In the past 12 years since I've been out of university, I've read dozens of visual novels ranging from a few hours in length to a few hundred hours in length. I've read zero books and one audio book. I clearly don't have an issue with reading but with the book format specifically.

I can't speak for other people, but the main reason I don't read books is because I find it difficult to follow them. When I'm reading, I tend to think about what's happening as I'm reading. So it's pretty frequent for me to zone out for a few seconds. With a book, I then have to hunt down where I was in a giant wall of text and probably reread the same passage several times to get there. Audio books have similar problems, especially if you're trying to play them while e.g. exercising. This can happen many times on even a single page so it gets frustrating.

With a visual novel, I'm presented with a small snippet of text at a time and there are other stimuli to engage my brain so it's not such a heavy focus on one single thing. This makes it easier for me to take my time and think about what's going on while I'm reading. I find visual novels a joy to read whereas reading a book feels like work. So at least for me, this is why I haven't read any books in over a decade. I assume a lot of other people probably also find the format burdensome and just turned to other media as a result, with TV and movies probably being the most popular alternatives.

The situation in Gaza is, at minimum, tragic. It's also extremely complex and nuanced. I do, at least, understand the feelings have over it, though.

And yet, as an employee of a business, a fairly basic expectation is that you will not deliberately disrupt business operations. If these individuals went into this expecting to lose their job and did so anyway, that's commendable; they stood up for what they believed in at substantial personal cost, even if I think they may have an oversimplified and naive view of the situation. If they were expecting any other outcome than this, though... I don't know what to say besides "welcome to the real world."

Microsoft is in a situation where they're so big they can afford to piss off plenty of users for no reason. That doesn't mean they should. There's no real good reason to do stuff like this.

The way they should handle this is to do a better job of explaining the benefits of using an MS account (there are some and they do a very poor job of actually explaining what they are) but still provide a clear "I don't want to and never bother me again" option for people who are dead-set on not engaging. Pestering people and forcing the issue does not have a net positive outcome for MS, even if they're so big they can ignore the relatively small number of users they piss off doing it. Even if you assume they have a financial incentive to get people to do this... there are better ways to convince people who might be open to it and not drive off people who never will be. And I say this as someone who has like a dozen devices and I use my MS account on every one of them. Just let people do what they want.

You have to understand that they don't care about losing people like us. It's hard to understate just how large YouTube actually is; it's fucking huge. They don't care about losing tens or even hundreds of thousands of users to this, especially since those users don't directly generate revenue (arguably they actually cost money). They don't need the additional popularity they'd get from such people at this point; there isn't really any sufficiently viable alternative to YouTube for the type of content they host and they know it (what, are you going to go to Vimeo instead?).

Alphabet knows that the vast majority of people aren't savvy enough to find a way around this and are too locked into the service to quit. Most users will either tolerate the ads or buy the ad-free subscription (in which case Alphabet makes even more money off them). They already won this battle a long time ago.

At the moment uBlock Origin seems to be capable of blocking ads on YouTube proper just fine but doesn't seem to work properly for blocking ads in YouTube shorts (maybe it blocks some but I still get ads injected every three shorts, although I can at least just skip past them). Another key piece of this puzzle, however, is Chrome, which is of course also owned by Alphabet. Chrome and Chromium, and by extension 99% of the other browsers people use, are going to be removing Manifest v2 support pretty soon, at which point only a substantially-reduced functionality version (uBlock Origin Lite) will be able to work on Manifest v3; at that point, only Firefox users will really be able to easily block ads, and considering they've already found a way around uBO for shorts, I doubt it'll remain that way for much longer.

Going to add some context since this is something I've been following a bit. If you're familiar with something like World of Warcraft where it's designed as a multiplayer game and a lot of the core functionality is handled at the server level, this is similar in that respect. It'd be like the WoW servers going offline and Blizzard not offering any alternative. This is actually pretty common in gaming; you see failed "gacha" games go offline with no recourse pretty frequently if they don't make enough money, for example.

The reason why this game is raising such a stir is because it presents a unique opportunity for consumers to actually push back against this practice. Ubisoft is based out of France, which has fairly strong consumer protection laws and requires a response if enough people petition the government about an issue. Ross (who you might have heard of from the Youtube series "Freeman's Mind" or "Ross's Game Dungeon") pointed this out and made a big video about it advocating for action that kind of took off.

The general point of contention is the "no alternatives" aspect and it's what I believe people are trying to get changed. My understanding is that they're saying that if a game like this needs to close down services, it should either still provide some (potentially reduced functionality) way to continue to explore and play the game, provided dedicated server utilities, release the relevant tools and information for fans to recreate official services, or provide a full refund. I think those are reasonable asks for companies to make, so long as they have the option to choose which of these routes they wish to pursue.

I can understand opposition to streaming because streaming sucks; you have zero control or rights and are entirely dependent on whatever company is serving you not to fuck you in any one of dozens of different ways.

But preferring physical media over local copies on your drives? I don't understand the appeal. Physical media has a lot more problems with degradation; not just because the media itself is prone to it (drives fail too), but because it's typically harder to back up, it's more difficult to notice subtle degradation, and error correction isn't really possible. If you have the actual video file on your local storage, then backups, integrity checking, and even error correction aren't really all that hard to set up.

