azertyfun @ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

It's really funny when you think about it. Nearly all movie planets are actually real places on Earth, from Tatooine (Tunisia) to Endor (Washington IIRC).

Even funnier, a lot of low-budget alien planets (especially the rocky sceneries) are found within a 30 mi radius of Hollywood or whatever the actor guild considers a long distance shoot.

The people doing this kind of bullshit are either children or fascists. They aren't interested in "healthy debate" with you. They are lashing out at the Great Woke Bogeyman.

Honestly we should be relieved that the time these brainrotted fascists spend vandalizing Wikipedia isn't spent sending rape or death threats to the developers, which is usually how these witch-hunts on "woke" go.

These are the pitfalls with the "amazon reviews/yelp" model.

A decent implementation of the Wikipedia/FOSS model sidesteps this because it theoretically is run by opinionated curators. No amount of bots/shills can break the article soft-lock ounce foul play is spotted.

That's not to say these systems haven't been occasionally broken through more sophisticated attacks, but empirically it seems clear that the model generally works well enough given enough community engagement (which would be the biggest challenge IMO, because maintainers can't be expected to buy every product, and reliable primary sources may be hard to come by).

Well "Going private" doesn't mean anything. It can mean PE. It can mean "traditional" personal/family ownership (e.g. Musk with Twitter). It can also mean moving to a co-op model (theoretically I don't think anything stops a bankrupt publicly-traded company being bought by its workers). "Private" doesn't sit anywhere on the political spectrum; even Marxists can generally agree that co-operatives are in principle better than publicly-traded companies.

Unfortunately PE firms are usually the ones who win the bid when a company "goes private" because the PE business model is driven by speculation and leveraged buyouts, and (at least in the US) supported by advantageous tax rates. Even from a purely capitalist perspective it's an objective failure that harms the macro-economy. It's not even capitalism anymore; it's oligarchic.

Ding ding ding. People hear "going private" and think "mom 'n pop shop". But PE firms are vultures. Actually no, that's mean to vultures.

How Private Equity Consumed America - Wendover Productions

I wasn't very old then but the main thing was RAM. Fuckers in Microsoft sales/marketing made 1 GB the minimum requirement for OEMs to install Vista.

So guess what? Every OEM installed Vista with 1 GB of RAM and a 5200 RPM hard drive (the "standard" config for XP which is what most of those SKUs were meant to target). That hard drive would inevitably spend its short life thrashing because if you opened IE it would immediately start swapping. Even worse with OEM bloat, but even a clean Vista install would swap real bad under light web browsing.

It was utterly unusable. Like, everything would be unbearably slow and all you could do was (slowly) open task manager and say "yep, literally nothing running, all nonessential programs killed, only got two tabs open, still swapping like it's the sex party of the century".

"Fixing" those hellspawns by adding a spare DDR2 stick is a big part of how I learned to fix computer hardware. All ya had to do was chuck 30 € of RAM in there and suddenly Vista went from actually unusable to buttery smooth.

By the time the OEMs wised up to Microsoft's bullshit, Seven was around the corner so everyone thought Seven "fixed" the performance issues. It didn't, it's just that 2 GB of RAM had become the bare minimum standard by then.

EDIT: Just installed a Vista VM because I ain't got nothing better to do at 2 am apparently. Not connected to the internet, didn't install a thing, got all of 12 processes listed by task manager, and it already uses 500 MB of RAM. Aero didn't even enable as I didn't configure graphics acceleration.

The studios! Think of the studios! Their execs couldn't live off merch sales and shitty reboots anymore! They might even have to - gasp - develop original IP if they want to milk an exclusive license. Some other execs would make money off some of last century's licenses! The horror! The tragedy!

That can't be. Clearly the best thing about Indiana Jones and Jurrasic Park is the death grip the studios have on those IPs. Ever since Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain I've been unable to enjoy the Disney Classics. All joy has been snuffed out from my life.

