That app is a special kind of inhuman torture.

I know this might sound a little condescending, but why are you torturing yourself by not using an adblocker?

Or not being able to play a board game, because it says “ages 9 - 99” on the box.

I’m not sure about this. Ever heard the phrase “the past is a foreign country”? Living through time would be like immersing yourself into a new country every couple of decades. You could even lessen the blow (and would probably have to in order to remain anonymous) by frequently moving around the world. People tend to give newcomers a certain amount of slack and with the enormous amount of knowledge and experience you would gain over time, you can easily and quickly immerse yourself in any new environment and adapt to whatever is “it” now.

I would only accept this kind of deal with the Devil if I had the power to turn people I care about into fellow immortals, which comes with its own pitfalls I’m well aware of (imagine holding a grudge for thousands of years), but still.

Probably, but it depends on the person. I stopped caring about some relationships that ended after a year, but I’m still thinking about others decades later.

Then again, you have billions of years to come up with a solution to this problem.

There is a difference between a war and a conflict. Hamas did not start this conflict, but they started this war.

Yup. I recall how the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs published new guidelines for digging mass graves in late 2021. One of many pieces of evidence pointing towards genocidal intent. Bucha at the latest should have made Putin’s goals in Ukraine more than clear to anyone.

You know there are massive differences between the war that Russia started and the war that Hamas started.

Dictators need the support of their citizens as well. None of them have truly unlimited power.

Every single one of them has to keep people both afraid and happy enough to maintain control. This includes various domestic interest groups (from peasants to members of the military) as well as influential individuals (a small number of key cadres, media figures, intellectuals and generals), in addition to foreign powers. It’s a constant and highly dangerous balancing act, because if there is one thing that is exceptionally rare among autocratic regimes, it’s a peaceful transition of power. No “president for life” wants to share the fate of Muammar Gaddafi.

You people have been shouting that he’s a dictator

Yes, because he is one. Nobody in their right mind would deny this.

since your owners told you to hate Russians.

This is ridiculous. So people in the free West are slaves now? And no, we don’t hate Russians, just Putin, his cronies, his soldiers who murder and rape their way through Ukraine - and his lap dogs who are busy regurgitating primitive “russophobia” propaganda talking points, either for free or in the vain hope that they don’t get sent in the meat grinder.

Yes! I remember experiments with similar projectors and interfaces like this device going back at least as far as the early 2010s. Would be fun to mess with.

Isn’t “soft launch” the usual term for this?

Yup, although my impression is that a significant part of it is spread by people who agree with the disinformation they are posting here. Then again, if a user behaves exactly like a paid troll, it doesn’t really matter to me whether or not they might actually be doing it for free. The damage is the same.

Interesting. I wasn’t logged in, so I didn’t know.

Bit late, isn’t it? I had already forgotten all about it and I don’t think I’m the only one.

Last time I checked, those had been made inaccessible before the recent hacking attacks.

I would recommend turning the brightness down to near zero. Combine this with Dark Reader for websites (Firefox) and using a white or grey on black night reader mode in ebook reader apps. At first, the display will appear almost unreadable, but your eyes will quickly adjust.

There’s a reason I said “so far”. I’m open to the idea that there might be newer and better systems in the future. So far though, they haven’t been invented yet.

I would recommend “spending” about 6 GB on a 1080p x265 encoding of a movie, if you can. The quality is much better, good enough to be viewed up close on a large screen, unless there’s a large amount of high frequency detail, like in recent animated or very CGI-heavy movies - or unless it’s an older film with strong film grain and/or large mass scenes (think Lawrence of Arabia). Those do benefit from higher bitrates and resolutions, even if your screen isn’t 4K.