Agreed - working as intended, and it's not just LDS. I'm in FL and churches here have been opposing publicly funded safety nets for my whole life, in favor of voluntary, often church-led, donations.

Witcher 3 doesnt need leveled enemies or loot. There is already a wide enough variety of monsters and equipment to convey player progression, and the leveling only exists to make sure that Geralt is as vulnerable to human enemies at the end of the game as the beginning. That's great! That's the kind of world it is. I just don't think you need constantly increasing hitpoints & a loot treadmill to keep it that way.

Smaller, narrower phones generally. Blackberry keyboards (and slideout keyboards) in particular.

Loved the various hardware oddities of the moto Z line: a rear fingerprint scanner that was easy to use while holding the phone, and of course the magnetic attachments. Used to carry two batteries that could hot-swap, and a game controller in my bag.

For a moment there, it looked like predictors of twitters final demise were going to be proven wrong - or would at least have trouble making a clear distinction in light of how durable twitter has been. Instead Musk is about to toss brand loyalty in the trash and paint a clear line for before-musk, after-musk. No version that succeeds twitter will ever be the twitter that rose to success, but now even a layperson will know the difference . May as well be an obituary.

"So, we’ve all had a... time on Reddit lately," Go_JasonWaterfalls wrote. "And I’m here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the 'now what?' conversation."

If I was part of the organization responsible for making unilateral changes that only benefitted itself, I'd be embarrassed to start a message this way.

"Now that I've slapped you around a little, let's talk about what YOU can do to repair our relationship" is what it sounds like to me.

I swear sometimes it feels like a superpower to have grown up in the 90s and learned the ground rules for multiple OSes, search tools, and file systems - the descendants of which are nearly all still in use today.

I defer of course to any oldheads who can still bang out a long .bat file or compile and configure Linux; I just mean it's a very useful quirk of the era that skills learned on windows 3.1 or OSX are still broadly applicable, even in fields where 'using the computer' is a minor task of one's workday.

That's ok lol, it's just a phone! My goal is to treat it as a tool, vs just scenery and this is more configurable than the standard Android grid. I don't think anyone is being mean, but the extreme range of opinions is pretty funny!

It's definitely not for everyone! I like being able to group functions by size and position, vs just a bunch of app bubbles, and the cubist look is oddly satisfying.

It's useful for me to get the whole picture, or whip open a productivity app, in one tap or swipe, so I can get back to whatever else is happening. So, on a 6.2in, everything is very readable.

OK, sure, except that Netflix is incentivized to say as much, regardless of public sentiment.

I'm sure the hit they took to subscribers is worth it in terms of their balance sheets, else we would see a retraction, but there's no real way for them to know what the subscriber base would look like in the absence of anti-consumer policies (or their increasingly unsatisfying content production policies), based solely on historical subscriber data.

Users who got sick of it left, but we can only leave once, and Netflix wasn't going to try and retain us unless the exodus was unprecedented. I'd argue the real proof of customer dissatisfaction will be the piracy numbers on their various shows. Customers who want their content, but not their costs or policy restrictions, represent actual money left on the table.

As for their labor practices, well - like Adam Conover said, strikes are more effective than boycotts, and there are several ongoing. Won't do much for the user experience, but maybe the long term consequence is fewer, better shows with actual completed stories.

For the moment it is still a massive repository of useful esoteric knowledge. I've stopped using it for anything active / current, but so long as it exists and is searchable I don't see that I'll be able to move away from accessing it entirely.

Twitter, however, is dead to me.

I'm reading Michael Crichton's The Sphere. It's an odd one - Crichton rarely spends a lot of time on character, but Sphere in particular is barely interested in the people at all. It's situations and implications, a sense of mystery and dread, that the author is interested in, and he whips from one dilemma to the next so quickly its a little disorienting. that can sound like praise, but I'm not sure it is. This is an early work, and it feels rough now and then. Without strong characters, the only voice you really hear is Crichton's, and his tech-terror-explainer 'tone' can be a little tough to swallow in large amounts. all the same, I'm desperate to see where it goes, even as I suspect it will all be over much faster than most of his later novels.

I think anyone who was around, and online, before reddit/twitter/Facebook became the consolidated social media behemoths that they are, are willing to learn something new. The before-times were replete with smaller communities where your internet handle was the only real source of continuity (and even then, only if you wanted it to be).

But those whose ONLY experience of online discourse is the big 3? It's a lot to adjust to. I don't know if this is what will hit critical mass, but then, maybe that's setting the wrong goal to begin with. Can the communities connected here be self-sustaining for a time, regardless? Definitely.