I had usually seen it explained that the genie is somehow magically enslaved into the whole wish granting thing and, as one might expect, quite resentful of that, so finding ways to twist wishes they’re forced to grant into something undesirable to the wisher becomes a way to rebel

Part of the nature of the fediverse is gonna be instance drama, since there are no higher admins to take disputes to between instances, and posts that affect the status of a large instance (like discussions about possible de-federation, or large communities migrating between them) are naturally going to get a lot of attention on their respective instance that will drive them high on /all feeds.

Not sure it makes sense anyway tho, like, if you threaten two people with a gun, but youve only got one bullet and they see that, theyre not gonna be like “oh, he cant shoot both of us, so we have nothing to worry about”. A 50/50 chance is still pretty scary.

Wasn’t it his idea to ban it in the first place, to try and force a sale to a US company? Given that hasn’t seemed to have worked, I wonder what changed to make him change his mind, was it just that Biden went through with it, or did they bribe him, or maybe just so he can go tell users that he “saved” one of their favorite social media apps?

I actually like the intro sequence for Enterprise. Was honestly my favorite star trek intro until I started watching ST again recently to see the newer stuff, and have liked the one for Strange New Worlds even more.

I just use the thing in Firefox where you can attach a website link to the home screen so that it acts like an app and doesn’t show the url bar when opened, that seems to result in the feed being composed of pages (though going back a page isn’t an option at the bottom, just going to the next one.)

It’s possible for platforms under the influence of the Chinese government and right wing American billionaires to both have harmful censorship.

To be fair, our ancestors, evolutionary speaking, didnt resemble us that much if you go back far enough. A system that just considers a few key features a “child to be protected” is probably more adaptable than if every change in appearance had to be accompanied with a corresponding mutation to whatever gives us our mental picture of what our young should look like, for them to still get taken care of.

To be fair, it is hard to hold a proper democratic election with part of a country occupied. Either you hold an election in which people in those areas cant vote and while risking division during a time of crisis, or you dont hold an election and in doing so risk democratic backsliding. Im not really sure that there’s a good answer to that situation

To be fair, the universe is also so old as to allow quite a bit of it to have reached us by now even limited to “unreasonable” timeframes.

It’s mainly just that, since information can be copied without removing access to the original from the current possessor of that information, I don’t see a good justification to restrict use of it. If you steal something, the original owner loses while you benefit. Since the unexpected loss is probably felt worse, this is a net negative and therefore a bad thing. But, if you copy information (which IP by nature is), you can give it to an arbitrarily large number of people without even taking it from the original, enough benefit to in my opinion outweigh the frustration that loss of control causes. Capitalism adds another element given it also ties monopoly over a given bit of information to artist compensation, but even without capitalism, I don’t think information should be seen as property

The way I tend to feel about this is that it’s a jerk move if you’re mocking some other group, or reasonably could be seen as mocking them, or try to claim that you/your group invented the thing you’re using, but otherwise, borrowing stuff people like from other cultures is just one of the ways cultures evolve.

I can see some people objecting on the grounds that imitating something distinctive makes that thing less unique to the original group, or that an imitation by outsiders won’t include some aspect important to the original and then that people that see the imitation won’t get that aspect.

I can certainly understand why those feelings could lead to frustration, but applied strictly, the idea that certain things belong exclusively to the cultures that invented them both requires forcing people into precise boxes as to which culture they belong to, and sort of resembles a type of socially enforced intellectual property, which, being against IP as a concept, is something I feel like I’d be hypocritical agreeing with.

Try fresh baked bread right out of the oven. I swear whenever my bread machine finishes, I get through the first third of the loaf within the first half hour and then take most of the week to finish the rest.

What if I want the reverse, shoes that have nice cushion to them but look like toe shoes?

that huge fruit slice is a bit interesting, because it seems like the AI cant decide if its generating a slice of watermelon or red pomelo

Ironically, the only irl example I can think of for powerful person throwing a car to space, was very much not someone doing so out of distaste for cars.

I just grab whatever random spices I have that sound good and add a few shakes

I remember a certain episode of batman beyond as a kid giving me a strange fear of “using powers to phase through walls and ending up accidentally falling through the ground”. On second thought though, thats the least of your concerns; you wont actually hit the ground or anything and more importantly you’ll phase through the air molecules as well instead of breathing them

this is why I like socials where you subscribe to communities for some topic, a lot more than microblog style ones

Grapefruits used to be my favorite citrus fruit. Then I learned about pomelos. Now I can barely stand grapefruit knowing there is something out there that has much the same flavor but with less of the sourness, while being much larger.