• 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle


  • The BEHAVIOR of a very small subset of vegans unfortunately causes a small but ridiculously vocal subset of non-vegans to tar all vegans with the same brush.

    Since volume equals truth for a not insignificant number of people in the Internet, far too many people don’t stop to separate behavior choices from professed beliefs and that’s how we get where we are now, I unfortunately.

    The world would be a better place if people stopped automatically associating and assuming causation and instead treated bad behavior as just that.


  • The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

    Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

    That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

    WTF were they thinking?


  • Huh.

    Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.

    I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.

    Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.



  • For those wondering about the upswing here:

    If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

    “This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.


  • I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

    Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

    Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

    All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

    Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.


  • Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.

    I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.

    I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)