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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • I say we let them hang with us. They’re a little confused, but they’re adorable enough.

    Also, talesfromtechsupport effectively became talesfromtech because just tech support is to small of a niche to sustain a sub with content. Likewise, if we banned all the not-strictly-programming humour, I don’t know the community will thrive still. It might drive out both content and viewers, and while it’s arguably correct, I don’t think it’s wise.

    I’d rather have it be something vaguely resembling the type of humour programmers tend to have than a little walled-off box with a big sign “NERDS ONLY”






  • A specialist in one field isn’t necessarily adept in another, and particularly coming from STEM to humanities seems a particularly treacherous transition because so much about humans is based on premises that cold, logical STEM principles just aren’t aware of. That doesn’t mean we STEMs are stupid, we just don’t know just how much there is that we don’t know and would need to know before we can understand, let alone predict human behaviour.

    I know I’ve found myself grossly misjudging human reactions in some case because humans are complex and there are so mamy premises and factors affecting individual behaviour and so many more for collective behaviour that they’re effectively non-deterministic and even predicting the probabilities requires such familiarity with the people or demographics, respectively.

    All that is to say: Yes, I think so too. She’s well-educated, but not above tripping over the same, common stone that many smart people have stumbled on.




  • On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.

    Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.

    On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?

    So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.

    The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…

    (I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)





  • “Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.

    The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.

    They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.

    The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.



  • Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It’s like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can’t really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

    That’s the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can’t start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.