DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him] @ DefinitelyNotAPhone @hexbear.net

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5 yr. ago

The answer is that the eagles are theologically angels in LotR and both sapient and very susceptible to the Ring, and having a flying Sauron-replacement is not an improvement.

Parry this you fucking casual

To add to the list of non-chud reasons to dislike it, the plot is driven entirely by characters doing the dumbest thing possible at every turn on all sides for little to no reason.

Someone once pointed out the First Order could have ended the movie in the first ten minutes by having their dreadnaught just shoot the Resistance's capital ship instead of the planetary (read: entirely stationary) base first, or by having the dreadnaught's fighter screen/escort ships deployed instead of just chilling and doing nothing the entire fight.

We can only do terrible things permanently. Good things are always temporary and we are powerless to change that. Children have to starve because otherwise politicians might have to actually do some work for a change. This is a very good and serious political system and we should just accept it as it is and ignore any alternative.

"How much map have you explored so far? How full are your pickers? About half, right? I'm a mid boss, a forgettable nobody! It's all rigged against me!"

How the fuck did I miss that we already had the perfect emoji for this?

Seems simple enough to me.

The funny thing about nuclear warheads is that you don't have to be terribly accurate with them.

That's what 70 years of exclusively using your military as the enforcers of neo-colonialism does. Turns out what works for leveling a low-tech guerilla hideout in Vietnam or Afghanistan isn't so effective when your opponent has comprehensive SAM networks.

No no, you see, having your weapon systems cost 5 times as much money as the opposing side's is a good thing actually. Clearly it means it's 150 times more effective, according to this marketing presentation I found from the for-profit corporation that makes it and then sells it to the military and this press release from the general whose entire career is intrinsically tied to it, both of whom couldn't possibly be biased in any way!

That's not entirely fair. Those buildings are the useless luxury malls built around their respective stations; the actual platforms are just as shit and barely functional as the rest of NYC.

He wasn't just a hero, he was a union man!

For the most part it is the same infrastructure. The signal system in the subway is still analog.

Horny answer incoming:

If you're into ERP at all, f-list.net is unparalleled in catering to just about anything you can think of that isn't outright illegal. There's a lot of trash as you can imagine, but you can build out a fairly intensive kink list and scroll through an absurd number of character profiles and channels for just about anything.

Well, I'd rather the day be sooner than later.

Agreed, but we're not the ones making the decision. And the people who are have two options: move forward with a risky, expensive, and potentially career-ending move with no benefits other than the system being a little more maintainable, or continuing on with business-as-usual and earning massive sums of money they can use to buy a bigger yacht next year. It's a pretty obvious decision, and the consequences will probably fall on whoever takes over after they move on or retire, so who cares about the long term consequences?

You run months and months of simulated transactions on the new code until you get an adequate amount of bugs fixed.

The stakes in financial services is so much higher than typical software. If some API has 0.01% downtime or errors, nobody gives a shit. If your bank drops 1 out of every 1000 transactions, people lose their life savings. Even the most stringent of testing and staging environments don't guarantee the level of accuracy required without truly monstrous sums of money being thrown at it, which leads us back to my point above about risk vs yachts.

There will come a time when these old COBOL machines will just straight die, and they can't be assed to keep making new hardware for them.

Contrary to popular belief, most mainframes are pretty new machines. IBM is basically afloat purely because giant banks and government institutions would rather just shell out a few hundred thousand every few years for a new, better Z-frame than going through the nightmare that is a migration.

If you're starting to think "wow, this system is doomed to collapse under its own weight and the people in charge are actively incentivized to not do anything about it," then you're paying attention and should probably start extending that thought process to everything else around you on a daily basis.

Translating it isn't the difficult part. It's convincing a board room full of billionaires that they should flip the switch and risk having their entire system go down for a day because somebody missed a bug in the code and then having to explain to some combination of very angry other billionaires and very angry financial regulators why they broke the economy for the day.

Train gang needs no justification

Games have to talk to your operating system to have it tell your GPU to draw lots of funny pictures that come together to make up the graphical portions of the game. Game developers do not want to do this directly, because talking directly to the OS is hard. As such, games talk to graphical APIs like Vulkan or DirectX to do the hard bit for them.

For years almost all games used DirectX, which is made by Microsoft. This gave Windows a virtual monopoly on PC gaming because they weren't about to let their competitors use their API. Then Vulkan came out, which was designed from the beginning to be OS-agnostic, sending us to the promised land of games that could (with some other efforts) run on any machine, anywhere.

caused the whole world to suffer

In addition to what others have already said, this line in particular is complete bullshit. The vast majority of the world doesn't care about Ukraine in any way beyond "war is bad," and indeed a large chunk of the global south has expressed that the war is entirely the West's fault for provoking Russia constantly since the collapse of the USSR. The only people suffering from the war are in Ukraine, Russia, or any of a number of European nations that were strong-armed into shutting off their access to Russian fossil fuels by the US so American oil companies could dominate the energy markets in that region of the world at the expense of workers who saw their utility bills go up 4x overnight.

Feudalism never ended, it just transitioned from a bunch of failsons inheriting land titles to a bunch of failsons getting middle management jobs through nepotism. Every company larger than 50 people is a vast internal labyrinth of lords-in-everything-but-name jockeying for promotions, accolades, and raises by inflating their roles, and the best thing you can do for yourself is find a position that isolates you as hard as possible from having to deal with that yourself lest you end up spending 50 hours a week working to get one over some petty rival of your boss.