MudMan

Not even partial in this case. I mean, the “turbulence sending you into the ceiling” event is fully resolved here.

Anyway, just here looking for the common sense pedantic clarification, found it, so now here just to say good job.

I genuinely stopped to think whether “next door” would prompt somebody to get pedantic about this and decided to keep it for expediency and to make the sentence flow better.

I’m not even mad about it, honestly.

I feel like we’d all be much more on board with this if Poland wasn’t in the shadow of Hungary right next door looking like somebody’s cat had a serious episode on top of a keyboard.

Well, I don’t know how long this has been a thing or how prominent it is. I haven’t seen it in the more mainstream news channels, this thread was my first notice. I expect if people start to freak out in larger, more mainstream circles they may want to address it. Right now it’s only reached a few people, I think.

I mean, it’s not like accidentally running Recall once is going to automatically compromise all your data to Microsoft in perpetuity. I don’t even know what the final implementation is supposed to be, I’ll make up my mind when I can review it, not before. Ditto for Apple’s version on the new iPhones and all the other stuff being promoted right now.

But in this case I’m just puzzled. At this point it sure looks like they installed some package or service that is probably the ground layer for the actual feature at some point, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing anything at the moment. Maybe logging the same metadata as the Win8 feature, but it’s not clear (there is a “activity history” setting in the privacy settings now, perhaps it’s part of that?).

If anything the panic shows how tainted the Recall name has become, but that’s not new for Microsoft. That original logging feature was also widely hated, as was a lot of their search or their current, mandatory “widget” news feed that nobody has ever found useful. The question is how widely tainted it is, and whether normies will want to burn it with fire as much as the Linux-facing techies.

So wait, did I miss a step or is this NOT the recall feature they announced for Copilot Plus PCs? None of the screen snapshots, none of the AI search.

As far as I can tell it’s some variation on the logging search that was in Windows in Win8, right? At least when it comes to user-facing functionality.

EDIT: As far as I can tell, people mentioning this mean the full Recall feature, but even though the package shows up on my Copilot+ PC the functionality itself is nowhere to be seen. I’m still confused about this and relatively convinced something is being missed somewhere.

Oh, no, I agree, what I’m saying is you don’t need to trust anybody here. Not everything is a sport, you can see this happen and not root for anybody. It’s a complex legal problem that likely flies over everybody’s heads without reading all the relevant communications. It’s not a take sides, trust-based thing.

What does trust have to do with anything? I mean, they seem to be arguing because Qualcomm bought a separate licensor and ARM argues that requires a contract renegotiation. This is the least take sides-y legal dispute in the history of legal disputes.

That’s fair, I suppose. I’d just argue that the movie forgot to… correct him? Endgame even makes a point about how nature is healing and the air is cleaning.

If the point was that he was wrong and misguided, the movies didn’t make that clear. Instead it was just “he’s ruthless and evil, but he maybe has a point” as an angle, which is a really weird way to frame your omnicidal nutcase.

I get why, relatable villains are more interesting, especially if you’re going to have the entire movie revolve around him. It’s just that they went about it in a way that raises questions.

Well, if you’re gonna be really nerdy about it, keeping the ability of life to reproduce intact and culling 50% of the population once only gets you one slice of the doubling time back. I’m not the first to point out that Thanos started a galactic war to send the population of Earth back to 1975. Tony’s kid would still be alive by the time humanity thwarts Thanos through sheer horniness.

He’d have been way better off by making every sentient species like 90% less likely to conceive or whatever. Except then most animals and plants would go extinct, so what’s the point. It’s really very unclear what “resource” Thanos is trying to preserve.

So… you know, if his take doesn’t make sense in the first place, and we do know that he at least impacted animals, because the movie explicitly shows a bird showing up as a confirmation that the un-snap worked, it’s not a crazy idea to ponder all the other ways it’d be weird, counterintuitive or self-defeating. Dead gut biomes, suddenly liberated E. coli, sudden deserts and unexpected outcomes of random distributions are all fun thought experiments, I suppose.

But mostly, it shows that it raises enough questions to break suspension of disbelief a little, which I think is the biggest sin of that particular change. The comic take is absurd, but at least it settles the question.

Look, we’re in the realm where the guy decided to remove 50% of all life… as a resource conservation attempt.

Lovely movies, but the “guy’s a literal death cultist” required way less suspension of disbelief. Jilted incel Thanos pining after an annoyed Aubrey Plaza or whoever would have been way more timely, too.

But if we’re doing it this way… 50% of the plants, algae and plankton would have died too. XKCD MUST have figured out what that’d do to the atmosphere by now, right?

I have to say, I have and like my Steam Deck OLED, but there are multiple solutions for desktop mode in other handhelds I prefer to Steam’s weirdo dual touchpads. The platonic ideal is GPD’s physical keyboard and optical trackball thingy, paired with their stick mouse emulation switch, but there are things like the Lenovo Legion Go’s single touchpad that also work.

