not logged in on my Reddit account since that big group boycott and switching to Lemmy.

If Reddit didn’t hold some specific info for certain video games or just a much larger group participating in Tech/Selfhosted subreddits, I’d rarely have to visit the website.

Honestly, to me the Reddit demise was happening organically anyway. For a lot of weirdly specific topics, Discord has become a good alternative.

Now just don’t get me started on Discord and how it will eventually have to better monetize the platform and ruin that too. Wish Matrix had a soundboard for voice chat 😢

Not sure I’m with you on the China not spreading their influence. It’s been exactly what they have been doing in Africa and the Middle East. This has been going on for a long while (close to 10 years) and seems to be working.

https://odi.org/en/insights/why-china-is-seeking-greater-presence-in-africa-the-strategy-behind-its-financial-deals

https://ecfr.eu/publication/east-meets-middle-chinas-blossoming-relationship-with-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae/

I struggle with this. I would under most circumstances agree and I get that we should be kicking and screaming as this happens. I just don’t know if even completely bank rolling the ACLU will help.

Not going to pretend to have the best legal understanding but doesn’t this eventually bubble up to the supreme court who will likely side with this current administration?

Unfortunately, our main recourse is a protest. Not a typical protest either. We need to have any citizen against this current administration to stop participating in consumerism. Buy the essentials, do whatever you need to do to survive, but stop there. No Prime day spending. No Super Bowl spending. No Memorial Day or Labor Day spending. Do this until all stocks tank. This will get the attention we want.

This seems pretty typical. Feels like Leaders only have one lever to pull. Things are going badly? Let’s ReOrg, that’ll fix it.

Instead of doing the smart thing and identifying smart individuals within the company and putting them all in group letting them solution.

My guess is the outcome of this will be google having an unofficial marriage with gambling companies as they are the last customers to pay for Ads and see a big positive result

Shameless question. At this point I approach this entire presidency as a cash/power grab by the incumbent administration.

So from an investment perspective how would pleb like me, with my Roth and 401k, game these tariffs? Local industry might get a boost, but for the most part we (the USA) still won’t produce a lot of the goods being tariffed. So, do you just bet high on commodities and U.S reseller/retailers as the big winners 12 months into the administration? Asking for a friend that’s totally not me trying to make the best out of a potentially disastrous 4 years. Thank you,

This. On top of being obvious at a glance, your file names and folder names sort nicely if use this format.

Yes, amazing extension in combination with what you said. I actually find myself watching a lot less videos on YouTube. This is because even knowing something is click bait, I still impulse click on it. Also, it has renewed my love for info YouTube channels because i realized that I prefer watching those, but usually they are not click baity and I used to skip them before DeArrow.

Also, highly recommend this extension combo if you have kids who consume YouTube

Firefox with Betterfox user script. Then from there is a bunch privacy focused/oriented extensions. I also harden my DNS with custom host files from StevenBlack. I also point all my devices to NextDNS as another catch and also to standardize things as I use NextDNS to manage my kids access to the world.

I do need to create a private VPN (of my own) still so my mobile devices can be setup behind StevenBlack host entries.

Kaladin would survive that nocap

But can’t that same argument be used for a Picasso or Van Gogh painting? Are those also regulated by the SEC for ownership? NFTs are trade-able when it comes to art. It’s just a contract in the form of a deed of ownership at a digital layer being transferred.

If regular art which is often considered an investment and hogged by the ultra rich is also regulated by the SEC then you’re right. If it’s not then I don’t get why we treat the “art” which is owned by a NFT contract differently based on the type of contract we’d like to consider binding.

Marketing has been rough lately. I stopped using reviews sites for the most part. A lot of the time I could not tell if there was any integrity in the reviews posted or if it was just a paid Ad. I rely a lot more on word of mouth and watching my favorite streamers play a game before even considering it. I get the devs struggle. How do you grab my attention when the market is full of these types of games and it’s hard to differentiate at a glance.

Also, this game from the article is the type of game I wait until a steam sale before buying.