For reference, the first generation of IPhone actually preceded the IPod Touch, but the Touch reached my friend group first. Thus my reaction when I first heard of the IPhone was more or less,

“The IPod Touch is a gimmick, and now they want to make it your phone? Why the hell would anyone want a touchscreen phone in your pocket? Touchscreens are finnicky at the best of times, break at the slightest provocation, and a whole computer in your pocket would cost an absolute fortune. There’s nothing wrong about just carrying an Mp3 player and phone separate in your pocket; this is just Apple selling an overpriced toy to their fanboys. Touch-screen computer-phones will never take off.”

Boy do I feel like an idiot now.

Ah well, fair enough.

Waterdeep Dragon Heist is, I believe, intended to have a conflict between the Xanathar’s Thieves Guild and Zhentarim. I know when we ran it, the DM noted that we had actually managed to avoid some campaign material by resisting getting associated with either guild. But I’ve only seen it from a player’s perspective, so I’m not sure how deep or detailed it goes.

And this infuriates me because the market for those suites is so oppressively terrible.

Like, hell, I don’t even need the full suite of simulation and modeling tools that they come with. Just give me a rock-solid parametric CAD engine, a decent rendering suite tacked on to it, and I’d really love it if anyone in this market could start investigating Linux compatibility! Hell, I’d even pay for that - just not the awful licensing regimes the current offerings operate under.

Never heard of this, but it does sound interesting. Is it remotely editable - as long as the host PC is on, can you sign in and edit it from anywhere? Or is it just an editing & organizing tool on the host machine?

Disclaimer, not a lawyer, etc…

In abstract, no. “Sailing under false colors” is considered a legally permissible act of deception under the laws of war, so long as the vessel clearly identifies itself as a military vessel belonging to its proper nation of origin prior to opening fire.

In practice, obviously this is a bit of the law that doesn’t have a clear answer in modern, beyond-line-of-sight warfare. It worked reasonably through World War 2 (where, indeed, several nations used disguised warships for various purposes - my favorite being the time the British disguised an explosives-laden destroyer as a German warship, then rammed it into a drydock). But what would that look like in a modern scenario? Lifting a flag, even if no one can see it? A radio broadcast?

There’s also the reverse side of it: That, if a nation is using warships disguised as civilian vessels, anyone fighting them would have wider defensible grounds to more aggressively engage any suspicious or uncertain vessels. This would, undoubtedly, eventually cause civilian casualties - but such is the risk (and sometimes, intent) of using a civilian disguise.

Yes, unfortunately. Or at least seems to.

This person was an eye-opener for me in terms of how deep political groupthink and unquestioning belief can go. He’s an intelligent person in a highly technical position that requires plenty of reasoning and thought, but if the right political commentator says something, it is absolute truth.

The overwhelming thing I remember is a sense of “Huh, I guess this is it.”

There was a possum in the middle of a busy road, acting oddly. Walking in slow circles, pausing to stare, wandering back and forth… just generally acting odd. I was concerned it might be rabid, and nobody else had called 911 yet, so I did. Gave them the info, they connected me with the local dispatcher, and that was that. Didn’t stick around to see what happened.

When I got home I found out that Possums are almost never rabid. Poor thing had probably been hit by a car. Animal control probably would’ve been a better option, but when I’d called I was actually worried for anyone else who stumbled into it.

Bonus points if it’s, “He’s childish because he’s so emotional.”

And then we wonder why men are closed off emotionally.

Huh. Today I learned. Neat!

Depends on the magnitude of what is being warned of.

“Warning, graphic gore”? Absolutely appreciated. “Contains scenes of actual combat, those with PTSD may wish to leave the room”? Yeah totally reasonable. “This book contains vivid descriptions of sexual abuse”? I can see why people would be squicked out by that.

But then we get into the absurd side of it. A film about the Holocaust, needing to warn its viewers that some contents may be distressing? Wow. You don’t say. A memoir about a tragic death, needing to put a warning that… someone dies? “This politics discussion may discuss slavery, racism, and oppression”? Oh no, we have to think about upsetting things that happened!

And before someone suggests those are unrealistic hyperbole, those are all things I’ve seen. I don’t feel those are helpful.

