Healthy parenting would go a long way. See some of the other comments in this thread.

You can also have settings on your local network. If you’re afraid of your kid casually finding something inappropriate, you can set that up stuff locally without involving the government. A determined kid will still find a way to get stuff, so this is more a safeguard against accidental discovery.

Investing in quality education would also benefit everyone.

the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn.

This is false.

Parents have a number of options available to them that do no need to involve the state.

Using AI seems extremely excessive compared to a regular interface or human.

I mean this is kind of true of all people everywhere. The marshmallow test has flaws but I think it’s still revealing. A lot of people are really bad at self control and delayed gratification.

The game is good despite DND 5e’s rules, not because of them.

Unfortunately, DND is mega popular. Many people have never played anything else. Many people have never even played it. So any discussion about it has a “of course 15 strength is +2, isn’t that just how RPGs work?” segment where you have to establish that DND is in fact weird.

I kind of feel like anyone who spends $20 on a video game skin shouldn’t be allowed to make any financial decisions for themselves. Like, it was a test and you failed.

Fallout 4 is like 4 different games crammed into a trench coat.

• high emotion story game. Go rescue your child!
• high action shooter. Boom! Headshot!
• stats driven RPG. That naked bandit is level 40 so you can’t kill him even if you shotgun his face
• settlement management game. Build and decorate a little town! Set up trade routes!

All of these are kind of badly done, and mashing them all together didn’t make something greater than the parts.

Yes. However, it’s an assumption they honor those requests and don’t try to track you anyway.

Plus Google isn’t the only company trying to do individualized targeted advertising.

First, individually targeted advertisement should be illegal. Instead of trying to figure out who I am and serving me ads based on that, they should only be able to look at server side facts. What is the video? This is how television and radio ads have worked for ages. You have a video about SomePopBand, you advertise concert tickets. You have a video about bikes, you advertise bike stuff. You don’t know who I am. Suddenly, the motivation for most of the privacy invading, stalking, nonsense is gutted.

Some people would still block those static ads. If they showed some restraint, I think more people would accept them. But that’s a sad joke- no profit driven org is going to show restraint.

Secondly, if they can’t ethically run the business at a profit, the business probably doesn’t deserve to exist. That or it’s a loss leader to get people into the ecosystem.

I already barely watch YouTube. It’s mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.

Jane Jacobs wrote about this pretty extensively in “Death and life of great American cities” back in like the 1960s, if anyone hasn’t read that.

This is part of why I plan to never move out of the city. Almost anywhere else in the US is going to be car centric. So I could move somewhere that’s “cheaper” but it wouldn’t be as good in ways I care about.

I’m just going to go scream into the void for a while.

The intersection of “people pleaser” + “inability to accurately imagine the future” + “low social energy” seems to be a vicious and common hell for some folks. They say yes to invites because they want to please the other person, and imagine they’ll totally be up for it, but when the moment arrives they don’t have the juice for it.

There’s probably other ways to have this problem, but that’s how a few friends have described it.

I live in NYC. It’s pretty great.

I can walk a couple minutes to some bodegas. A couple more minutes to some small groceries. Looking at the map, there’s a couple supermarkets I forgot existed within 15 minutes of walking, in addition to the two I usually go to. There’s also other useful stuff like pharmacies, hardware stores, libraries, and so on. This isn’t a fancy or especially expensive neighborhood.

I have a hand cart for when I want to buy something heavy.

I haven’t had a car for like 15 years. I have no regrets. None of the “But what if it rains??” fears have ever been a problem. I can only remember twice in 15 years I needed to borrow someone’s car to move stuff.

Targeted, individualized, advertising should be illegal. This will gut a lot of the motivations for the privacy invasions and data harvesting. This is how advertising worked for thousands of years. I think it could continue to be just fine.

The amount of resources humanity is spending on targeted advertising is extremely depressing when you consider the opportunity cost. There are thousands of engineers and product managers that spend all day on this stuff instead of anything useful.

I know pre 1.x.x is kind of a wild west for versioning but uh is there any logic to the version numbers here? I’d think a new feature would be a minor version bump, not patch

I liked The Dispossessed a lot, aside from one scene. The book overall really made me think.

It’s difficult to compromise with people who want to kill you for what you are.

I’m out of the loop. What?