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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • The phonology of “moth” is just bad (not just subjectively but in a way that I’m sure linguists could pick apart). It’s adjacent to “moist”. That’s the kind of name you give something you don’t like, a name made to be spat out. Contrast to other monosyllabic names like “fly”, a decidedly more despicable insect but with a much prettier name. Which one would be easier to use in a song?

    Also I just checked and moths are butterflies, etymologically it’s just that old Germanic peoples assigned a different name to the less colorful butterflies.



  • Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.

    Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don’t gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.


  • Supervision doesn’t have to be patronizing or demeaning. A 15 year-old isn’t dumb anymore, merely ignorant and impulsive which does tend to make them shitheads but that’s kind of a separate problem.

    Most adults are shockingly bad at understanding and explaining their own thoughts and rationales, including to other adults. So when interacting with a teenager, they either throw their hands up or fall back on “shut up and do as I say” as one would with a 5 year-old.

    That’s where teens can be failed really badly by the adults around them because they are at an age where unlike children they are mostly/fully equipped to understand “adult” advice, and will not blindly follow orders anymore. But they also need way more advice, guidance and explanation than an actual adult. I think that’s where the post is getting at. Don’t forget that teens are kids, but don’t treat them like they are subhuman or lacking in agency.



  • I’m not a revolutionary and I disagree that the semantic difference is unimportant.

    “The system must be destroyed” implies, assuming we’re talking about national politics, at the very least a short period of very deep constitutional and institutional reform, but really refers to nothing less than civil war, violent revolution, and the systematic dismantlement of existing institutions from which proponents of such action generally assume that their preferred method of government will naturally emerge.

    This is opposed to a belief that, flawed may they be, democratic institutions also act as safeguards against the tyranny of the majority as well as the tyranny of whoever has the most money/guns, and slow incremental change to these institutions is preferable to their dismantlement.

    Of course everything in the world isn’t so black and white. Nonetheless the existence of gray doesn’t diminish the difference between black and white. “The system must be destroyed”, by virtue of the violence it implies, is an extremist statement and different in nature to “the system must be fixed”.


  • Oh you completely misunderstand the modern fascist playbook. Putin Erdogan Orban or Modi don’t usually ban semi-obscure shows outright. They use their near complete control of all major media to ensure these shows never become a major cultural hit in the first place (by not funding nor platforming them). Cult classics aren’t burned, their meaning is just subverted; Star Wars isn’t a critique of fascism, it was always an allegory for the Righteous Traditionalists (the Jedi) working against The Woke (The Empire). No-one quite knows what Tolkien meant with Isengard, surely no allegory there, but I can tell you The Shire shows how good the tradwife life can be so get back to pumping out kids and churning butter missus!

    Slight deviations are tolerated of course. Who cares if the urban elites have some woke media. As long as they keep to themselves, it’s just convenient to keep the intellectuals distracted. Just don’t make the mistake of making a nationwide cultural hit that questions the official narrative a bit too directly, because that’s when you’ll find yourself accidentally defenestrated.


  • Uncut diamond is a good way to put it.

    The scenario, world building, graphics, and acting are world-class. Combat was decent. Most side-quests were forgettable and clearly worse than the main quest. The open-world was mechanically massively underwhelming, especially considering TW3 came out five years earlier.

    This game received a lot of love and took a long time to make, but failed to achieve in some key areas. CDPR didn’t have the means to do what R* or Larian could, and that’s fine. I can’t help but feel that if these developers had put the same time and energy into a (semi) closed world à la Mass Effect or Deus Ex, not having to spend so much time filling in a huge open world map would have allowed them to make the whole game as tight and polished as the main quest stuff, and this could have been the best game of the decade or close to it. Only downside is it doesn’t tick the mandatory “Open World” box for AAA games, but does anyone actually care if the RPG elements are good? Mass Effects fans would surely disagree.



  • The FBI apparently learned some lessons on how to deal with Russian interference since 2016 and made some arrests this time around. Way too little too late though, and in January Trump’s cronies will take over and that’ll be that. Other countries should take notes though and start being much harsher on Russian trolls and their puppets. Unfortunately Von Der Layen recently fired the guy who was prosecuting Musk over Twitter so I’m not too confident anyone in power learned their lesson. Which is mind-boggling because russian-backed far-right parties are a meaningful electoral threat to people like Von Der Layen.


  • Everyone from Sanders to Dick fucking Cheney endorsed Harris. Anyone who was paying any attention and wasn’t a literal fascist voted for her. The direction of the swing seems irrelevant.

    The swing fell short because it’s not so much about direction than strength. Macron in 2017 ran the most “hard center” presidential campaign imaginable. Difference is it worked, not because his centrist program was particularly novel but in large part because he is a very charismatic figure and managed to create a voting base of hopefuls for himself. The same can broadly be argued about Obama (whose first act as president was to essentially absolve the previous administration and Wall St of their many sins in case anyone forgot how moderate he was).

    Harris ran on a platform of… “I’m not him”. Which to any reasonable person is an obvious “yeah OK”, but unfortunately most Americans are apathetic cretins who will refuse to move their asses to a polling station if the guy on the telly doesn’t promise them a blowie at the voting booth. And the Democrat establishment is simultaneously too big to fail and incapable of producing an actually charismatic leader.

    Well, all that and the obvious election interference from Musk, Putin, and the ontological inability of traditional media not to platform literal fascists.


  • Whether it’s 48 or 52 % is an immaterial difference. Every other American who voted, voted for Trump. The rest don’t seem to care either way. He has very broad popular assent and is as popular as Harris give or take a margin of error.

    Everyone is lasered-focused on the EC because it makes all the difference for the practicalities, but if one is to make a broad judgement of whether Trump won fair and square the answer is “yeah, mostly”. Further proof is the fact that the House is probably going to be his as well.

    Americans now bear the collective responsibility for the horrors of the next 4(+?) years. Do not make the mistake of blaming the popular will of outright fascism on institutional failures, because institutions didn’t force half of Americans to vote for the fascist, again.





  • Cop-out answer. Ending capitalism and ending ST are not the same fight. I’m not confident I’ll see the former happen in my lifetime, but the latter is a distinct possibility (though the pro-ST “I hate to see the sun in my free time” people have a slight edge where I live). Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

    Also I’m not even sure how ending capitalism is actually relevant. My skillset is office stuff, and until further notice humans still need to collaborate to get things done and therefore have a concept of “business hours” (though those don’t have to be 8-6).

    I see the “8 hours of work is too many” angle, but that problem is mostly orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalist societies can (and have) changed the standard number of working hours. Communist societies are not exempt from the concept of mandatory labor either (quite the contrary for all historical examples!). If you’re looking for an economic model where everyone is free to work whenever they damn well please, I’m afraid you’ll have to bring the replicator thingies from Star Trek into existence first.



  • Oh I’ve got a window alright. It is set up perfectly right so that on the day after ST takes over I can see the sun set 6 minutes before I get off work. Sun’s down, guess I can go outside now!

    That is absolutely devilish. I have to get to work so I’ll wake up whenever to get there. But all outdoors evening activities are, at best, a complete joke 5 months of the year because of fucking ST. Wanna take a quick jog around the neighborhood? Bad news bitch, it’s pitch black outside. Here’s to hoping I don’t get run over by a fucking bus.

    “Sun rises after work starts” is a setup for caffeine addiction, but “sun sets before work ends” is a setup for crippling alcoholism. Literally nothing to look forward to all day long, five months a year. I will not take any shit from so-called morning people about this, there is one objective truth here and it’s that standard business hours being the worldwide standard that they are, ST the absolute fucking worst for office workers.