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Discord’s New Policies Means They Caved to Nonsense

  Introduction I was about to begin my drive back home and before I did I thought that I would go ahead and open Discord to check on any messages or pings that I missed while I was volunteering today. On my opening of the app, I was prompted with a pop-up screen that announced that Discord is changing its policies. At first I thought it was likely just their privacy policy since those seem to change on a dime these days due to constantly shifting trends, regulations, and laws regarding privacy [1] . However, I headed over to the discord blog and I was surprised to see that they were doing more than just their privacy policy. I set out to figure out why exactly they went along with these changes. Summary of Changes The changes of the policies according to the official blog are as follows [2] : In the community guidelines section of their terms, they no longer allow the sharing of: Anti-vaccine content Medically unsupported and dangerous cures for disease Content that disto...

The Metaverse Primer by Jefferies Part 2: A Peculiar Economy

 Introduction Continuing in our discussion over the fine piece of analysis that is the Metaverse Primer by Wall Street financial firm Jefferies, I wanted to take some time to highlight and discuss some of the more strange and peculiar aspects of what the metaverse economy will look like. In addition to our source material from last week’s Part 1 (link below), we’ll also add a video released by Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) about Mark Zuckerberg’s (The Zucc) vision of what the metaverse will look like to him, and likely a siginificant portion of the future metaverse for whatever that will look like. Beginning with the Jefferies article before we move on to the video from the Zucc, we’ll slide into the first peculiarity below. Link to original article:  https://assets.website-files.com/61152de79f1b0a81f1dcf4b7/615e101cf1cda13c40ee4d13_Metaverse%20Primer.pdf Peculiarity 1: Digital Consultants for Everything? One of the strange things that authors of the Metaverse mention on ...

The Metaverse Primer by Jefferies Part 1: Why now?

  Introduction It was October 2021, and I was perusing my favorite investment-related website, Seeking Alpha. All the sudden, there was an interesting bit of news that appeared on the right-hand side of my screen. It said, “Facebook has a new corporate name: Meta” and I thought to myself that this seems reasonable given the high amount of negative publicity Facebook was getting at the time regarding issues with censorship, discrimination, data integrity, privacy, and anti-trust issues [1] [2] [3] . But around this time, the term Metaverse appeared everywhere in the financial news, and I found this to be odd, and almost astroturfed [4] [5] [6] . It seems my assumption at the time seems spot on judging by the Google Trends Analysis chart shown below. So, I’m not sure how every financial media outlet and some mainstream media outlets became so enamored with the term. Some part of me thinks that Facebook gave money to outlets to run a campaign to popularize the concept. Quick...

Living on the Curve

  Originally written: 3/14/17 Living life on the curve. What does it really mean? The basics comes down to this: Principle 1 - The earth provides a 7-billion-person sample size which means that every person falls on a bell curve somewhere, right? Principle 2 - There are variable curves and robust curves in life. For example, personal traits/attributes are more dynamic, as the principal size is oneself. A more robust bell curve is something such as height, income, education, etc. revolving around genetic factors and sociofactors. Principle 3 - Changes in dynamic curve may have or have not any impact on more robust cell curves. But how do changes in the curve happen then? Is it a matter of changing the right dynamic variables, or is it changing enough dynamic variables? 2021 additions I remember vividly how this thought came to be. My first large professional setback happened, and I didn’t take it very well and fell into a large slump where I didn’t write for some time....

Searching online with Searx

Author's note: This is to have a piece of content out this week while I work on finishing this week's writing, which should be released some time tomorrow. This is a visual guide to setting up Searx as your default web engine for your browser. Searx install guide for chromium based browsers What a search result looks like  

I'm with Stupid on COVID

Introduction About a month ago, or so an extension of the 2019 COVID19 pandemic entered the US. I call it an extension at this point only because it’s got people triggered to near early pandemic behavior despite current reports from South Africa and the US showing that this new variant, dubbed “Omicron,” is milder onto the scene [1] [2] [3] . Although nothing has changed in my now heavily appreciated hometown in the country, it’s my current city that continues living in dystopia. This applies for many other cities around the country as they adopt the next round of draconian measures. Many places have seen mask mandates come back into place, and many employers continue to press their employees on vaccines. Lastly, another dose of the vaccines has seen a massive revival in importance, and social pressure to consider another round of lockdowns have been proposed by politicians and commoners alike. What’s driving dystopia? It’s the testing. Over in my current city, there’s a social u...