Bazzite supports the Legion Go’s detachable dual controllers surprisingly well, too. I was shocked, considering how weird and proprietary they are. You can’t even get Switch Joycon support that good on a desktop PC.

Alright, I normally show up to these to be the voice of reason and moderation…

…but no, this one kinda tracks, actually. Carry on.

I mean… the normal speed for seeing behind your car is the speed of light, so that may come a bit short of expectations.

In any case, I agree that by itself it’s not a big deal. After the broken windshield wiper, the pieces that fall off and the sticky accelerator one may… you know, infer a pattern. Which, really, is the news here.

I once was travelling abroad as a student, staying at a family’s place as an exchange student.

Their cat was… well, this comic. I once sat on it. It was a very weird, creepy feeling, I could feel his little bones on my ass while my brain tried to figure out what the ball of fuzz, claws and rage was under there.

The cat ran out the back door and nobody saw it for like three days. It was, needless to say, a very awkward stay after that.

Alright, let me take a step back to the OP.

The claim here is that unless something is flagged as being “world” something, it’s assumed to be specific to the US. The obvious example is politics forums with no qualifier in social media (including here and on Reddit) being about US politics where everywhere else is qualified with either “world” or a specific country/region.

That’s the claim.

The counterclaim is that makes sense for US-based social media where most users are American. I dispute that because… well, most users are not American in many of those sites, or a large enough proportion aren’t that the assumption is not justified.

The logical way to organize that would be for the US politics channel, forum, magazine or whatever to be flagged “US politics” while everything else keeps its own qualifier. There is no default nation for politics. If anything, “politics” without a qualifier should be fair game for all world politics. That makes logical sense, but it’s often not what happens in social media unless the specific social media site is heavily restricted to a specific non-English language or territory.

That’s the observation here.

Wait, what?

We’re talking about assuming that a site’s default user is from the US. I’m saying if 49% are not, then that assumption seems ethnocentric. That doesn’t require every other user to be part of a monolith of non-Americans, they all share the trait of being… you know, not American.

That’s a big chunk of your users that don’t conform to your default use case. If this was about anything else you would not a default at all in that scenario, but that’s not what happens. Also, it’s not blamed on the “average American”, it’s being blamed on Americans as a whole, culturally, on the aggregate, which is fundamentally different.

This is true. I wonder how often people assume and don’t think anything of it because it doesn’t even register that they may not be correct.

That said, I once did have a long conversation here with someone who just straight-up refused to believe I’m not American and would not take my word for it. I never quite got why he believed I’d be lying about that, but that person would not be persuaded, and it was one of the most baffling interactions I’ve had in my life.

Well, yeah, but it’s not anecdotal. There is data to tell you how big Facebook is and was outside the US, in what territories and by how much relative to their US popularity at what point. My personal experience just happens to match those numbers (India, by the way, is Facebook’s current biggest market).

I would also point out that by your own data, which is accurate as far as I can tell, 49% of Reddit is not American, so even with its more US-focused audience the assumption that users are American unless proven otherwise is wildly ethnocentric.

Now, I agree with you that assuming things about anonymous accounts, and especially anonymous accounts writing in English, is foolish. Lots of people are fluent in English who are not native speakers and definitely who are not from the US. Most, in fact, depending on how you define your parameters.

I disagree that this is “human nature”, though. I don’t assume the same thing from people who speak my native language online. I also don’t assume the same thing about English speakers. The reason the OP is asking is that US ethnocentrism stands out. That’s not to say it’s not natural. We non-native dwellers in anglocentric social media will often comment on US cultural and political minutia, because US cultural and political minutia is present and relevant to us in a way ours isn’t to Americans (thanks for that, cultural imperialism). We pass for Americans in more situations than some American lurking in a German-language forum would, and we’re likely many times more numerous than… well, Americans lurking in German-language or Chinese-language socials.

But it being natural doesn’t mean it isn’t notable or an issue or a symptom of a dysfunction. Which it is, and it does annoy me for that reason.

… I am a non-anglophone who, at the time of Facebook’s raise to social media dominance lived in multiple non-anglophone countries. I was there.

In one of the places I lived there was briefly a popular local Facebook alternative. It lasted maybe a couple of years before entirely capitulating and getting absorbed. That place does still have a local Reddit-like alternative, and Reddit is certainly more US-centric. You are right that Facebook stayed popular much longer outside the US. It has started falling off in some of those places, but I did keep a Facebook account for work purposes for a lot longer than you’d expect because work relations in those territories would share Facebook credentials as a way to establish professional contact. Twitter may as well have been a lost ancient civilization, though.

There’s also a lot to unpack in the assumption that on a thread about “why do Americans default to assuming everyone is from the US” you’re reflexively lumping the entire anglosphere as part of the US, but honestly, I’ll let the recently annexed English-speaking countries deal with that one on their own.