Counter Strike 2 has a massive problem with cheaters because Valve refuse to make VAC operate at the kernel level.

Just a friendly reminder that the OSA was never about safeguarding kids from seeing porn.

Are the government seriously worried about a child being exposed to Break Stuff or So What on Spotify?

(NOTE: Any links to politician tweets in this comment are from Nitter mirrors, not direct links to Elon Musk’s nazi bar.)

The Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, pretty much called Nigel Farage a paedophile in a news network interview earlier today because he opposed the Online Safety Act, by saying he’s on the side of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile.

He then went to Twitter and doubled-down on this stance:

If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.

This of course generated a lot of fury among the site’s users.

For context, the Online Safety Act has been used to censor and age-gate anything and everything deemed “illegal content” under Ofcom guidelines. Any social media platforms must comply, else risk getting fined up to 10% of your annual global revenue. This is so broadly worded that it includes anything related to illegal immigration and people-smuggling (literally quoted in the GOV.UK page I linked.)

Twitter had genuinely been forced to censor all coverage around anti-asylum seeker protests behind age verification requirements, which has riled up a lot of right-wing politicians here. The reason for these protests is that the previous (Conservative) government had been paying exorbitant amounts of money to house asylum seekers in hotels, effectively lining the pockets of hotel chain executives - all while we deal with a massive housing and cost of living crisis.

This was meant to be a measure to give asylum seekers temporary accommodation which was put in place at the start of COVID, but has been government policy since 2020 with no end in sight.

Labour have also done jack-shit to resolve our skyrocketed (legal) immigration levels since they got into power, except for scrapping the Rwanda Deal which would have deported any illegal migrants to a third country for processing (which as the name obviously suggests, is the East African state of Rwanda.)

Zia Yusuf (head of Reform’s DOGE division, yes they’re ripping off Trump and Elon Musk) had this to say about the OSA on Twitter:

Britain is now a country which you can enter illegally without ID, but need photo ID to watch a protest against people entering without ID.

Let that sink in.

Labour have fucked up so catastrophically hard with how they’ve handled this legislation, that they’ve straight-up generated bipartisan sympathy for the leaders of a right-wing populist party - who are the only political force that have vowed to repeal the legislation because it is being used for mass surveillance and censorship.

Also, if you’re thinking of voting Reform UK in 2029 (and it has honestly crossed my mind because age verification checks are a major sticking point for me), then you should take the pledges from Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf with a grain of salt. Richard Tice (the party’s deputy leader) openly tweeted support for pushing through mandatory ID checks on social media four years ago.

If Labour don’t get rid of Keir Starmer, do a full cabinet reshuffle and reverse course, we are going to see a Reform landslide in the next election…

Under the guidelines imposed by payment processors which were recently clarified by itch.io, Baldur’s Gate 3 would be banned, as it contains moments of non-consensual sex and bestiality.

The app is literally called Tea, as in “spilling the tea.”

Did I state that? No?

You can fuck off.

Let’s say a vile, manipulative, entitled woman went on a Tinder date with a guy. He insists on splitting the bill rather than paying for her food. She feels insulted.

She then takes to Tea and her local Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group, slanders him with false accusations that he tried to sexually assault her, then posts his Tinder, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles online. Suddenly he’s being ostracized, receiving nasty messages and even loses his job from women bombarding his employer with negative phone calls, emails and comments about him.

Men have had their lives ruined by false allegations posted to AWDTSG communities before. But opposing the existence of these platforms is “misogyny”, apparently.

Good advice actually. Dating apps have been monopolized and enshittified by the same two or three parent companies in recent years.

They also said they deleted IDs once users were verified. The breach proved that to be an outright lie.

Tea is the offshoot of all those “Are We Dating The Same Guy” Facebook groups where ladies gossip, talk shit, slander and creep-shame guys they went on dates with, sometimes throwing around false accusations maliciously to get men ostracized.

On one hand, damn these groups are toxic as fuck and that makes me feel a lot less sympathetic. But on the other hand, this is a textbook argument for why mandatory age verification laws need to be abolished. AWDTSG works as a way to keep women safe when it’s used as intended but there are too many women that will slander men with false allegations purely out of spite.

Nah, this is yanderedev

This is YandereDev levels of bad.

Ouch, Chávez Jr isn’t having a good week. Imagine losing a boxing match to Jake Paul of all people, then getting deported.

What is Zidane gonna do? Walk up to their president and headbutt him?

India are also still doing business with Russia.

If Operation Spiders’ Web is more than just an isolated attack on Russia’s air bases and is continuing to strike deep into Russian soil, then this has serious potential to finally bring Putin to the negotiating table.

Other than that, I think this will be a bloody war of attrition that Zelenskyy has no chance of winning.

I thought the royals in mainland Europe were generally well-liked? I’m only basing this on the lack of negative attention they get compared to the British royal family.

Another big problem is that we’ve been collectively trying to shoehorn everybody into programming careers for the better part of two decades. In fact, “just learn to code” is often thrown around by people in response to the prospect of AI automating and taking over everybody’s jobs.

What they don’t understand is that coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math, which is a significant portion of the population if you look at statistics, grades, test scores, etc. Expecting a lowly paid call center worker who lost their job to AI to suddenly open up Visual Studio and write any code is a fools errand.

I bring this up because I think there’s a correllation between people asking low-quality questions and people being pushed into making a career move into tech.

I’m not a programmer (last time I seriously dabbled into coding was building a website for an A Level Computing project and I had to teach myself HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL because my sixth form was shit and was only teaching us Visual Basic 6 when the IDE/language had been obsolete for nearly a decade) and I have never personally posted on StackOverflow. In fact, the only StackExchange site I’ve ever been part of was EpicAdvice, a short-lived offshoot that was for World of Warcraft specific questions. But I do have a sibling with a computer science and software engineering background which is how I became aware of the site in the first place.

This isn’t my personal criticism of the site, it’s me echoing the sentiment of the many who have complained about the community across the web.

Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.

ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site’s coffin because it’s now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn’t “use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic.”