Mhm, fair point. Although… I would say the steam deck’s popularity and proof of viability as a gaming device is doing an immense amount of work on its own. I built a gaming PC ~2 years ago, and even as a long time developer and someone comfortable with a UNIX terminal I opted to get a copy of Windows for gaming, and had to awkwardly get to grips with it and find tools to get it playing the way I wanted.

It’s only ~1 month ago that the prevalence and maturity of the steam deck (combined with Windows recall re-emerging🤮) finally had me at ease enough to give Bazzite a shot, and since jumping myself and expressing how happy I am with it, 2 of my long term “on the fence” friends have asked me questions and are starting to try Linux themselves.

Larger Linux market share, regardless of how it gets there, gives broad confidence in Linux, and also pushes developers and Steam itself to maintain Linux support and tools like Proton, which reinforces the cycle, even if it doesn’t help us “kill Windows” for as long as users don’t understand how to install it.

Bit of an odd answer, but for me (and my wife), the last piece of the puzzle was really budgeting. The invisible, constant financial stress is a lot, and adds to that feeling of “pretending” when you’re not even sure if buying groceries will cause a bill to bounce, let alone hanging out with friends who always seem to comfortably have the money to do whatever it is you’re doing.

It’s been several years now (early 30s, started budgeting in late 20s), it took us a while to figure it out and progress was slow, but I can “see the line” now, towards retirement, towards home ownership, we have no more credit card debt (just student loans left, which we’re working on), and we budget “fun money” that I save up to make big purchases like a 7900XTX without any guilt or credit.

We’re also having our first kid soon, and at least financially, I’m not stressed about it at all, which would’ve been impossible in our twenties. Getting our financials in hand and headed in the right direction has just done massive work in helping me feel like I know what I’m doing, and that our life is actually getting better rather than stuck in place.

I’ll give two answers to this question, from the perspective of a Christian reading the Old Testament/Torah.

Wouldn’t it be effective to convince followers of a religion if a religion could accurately predict a scientific phenomenon before its followers have the means of discovering it?

This is interpretative, but if there is a God, he seems big on free will. Why give humanity the option to sin in the garden at all? Why not just reveal himself in the sky each morning? Why even bother creating a universe that can be explained without him? There’s an abundance of easy ways God could make himself irrefutable, and yet in the Bible he makes us “in His image”, and offers us choices like that tree in the garden.

Furthermore, why even create us to sin in the first place? My interpretation of the Torah is that God is big on relationship, and that free will is a key part of that. Just like a human relationship based on a love potion is kinda creepy, and a pale imitation of something real, it seems like God doesn’t want to be irrefutable.

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I think that’s the more relevant answer to your question, but I’ll also give the only example that comes to mind of the Bible seemingly imparting “scientific knowledge”, which is to look at the laws around “cleanliness”. Someone else already mentioned some “unclean” animals, but if you read more, they pretty consistently seem like good advice around bacteria. Some examples of times you need to “purify” (essentially take a bath) that seem like common sense now:

• being around dead bodies
• touching blood that’s not yours
• having your period
• etc.

Reading this as a modern person aware of germs, many of these “laws” seem like they would have kept the death rate of faithful Jews a lot lower than their neighbours in that day.

Exactly what I’ve done. Set my settings to hide NSFW, blocked most of the “soft” communities like hot girls and moe anime girls and whatever else (blocking the lemmynsfw.com instance is a great place to start), and I use All frequently. That’s how I’ve found all the communities I’ve subscribed to, but frankly, my /all feed is small enough that I usually see all my subscribed communities anyway.

Damn, that’s an extra level of weird here. Like… fair enough if you need to confirm you messed up the order and aren’t getting scammed, but you don’t need to trash the dang thing, for absolutely zero profit.

I feel like the worst case of leaving the pizza with you is free advertising when you share that free bonus pizza.

Not too uncommon to bring it with you to show them, an instinct to prove it’s wrong and you’re not lying. Although most places will ask you if you want to keep both, rather than just immediately tossing it.

Amen to that, here’s to hoping.

Mhm, fair enough, I suppose this is a difference in priorities then. Personally, I’m not nearly as worried about small players, like hobbyists and small companies, who wouldn’t’ve already developed something like this in house.

And I brought up “security through obscurity” because I’m somewhat optimistic that this can work out like encryption has, where tons of open source research was done into encryption and decryption, until we worked out encryption standards that we can run at home that are unbreakable before the heat death of the universe with current server farms.

Many of those people releasing decryption methods were considered villains, because it made hacking some previously private data easy and accessible, but that research was the only way to get to where we are, and I’m hopeful that one day we actually could make an unbeatable AI poison, so I’m happy to support research that pushes us towards that end.

I’m just not satisfied preventing small players from training AI on art without permission while knowingly leaving Google and OpenAI an easy way to bypass it.

Exactly, it is an arms race. But if a few students can beat our current best weapons, it’d be terribly naive to think the multiple multi-billion dollar companies, sinking their entire futures into this, and also already amoral enough to be stealing content en masse from the entire internet, hadn’t already cracked this and locked everyone involved into serious NDAs.

Better to know what your enemy has then to just cross your fingers and hope that maybe they didn’t notice this was possible, and have just been letting us poison their precious AI models they’re sinking billions of dollars into. Having this now lets us build the next version of nightshade that isn’t so trivially defeated.

Eh, it’s a fair point. Not trying something like this is essentially “security by obscurity”, which has been repeatedly proven to be a mistake.

Wouldn’t surprise me if OpenAI or someone else already had something like this behind closed doors, but now the developers of tools like Nightshade can begin to work on developing AI poison that’s more resilient against these kinds of “cleanup” tools.

Might be a good use case for Anubis, in addition to the URLParam passwords mentioned elsewhere. Enough protection to prevent trivial brute force scraping, while also being basically invisible to users.