TwinIon

I found this kinda funny: Pirate Bay Founder Thinks Parler’s Inability to Stay Online Is ‘Embarrassing’ I do think it shows an incredible lack of foresight on behalf of Parler that they didn't see this coming and prepare for it in the least. You could maybe argue that Gab was rightfully caught off guard, even though there had been examples like 4chan/8kun/TPB they should have learned from, but Parler launched about a month after Gab got deplatformed. It's incredible to me that they didn't think it could happen to them. Honestly, I think the difference between something like Pirate Bay and Parler's ability to stay online is that the Pirate Bay was a "tech" organization, and Parler is not. It makes a lot of sense to build most new companies on existing frameworks and platforms. Why hire smart tech guys that could build a hosting infrastructure when you can just sign up for an AWS account? Why build a software stack for auth when you can use Twillo or a payment stack when you can use Stripe? Why have any in-house tech knowledge when you can outsource it to companies that have already solved those problems? If I was trying to sell widgets online, there probably wouldn't be any reason to do any of that. My core competency would need to be the creation and distribution of widgets, not the boring tech stack that my store runs on. However, if you build your entire company around the idea that this is the place for terrible people to say terrible things and not get punished for it, you have no right to be surprised when some of that content gets you in trouble. 230 might protect you from the government, but it's not going to give your company the knowledge base to stand up your own servers.

I've already seen posts saying they might have to wait for "a little while" after inauguration before the mass arrests and Trump's second term to start. Never underestimate their power of self delusion.

I'm aware that he doesn't need to have committed a specific crime. I was just thinking about all the jokes about how (should he be removed) it's only a few years too late, and wondering if there were other times that a theoretical reasonable congress would have impeached him.

If we had an honest, functional, and non-partisan congress during the whole of the Trump presidency, at what point would he have been impeached? There's been so much during these last four years it's hard to keep track. He's been dreadfully incompetent, hyper-partisan, consistently cruel, repeatedly bowed to enemies and inflamed allies, but other than these two impeachments, I'm having a hard time thinking of something else specific he should have been impeached for, but I feel like there must have been something. Tax fraud maybe?

I'm guessing it'll be a Destiny style experience where you have these relatively small spaces on multiple planets, but I hope that's not the case. I've put hundreds more hours in Destiny than Division, but something I really like about the Division games is that they feel like more expansive locations. It helps that it's mostly one single map, rather than a bunch of different ones, but locations in Destiny feel small. Still, I don't see how you make a big Star Wars game and keep people on a single planet, and if you have multiple planets, I don't know how you make each one sufficiently big. Hopefully they find a way.

Amazon's response to Parler was filed Tuesday and while I'm no lawyer, I think they have a pretty good case. I can't find a great twitter thread breaking down the important bits, but apparently Amazon has been repeatedly telling Parler that they need to better moderate their content, for months. Parler hardly changed their moderation at all, relying largely on "volunteers" and at some point admitting to Amazon they had a backlog of 26,000 reports they hadn't gone through. So Parler's contract with Amazon stated they couldn't host much of this content (which Amazon provides examples of you can see in the above linked Verge post), Amazon warned them they needed to clean it up, Parler did nothing significant in response while holding a public position that they wouldn't be, and ruling in favor of Parler would effectively be forcing Amazon to host speech that is heinous, against their own TOS, and arguably against the law. They also address the Twitter antitrust issue, noting that Parler doesn't even suggest that Amazon and Twitter conspired, that there is no such communication anyways, and also that they don't even host the Twitter feed portion of Twitter, so any comparisons to Twitter content is irrelevant anyways. It's no shock, but I think Amazon has better lawyers than Parler and it seems the facts are on their side.

So we got a 3060, but no 3080 Ti? Bummer.

This Essay in the Times is worth a read in general, and (among many things) it makes a good case for why we would see Mitch think Impeachment might be a good idea: [The essay outlines two types of Republicans: those concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power (gamers), and those who think they can break the system and hold onto power (breakers]

So will they basically be trying to make a licensed Uncharted game, or is there a less obvious game style that would fit the IP?

The "intelligence" failure here isn't hard to understand. The people in charge figured "these are our people, so no need to worry." If you had the same level of warning from the FBI and open online planning from people protesting against the President, the National Guard would have been there in force. I don't even mean if it was specifically BLM or Antifa, just any ol group that isn't pro Trump.

Looks like Epik (wiki link) will be hosting Parler. Epic is a registrar and host that also serves 8chan, Gab, and the Daily Stormer, so Parler will be in good company. I would expect the transition to still take a little while, since it's not only just a matter of moving the domain name and hosting, but also transferring info and setting up all sorts of other services (like Twillo auth) that they need to replace.

I agree that using a firearm should be a measure of last resort for the police. Based on what I've seen, I think there's a case for that here. I don't know what that officer's options were or exactly what the layout of the Capitol behind him is, but if he felt like this barricade was his last stand, or the last stand to protect congress (or anyone else) from the mob, I think you could justify the use of force here. It certainly wasn't a case where the worst case scenario is a suspect gets away or some kind of snap decision by an unprepared officer.

