Is it not also your responsibility as a parent to teach your child that many others (certainly not all, but many) have a strong moral compass and many will choose not to engage with them if they espouse repugnant views? Including you, the parent.

I can think of nothing more potent an indicator that maybe I’ve fucked up pretty badly than my own parents deciding my moral compass is so warped it’s not worth interacting with me. Assuming they’re otherwise loving parents who aren’t seriously warped themselves, that would be right up there with “big bright red flashing electric billboard by the freeway calling me a humongous asshole by name” as far as signs that I need to make a change go.

well, again, I don’t know the situation – when he approached you, has he ever offered any indication these views he’s held are changing? Or is he still actively praising the orange turd? Because if you’ve set a clear boundary that you don’t want that type of person in your life, it’s not a good idea to go back on it. I wouldn’t want that type of person in my life. I don’t. I’m very grateful I’ve not had to cut off any family because of it, yet.

Love them, support them if they desperately need your help, but there is not a single person in my life I know or have known whom I would willingly welcome into my world who pursued an engineering degree who actively espouses harmful ideologies, those that make rich men richer and sets poor people fighting each other over culture wars, or actual wars sending kids off to die in far corners of the world. And when you take those ideologies to their extremes, you get gas chambers and world wars.

If they don’t know the harm they cause (and that they’re assisting in by supporting), then make it a teachable moment. Show them the consequences of supporting fascism – show them Don’t Be a Sucker, show them photos from concentration camps or testimony from the Nuremberg trials, show them how right-wing authoritarianism is harmful to everyone. Show them the parallels between the historical atrocities that right-wing populism has been used to justify, and how they connect to the actions of the men now in power. If they know about the harm and don’t care, I’m not sure how I could actively welcome someone like that into my life.

I’m probably not telling you anything new with my rambling, I’m just spitballing. You’ve probably thought a lot more about this than I have and tried plenty, I don’t know the situation; but I empathize with your predicament greatly. Nobody wants to cut family out of their lives, we all want to see our kin be the best they can be.

Certainly, but if ~18 years of parenting wasn’t enough guidance, what more can be done? At a certain point, they have to make the decision themselves to change, and if they won’t there is little sense in trying to force it or provide further guidance. Further, this doesn’t exactly sound like a small difference of opinion if they’re calling their own kid “fascist”, from the way it sounds it’s probably a lot more than just wearing a red hat, this son might well have become a straight up unpleasant person to hang around and engage with; and I don’t think one should be obliged to entertain fascists regardless of how you know them, they should be shunned, at best.

if I may ask, what are you hoping to achieve by trying to regain contact with someone whose fundamental values differ so greatly from your own? They may be your son, and you can still love them from afar and the person they used to be, but I think you shouldn’t compromise on your principles and break bread with him unless he himself wants to be someone worth associating with.

It’s probably much easier for me to say than it is for you to do, but I would strongly suggest actually not approaching them at this get-together, and instead seeing if they approach you first. If they don’t and just pretend you aren’t there, I wouldn’t say they’re someone you should be overly concerned about connecting with.

Sure, but then it’s a lot easier to notice it’s broken. It also makes a lot of noise, shooting a gun; a spray can is near silent.

no, I spent probably 10+ years of my life trying and failing to retain anyone’s interest, and all I got for my effort was jerked around emotionally and used for entertainment by a handful of different people. I didn’t even manage to get laid for the trouble, I’m still holding my v-card. I’ve finally come to accept in the past year or two that not everyone gets to do everything they want, and just quitting is less painful. I’m not getting lead on and fucked with, I’m not getting my hopes up for stupid shit – I’m not happy about it, but I can sit and be unhappy just fine all on my own, I don’t need some asswipe playing games with my head to do so. Whatever an honest, actual relationship looks like or would be, it can’t possibly be worth the level of bullshit I’ve already endured to try and make one happen, let alone any further bullshit I’d be put through by continuing to entertain the idea. No thank you. I just thought I’d share the main reason I’ve resented my height for most of my adult life, though there are also more practical considerations as I’ve mentioned.

Some of the other 0days this guy released are already being actively exploited in the wild, but no reports of big losses as a result of them yet. Having said that, the entire point of BitLocker was that it was full disk encryption that you didn’t have to think too much about; and now I bet every corporate IT department out there is looking at it with suspicion. If this guy can keep delivering on “things that keep sysadmins awake at night”, like “oh god every hard drive we’ve had stolen in the last few years can be fully decrypted now”, eventually a lot of them will decide it is less harrowing and less work to move their entire stack away from Microsoft than it is to live with them.

They’d better not be overselling this bomb they’re gonna drop in July. I’m already moved over to Linux fully now, to quote photonicinduction: I want flames. I don’t just want to see it all over the tech news, I’m hoping he screws with them hard enough the story makes it to actual TV news channels.

oh, I’ve found I don’t mesh well with others for a variety of reasons, I’ve since given up on dating. Thanks though. The height just ticks me off because there are lots of things you can change about yourself with genuine effort, if you were wanting to go about changing yourself (for your own sake or for others); but no amount of self-help or positive thinking, nothing is ever gonna make me any shorter.

