I’ve done a fair bit of DIY stuff in my home including various plumbing projects and it’s all been doable with just reading manuals, watching videos and spending time thinking things through. That said blow torches scare me and I did everything with pipe cutters and sharkbite connectors and such, but it works, and I did what I could to make sure it was done well/correct because I need my plumbing to work.

My experience with commercial plumbers, mostly from when I was renting, is overall pretty bad and that they are mostly unwilling to think at all beyond the immediate billable job. There was a whole ordeal where water backing up from the drain kept flooding one of the rooms in my apartment from under the walls, and while fortunately my landlord was honest enough to call plumbers when this happened, just about every time they would use a drain snake, claim the problem was fixed without really checking, and then it would just happen again later. It ultimately turned out to be a problem with the pipes not being connected to the sewer where they met the street, and was finally fixed with city involvement, but it took a hell of a lot of advocating for myself and pushing back on bullshit explanations to get to the point where the real problem was even identified or acknowledged.

I am 100% convinced that just about any anarchist system of plumbing would be a significant improvement, though maybe the plan described in the OP image should be adjusted a bit away from hobbyist plumbers going around taking responsibility for the critical systems in other people’s homes and towards a network of free expert advice, guidance, and tools to help people maintain their own living spaces, which they will naturally understand and care about on a level people who don’t live there won’t.

Even simple gripper pads work pretty well.

The ideal is people doing it just because they can, but how many people have the financial means for that? I’d say another reason for Reddit going to shit is all the people wanting to express themselves somehow, but only having a little bit of time to type something out on their phones and not enough to put thought or research into what they are saying. Streamers, youtubers etc. put a lot of work and practice into making something someone might consider good, and a lot of that is only possible because they get paid and so don’t have to get another full time job that removes any time for creative pursuits.

It’s under clear attack, but is not yet nullified. I already touched on this but the examples you cite are exactly where it’s doing what it is mean to; the clear illegality of these things is something people can recognize, and courts still have power. As an American, I’ll say that this is the only civic principle with any sort of universal recognition that matters, and it is the biggest thing holding the country back from collapse. What else do we have? Surely not a sense that human beings should be treated with care and respect. If freedom of speech ceases to exist, so does the United States; we must never let it go.

But to such a government it doesn’t matter anyway. They will do whatever the fuck they want. They will introduce new laws if they feel like it.

They need to entirely trash the constitution and effectively dissolve the US republic first. Maybe they’re heading that way, but it is a barrier, and the lack of ambiguity of

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

is the whole substance of that barrier. If you think an exception for hate speech isn’t something that can be abused, look at all the countries right now criminalizing protest of the Palestinian genocide using it as legal justification. Think about the entire situation that is prompting these killings; we have clear legal rights to peaceful protest, and people are exercising those rights, for which they aren’t arrested and charged with speech crimes but killed outright in profound contempt for the law, because they don’t have a legal process to silence them, just the ability to kill people. This is exactly when we need free speech the most, and it makes very little sense to fantasize about removing it so you can silence others when you are the one whose speech is in dire need of protecting right now.

It makes for some pretty neat (infuriating) game mechanics. Like an infinite mob spawner, but more intuitive and less dull.

The reveddit browser extension is pretty good, notifies you of all your reddit comments that are getting invisibly deleted (probably more than you think)

Is Signal secure? How do they get the info?

There is no reality where repeating state propaganda lands you in jail, unless maybe you do it in some way the state doesn’t like. Government censorship can’t solve this problem, it can only make it worse.

Propaganda by definition can be basically anything, and isn’t inherently bad, it just means someone is spreading a message on purpose. What makes it bad is when it is in support of evil. People often think the solution should be to give control to some central authority which identifies the bad propaganda and filters it out, but that’s a problem because such authorities are subject to powerful perverse incentives and are easily corrupted. Obviously the current US government is going to promote harmful propaganda and suppress necessary propaganda, and even if we can boot them out, the underlying corruption risk will remain.

I think the only actually robust solutions possible will have to involve individuals being able to take on more responsibility for social networks and information sharing, and not leaving it up to a company to decide what everyone sees. The basic premise of TikTok as an endless stream of personally appealing content that a hidden algorithm curates for everyone is inherently dangerous. People should move to some sort of model of sharing information that has more of a community trust dynamic and involves way more people in the work of filtering out bad info, and doesn’t put all the trust in a single party.

Not that you in any way have to, but to me the simplest thing that gives off non-AI vibes for a comic is if the text is in a less common font, because AI comics basically always have the same font.

In this case I feel like it is extra nefarious, since the point of using chromebooks in schools is also to surveil students and not give them control over devices that are managed by school admins who would like a company to ensure that they do not get revealed as incompetent by child hackers. That shit is getting normalized and students are also not getting experience working with computers that aren’t just edu-kiosks that only allow superficial interaction. Major contributing factor to tech illiteracy.

Should be pretty simple to make a client display things like that without voting UI stuff

Why and how is it that people in countries with unstable currency are somehow providing profit to you?

Afaik most of the revenue for stablecoin issuers comes from investing the dollars backing the stablecoins mostly in things like treasuries (“cash-equivalent assets”) and pocketing the interest. They don’t provide all of those dollars to begin with, rather people give it to them in exchange for stablecoins, and they accumulate a lot. Actual users of stablecoins don’t pay fees to the issuers. Not sure if issuing stablecoins is the actual business this person is involved in though, that statement is vague and it could be something else.

An interesting fact is that even if stablecoin issuers wanted to give some of that interest back to users instead of keeping it all themselves, the US government has been recently taking steps to make that illegal.

Imagine being the person who paid 7.9 Bitcoin for stolen Runescape gold that now gets deleted

What’s a better way to word it? I can’t think of another way to say it that’s as concise and clearly communicates the idea. It seems like it would be harder in general to describe machines meant to emulate human thought without anthropomorphic analogies.

I thought this talk page comment was pretty cool:

Get off your highly partisan POV-pushing labeling of him as a “domestic terrorist”. You will need reliable sources to verify any claims that Pretti fired a shot, obstructed operations, resisted arrest, or any of the other drivel that you have mentioned here. That’s enough, and you are violating WP:BLP by even mentioning any of this unsourced nonsense here.

I think maybe we’re getting to the non-boring type of dystopia

If you were invited to such a party you’re probably already ahead of the curve

Makes sense, in other contexts I’d watch at lower speeds (I watch starcraft games sometimes at 1.25x), but for me this is kind of like the video equivalent of skimming an article, actively reading and listening at the same time and not multitasking. I also manually skip around to get to relevant information faster.

I’d also like to mention that I’m able to do this because I use FreeTube, not because I pay for YouTube…