Bro I wouldn't trust most companies not to store their only copy of super_duper_important_financial_data_2024.xlsx on an old AliExpress thumb drive attached to the CFO's laptop in a coffee shop while he's taking a shit.

If your company has an actual DRP for if your datacenter catches fire or your cloud provider disappears, you are already doing better than 98 % of your competitors, and these aren't far-fetched disaster scenarios. Maintaining an entire separate pen-and-paper shadow process, training people for it? That's orders of magnitude more expensive than the simplest of DRPs most companies already don't have.

Friendly wave to all the companies currently paying millions a year extra to Broadcom/VMWare because their tools and processes are too rigid to use with literally any other hypervisor when realistically all their needs could be covered by the free tier of ProxMox and/or OpenStack.

We're like 1960s tobacco industry at best. I don't see the subsidies on red meat going away in the next 10 years, and probably not the next 20 if I'm honest, short of a catastrophic food crisis that would cause us to re-evaluate the number of human calories produced per hectare of agricultural land.

I'd like to be wrong, and change does come in waves so maybe 10 years from now I'll change my mind. Maybe. But right now the idea of not subsidizing red meat production is fringe even within the left of the left – and the left hasn't exactly been making electoral strides in most countries recently.

Vegan ≠ Vegetarian.

Veganism starts and ends with "no animal exploitation". And due to some weird ingroup/outgroup dynamics Extremely Online Vegans will get batshit insane radical with it and refuse to feed meat to their cats or insist that eating honey is fundamentally unethical.

I eat very little meat, mostly for environmental and partly for ethical reasons, but bringing up the environmentalist side of vegetarianism to defend veganism (a radical dogma based on a specific ethical stance) is missing the mark entirely.

With all that said, everyone should eat less meat, and way less red meat.

There's probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.

The "traditional" AAA pipeline is "make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS". Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).

That's not to say there aren't good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I'd say we're nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won't want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.

Wait until you learn about debhelper.

If you use a debian-based system, unless you have actively looked at the DH source, the one thing that built virtually every package on your system, you do not get to say anything about "bloat" or "KISS".

DH is a monstrous pile of perl scripts, only partially documented, with a core design that revolves around a spaghetti of complex defaults, unique syntax, and enough surprising side effects and crazy heuristics to spook even the most grizzled greybeards. The number of times I've had to look at the DH perl source to understand a (badly/un)documented behavior while packaging something is not insignificant.

But when we replaced a bazillion bash scripts with a (admittedly opinionated but also stable and well documented) daemon suddenly the greybeards acted like Debian was going to collapse under the weight of its own complexity.

The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.

To summarize:

• The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that's only around 1/3 total.
• The reason the left proclaimed they "won" is they came "first" and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the "hard right" (welp)
• That, in isolation (!), isn't antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can't work otherwise.
• However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I'm not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn't going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.

The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.

Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.

In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don't understand then breaking them and/or giving up.

Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn't do anything? Do you think it's because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

You are so haughty you've circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you'd hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.

Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

That's... not a war crime is. I don't want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

Now that's fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there's not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.

I'm as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that's like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.

Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it's not like there's a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.

EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks... How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.

Then you're knowingly engaging in the consumption of abusive products? Do you not see how you have literally no leverage whatsoever as a consumer?

Do you not consume a single Google/Meta/Microsoft product or do you not care about their abhorrent business practices?

You are conflating Consumers with Citizens, a classic pitfall of modern neoliberal democracies.

Just because people willingly Consume a Product does not mean they think The Product is good or even that it should exist at all. Neoliberalism is unable to acknowledge that, because Everything is a Market and the Market is Infallible.

In reality, the game theory is such that individuals may not have the means to get out of the local minimum they found themselves stuck in. Prisoner's dilemma and all that. That's what representative democracy is supposed to solve, when it isn't captured by ideology and corporate interests.