Eh, I disagree. Slavery being banned is obviously a good thing, but that’s because it’s immoral to own someone else, so it’s essentially just kidnapping. Gambling, on the other hand, shouldn’t be banned for the simple reason that consenting adults should be able to do it if they choose.

Basically, I believe there are two types of rights:

• negative rights - restricts others from preventing individuals from doing things to you (e.g. freedom from slavery, freedom to gamble, etc)
• positive rights - forces others to provide goods or services to you (e.g. free healthcare, right to counsel, etc)

I believe nobody should gamble because it’s a poor financial decision and very addictive (and I choose to avoid gambling), but I also believe you should be allowed to gamble, and the government should ensure that companies that provide gambling services do so fairly (i.e. advertisements about win-rates and whatnot are accurate).

So yes, if gambling wasn’t allowed, people w/ addictions would be better off, but those who aren’t at risk of gambling addiction would be harmed due to restrictions on their freedom. So the question is, do we want government to protect us from ourselves, or merely provide a safety net for when we screw up? I’m absolutely in the latter camp, and I think we should use taxes to fund recovery programs for addictive behaviors in lieu of banning them. In general, I think a tax is way more rights-respecting than a ban.

Eh, not revisionist, just overly simplified. Prohibition massively increased their power and relevance.

Yup, and that’s how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.

All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.

Yup, I want “unobtrusive, lightweight, compatible, and secure.” Basically, the best case for an OS is that I don’t notice it.

I care a lot about rendering engine diversity, and Firefox is the largest non-chromium browser, so I use it. It’s fast enough for me, and my handful of extensions gives me what I need.

I don’t like Mozilla either, but here are my priorities in a web browser:

1. FOSS
2. Privacy tools - includes ad blocking; I’d actually be okay with ads if they didn’t track me
3. Promotes open web standards - rendering engine diversity is critical here, I don’t want a repeat of the IE era
4. Security
5. Performance

Firefox ticks all of them, and my issues with Mozilla as an org don’t really come into play. I use a fork on my phone, but I use Firefox on my laptop and desktop because I trust the binaries coming from my Linux distribution maintainers (part of 4).

What does that have to do with the browser? Last I checked, browsers aren’t transphobic.

You do you, but I personally refuse to make product choices based on the person who makes it. Brave is the least bad chromium browser, so I use it as a backup to my main Gecko-based browser. I’m not a fan of Mozilla either, but that’s irrelevant since I pick my software based on what it does, not based on the management of the company that builds it.

A lot of Steam games don’t have any DRM, and most of the rest are pretty easy to strip.

Give it a shot sometime. Completely quit out of Steam, turn off your internet, and try running some of your older Steam games directly from the Steam folder.

I do this somewhat often when my kids are on my other computer playing games on my account and I still want to play something. It’s a little trickier on Linux since you need something to run the Proton/WINE layer, so I mostly stick to Linux-native games in that pretty rare case.

Yeah, just give me actual temp and wind speed, and I’ll get a feel for what’s cold by going outside.

The article mentions streaming, but anyone know how much of purchases go to the artist? I’m not interested in streaming, but their store looks attractive.

Also, can I redownload the music later? Or is it a one and done deal? Just thinking about backups.

Seems like a decent card, but here are my issues:

• 12 GB RAM - not quite enough to play w/ LLMs
• a little better than my 6650 XT, but not amazingly so
• $250 - a little better than RX 7600 and RTX 4060 I guess? Probably?

If it offered more RAM (16GB or ideally 24GB) and stayed under $300, I’d be very interested because it opens up LLMs for me. Or if it had a bit better performance than my current GPU, and again stayed under $300 (any meaningful step-up is $350+ from AMD or Nvidia).

But this is just another low to mid-range card, so I guess it would be interesting for new PC builds, but not really an interesting upgrade option. So, pretty big meh to me. I guess I’ll check out independent benchmarks in case there’s something there. I am considering building a PC for my kids using old parts, so I might get this instead of reusing my old GTX 960, the board I’d use only has PCIe 3.0, so I worry performance would suffer and the GTX 960 may be a better stop-gap.