Tobacco industry boss: smoking two packs a day is not addiction.

Oh, who could have guessed???

If I remember right, Mastodon and the Fediverse in general isn’t included in this ban. Therefore it’s interesting to see if Australian teens somehow find the Fediverse, starting a rush of new users.

Similar discussion is happening also here in Finland. However, if something is to be banned from kids, it has to be clearly defined. What is considered “social media”? Is it platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat? Does it include messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal? Most of this discourse is also based on works of Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff and Jennifer Twente, all of which have received a fair share of criticism. There is also a considerable amount of a classic moral panic sprinkled in.

Alice Marwick, an academic that has extensively studied kids, technology and social media, was on Taylor Lorenz’s podcast earlier this year. Her organization published a report, where the following is stated:

We strongly believe that reform of social platforms and regulation of technology is needed. We need comprehensive privacy legislation, limits on data collection, interoperability, more granular individual and parental guidance tools, and advertising regulation, among other changes. Offline, young people need spaces to socialize without adults, better mental health care, and funding for parks, libraries, and extracurriculars. But rather than focusing on such solutions, KOSA and similar state bills empower parents rather than young people, do little to curb the worst abuses of technology corporations, and enable an expansion of the rhetoric that is currently used to ban books, eliminate diversity efforts in education, and limit gender affirming and reproductive care. They will eliminate important sources of information for vulnerable teenagers and wipe out anonymity on the social web. While we recognize the regulatory impulse, the forms of child safety legislation currently circulating will not solve the problems they claim to remedy.

Dr. Candice Odgers is also a vocal critic of Haidt, accusing him of cherry picking with a pre-made agenda in mind:

The cross-country comparisons, you know, they’re they’re often a starting point to see whether there might be something interesting correlationally going on, but it’s a very slippery place to start and I think you know, unless you start with the pretty clear hypothesis about what should explain those differences, if you’re just looking at trend lines and then going backwards and starting to fill in an explanation, it’s hard to follow where it goes and whether or not we’re just fitting these lines to our existing theories, but I’ll leave it.

A similar inquiry should be done in Finland, here all the restrictions were dropped during Spring 2022. At least one association of entrepreneurs has wanted an inquiry to be done so that they would have tools to prepare for a possible next pandemic.

At last, there were lots of rumours! Plus that controller looks like it has a face.

Dang it, I mean Ninja Gaiden Sigma, the original from 2004 was for Xbox only. I have the Master Collection.

I have been going down the rabbit hole of overclocking and undervolting Nintendo Switch. So the games I have been playing are Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Ninja Gaiden (2004). Thanks to overclocking, the former runs at stable 40 FPS, the latter of course doesn’t need any.

In the 2000s, Nokia was full of hybris and ignored many trends, such as the iPhone, and things started to go downhill quickly after it switched to Windows Phone in 2011. Had it acted differently, it would have been successful in the phone industry. However, Nokia’s network business has been quite successful, and the dispute with Huawei that you mentioned has increased its popularity. In that sense, the Nvidia deal is a logical continuation.

I have to admit that I’m not really familiar with that website. Kotaku on the other hand is a site whose links I never click, unless archived.

Their styles certainly are similar.

Been mostly playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The game is now a decade old, so the timing is good. Of course pirated, as I’ll never give Konami any money.

Got Pop OS with Nvidia’s driver packages and it worked like a charm. And of course updating can be done through the package manager. No problems whatsoever, at least for me.

Finished the main story of Enderal. Impressive for a total conversion Skyrim mod, I wish there were more like this! Feels like I may touch this game again after five years or so.

This time I have only been playing Super Smash Bros Ultimate on my Switch. I feel like there is always a lot to learn in that game.

Enderal and Tetris 99

The bigger your backlog of games is right now, the better. No need to buy new games for a looooong time.

Been playing Enderal for the last three weeks or so. Downright impressive RPG, blows Skyrim out of the water easily. Made by indies, but AAA quality, and free of all things!

He was inconsiderate when he made edgy jokes, tried to test if those two Fiver guys really would put up a sign saying “gas the Jews” and once said the N-word in a livestream – controversy ensued for obvious reasons and he since apologized for his actions. I haven’t been really following him in the last few years but after those controversies he left any Nazi jokes out, I think he learned his lessons. He has since settled down with a family and it has been pleasant following his life, especially now that he has gotten into Linux.

But don’t tell anything like that to the average Internet leftist! Even if PewDiePie apologized and left edgy jokes out, changed and moved on, in their eyes he is eternally a Nazi or Nazi-enabler who can never redeem himself! No matter how many years have passed, no matter how many apologies, any time PewDiePie gets mentioned in a post or is the main topic, this happens.

Those two are real GG Allin songs.