Your media sources aren’t really indictive of monoculture. More the opposite and that’s the problem for marketers. It’s hard as shit to reach people because everyone can form their own niche media community. If people still treated IGN and like award shows as their mainstream trustworthy source, we’d still be in the pre-youtube monoculture

2020 plain clothes federal agents kidnapping people to makeshift prisons and the none of that really being addressed should have been an ey opening for people to view their greatest threat being the government they live under. Same with the Snowden leaks and rather than that becoming illegal, much of of progressively becoming legal going forward. Maybe some even made retroactively legal

I keep thinking maybe things will good by 2030 and remember that’s 4 years away. Game devs please target the Steam Deck and Switch 2 as the baseline. Mid range and high end is just too premium for most people. Even entry level enthusiast gaming hardware is too expensive because of memory and storage. Steam Deck and Switch 2 are good low power draw integrated graphics level. That’s not terrible for pricing

Yup. For all the making fun of chinesium (socially acceptable racism often when people talk about chinese products. Very clear when one scoffs at a taiwanese product as being trash because chinese but then walks it back when they learn it’s of taiwanese origin), in my life I’ve seen chinese phones, audio products, and cars go from scoffed at to being well regarded in enthusiast communities.

I saw it in other hobbies of mine. Not long ago people only talked about Japanese and German chef knives - Chinese knives must be trash. Then eventually people started to try out Chinese knives that weren’t just grocery store bargain stuff. Now progressively people are trying knives from Vietnam. Turns out people have been making knives in these countries for thousands of years. Not as bad but maybe worse is when a person I knew told me they were at first surprised to learn movies were made around the world rather than just being in hollywood, english language. Went from American and European made video game peripherals dominating to more and more chinese competitors like 8bitdo, aula, whatever.

In my lifetime, earlier if it said made in South Korea of made in Taiwan, the assumption was poor quality. Hyundai was scoffed at until like the mid 2010s in my experience. I’m told Japanese products were scoffed at as poor quality until like the end of the 70s and then you had major strikes and violence against Asian American people in the rust belt as anti-Japanese sentiment primarily in regards to competition for autoworkers and steel. Now Japanese made is fully regarded as high quality and the desire to compete in quality+value+parts+serviceability doesn’t seem to be of much interest to US or European automakers (that parts availability and serviceability is major)

I imagine it the same as decades back with Korean and Taiwanese made goods, you get you pay for. If you start on the premise that a $200 Chinese product should be as good or better than like a $500 American product, that’s a nonsense expectation to have. People will go from a $1200 iPhone and use a $200 Ulephone and determine that $800 phone from a company with a Chinese sounding name, name of their CEO, are trash unless it turns out that that Chinese sounding name company is headquartered in Taiwan or Singapore

I suppose so. I’d rather they spell it out for simple readability. Like I don’t know what Krita means but easy to read. Kate text editor may mean something, I don’t know. Kdenlive is easy to read. Don’t know what the ‘den’ part is supposed to mean

Apparently it’s “KDE Non-Linear Video Editor”. At least kdenlive is easy to read in my opinion

It took me reading the comments here to get that it’s pronounced Wilbur. I don’t get why it needs to be an acronym

I just did the upgrade from 25.10 and am very entertained that it has wobbly windows on by default

Linux is legit pretty easy now comparable to Windows. It’s application preferences and familiarity that keeps people at bay. New to computer user, I don’t think they’d struggle anymore with a gnome or kde linux desktop than with windows. to do the regular stuff people do. Browse the internet. Save their photos/documents in some folders

We’re in a mature software stage for these art software applications. Easier to catch up than create new features that people make essential to their workflow. Today it’s commercial alternatives that have closed the gap well enough. Someday in the future open source stuff will. It’s inevitable

From what I interpret off the Wikipedia page, it had sold single digit millions by COVID and then went viral in China during COVID and that’s how it ended up selling tens of millions more

Didn’t think the Witcher 3 had caught up to infinite releases Skyrim. TW3 will have another big bump when the new expansion hits. It’ll probably get rewnewed interest from modders as well

