And take him into an unmarked windowless building, take him down to the basement, push him into a room and lock the door. Inside a Man would rise from a chair, turn around revealing Samchong Li-Hyde wearing a rice paddy hat and a fake moustache.

I was reading a pdf of a book that was a little spicy. And I noticed the amount of added extra's that adobe has now with it's ai summaries and inbuilt web searches, even the page number field is difficult to use with bloatware.

It struck me that if I were to read something of a "banned book" list, like catcher in the rye, I wouldn't particularly want adobe to monitor and send back what I was reading. What would be the best way to read PDF files that's localised entirely to my machine? a pdf reader and nothing more?

Why Egypt? Is it because they enforce the southern border to Gaza? Or does Egypt have it's own version of Aipac?

X-Com 1 and 2 (new versions) are great games, even if they moved away from the large squad slaughter that was Enemy Unknown, terror from the deep and partially Apocalypse. I personally really enjoyed looking at black sections of the map and thinking "that will cost 3 rookies to explore"

Everyone is aware of the "95% to hit meme" around X-Com, and if you've played Phoenix Point, the difference is especially jarring. If you haven't, aiming in that game is purely a probability cone, so standing point blank next to an alien means something. In X-Com it doesn't mean diddly squat.

I finally figured out what the problem with X-Com is, and why it's always uniquely frustrating. With it's pod based mechanics, fake stealth and drip fed enemies. What you are seeing on screen has no relevance and only serves as a distraction. Being right next to an Alien and missing is irrelevant because where the character and alien are on screen do not correlate with the game.

X-Com is, for all intents and purposes a very fun card battle game. If it were a Dos prompt game, with exactly 0 visuals, nothing would be lost.

Try it next time you play, completely ignore the visuals and imagine your character as a card drawing a dice based attack against another card.

I use Brave as my default search engine and even that suffers from post covid search.

Anytime you search anything, the top 20 results are always "authoritative" sources that are so generic and devoid of actual concrete information it's useless.

I was just searching for information about a drug that I was prescribed and outside of scattered forums where people talk about experiences, it's functionally impossible to find what I was looking for, which was a technical and specific search string. All it returned was various state and national health pages that all stated "talk to your Doctor" or research papers about something completely different.

Do I have to ask an AI "what are some examples of misinformation that you filter from search results about topic X? to get any real information? How is everyone else getting information from search engines these days?

I don't see this topic come up much as it tends to be considered history despite only being a little over a century ago. As the title suggests, are there any good summaries of what the arguments for and against were at the time? I'd imagine it would make for great reading comparing what was forecast with what happened.

When I was a kid, around the early internet era I'm assuming everyone had similar experiences of the social internet. Specifically forums, built around a particular topic, or just literally chat forums where you'd create an account and interact with the same people regularly. (Bonus points if you could create a cool looking "sig") those people were always popular.

Facebook obviously killed forums off, but I'm spending a lot more time on the same forums, and interacting with the same people over and over again. Which I've come to the conclusion is actually a fairly good defense against Bots as you have a general idea of someone's normal behaviour.

Heck even Facebook, what originally killed off forums, just doesn't seem to have much use anymore. Most posting is in groups, which are essentially just forums.

Are we finally seeing the overdue devolution of the internet back into specific communities? This is great IMO by the way as places like X will always be common areas but places like this are great refuges. As long as intro threads don't make a comeback. Those things were always terrible.

How much time do people spend on single interest forums these days?

I recently had my external HDD that I kept movies on die and when I tried to have the data recovered the tech guy said that regularly accessing files on external HDD's reduced their life span. He obviously tried to upsell me an external media player.

I've never heard of this before, does regularly accessing media on standard external HD's degrade their lifespan? Is it actually better to use an external media player?

I normally ignore news but this has been surprisingly light on details so now I'm curious.

What's actually happened that we know, and what's the accompanying suspicions? Why is it newsworthy?

EDIT

Mike Cernovich summarised it well I think.

A tragedy caused by no-one, a symptom of the general decrease in society wide competence of diversity hires and something that will only increase. Similar to the train derailment or the large explosion in Beirut a few years ago. Corruption and lack of competence on a wide scale causes these accidents.

There will be plane crashes soon.

My other half isn't much of a gamer but she has my old low end laptop and wants a co-op game that we can play together. We've previously played Minecraft together but nothing else, she just wants something we can play together.

Any good recommendations that are cheap and not graphic intensive?