Not particularly surprised.

By most accounts they're very capable pieces of hardware, but the prices are way too high for current conditions.

Think there's also a case of incremental performance improvements in the form factor becoming less perceptible, and also more people favouring phones and tablets over laptops for everyday use.

Those titles don't, the person you're responding to is being sarcastic because the article sorta implies that removing the microtransactions from an indie title is somehow novel.

I don't think it's especially likely that you'll find consistently interesting, well-reasoned discussion through any platform bringing together anonymous strangers in an ephemeral manner.

I think consistently interesting discussion has shared stakeholding as a foundational aspect - participants need to actually care, either because the discussion is a product of some commitment they've each made (e.g. reading something for a book club), or because the participants are familiar with each other and the outcome tangibly matters (e.g. a physical town hall meeting).

Otherwise, I think you're more likely to get what you're looking for from adopting some tangential hobby and having those discussions with the friends you get through that.

Good.

I'm far from a social media fanatic, but make no mistake that the primary purpose of legislation like this is to increase the degree of control that parents can exert over their children - not to improve the wellbeing of young people.

For teenagers from marginalised groups living in oppressive households: social media can become an outlet for self-expression amongst trusted peers which might otherwise put them at risk of retaliation from abusive parents, or a venue for them to discover like-minded people and organisations who might be able to help them cope or increase their available options by offering sanctuary should they ever need it.

It also can't be overstated that social media is one of the main venues for political expression nowadays, particularly beyond the orthodoxy. There remain issues with misinformation and the far-right, but nonetheless the breadth of opinions can help people to develop a degree of political consciousness which they might not otherwise. Consider how infrequently sympathetic portrayals of protests, strikes, and unionisation drives make the mainstream media in comparison to social media.

It's unsurprising that the politicians most aggressively pursuing legislation like this are also the ones who are trying to prevent, for example, queer people and especially queer youth from being able to express themselves without fear of reprisal - and who are actively trying to prevent access to information and depictions which might contradict their political ideology through mechanisms like internet censorship and book bannings.

Ah, of course - that's unfortunate, but thanks for the pointer.

The rule of the 196 community is that you're supposed to post a submission of your own before leaving, and it's customary to include the word "rule" in your post in reference to that rule.

In short, it's another hormone.

It's still debated whether and when it's useful for trans women to take, and it can therefore be difficult to find a doctor who'll prescribe it - but some people who do take it report increased breast fullness / roundness, and increased libido.

There's little risk associated with taking it, so a fair amount of transfemmes try it out just to see whether it produces desirable effects for them.

I feel like you'd be interested in the Web Monetization API, if you're not already aware of it.

Prog is progesterone.

There actually is a Web 3.0, and it predates the cryptocurrency-oriented conceptualisation of "Web3" by quite some time.

Web 3.0 is otherwise known as the Semantic Web, a set of standards developed by the W3C for formally representing (meta)data and relationships between entities on the internet, and for facilitating the machine-reading and exchange thereof.

It's fairly silly that this course of action is the consequence of a desire to manipulate search engine results, but at least they're archiving the articles before taking them down.

To address the headline, though, I don't think that anybody reputable ever seriously claimed that the internet was forever in a literal sense - we've been dealing with ephemerality and issues like link rot from the beginning.

It was only ever commonplace to say the internet was forever in the sense that fully retracting anything once posted could range from difficult to impossible after it'd been shared a few times.

Only in the modern era dominated by corporations offering a platform in perpetuity have we been afforded even the illusion of dependable permanence, and honestly I'm much more comfortable with the notion of less widely distributed content being able to entropy out of existence than a permanent record for everything ever made public.

The bill says that commercial entities serving pornography are required to do age verification through either verifying a driver's license, verifying another piece of government-issued identification, or through the use of any commercially viable age verification mechanism.

So, yeah, I'd imagine compliance to look like either uploading a photograph or scan of an identity card or document for the site operators to check, or uploading it to an affiliated service which does age verification on their behalf.

Which is obviously horrendous from a privacy and information security standpoint for the consumer, and exposes the site operator to costs and legal risk associated with verifying and storing sensitive personal information.