It’s quite amazing how these people show their asses on LinkedIn and think it makes them look smart, instead of proving that they completely lost touch with reality. It fits the picture that one the very same day they laid of thousands, Microsoft also send out an invitation to hear them pitch genAI at GamesCom. That’s corpo brain on late stage capitalism.

Ah, well, better skip “Strange Days”, “12 Monkeys” and “Gattaca” then…

June 12th:

“I am pleased to confirm the 6th round of Iran US talks will be held in Muscat this Sunday the 15th,” Bad Albusaidi, the country’s foreign minister said on social media.

Israel struck Iran later the same day.

So why should Iran have any reason to believe that “talks” will stop Israel and the US?

The Guardian shedding crocodile’s tears? Boohoo, we spend years vilifying trans people and now look what happened…

As other people have already mentioned: No, you are not paranoid. The pattern that you recognise is fake outrage or ragebait.

If you have some time to spare and are curiously about how the right-wing outrage machine works, I can highly recommend the video essay “Stellar Blade: The Fake Outrage” by Shaun. His videos can be a little dry, but he goes to great lengths to pick apart a single example (the video game Stellar Blade) and how the right-wing first embraced the game (in the name of their fight against “wokeism, DEI,…”), only to then do a full about-face when the game did not turn out exactly as they had envisioned (and claim that the game was full of “wokeism, DEI,…”).

It’s a long video, but it does a very good job to expose the mix of unsubstantiated claims, copy-pasted accusations and ultimately fake outrage that underlies right-wing behavior these days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPsSguYNHpk

I can’t take articles such as this one seriously if they don’t mention right-wing terrorists recruiting through the same channels and means. That has been a known problem for more than a decade.

Treating online radicalisation solely as a problem of people with a migrant/non-European/Muslim/… background is very telling and borders on lying by omission.

Obligatory footnote: EvoPsych is mostly bunk, deeply intertwined with eugenics and riddled with homophobia, sexism and rape apologia.

The stock went down when Tesla’s sales numbers for the first quarter of 2025 got out and showed a decrease of sold vehicles, on top of Musk’s shenanigans and the protests at Tesla showrooms. Now these events have been “priced in” and the stock operates on vague estimates and wishful thinking again until the next slew of substantial bad news hits, at the latest when the next quarterly numbers are due.

AFAIK the importance of the proteasome for the immune system has already been established quite a while ago. If I understand it correctly this new research digs deeper into the processes in the proteasome as “the cellular mechanisms underlying [the generation of antimicrobal peptides] are not fully understood” (Quote from the actual research paper). So this new research fills a knowledge gap and is thus very valuable, but - no - the scientists do not claim to have “discovered a new part of the immune system”. That’s just hyperbole for the sake of generating clicks for the article.

The links to the registration do not work for me.

It’s a very strange coincidence that these are the subreddits that are suddenly experiencing a “bug”.

Chanel No.5 suffers from the problem that it was originally made over 100 years ago. While the scent of No.5 did not change much, lots and lots and lots of products that came later imitated the scent of the (at the time) prestigious No.5. So it’s not necessarily a case of “No.5 smells like soap”, rather than “soaps smell like No.5”. And No.5 can’t escape the position it founds itself in without becoming something else entirely.

Add Naughty Dog’s “Intergalactic” to the pile: The protagonist is female and a PoC! The usual suspects are already frothing at the mouth and recording a bajillion outrage bait videos for their Youtube channels.

“I’ll kill you… after I eat all these donuts and get off the couch.”

Because this confuzzled me, note that the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) are two separate things.

The Digital Markets Act is the one which is meant to remove economic barriers by “gatekeepers”. For example the DMA is used to force Google and Apple to open their app stores.

The Digital Services Act is the one that regulates (among other things) moderation, political neutrality and removal of extremist content on social media platforms. That’s the one Thierry Breton oversaw and threatened Elon with.

So while exTwitter’s lawyers may sigh in relief, because they got out of the DMA; the DSA is still looming large.

It still bothers me that the cube inside the cube is bigger than the outer line, despite forming the outer line during the intro animation. It will never stop bothering me.

My ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt is raising question already answered by my ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt.

Yes and no. Like in Stardew Valley, technically you can romance every NPC in your party, but in practice you have to meet certain criteria to do so and those differ from character to character. Of course, it is possible to “game” that system.

The most famous one ATM is probably “Baldur’s Gate 3” which offers a wide variety of mechanics and stats to measure if an NPC member of the player’s party is romantically interested in the player character. Two examples given in the talk I linked are the VNs “Monster Prom” or “First Bite”.

I love this game (500 hours played), but I have to bring up a point of criticism…

One aspect which has not aged well IMHO is the “kindness coin” mechanic: The exchange of goods for the NPCs’ friendship and/or affection. You give the NPCs stuff, then you give them more stuff, then some more on top, then you get a cut scene and then you get back to giving them stuff until you trigger the next one.

Yes, the requests on the blackboard and the occasional personal quest mix up things a little bit, but overall the mechanic remains the same and for me over the years this has cheapened the interaction with the NPCs for me somewhat: They are mostly transactional and predictable to the point where you can calculate their outcome.
You have to give character A so-and-so many objects X to romance them. It takes so-and-so many days to do that.

Sure, the “kindness coins” mechanic was industry standard at the time, but I wish there were more variety in regards to the interactions with the NPCs, because they are amazingly written and I wish there was more to do with them besides giving them stuff over and over again.