Once in a blue moon, SCOTUS these days gets it right. Which is good!

A shame we don't have more blue moons.

100%, but I think some of us are like "Why are you self-censoring? This isn't TikTok!" Let's not use seggs* and PDF files.

*Unless we're talking about sexy eggs for some reason. Sorry, "seggzy eggs."

Mostly FFXIV. I decided to try a new class: Rogue/Ninja. Kinda impromptu, but I needed way to sneak by some baddies in the new-ish "Occult Crescent" field exploration zone. And Ninja has an ability to slowly stealth walk, going undetected by mobs.

And Oh. My. God. I'd forgotten how awful it is to level a class from 0 to 50. I haven't done this since I did my initial class as Thaumaturge/Black Mage. Which would've been like 3-4yrs ago? I have other classes -- technically, Jobs -- to max level (Lvl 100), but those classes all start at higher levels. FFXIV is weird like that; classes from expacs 3.0 and up start at higher levels. Like Machinist at Lvl 30, Red Mage (which is my main) at Lvl 50, and one of the most recent classes, Pictomancer, at Lvl 80. I was also playing those classes/job while going through the game's Main Story Quest, so I didn't "notice" the grind. I was just playing the MSQ, the game, normally.

As such, I've really not tried to quickly grind from Lvl 1 before. And the game doesn't help. No access to dungeons and trials until Lvl 15. And overall a very limited selection until Lvl 50. No AoE attacks until somewhere in mid-30s! Barely any attacks in the kit, until Lvl 30 (when the Ninja job opens up).

For EXP, had to grind out leves, dungeons, FATEs, and random quests. I'm not against grinding, it's just a boring-ass grind.

Anyway, I got to Lvl 50 yesterday, so now things should start get less boring. Lvl 50 on its own opens up like 30+ instances of various kinds. And there are tons more opportunities from there til Lvl 100. My goal is to get to 100 within the next two weeks. Could probably do it this week, but I don't wanna go that hard.

EGM will always be my favorite vide game magazine. I like Game Informer, had a subscription back in the day, even had a subscription last year before they shut down. But GI is no EGM. Wish they'd come back, too.

Not that I care about TikTok one way or another, but one of the best arguments I've seen against banning it dealt with supposed protection of Americans' data. And I'm pretty sure that's the approach that lawmakers have taken with this; it's not that Chinese propaganda is bad, it's that China shouldn't have this much private info on Americans. I believe that's the primary angle they've taken to get around First Amendment concerns.

Anyway, the argument is, "Oh, but it's OK for US tech companies to harvest data? That's it's OK that we have weak privacy and data protection laws? As long as US companies are doing it, then it's not a problem?" Because, remember the laws says that the company becomes "unavailable" in the US if not sold to an American company. Presumably, if TikTok were sold to a US company, then the app could continue with no issue, tracking and collecting tons of data on Americans to be packaged and sold to the highest bidders.

I will admit, I was somewhat more pro-ban before hearing that argument. But now I'm more neutral. I don't use it, so I'm not/shouldn't be affected. But the government trying to hide behind data privacy and protection to ban TikTok does feel rather empty.

It'd be interesting if everyone "started" in the same place. For example, Mastodon.social. But then eventually, like maybe after 90 days, one was forced to choose a "home" instance to migrate to. Could be through a list of servers presented, or maybe a user has found one through friends, so they just type in the server and it kicks off a migration process. I'm almost thinking like an MMO starting area.

During that 90 days, the user has to (or should) learn about federation, why decentralization is important for privacy and security, what defederation means and blocking options, how and why instances are a thing, how to migrate an account, etc. Maybe even some info on how and why one could stand up their own instance.

And this doesn't have to like a classroom/book setting. It doesn't have to be "read this documentation." Maybe some 1min video clips, brief tooltips, little reminders to read a brief paragraph of two on some Mastodon topic. Gamify it; let people collect badges and achievements.

During all this, users have full access to everything Mastodon users can do. They can interact with anyone on the entry server, plus any server that's federated with it. Or maybe they're an already experienced user and want to go straight to another instance; they can either skip all this and migrate or start straight at another instance.

Though I wonder if that's still too much friction.

Because Mastodon and the Fediverse is confusing, especially at first. I'm a techy person. I work in IT. But when I started to looking at the Fediverse back in 2023, it was confusing. Where do I go to sign-up? There are different services on the Fediverse? Which do I get access to? Do I need an account for each service? How do I know that this instance for this service (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Masto, etc.) is a decent one? What happens if my friends/people I follow are on a different server? Will we be able to interact? What does it even mean to federate/defederate?

These are all the questions I asked as I was looking to all this. And it wasn't a quick 15min look. No, I spent a few hours looking into it.

But the average person isn't going to ask all this and research this. They just want a place to follow famous people, post about their life, and post pictures of their food and pets. When these people (myself included) signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, they just went to the appropriate site and signed-up.

It's not nearly as simple for Mastodon. Sure, Mastodon.social acts as the flagship and "gateway," but there are still the other questions that probably need some answers. Otherwise, a user may have a bad experience ("Oh, my friends aren't on this Mastodon server thing? And we're not federated? I gotta make a new account there? Ugh..."). Twitter and even Bluesky don't require those questions. Everyone is on the same instance, all the time.

The reality is that most don't really care for options and choice. Or even security and privacy. They want ease of accessibility. Mastodon is likely a better product (in most regards; I have and use both Mastodon and Bluesky, daily; Bluesky does a few things better), but the options Mastodon provides, especially at the start, are really more roadblocks or offramps than anything.

When I want to pirate, torrenting is my go to. I don't do it very often, so I'm not really up-to-date on more modern methods. For some movies, I know there are those websites like 123movies or whatever. And I've used those. But Idek what additional methods there are anymore.

That said, I've tried torrenting over I2P, but it's just slow. Not necessarily super slow, but obviously slower than doing it over the clearweb with a commercial VPN. Additionally it seems like there's less available content with torrenting over I2P. At least in the little experience I've had with it.

Ah fair point. Yeah, I rarely look at political content on YouTube, Instagram, and even Bluesky. Mainly because I use my real name on these platforms.

I reserve that for reddit, Lemmy, Tildes, and Mastodon, where I use screennames. And Mastodon doesn't have an algorithm.

On Twitter, I did engage in political content, even with my real name, but I largely stopped using Twitter daily years ago. I went from tweeting regularly, to only lurking, and just maybe once or twice a week at that. By the end, I was checking maybe once a month. The Twitter algorithm probably didn't have enough info on me, given my weak activity levels.

Same. And I am a racial minority (though not black, so that may color things...excuse the unintentional pun). That said, on Mastodon, I mainly interact with the people on my instance. And it's small. There's probably only a core group of like 50 active individuals, and I'm one of them. So there I'm not surprised I don't see racism.

Interestingly, I have the same experience on even the proprietary social media sites. I was on Twitter from 2009 to 2023. I can't say I was ever served up far-right content by the algorithms. I'm still on YouTube; same experience. Same on Instagram. Same on Bluesky.

I'm not trying to discount other people's experiences, and I've seen the horrible tweets referenced in news articles and reddit comments and such. So I know it exists, but why am I not being served this content, while so many others apparently are? I mean, I'm OK with not getting far right wing content, lol. Leave me out of it! Makes my online life easier and more enjoyable. But it's just odd.

Oh god, please no. I need some mind's-eyebleach.

Mitigations

Just use another torrent client. Deluge and Transmission etc do not have this vulnerability.

Was wondering what the takeaway is here. I updated to 5.0.1. Does that fix all these? If not, guess I'll try a different torrent client.