Some good or at least decent stealth action games, some are open world, some not:

• Far Cry: most of these can be played in that way
• The modern Tomb Raider games (since 2013 or so)
• The Sniper Elite series
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series
• The Hitman series
• Dishonored + Dishonored 2 + all addons/DLCs
• Deus Ex Human Revolution & Mankind Divided (also the very first Deus Ex if you can tolerate its “graphical fidelity” nowadays)
• Deathloop, but it’s worse than Dishonored and much less “serious” than the other games on this list

My take on it: most people do have foresight or at least understand the issue, but they still don’t act on it or ignore it as long as the status quo is still convenient enough. So it’s purely a matter of pain and inconvenience. Once enough pain and inconvenience has accumulated, they’re much more ready to make an actual switch. Thankfully, with Microsoft’s services also becoming increasingly enshittified (forced AI chatbot integrations everywhere, even more cloud dependencies, ever more expensive subscriptions, …) there’s also Microsoft shooting itself in the foot a bit in order to accelerate this process. Vile actions from the current US regime are also accelerating the process of course.

Yes. Unfortunately, propaganda, intimidation and many lies and illegal actions from authoritarian regimes do work. The ones in power also don’t need to care if they’re still being supported by the population or not. After they’re in power, they don’t need supporters in the general population anymore, they just need people to be inactive and suck it all up so that they can continue staying in power. As long as there’s no revolt or upcoming election which actually gets rid of the regime and its background helpers, people are simply letting it happen right before their eyes. And so it will happen. And it will get even worse.

Data gathering and analysis is still happening in the background. They just won’t show you these 2 things in the frontend.

Well, as a general rule of thumb, if Orange Hitler says one thing, then the opposite of that is the right choice. So in a way, what he’s saying can be interpreted as a recommendation (only) if you invert the meaning of his whole expression.

“Ich kann wieder sehr viel lernen; vor allem, daß das Volk meistens viel primitiver ist, als wir uns das vorstellen. Das Wesen der Propaganda ist deshalb die Einfachheit und die Wiederholung. Nur wer die Probleme auf die einfachste Formel bringen kann, und den Mut hat, sie auch gegen die Einsprüche der Intellektuellen ewig in dieser vereinfachten Form zu wiederholen, der wird auf die Dauer zu grundlegenden Erfolgen in der Beeinflussung der öffentlichen Meinung kommen. Wer einen anderen Weg einschlägt, mag den oder jenen labilen Intellektuellenkreis beeinflussen, das Volk ist er nicht einmal an der Oberfläche zu ritzen in der Lage.”

– Joseph Goebbels, Tagebuch, 29. Januar 1942

His attitude towards humans in general (including Americans) is a disgrace. He only exists to accumulate money and power. Nothing else is of interest to him. The only people who are gladly supporting him are 1) companies and individuals who want more money/power themselves and 2) right-wing extremists who are gullible by definition (pro-authoritarian, want to follow a Führer blindly, hate outsiders of their own group). Hence the strategy to convert conservatives to right-wing extremists via manipulation and propaganda.

I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took a cat to the knee.

Yes, even the term “sideloading” is already a discrimination. Let us “install” (not “sideload”) software from sources we want or trust. A smartphone is a computer, and there are lots of reasons to NOT use the Google-approved app store. Fight scammers by educating people, not by crippling core features of an operating system or alienating existing users.

Just throw it on the already existing mountain of evidence that he should spend the rest of his life behind bars.

I’ve always wondered where the line was, or how blurry it is, between “haha, look at us, we’re the PC masterrace and those are the console peasants” and actual chauvinism…

Same here. Built a new PC like 6 months ago when it was all barely starting (good timing) and my notebook and phone are also fairly recent, like 1.5 years old. Tablet as well fairly recent, 2y old, but that’s really only used for home media consumption so it doesn’t even matter in that case. So I should be good for the next 5+ years or so. Hopefully the AI bubble has burst until then.

Some of the better RPGs allow you to play as an evil guy (equally fleshed out as the good guy playthrough), e.g. Baldur’s Gate 3 (it even has a special evil background storyline called The Dark Urge) or (some of?) the Mass Effect titles.

Cult of the Lamb is also a great game where you play a cult leader. Although the game’s design is strong on the entertaining/funny side, it’s kind of dark also.

Stellaris is a grand strategy game where you can play anything, from a ruthless ruler trying to destroy the whole galaxy to a pacifist trader.

That’s the thing with the radioactive waste and it being still dangerous for many thousands of years… We humans manage to ruin the planet within a fraction of that time already. How could we ever manage anything correctly, let alone something that requires attention for tens of thousands of years. It’s like the ultimate technical debt. A burden we can’t handle, among many other problems we also can’t handle. Collectively speaking.

Arch on Desktops&Notebooks, Debian on Servers.

These are professional liars and manipulators. Nothing they say should be taken at face value. Watch what they do, not what they say. If they say A but do B, then A was never the intention. In the case of wars, A was likely just PR for B. Putin probably still calls it a limited special operation in order to better sell it to the Russian public.

Intelligence in Republicans is a Myth.

It’s definitely a form of Linux. Their own product Windows Server is just for small and medium businesses and mostly used for managing Windows devices (with Active Directory domain controllers) and various Windows application/terminal servers in an intranet scenario. It’s never really used for anything serious. Linux is basically the only relevant server OS these days, except for some specific use cases or specific preferences (I’ll count the *BSDs to that category).

Yes. Open source software is never really (in theory, yes (jurisdiction of the project/developers), but not in practice) dependent on particular jurisdictions anywhere, because it’s like open knowledge that can be instantly translated/compiled/packaged into a usable product. And this open knowledge can spread anywhere and also be modified by anyone anywhere at any time.

And this is important, as we’re seeing with the US now drifting into a fascist dictatorship that stopped being reasonable or sane and just does what it wants. Open source is an important defense against the appearance of criminal regimes, because it guarantees independence and always possible continuation of the software.

So for example even if the devs/maintainers of open source projects would be legally forced to add age verification code, it’s still open source and can be patched out rather easily (e.g. be replaced by code that just does “isAdult = true; return isAdult;” without any online spyware verification systems behind it, and the modifications can then be distributed by anyone, anywhere, anyhow and be applied by all users of that software.

This age verification stuff is only really broadly applicable within the context of proprietary software where users have zero control over what the software does and have to use it exactly like packaged (although there are probably workarounds even in that case). Worst case scenario is that they’ll realize this and as a result not scrap the whole idea or make an exception for open source, but instead try to make open source software illegal simply because it can’t be enforced there. But that would of course prompt such a major backlash world-wide that they won’t achieve anything with that except make themselves look silly. But you never know what those politicians and lawyers are smoking next…

Consequences? (… are only a thing for poor people, unfortunately)