They're kinda famous for punching people (physically) unprovoked at this point. There was a whole discourse around it that comes back up pretty regularly, I don't know how you could miss it.
The real question is where do you draw the line with these ideologies? I don't think anyone deserves violence just for thinking the wrong things, but we're currently seeing the result of when those thoughts inevitably turn into actions.
It doesn't seem like America ended up on the right side of the paradox of tolerance, so I'm curious how you think we could have avoided our current fascist leadership?
Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.
Soft power includes positive perception. Every time someone learns that GPS is completely paid for by the American government and then freely available to the rest of the world, that shapes perception.
The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take much to be a net gain.
You completely misunderstood what everyone was talking about. The point is to make people in other countries do what we want them to do.
American diplomacy, foreign policy, spying, soft, and hard power etc is obviously primarily targeting non Americans here.
Thus like most things the CIA does this is targeting foreigners or foreign influence, though of course direct impact on Americans is a nice bonus. We don’t want young Americans looking up facts on a Chinese or Russian website.
I had something similar to this talking globe[1] when I was a kid and it was amazing for raising my geopolitical awareness. You tap on a country with the pen and it tells you the name and some facts about it. Even if I hadn't learned anything, I had fun pressing "Azerbaijan" over and over because 10-year-old me thought it was a funny spelling and pronunciation.
You might be underestimating the reach, you've got schoolchildren around the world using it as it's usually the most convenient source you're allowed to cite for this data
As an anecdote example, I've never ever accessed said Factbook, but I've heard about it enough times to remember that such thing exists and that USA govt. is collecting a relatively objective fact list. So yeah, it was a tiny bit of soft power of sorts. It showed that USA cares about outside world, in some way at least.
PS: and I live in Eastern Europe, far far away from the USA.
I grew up outside the US. I have a distinct memory of using the Factbook for homework assignments and being told it is a reliable source of information. That shapes people's perceptions of the US and the CIA from a young age.
Are they being removed or replaced with more heavily redacted documents? There were definitely some victim names that slipped through the cracks that have since been redacted.
You're welcome to come up with a better litmus test, but it's beyond clear that lawmakers writing gun control regulation have less than a wikipedia level understanding of the topic. See "shoulder thing that goes up", the weird obsession with the Thompson, the entire concept of an Assault Weapon, etc.
Wikipedia has much better information about guns than most of the people talking about them in politics, generally speaking.
It's not too surprising, considering the way the rules are written at the ATF. There's basically zero logical thought that goes into pistol vs rifle vs felony:
ATF rulemaking can be unintuitive and arbitrary but there really is a level below it occupied by people who have dedicated a significant chunk of their lives to trying to restrict firearm ownership, who genuinely seem to believe that Die Hard, Rambo, and Spaghetti Westerns are real life. Politicians who can't answer basic questions about their legislation, who have to be told live on air that magazines can be repacked, that just make up impossible crime statistics. Yeah it's stupid that the ATF has decided that vertical grips are a rifle feature but angled grips aren't, but it gets worse.
There's no legal definition per Congress. Generally speaking, braces are intended to stabilize a pistol against your arm [0], whereas a rifle stock is meant to stabilize against your shoulder. However, braces can technically be "misused" such that the rear of the brace fits against the shoulder, meaning it is used as a stock. Likewise, the distinction is so small something as simple as a sling attachment to the stock could make it a brace, or an articulation that could be used as a cheek rest turn a brace into a stock, converting a pistol into a rifle or vice versa.
For awhile, the only way to know the difference was for the manufacturer to submit an NFA and hope.
The ATF has been in court (and lost) quite a bit [1] over this.
A "pistol brace" is designed and "intended" to be braced against your forearm to stabilize the "pistol" in a way that allows you to shoot a particularly large and heavy "pistol" with one hand. The ATF said this was fine, although I think they really regret that now.
Stock goes against the shoulder. Brace goes against the elbowpit. If you let the brace touch your shoulder, your braced pistol suddenly becomes an unregistered SBR, and you become a felon. Oopsie!
