I would recommend learning about skepticism, but not the kind you will find in the USA to be honest, the USA skepticism community has some bad actors mixed in and it is hard to get the good without the bad.

Skeptics with a K is a podcast from the Merseyside Skeptics Society and they do great work. If you start there and listen through a little they will recommend other podcasts and websites and you can go from there.

The reason I suggest them as a starting point is their attitude. They are compassionate people who see the harms of woo and religion but really so embody kindness and connection over anger and hate. They also embrace the kind of skepticism where you maintain a focus on the tools but don’t get locked into extreme positions, exactly what you are talking about. They practice not running to the extremes, but not by saying things like “both sides are the same”. They have convictions, but they are slow to build and carefully constructed. If you copied their mental processes you would be in a fairly good starting position.

I did the same with the Athom bulbs, they were easy to get connected to Home Assistant and the firmware is easy to manage.

Unfortunately they are not so easy for managing PWM sensitivity. They have a fairly high level of flicker and for some people, such as my partner, it can be quite bad on the eyes.

Apparently you can modify the PWM frequency to something much higher and fix the problem, but I have not been able to figure it out yet.

If you want a real mind bender consider intersex people. They are also a minority, smaller than trans as a group, but also have a lot of discrimination and ambiguity from the binary view of sex and gender. Some intersex people have indeterminate genitals, others have mixed features, and some rare few have something close to both sets of organs. They may have a gender which aligns with one or the other general gender presentations, they also may not. It is really a full range of possible outcomes.

They also have some major historical, and current, bigotry around how they are seen and interacted with. Many people with indeterminate genitals are operated on by surgeons based in the surgeons best guess for the sex of the child, not based even on genetic details like karyotype, XX or XY. Sometimes the parents are told that their child had a small abnormality and it needed medical correction, but this is just to make the child fit typical sex norms, not for medical necessity. The surgeries can be very harmful to the child and may lead to difficulties later in life, especially around puberty, where they end up having been “corrected” to a sex which does not align with their gender identity.

Past all the horror, what is the sexual preference of someone who dates an intersex person? This is where externally applied and rigid categories fail. If a cis man is interested in an intersex person who has male genitalia but presents and identifies as female is this straight attraction? The woman here is clearly a woman in all ways bar genitals, so a casual or even in depth check without going under clothes will not identify any difference from female. The woman identifies as a woman, the man sees her as a woman, and she behaves as a woman in all ways bar sex and toileting. Straight doesn’t really have to exclude this relationship, but also it may be a bad rigid category, it may be better to say the man is on the straight end and likes fem people. It also may be best to not look for a single word or term and just describe things, saying this guy likes fem people but isn’t repulsed by typically male genitals.

I think the language here is hard because we are trying to fit messy reality into boxes. Fascism relies on this simple categorisation of people to form boxes for control and regulation of people. We don’t actually have to do this. We can just describe the world we find and use labels loosely to act as a shorthand, not a prescription. Someone could be described based on their behaviours but not have that result in a demand for consistency. As you say, no need to yuck someone else’s yum, but I think also no need to define their yum into a tiny box because it is convenient, let them yum without labels and allow yourself the same.

I have to say the argument here is nutty.

They are saying that because the games are distributed with encryption and the emulators play decrypted games they are therefore primarily used to bypass the encryption. If that process was moved out of the emulator into a separate app then their argument would fall apart.

So it isn’t that the emulator can play the game at all. It isn’t that it can play decrypted games. It isn’t even that a pirated game can be played on the emulator without checking the licence. It is specifically that the emulator can take the prod.keys file and use that to decrypt the game.

By that logic if someone takes Suyu and moves the decryption logic to a separate app and makes a Suyu which only plays decrypted games then there would be no case for the DMCA takedowns on the emulator.

Is my understanding flawed here? If that is accurate, why have developers not done so? You could even have Suyu call the decryption program which is installed separately and presumably not fall afoul of this legal issue? I mean, the logic seems really limited to actually facilitating the piracy, not to emulating the operation of the console.