… no, nevermind.

Well, yeah, it isn’t built for the seriously vertically challenged either, but everyone thinks being tall is soooo much better. It really isn’t – for every high shelf or tall counter that might piss someone short off, I can point to a basement I’ve had to stand in, a low counter I’ve had to hunch over, or a vehicle I’ve had to sit in that pissed me off just as much if not more so, especially because this usually caused me physical pain (bumping my head, crushing my legs, and so on) – whereas if you’re too short, I imagine you just sigh and go “damnit, I need a stepladder. Again.”

you know, since this little saga began I’ve had this tiny voice in my head hoping this one vindictive dude is, eventually, directly responsible for Microsoft going out of business/doing severe restructuring or downsizing as a consequence of businesses losing faith in the company’s products. Lots of people already raise an eyebrow at Windows 11’s issues, things like “all our shit is fundamentally insecure because microslop left a backdoor in [insert critical thing here], and has been for [weeks/months/years/???]” tend to have an adverse effect on sales, especially to risk-averse business customers. It’s not impossible to imagine that continued “holy fuck what 0day exploit just dropped?” incidents, on the level of YellowKey, happening every month, could result in businesses deciding to drop their enterprise licensing of MS products; and that’s going to hurt. That’s where a big chunk, if not the biggest chunk iirc, of their revenue comes from. It’s unlikely, it’s a longshot, but I’m allowed to have hope.

I’m especially now wondering, if YellowKey was the teaser – you know, just casually revealing a backdoor in BitLocker, like nbd – what the actual fuck are they going to drop in July? If that’s the appetizer, how juicy’s the entree gonna be?

6’4 cis gay man here. God, what I wouldn’t give to be a foot shorter – for one, there are the practical concerns like low basement ceilings and economy cars (the world is built for people 6ft and under); but then there’s the fact that most gay men who are tops have the notion (expressly stated or heavily implied) that they want a short, skinny femboy bottom they can manhandle. Which is fine, if that’s your thing. And it’d be totally fine if I were a top – but I’m not. I want to be held and feel smol in someone’s arms, which I can’t really achieve. Being neither short, nor skinny, nor particularly inclined to go topping, it’s hell for dating. :D

True, but OP is a moron who doesn’t know the definition of “strawman” and dismisses every legitimate criticism of the catholic church as such, so there’s actually very little point to the discussion.

Hey, OP, does it also drive you slightly crazy? Like you might be able to identify with the learned experiences of a homeless schizophrenic?

Lincoln’s.

I’ve no idea whether Reconstruction would’ve been successful with him at the helm, but it almost certainly would’ve gone better.

Oh no. Not the golf. Anything but that.

I do not believe anything is “all good” when a website starts speaking R’lyehian.

unfortunately, if ever there was an era of truth, we are now well into a post-truth era. the world is full of, is run on, and is continually generating more: utter bullshit.

Not only does “pics or it didn’t happen” no longer have any meaning, neither does the stock market or the SEC or any of this rule of law or liberty and justice for all horseshit we were fed as kids in school, or any of that trickle down Reaganomics horseshit our parents and grandparents were fed. AI is only the latest in a long line of advancements in the manufacturing, repackaging, commercializing, re-distilling, and the redistributing of greater amounts of complete bullshit than ever before.

It is Bullshit 2.0. It is New Bullshit. Crystal Bullshit, if you’re more a bepis fan. Bullshit Classic was what got your parents and their parents riled up in the aftermath of 9/11 – Fox News and all the other things Rupert Murdoch infected. Now, we can get custom, personalized bullshit for each of us parsed through whatever moral lens ChatGPT is paid to have (or, worse, parsed through whatever moral lens Elon Musk gives to Grok). We have “people” acting as little more than a sausage casing for an OpenAI/Claude API key churning out more infuriating bullshit on the internet every waking minute of the day (and some of them, I’m almost certain, automate some of this during the night while they sleep). And in any form you like – text, audio, video – we have bullshit generators for any and every sort of media you like. Whatever makes the narrative they want to push just that little bit more believable to the gullible.

what a wonderful world indeed.

I’m pretty sure I got TM 32-201-1, the master blaster’s training manual, the improvised munitions handbook, and a handful of others from archive.org.

Less reputable sources are available in all sorts of dark corners of the web, and certainly people could upload tampered versions to IA, but it is generally best to stick to resources that have… some kind of pedigree, when dealing with things that go boom when you look at them wrong.

Not that I’d ever do anything of the sort.

Speen

Yup, it’s why I’m not too bothered about “missing out”. I really hope it goes well for Valve, it looks super promising, more so than their first whack at a controller (which I own), and their hardware quality has always been pretty on point. But there’s no sense rushing to get one when they’ll likely be available again before too long, and by that time there will be word on whether they’re great or not.