Sorry no it doesn't prove my half joking claim it only documents a single case of a high profile terrorist plot from a small group that was led by an FBI informant, containing another 4 informants and agents, and funded by the FBI in which they had trouble convicting several defendants (despite a 95%+ conviction rate normally) for some reason no clue why.
Even this framing is silly, if you have a PC to game there are not enough pros to choose Linux. You are giving up the ability to play some popular games and increasing the amount of effort required to play another chunk of them in exchange for what? A snappier file browser? Fewer anti-consumer dark patterns? It's not about "path of least resistance" it just flat out isn't worth it.
This is a gross reduction of why people choose Linux. People don't choose it just for a snappier file browser and fewer anti-consumer dark patterns.
1. games that install what amounts to be rootkits on my computer are not ok
2. windows potentially spying on my data without my consent is not ok
If you wanna label these as dark patterns, that's fine, but let's not pretend that this behavior is ok.
I like playing games. But I like privacy and security more than playing games, which is why I have a linux gaming machine and a PS5. Some people would rather just play games and not worry about the other stuff, which is understandable for the reasons you mentioned.
This is overestimating the amount of effort involved to game on Linux, imo. It is true that there are a couple games using kernel-level anticheat which preclude their working on linux, but for the most part the effort required to play games on Linux now is zero if it's a Steam game and almost zero elsewhere.
Delta Force used to work but also doesn't anymore (still marked Bronze), people are tinkering with config files but nothing seems to work https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950
GTA V public lobbies don't work, requires you to tweak launch options, disable battleeye anticheat, seems to just not work for some people. https://www.protondb.com/app/271590
It goes on and on these were just from the first few games sorted by player count. Much of the tweaking seems to be different person to person, sometimes it just works sometimes it's Nvidia's fault, sometimes it's something totally different. There's a "recommended for tinkerers" option for reviews. To be clear, every single one of these works right out of the box first time on Windows.
PROTON_DISABLE_D3D12: Disables DirectX12
There are also D3D11, D3D10, D3D9 options too
PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=1: Tells the game you have an AMD GPU instead of Nvidia
The default setting is that Proton hides the GPU, so this option here is superfluous.
-force-d3d11: forces usage of DirectX11
This is already going to happen because you disabled DirectX12
People are copy pasting settings and sharing but not actually looking at any docs. Disabling DirectX12 is going to give you a pretty good success rate of making a game work if it doesn't work out of the box.
Also, let's be clear about what those rankings mean on ProtonDB
Native: Just works
i.e. Devs are cool
Platinum: Just works (but is using Proton)
i.e. Valve has got this shit handled
Gold: Works but you either need to use proton experimental or change an option that someone has already figured out.
i.e. Community has figured it out, Valve is tweaking.
Note that many people are on Proton Experimental by default so possibly that's why it "just works" for them.
Silver: Very likely to work with a setting someone has listed.
i.e. Community and Valve working on it
Bronze: People are figuring it out, leave it to your friends that know Linux
i.e. Sorry, you're probably out of luck. Leave it to the tinkerers
Borked: Publisher is actively working against the community.
i.e. EA hates you
I'm not trying to say everything works on Linux. It doesn't. But let's also not pretend that it is worse than it is. That's the same error in the other direction. Linux is not the right choice for everyone, but it is a good choice for many people.
You're implying that 'clicking the cog icon > properties > and then copy pasting some text into a text box' is overly burdensome. To be frank, if you believe that then not only is Linux not for you, but neither are computers, and I really really am curious why you're on a website called "Hacker News".
First off, a hell of a lot more of those top 50 are unplayable. But more importantly the thing that you are ignoring is that every single one works on Windows. By choosing to use Linux you are choosing to not be able to play these games and an unknown number of future games for... what? If you only have a PC to play games with your friends, what could possibly be more important to you than the ability to play games with your friends?
You and most of the other people in this thread clearly do not understand what's going on here. I and everyone else you're griping about do not give a shit about Slop Spoogers 7 from 1998 running great on Linux, we care about the games that we play with our friends being playable.
This is what matters, on Windows every single one of these is Native. Switching to Linux will be painful at best until every single one is at least Gold if not Platinum or Native.
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