There are a lot of other benefits, too. Less physical space is used; if you have a large collection of media, those discs add up, especially if you use individual boxes. Playback is easier, copying is easier, modification is easier... I could probably think of another handful of reasons but I think my point's evident. What exactly is supposed to be the appeal? I guess you have some pretty box and disc art if you're into that kind of thing... I mean I like retro computers and those don't have a ton of practical utility either, so if that's why, I can understand. But for practical purposes I don't really get why anyone would prefer physical media to a local digital version.

It's called "Startup Boost" and I disable it on almost any PC I touch.

Putin may be many levels of evil but he is not overtly suicidal or stupid. Even in a declared war scenario it's unlikely he would use nuclear weapons except as a response to an equivalent class of threat because it would invite others to do the same; that's the whole premise of MAD. And beyond their nukes, which they've found they can't really leverage into anything except deterrence, Russia has no real form of power outside of its willingness to use its population as disposable people. This isn't much when faced with a properly-equipped modern military.

For the past 20 years or so, Putin has been following the playbook of Nazi Germany leading up to WW2; that is, a combination of rapid, decisive deployments to eat up smaller neighbors and the weaponization of fear, uncertainty, and doubt to deter other nations from responding in any way more substantial than a stern "please don't do that." What was legitimately surprising to me was that the US actually didn't let them get away with this in 2020; crazy how actually learning from past mistakes can sometimes lead to more positive outcomes. Chalk one up for Uncle Sam, it's one of the few unquestionably good strategic decisions I'd attribute to my own government over my lifetime. I may not like Biden or his DNC puppetmasters all that much but they damn sure got this one right.

As a result, the past few years have started to demonstrate Russia's martial ineptitude and people have finally started to wise up to their act. It's unlikely that Russia will be able to get away with their previous strategy again any time soon now that Europe is starting to re-militarize and Russia's neighbors are jumping at the bit to enter NATO. It's only a shame that it took the loss of Crimea, substantial parts of Georgia, and many Ukrainian lives to get to this point.

I think we can all agree that the former is substantially worse than the latter. I still think the latter is a problem; the existence of a greater problem does not negate a lesser problem.

Platforms like Facebook are one of the main ways people discuss matters of politics and ideology these days. Strictly in the sense of "should such places be free," I'm in the camp of "yes, they should." I believe it's important that people be able to discuss their opinions openly and freely without fear of substantial consequence. Being able to openly talk about our beliefs and having those beliefs challenged is how we advance our understanding of the world. Bottling them up or only talking about them with like-minded individuals only serves to increase tribalism and insulate us.

Now, private organizations like Facebook are recognized to have certain rights, and compelling them to do things should require good cause. I personally think, ideologically speaking, that this should pass that bar. I think this is something that's really important and I think it's worth impinging on a private organization's right to self-governance in order to ensure the public is able to continue to discuss things openly and freely on the platform of their choice. I know a lot of people disagree with me and that is their prerogative, but I personally think it's important.

Speaking more to the legally recognized right to free speech in the US, the US Constitution only protects it in the context of government power because that is the limit of its scope; it's a document designed to define and limit the powers of the US federal government. I don't think that means that the people who created that document felt that the government was the only possible source of encroachment on that right, rather government was what they were seeking to define and, possibly, the main potential threat to it that they were aware of at the time. We're in a new age where governments are not the only major threat to many of our rights, so I think maybe it might be beneficial to expand the protections that give the right of free speech. Corporations aren't currently compelled to protect free expression on their platforms, but maybe it's time to at least talk about changing that. After all, tyranny wears many faces, and government is not the only potential source of tyranny.

Notepad's strength is (or was) that it's a dumb text editor. It's the nano of Windows. I don't want spellcheck in nano any more than I want it in notepad.

Hopefully these stupid modifications are built into the frontend so that I can at least use Metapad LE as a suitable replacement.

The EU can do whatever the EU says they can do within their own jurisdiction. It's their market and their rules. If Apple doesn't think it's profitable to operate within the parameters that the EU has set for their market, they are welcome to exit that market. Otherwise, they will, in the end, comply with EU regulations or continue to receive whatever punitive measures the EU enacts for non-compliance, up to and including a total ban from the market.

"It is like if a sports team" decided that it would simply ignore its parent organization's rules. If the Detroit Red Wings tried to give the middle finger to the NHL, they would likely face increasingly punitive measures and eventually be banned from the league and replaced by an organization that respects the rules. They don't do this because they're likely not interested in financially ruining themselves, so they play by the rules the NHL sets. Likewise, Apple will eventually either comply or deal with the consequences.

He'll have to contend with my commanders, Colonel Panic and General Protection Fault.

If the owners have voluntarily blocked their own website in the state of Texas, how does Texas have standing to enforce or sue over their laws? It seems that the company is no longer doing business in the state of Texas, so I don't understand how they can be liable to Texas laws.

I'm not so sure. If you're running calculations that feed into themselves many times, small errors can escalate to give you inaccurate information. That might be a situation in which more precision is necessary.

I looked at the pictures on the linked article as well as the Reddit post the article links to. It doesn't really look like malware to me, it just looks like an ad. For that matter... what exactly is malware supposed to look like? A lot of malware doesn't look like anything. Maybe a ransomware prompt? But this doesn't really resemble that.