I'd be happy to see it go, but I'm always surprised how much bipartisan support there is for the death penalty, so I doubt this one will be going anywhere.

Reading a bit more about the Parler lawsuit against Amazon, they're making the argument that since Twitter uses AWS, Amazon is using their market power to help Twitter, which is just stupid on the face of it. Since both are AWS customers, why the hell would Amazon care where users go? If anything, Amazon would have a compelling interest in seeing more Twitter size customers use their platform. Besides, Amazon hosts tons of competitors on AWS, even competitors to Amazon's own products, like Netflix (where a legit antitrust conflict could actually exist). There's some contract stuff that could be more legit, but given Parler's very public stance on not moderating the problematic content, I don't think Amazon will have much trouble convincing a judge that Parler was in breach for quite a while.

Option 2 is what seems to have happened in Hawaii.

Glad to see the Georgia calls made it into the articles of impeachment.

Started playing Hellblade via the Wireless Virtual Desktop link and I'm very impressed how well it works. After Hellblade I'll definitely have to give Alyx another playthrough wirelessly. Anyone have the Elite battery strap? I've also noticed the issue that @cusideabelincoln mentioned with a narrow sweet spot. Wondering if the upgraded strap would help.

There are some theoretical antitrust concerns with AWS. If Amazon is using data from AWS to gather proprietary information from competitors or something, they're certainly big enough to face anti-trust issues. Refusing to host a website after they break your TOS is definitely not going to get them in trouble beyond some Republicans yelling at them in their next congressional hearing.

I'm almost disappointed I didn't get to unfollow him after he left office. I'd long expected there would be a short window between Biden's inauguration and Trump being banned, so I'm pretty surprised the hit the under.

According to Buzzfeed news, Apple has given Parler 24 hours to submit a moderation improvement plan or else be removed from the App store. Parler's CEO has pretty much said they won't do it. Google hasn't said anything about doing the same on the Play store, but if Apple does follow through, I'd expect them to follow Apple's lead. The next question is this is the beginning of a larger deplatforming of Parler as a whole. If they start losing their domain provider and CDN and what not, it could get very hard very fast to keep the service up.

So I've definitely hit the real endgame of D2, and it's kind of a bummer. I certainly can't complain about how many hours I've been able to put into the game. I've put more time into Destiny 2 this year than I have any game for a long time. There are a lot of issues with the game, but overall I have really enjoyed my time with it. I really like Europa, the new raid, and I've enjoyed tackling content at higher difficulties. In particular I've really liked doing the Grandmaster Nightfalls. So much of Destiny quickly becomes about how fast you can do content over and over again, but GMs really feel like a place where your gear and your build and your teamwork matter. Far more than any other part of the game, it feels like it's what you've been building towards. The bummer of it all is that it's very much a case of climbing the mountain because it's there. There's very little reason to do GMs when the same rewards are available at lower levels where they're much easier to farm. I complete one for the Conqueror title, but there's no real point in running it over and over again. It's strange that it feels like the whole game is built towards preparing you for non-existent content. The only other part of the game that felt like that was day one raiding. By day 2 the challenge was making sure teammates knew the mechanics, the enemies hardly posed a threat then, and are a complete joke now. I think it's good to make raid content accessible to more people, but I also wish there was a raid mode that required the same thoughtful playing that a GM does. At first I was carefully crafting my mods and loadout for each encounter, but now I really just make sure I have the right guns. I'm very guilty of looking back at my time in WoW with overstated nostalgia, but while I was raiding then it felt much different. I suppose I never was quite as well geared in WoW as I am now in Destiny, and I imagine that if vanilla WoW came out now I might rail against the slow drip of progression. Still, when I think back I remember upgrades feeling so much more impactful. Getting my mana regen up so I could keep up with healing on a raid boss was hard, and it was almost never enough. Even when my guild could regularly complete the raids, they were still clearly the endgame, the pinnacle of difficulty and loot. Perhaps this is me wishing for Destiny to be a game it never promised to be. I wanted it to be a game where I had to min-max my stats and find the right gun with the right mods and where my time spent would be rewarded, but very little of that actually matters. It's a game where they want you to be able to get into almost everything very easily. There's a lot to do, checklist after checklist of triumphs and light levels and weapon rolls to chase down, but there's almost no content that actually asks you to have done all that.

Just got my Quest 2 in, haven't really taken it for a spin yet. Kinda annoyed that some games I'd happily replay aren't available for cross play. How often do games like Beat Saber or Superhot go on sale for the Quest? I think I'm going to try out the wireless PC link and see how that goes.

I imagine someone telling Trump that if he doesn't admit defeat he won't be able to get a TV show.

Well, he admitted that he lost. I'm guessing that's enough to prevent the Senate from removing him.

Well, guess I'm definitely waiting for a Ti now.