I thought it was another one of those meme languages at first.

My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.

One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.

But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)

I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?

Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.

I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?

Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.

This graphic is a year old! It’s actually seventeen years since that blockade now.

I wonder why some people there might think violence is the only thing their enemy would understand. Really a mystery.

That’s without counting the extra money spent on replacing strings, I’m sure using this kind of thing regularly would seriously shorten their lifespan.

The TS80P is lower wattage, technically, but the heating element is right up at the very tip, instead of having a heating element inside the handle with a long metal piece transmitting the heat. It gets hot way faster than you’d expect, it doesn’t feel like 30W at all.

It punches way, way above its weight. Unless you’re soldering pipes, comparing the wattage to traditional irons is misleading. Love that tiny thing.

Only problem is that this design necessitates proprietary tips that are relatively expensive. Not a fan of that, coming from the no name Global South Especiale 2$ firestarter irons that are the norm where I am. Not the end of the world, but worth keeping in mind.

The one I bought came with a USB-C cable that couldn’t handle the current though. That was the only real red flag. Shame too, that cable seemed like it was silicone coated and would have been ideal.

I genuinely believed (some number of) people would homeschool because regular school is too expensive. Interesting. American schools being free by default is really unexpected, especially given how expensive tertiary education is over there, and especially with the volume of complaints I hear about American school education being low quality. The free drinking water at restaurants thing is also unexpected to me.

It’s just weird that police have that responsibility there. I don’t get it. Getting questioned over being outside? I get that. Getting stopped? Weird.

In my part of the world (Lebanon) homeschooling isn’t really a thing. Public schools are seen as the cheaper, worse alternative, with many students who were kicked out of private schools continuing their education there. Teachers there get paid dirt and the buildings are often crumbling. Very few have a noteworthy reputation.

Most schools are private, not all that expensive, and usually religiously affiliated. That’s the default option. Then you have a very small number of expensive private schools mostly full of more affluent people.

The curriculum was last updated in like 1992 though which isn’t good lol

I was once walking down the street in the middle of the day on a weekday, and I literally had a cop stop me, thinking I was a high school student playing hookie from school.

Wait what? Is it the police’s job to make sure kids go to school in the US? What if they’re from a family that can’t even afford public school tuition? That’s so foreign to me. Cutting class should be frowned upon but not to the point of being harassed by police.

Excuse me, what the fuck is that exchange? Is this something that actually got published or some kind of bootleg zine?

(CW the below Wikipedia link has some uncensored imagery of the Sabra and Chatila massacre, I did not think it would have that - I think it’s an important historical event to know about but the page has photos and it’s pretty grim. Just a fair warning)

If this is a real character created from the mid-80s onwards, surely they didn’t name her fucking Sabra of all names? Jesus fucking Christ

Okay I looked her up. Created 1980. It’s a real character, canonically an agent. Making a movie about her in 2025 though?

The Hulk’s sentiment in this page is nice I guess but vaguely gestures at everything

I wrote a similar comment under a similar post here.

I don’t know if it’s considered better to link or to quote an old comment.

My understanding is that this is a deliberate choice, at least for Mercedes and BMW having their models be letters and numbers instead of memorable names. The idea is that all models seem closer together, kind of elevating them all.

Compared to when you look at an Accord and think this is the nice Honda, unlike the other not nice Honda. The implication is that all of the Mercedes ones should be nice.

But what do I fucking know. I like quirky weird cars, I like shitboxes, I’m one of those simultaneous fuckcars car guys (I hope I don’t need to explain how I can be in both camps at once?). I’m not the person any of these companies are marketing for.

I’m so glad I nuked my Facebook a few years ago before these companies were paying this much attention to web automation.

U

Replying under the top comment but this really applies to all of these, how do these search engines determine what counts as a personal site? For example I had procrastinated for years on finally spinning up a static, barren HTML blog. The infamous Lucidity AI post introduced me to Mataroa and I got over the hump and started writing. Would that get indexed? Etc

Does it just crawl through webrings?

For good measure, in Arabic, Niemcy (actually “Namsa”) is what we call Austria. Germany is “Almania”, same as in French.

Of course, we have as many curveballs as you could want for European place names. Like Venice. Somehow we ended up with “Al Bunduqiya” for Venice. Have fun with that one.

I don’t find it particularly funny but the art style is cool.

I have to make a confession, my brain immediately parsed this image as a Linus tech tips thumbnail.

I remember people recommending decentraleyes for some time and then I remember there being an argument against it. I don’t remember what the problem was though.

This post reminded me of a post I vaguely remember, in the far recesses of my mind. Did I save it?

Finally, local OCR in our phones letting us quickly dig through the archives for moldy unfunny memes from 2018. The future is now.

The fact that it being sweet-tasting is one of the first line items of its definition is interesting. I’ve heard of “eating paste” being something stupid characters do in older media, and I never thought about why one would eat paste. I thought they were eating modern PVA/white glue or maybe wood glue.