Yes - tortured using a burning hot gas-light, from what I understand.

There are a lot of subreddits which routinely award hundreds or thousands of upvotes for repetitive low value posts. ... This is a cog in the well-tuned machine of new-accounts being created and matured to look 'real' for when they are later used for advertising / manipulation later down the line.

In the early months of a new account, it is easier to spot. Eg. If you see a post on a game subreddit with a title like "Exciting to try this game, any tips get started?", you might click the profile and see that their entire history is a bunch of low-effort discussion starters. "Name a band from the 80s that everyone has forgotten"; "What's the most misunderstood concept in maths?"; "What's the most underrated (movie / band / drug / car / tourist attraction / whatever suits the topic of the subreddit)?"

A heap of threads like that, on a new account with a very generic name (adjective-noun-numbers is a common pattern); posting on a variety of subredits... is highly suspicious. But it gets harder to recognise as the account gets older and has a longer history - at which point it is ready to be sold / used for its next purpose.

A typical ActivityPub+Lemmy post.

I'm sure Microsoft would be supportive of that point of view. And with their wealth and lobbying power ... ... Lets not mention it again, and hope for the best.

Yeah, taking precautions to protect your health and the health of other does sound like anti-freedom. Is it still legal to wash your hands in the USA, or are they cracking down on that too? It's surprising that kind of stuff was allowed to continue for so long.

Notice "free speech" is in scare quotes. The previous comment isn't suggesting that free speech should not be protected. But rather they referring to the fact that many fascists claim that to criticize them, or to refuse to promote their views is to stifle their free speech.

Yesterday I bought something on Steam for the first time in many years. (I have a large Steam library, but in recent years I've been getting games from gog and itch instead.)

Since I hadn't bought from Steam in a long time I figured I should read the "Steam Subscriber agreement" that you have to click to accept when you buy something. Let me just say now, the agreement is a very very bad deal for customers.

It goes to great lengths to make it very clear that you don't own anything. You aren't buying anything, you have no essentially rights. You are simply paying for a license subscription to use software with various conditions. Valve is able to end your subscription with no refund if you break the agreement. And the best bit:

Furthermore, Valve may amend this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use) unilaterally at any time in its sole discretion.

So by using Steam we're putting a lot of trust in Valve; because the 'agreement' basically says they can do whatever they want, any time they want, for any reason they want.

Steam is quite good. I particularly appreciate their Linux support. But they are clearly using their position of dominance to make people agree to unfavourable terms. At the moment, things are fine. But make no mistake - when you use Steam, Valve has all the power. They can screw people over whenever they choose to.

With all that in mind, buying DRM free is better if you want to still have access to the software when a company decides to change direction for whatever reason.

Google has been doing this kind of thing for years, to strangle their competition. For example, back when Windows Phone existed, Google went deliberately out of their way to cripple youTube, and maps. Apparently google will do anything they can to create lock-in and faux loyalty.

Google are completely evil. Here we're talking about them using their popular products as weapons against competitors in unrelated areas. But also have a history of copying products made by others then using advertising strength to promote their version over the original. And if that somehow doesn't work... they buy out the competitors. Both youTube and google maps are examples of this.

Some people seem to bounce off Mastodon, saying that it doesn't have the content that they were looking for. I'd suggest that it probably does have the content that you are looking for, but you can't expect instantly see everything you are looking for from a fresh account.

People have spent years building up their twitter feeds; finding the people they like to follow, and browsing for new things, getting recommendations, and removing they stuff they don't like. You can't expect to match that level of content 10 mins after signing up on Mastodon. You will have to look around and tell it what you want to see before it will be what you want it to be.

So apparently having consumer-friendly laws does in fact lead to better products. Cool.

Perhaps the USA and other countries should follow the EU's good example on this.

Ah yes. How fitting for a young new person in the world. A reminder that 2°C of warming above the pre-industrial mean would be catastrophic, but also is a good lower-limit of what to expect based on current intentions.

It's too late to avoid problems; but it's certainly not too late to take action. This is not a binary yes / no or climate change / no climate change situation. It's a continuum. We can't avoid it completely, but the longer we delay action the worse it gets. There is still a lot of room for it to get worse. So reducing emissions is more important now than it has even been, even if some problems are unavoidable.