He was probably always like this to a degree. Thing to keep in mind is that political alignments when it comes to voting blocs aren’t all or nothing. Even if historically Chapelle has voted democratic, that doesn’t mean he cared for everything equally or at all and this applies very much to black people and racial minorities in the US and western European countries and leftist parties as those parties are seen as less racist parties so you really don’t have as much leeway to vote for other issues when your safety and basic rights as a minority group are more of a concern over stuff like economic/immigration/healthcare/sexuality/gender/etc policies. Like Chapelle will dependably care for politics that are pro-black Americans but any other race, I’m skeptical he actually cares and very likely doesn’t care for matters of gender and sexuality. In regards outside of social black american policies, he may very well be firmly conservative. It just wasn’t good for his brand earlier in his career

Similar vein would be like the past decade of popular rappers being way more embracing of the republican party than in the past. Like Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj. Like do Beyonce and Jay-Z really care about the working class or other races. Jay Z was a crack dealer and in the Epstein papers and Beyonce has consistently made use of sweatshop labor and been ruthless with her touring employees. Social progressives in regards to the what they identify with, conservative in regards to their money and possibly other identities.

Racism is still a problem but this isn’t the 70s. It’s not that surprising considering how mainstream homophobia a lot of rap used to be up to the early 2010s. So as multiculturalism continues to become more and more normal, I have expected for a long time for left/right voting splits by race to trend towards 50/50. In the past openly conservative actors/musicians/comedians/entertainers/etc were a lot more common. I’m guessing the civil rights movements going mainstream is what changed that. Then as the civil rights movements that had huge swaths of people could identify with starting passing some good enough threshold, demographic based civil rights becomes more niche and parties have to experiment with messaging and being a conservative entertainer/artist stops being career suicide

I think there should be some healthy skepticism for actors and their actual political alignments. It’s been practically required for public relations for entertainers to be seen as leftist but at the studio executive and I expect at the funding source producer level, there’s always been a high percentage of conservative representation. And publicly rich leftist, I’ve never seen them as eager to fund leftist political causes like publicly rich conservatives. Well known advocate for victims of sexual abuse, Ashton Kutcher, was quick to defend his close friend and serial rapist from that 70s Show. Stories of him and Wilmer Valderrama make them both sound predatory towards young women/girls.

Like their shouldn’t be any genetic reason why white people should be more conservative across the board of polices. The same really for LGBTQ people being progressive which is why I’m never surprised about the existence of conservative people of LGBTQ backgrounds. People always mention how western European politics are so much more leftist than American but to me that only really applies to the social safety net but that doesn’t apply to overall policy in regards to capitalism, immigration, foreign policy/imperialism-racism outside of their own borders. As non-white populations in European countries increase, to me it looks like race politics and racism have become more and more reflective of the US. I have doubts the social safety nets in Europe would have ever been passed if at the times their populations were as racially diverse as the US was in the 50s-80s

Dave Chappelle the older he’s gotten, the more he’s punched down. It’s not like he wasn’t doing that when he was younger, he just got worse and worse over time. Then he tried to be one of the good ol’ boys and just wasn’t rich or influential enough to fit in and now he wants to pretend he isn’t a crappy person deep down. It’s a bit hard to make it far in entertainment if you aren’t pretty self-centered and opportunistic. He just unmasked to the crowd that weren’t his audience and now he wants back in with the younger crowd again

I remember a study that had Duolingo as the most egregious data collector by far on people’s phone

I’d absolutely use crypto if it was more available in anything I’d want to pay for. So far it’s mostly just VPNs and donations

At the size of transactions they’d be doing, it’d probably be worth it to set a high fee so that it gets picked up and processed faster. Should still be peanuts compared to the value of cargo these tankers are carrying

Friend one day added me to his family plan because they had one space open. I’m still in the habit of always going to youtube in ways I can ad-block but am always pleasantly surprised when I go in the normal youtube app and I have no ads. I’ll pay for the service though

I’m hoping by the time googles Android goes to shit, GrapheneOS is readily available on more phones or PostmarketOS. Same with Linux with KDE Plasma Bigscreen running on a minipc rather than using an android TV box

Like others, desktop I’m using Firefox with ublock origin. Android phone, Firefox with ublock origin. Android TV, SmartTube. Ad blockers have always outpaced Google in my experience though I use youtube maybe like twice a week and I don’t randomly browse reccomendations. Just there for specific stuff

For the most part no. Exceptions being like if some high budget game came out built with Godot, that’d be something I’d consider as a showcase for open source game engines. Same with other lesser known ones like Bevy or O3DE. Once any becomes fairly common, the novelty for me wears off like 2D games made in Godot. It was the same for me and Blender Open Movies ~15 years ago