Pronouns: They/Them

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Satisfactory is a fairly good example of it (and also a game I am obsessed with). Games differentiate areas with biomes often, but the position of biomes often follows no climate logic. Having a rainforest and high desert and boreal forest, each maybe 1km x 1km within a 5x5 km area, with stark borders between them would be utterly bizarre on earth. Satisfactory does it’s part to hide this by having such a maze like layout, broken up by the steep karst landscape, with no clear line of sight across the whole map most of the time, but a lot of games just let that be something we suspend our disbelief for in order to have more variety in the game. Satisfactory also can do some hand waving of it through the implication that it’s some sort of alien garden world as well, and might be ecologically influenced by an entity which may be pursuing variety (that said I haven’t gathered all the mercer spheres, that’s just the vibe I get fairly early in the game). The bizarreness is reduced by not having a taiga or frozen desert in that same 5km x 5km region, something some games will include so they can have a snowy place as well.




  • I get where you are coming from, but this event is pretty much entirely the fault of Crowdstrike and the countless organizations that trusted them. It’s definitely a show of how massive outages are more likely when things are overly centralized and proprietary, and managed by big, shitty, profit driven organizations. Since crowdstrike operates in kernel space, it doesn’t matter which operating system it’s on, it can break it if it does something stupid. In fact they managed to break some redhat machines not too long ago, and some Debian machines not long before that. It’s just the impact wasn’t as far reaching as this recent utter fuckup, just because fewer critical machines were affected, so we didn’t hear about those smaller fuckups in the news.


  • I think that the Democratic Party is hated both from the left and the right, and calling them the Democrat Party makes some sense if you don’t view them as aligning with real democracy. Kind of like when one calls pro-life people “pro-forced-pregnancy” or “anti-abortion”.

    Like there’s probably plenty of astroturfing out there, but I don’t think this is a strong sign a particular account is astroturf. Since we are all exposed to everyone’s discourse, that way of referring to Democrats could fairly easily hop between different groups that don’t like Democrats. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” makes its way to the right somehow just because it’s anti-liberal, even though it originates from the left.

    Despite its origin on the right, I think that type of phrasing makes a bit more sense coming from the left than the right, because the right does not actually care at all about democracy, except when they equate it with capitalism, and democracy is like the left’s whole deal.


  • I was gonna answer that most animals don’t live as long and reproduce faster than humans (so populations survive despite increased cancer risk), but when I looked into it I found a deep rabbit hole. In the case of wolves, I’m sure plenty died early on, because the populations present appear to have some genetic immune adaptations that protect them from cancer. I know other species (like frogs) have dark skin because the melenin increased the survival rate of the darker frogs at the time of the accident. So that is to say probably a lot of wildlife died, and that natural selection lead to some critters that are pretty resistant to radiation.










  • I use Chatgpt 3.5 both personally and at work for tip of the tongue questions, especially when I can’t think of a word. Sometimes as a starting point when I have trouble finding the answer to a question in Google. It can sometimes find an old movie that I vaguely remember based on my very poor descriptions too.

    For example: “what is the word for a sample of a species which is used to define the species” - tip of the tongue, holotype. “What is the block size for LTO-9 tape” - wasn’t getting a clear answer from forums and IBM documentation is kind of behind a wall, needed Chatgpt to realize there was no single block size for tape.

    It’s excellent for difficult to search things that can be quickly verified once you have an answer (important step, as it will give you garbage rather than say it doesn’t know something).





  • Do you know how much work it is to live unhoused? How uncomfortable and dehumanizing? If you are completely without shelter, how it is after it rains, or the air is choked with smoke during fire season?

    It seems like you have just one explanation for everything here. When there’s a problem, it’s because of some moral failing that has to be punished. The publication you reference is telling.

    Your attitude toward both Roma and unhoused is an outside look in, entirely through the lens of criminality. There is no understanding there. You are missing the big picture, the why behind all of the things people do.

    If you really want to scam people, you start an LLC and live comfortably off of other people’s work, like, you know, rich people do.


  • You are completely divorced from the reality on the ground.

    A good chunk of the unhoused (at least where I live, US CA) have jobs, it’s just not enough for rent or they can’t find a place because of poor credit, which means the places available are even more expensive. Rent has increased faster than median income, and way faster than low income.

    Most unhoused are there temporarily. Anything nice they have may be from before they got into their present situation. And what are they supposed to do? Pawn off their cell phone for pennies on the dollar?

    The explosion in number of unhoused people is not just a bunch of people happening to have some sort of moral failure all at once. The simpler explanation is that our economy and society is failing. And what do we expect to see as resources are hoarded by the powerful at exponentially increasing rates? Where do those resources come from?

    Also self report on your attitude toward Roma people.