In essence, “You can’t.” Or rather, at “present” in the setting, the technology for turning a planet that is unsuited for Earth life into one that is, doesn’t exist. Things like “Doesn’t have a magnetosphere”, “gravity too high”, “too close to the star”, or “404 Oxygen not found” just aren’t things humans can change yet in a reasonable timeframe.

Turning basically-human-livable but barren planets into ones with an active biosphere is a much different story, however. In those cases, it’s more or less just a case of seeding life in already-primed conditions, maybe with specially-tailored “pioneer” organisms. Unfortunately, out of hundreds of millions of surveyed worlds, we’ve found only a mere handful like this.

Instead, humanity has gotten pretty good at building our own biospheres inside vast cylinder space stations, which are much easier to control. Frankly, long-term terraforming projects (those able to do something over multiple centuries or millennia) might be more heavily pursued if we weren’t so good at building space habitats.

That said, a persistent conspiracy theory suggests the United Nations Human Alliance has a way to FTL jump entire planets to different orbits. Some flavors of the theory even posit using stable FTL conduits to add or remove planetary atmospheres.

It sounds like, for almost-Earthlike worlds, I’m using something similar to your “Rockeater” mixture. For the UNHA, where bio-engineering is viewed cautiously, this is the riskiest step. How do your cultures view the use of such? Is it basically a non-issue, since their goal was to create life in the first place?

All you are saying here is ‘anything i declared bigoted shouldn’t be tolerated’.

Yep. Basically this. And to bring it back around to OP’s question:

[Opinions] you mention without a caveat immediately makes people jump to conclusions or even attack you?

…well, it feels like this is a great example. Suggest that the fediverse has a bit of a bigotry problem, and you immediately get hit with an implication that no, everything is fine, if you’re not happy then you must actually be the bigot!

That Lemmy can be just as bigoted, hostile, and close-minded as the sites it set out to replace; it drives out views which aren’t in line with the gestalt majority. This thread, then, mostly gets answers which are on the mildest end because those who actually hold opinions out of step with the majority know damn well not to speak up, or, well… be immediately othered.

Yes, for one particular reason: I’ve always favored longer, slower posting - structured responses to earlier posts with multiple paragraphs to propose a point, explain, and support it. Including the ability to quote / link back to multiple different posts in a thread if needed. The… for lack of a better way to put it, “Reddit-esque” style of branched comments to a post (which includes Lemmy) is nice because it allows multiple parallel discussions rather than one dominating one, but it also seems to discourage longer, more in-depth responses. It also means that interesting ongoing discussions which I’d love to get into can get buried down later in the comments.

Like OP, I recognize that there’s nothing actually stopping me from doing this on Lemmy. There’s chat and sort-by-new, and of course I can link as many other comments as I want. But the overwhelming trend is towards shorter, snappier answers before you move on to the next comment chain or post; discussions rarely last more than a few hours, whereas forum threads used to be able to keep them going for days.

Oh! That is very good. Sounds like a nice balance of “ability to remove yourself” and “ability for others to find their comments” too.

It’s frustrating for me as well. I’d sometimes like to go back and look at a conversation I had once before - so I don’t have to manually unearth whatever point or evidence I had in that post - only to find I’m actually unable to.

What really frustrates me is that if a post is removed or - it seems like - the parent of comment of a conversational thread, I become unable to view any discussion in that post’s comments or conversational thread. I get that people might want to remove their own posts, and that’s just fine - but one person removing my ability to view anything else in the comments doesn’t seem great.

Besides this one, the Discord server of a more military-focused Worldbuilding community that spun off a Subreddit a while back, and a couple fiction writing communities which guess kinda count?

Combination of:

• People whose only exposure is clips from Portal and think he’s just a goof who rants about combustible lemons, not a deeply disturbed person who subjected people to horrific experimentation.
• People who can’t distinguish between other fans saying “I like this person as an interesting, well-portrayed, flawed character” and “I like this person directly as an individual”.

I do kind of thing a lot of these are more predicated on the specific setting or polity within the setting than issues with the intrinsic technology itself. For instance, the idea that they would be externally-interfacing and so vulnerable to cyberattack.

But also, yeah: Cybernetics are also one of those sci-fi techs which comes with a lot of “hidden” technologies “built in” (for instance, the ability to perform reliable low-risk surgeries, or creating materials which are reliably not rejected by body tissue). Some of these, to me, are actually kind of feasible (minimally invasive surgery today is practically a miracle, compared to how it was even 20 or 30 years ago).