I have an Index also, one thing I find frustrating is that because the Quest has such a dominant marketshare and packages games differently, some smaller VR games and experiences I see seem to be only available as an apk file for Quest sideloading and there is no straightforward way for me to play them.

The main reason I don’t use it more though is I never got past the physical discomfort, I still feel nausea playing most games for more than a few minutes, and headaches from the pressure on my scalp/face if going longer than that, ie. trying to watch a movie with the headset. So that basically means I’m not going to just spend a lot of time passively chilling out in VR, it has to be some specific thing I want to do that feels worth it to push through the discomfort involved and can be gotten through relatively quickly. Mostly that ends up being just Beat Saber.

so let them keep doing what they do

Why would that be implied by anything I said?

I don’t think it’s either/or, having empathy for someone who killed himself because of the horrible things his country persuaded him to do doesn’t preclude having empathy for his victims, and it doesn’t mean absolving the crime. It is reality that everyone involved is victimized by war.

the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so

Part of how this was done is by using the emotional weight of atrocities for dehumanization of those claimed to be responsible. You might say that we don’t need to acknowledge the humanity of everyone universally, because the murderers have crossed a clear line by their own free will. But there is a concerted effort to obfuscate that line and drag everyone into plausible complicity; mandatory military service, suppression and murder of journalists, manipulative propaganda campaigns, it’s all effective and hardly anyone is genuinely immune.

Which isn’t to say the framing in the OP article is right; saying slaughtering people like that is “difficult to accept”, “psychological trauma”, calling all the victims “terrorists”, makes what should be an issue of recognizing and reacting to injustice into a problem of medical treatment to get people to be ok with doing the evil things the state directs them to do. That’s more manipulative propaganda, and many people will be convinced by it. The simplest counter that is least subject to being twisted is the conviction that everyone is always human and should be treated with empathy, without exception.

I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.

Another problem is, this (what you are personally being presented with, view counts) is also just something your screen is presenting to you to be taken at face value as reality. Might be better to give up on social media entirely as a reliable source of information.

If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

What about just a blackmailer assuming anyone booting an OS from a public computer has something to hide? And then they have write access and there’s no defense, and it doesn’t have to be everywhere because people seeking privacy this way will have to be picking new locations each time. An attack like that wouldn’t have to be targeted at a particular person.

Isn’t it risky plugging usb drives into untrusted machines?

The detail that negative reviews warning of the danger kept getting removed or edited is really sinister

From the article it sounds like a mostly psychological thing, like they have been so conditioned to do what they are told that bosses can bully/shame them into staying even after saying they quit.

Can’t track mouse movements on mobile though

Quality of journalism isn’t a binary based on whether it is propagandizing for the correct side.

I don’t think it works that way, it can be at different places on the scale. The other OP headlines are worse than the NYT one because they directly imply the “pre-emptive” claim is true, as opposed to indirectly implying it by choosing to reference the perspective of the IDF.

One relevant detail is that this was not a self contained device, it was for monitoring likelihood of seizures and had an external wireless interface. So my guess (this is pure speculation) on what happened is, the company owned the monitoring device, and the signals from the in-brain device were proprietary and encrypted. They couldn’t force her to have surgery but they could take back the external interface which was their property, and without that the in-brain device did nothing. Then the patient agreed to surgery because there was no further benefit to keeping it in her head and probably greater health risks to doing so.

It’s true that it’s biased in favor of Israel, but I’d say a biased headline isn’t as bad as a misleading one which isn’t as bad as a lie.

Obligatory LLMs see tokens not letters

I bet you could do it with ring signatures

a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular set of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the set’s members’ keys was used to produce the signature

I agree that it’s bad that there’s a false impression of privacy, but I think it would be better to allow this as an extension or something and not include it as a feature in the UI, or at least not on by default. That way people who otherwise wouldn’t bother won’t be tempted to drive themselves crazy looking for imaginary enemies.

Can anyone recommend any cool mods/projects built on top of Minetest?

Seems like with a lack of effective enforcement it could make things worse in some ways, since it would give a competitive advantage to the marketers corrupt enough to willingly break the law and try to get away with it. Also if there’s a situation where this kind of fraud is basically required to be competitive, it could allow authorities to selectively go after people for illegitimate reasons with this as a pretext.

I was agreeing with you so this is confusing, ok though.

If you think about it, it does not make financial sense for them to maintain this kind of system as a purely progressive price discrimination that charges richer people more money. I expect a lot of it would end up more like the Uber practice of charging more to people with low phone battery; they will identify who is more desperate, who has less choice but to buy the given product immediately, and charge them more. Because of how poverty works, that’s more likely the poor.

This is a major reason we still need cash and other ways of saying no to corporate surveillance; if we can’t maintain privacy when making purchases that information will be used as a weapon against us.