rwhitisissle

@rwhitisissle@beehaw.org

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rwhitisissle ,

“The Democratic Party is more invested in trying to maintain control than it is in trying to win an election in November,” said one DNC member.

First time?

rwhitisissle ,

I mean, Jesus famously overcharged on delivery and transaction fees when feeding the masses with all that miraculously created bread and fish while also losing 13 billion dollars in the process, somehow, right?

No, wait, I'm thinking of a different guy...

A supermarket trip may soon look different, thanks to electronic shelf labels ( www.npr.org )

Grocery store prices are changing faster than ever before — literally. This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds....

rwhitisissle ,

I love how reality manages to combine the most comically exploitative parts of cyberpunk fiction with literally none of the intense, vibrant, or interesting parts. It's just a dull, gray, sexless, post-industrial dystopia with ugly cars, chronic obesity, and fentanyl addiction. And now surge pricing.

rwhitisissle ,

American corporations want an "easy" war. Like against a country like Iraq or Afghanistan. You know, someone that has no real capacity to fight back or strike foreign military targets (like a Lockheed martin manufacturing facility) and is more of a punching bag for the US military. A war with China would immediately spark World War 3 and trigger a global economic and military crisis. It is also extremely undesirable because China is a nuclear superpower and, uh...we tend not to get into shooting wars with those because they can potentially escalate into literal nuclear holocaust.

rwhitisissle ,

He's telling them they better "cut the malarkey" or else he'll say something else that makes him sound comically old.

rwhitisissle ,

I would imagine IP bans would be useful. Although the issue with this is that you run into the problem other websites are having: people who are valid users that are on VPNs get caught in the filter of IP bans because botnets also use the same VPNs.

rwhitisissle ,

Morgan Spurlock was not a great person (history of sexual misconduct) and his documentaries are deeply flawed, but Super Size Me is how I first learned about the federal corn subsidy, which contributed to the process by which fast food gradually became a calorie drenched bizzarro version of itself. So that's something.

rwhitisissle ,

From a historical or intellectual archaeological perspective, no one in 2000 BC Babylon thought their pottery would be of historical significance, but 4000 years later, it is. These websites, particularly ones independently created and maintained by hobbyists, are snapshots of the ideas of the time and people that created them. These websites may not have been intensely popular, but they were in many ways a foundational part of the inchoate tapestry of the internet that would eventually become the "modern web."

rwhitisissle ,

Dead Internet Theory is one of the few "conspiracy" theories I sort of buy, in the sense that it's probably not descriptive of the nature of the current internet, but rather predictive of what it's becoming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

And also with less of the whole "they're doing this to manipulate people into believing...things" and more "people want quick and superficial information so that's all that's being produced and since it's easier for machines to produce it than humans, humans will automatically get outcompeted and eventually that's all the internet will be." The internet is becoming a dead mall, filled with the corpses of long abandoned Hot Topics.

rwhitisissle ,

This is true. Right now the OG internet is sort of kept alive by oral history, but we have the technology to save these websites in perpetuity as historical artifacts. That might be a good coding project - a robust archiving system that lets you point a URL at a webpage and scrape everything under its domain and keep a static collection of its contents. The issue, though, is that this doesn't actually truly "capture" many web pages. A lot of the backend data that might have been served dynamically from a database isn't retrievable, so the experience of using the page itself is potentially non-archivable.

rwhitisissle ,

Maven is a yiddish word for understanding, or something similar. There's a few things that have been named after it, but as it's in the tech space for this social non-network, it definitely has the potential to be confusing.

rwhitisissle ,

What about remembering him as "Raghavan, Nimble Pilferer?"

rwhitisissle ,

This is my thinking as well. IPOs are almost never profitable. If the stock lists at 50 a share, six months later it'll probably be way closer to 20. And it's not like Reddit is Facebook, either, if you want to compare it to another publicly traded social media website. Facebook, for all its faults, diversified its corporate enterprise years ago. It's not just a social media company, but a legitimate tech conglomerate. It now handles payment processing, offer a functional storefront for small businesses, and also owns Oculus, Instagram, and a massive truckload of other shit. What does Reddit own? Well, it owns...Reddit. Its valuation is...maybe 15 billion dollars. What does it have to offer other companies? Well, it has user data. Which is not valueless, but also worth way less than it used to be since every single company you have an online account with collects and sells your data to someone else.

rwhitisissle ,

Yeah, it's really more about two massive industries colluding to extract additional income from working Americans. Rental agencies contract with Spectrum, get a cut off the top, and the renters are stuck with a shitty internet service they don't want. Honestly, renting has never been a great experience for the average American, but it's been getting worse over time. Rental agencies are starting to cut staff, reduce actual beneficial services offered, force renters into paying for additional junk services they don't want or need (what the fuck is a $50 a month "beautification fee," anyway? Nobody ever fucking cleans this place...), and, of course, increase rent every year. And they can do this because...what the fuck else are you going to do? If you're working class and live in a high cost of living area, you can't just move, or buy a house. You have to rent. No other options, really. And while you'd think "well, if someone else opens an apartment complex that offers better services, you can just move there." Sure, and spend 15 grand moving a mile and a half only to have the apartment complex you moved to suffer the same enshittification after 6 months that the first one did.

rwhitisissle ,

As an FYI, this is a very old thing that people are doing. There's actually a term for it (beyond just "corporate censorship"). It's bowdlerization or expurgation. And, on some level, I understand why people of a certain ethos would be opposed to it. Beyond the obvious reactionary agenda of being "anti-woke," there are concerns here over artistic or authorial autonomy and the fear of a slippery slope in which previous cultural attitudes are historically white washed. And I think it's good to acknowledge the past honestly. Not to celebrate those old attitudes, of course, but to let it stand as it is, scars and all, as a cultural artifact of a very different time. Editing the content of the original work to hide what is and was reduces it from that status of cultural artifact to just pure entertainment. That said, content warning wouldn't really rob much from the book, unless you believe every book should be a complete and total surprise to the reader. I can't comment too much on the beliefs of the author of this article, but their opposition to much of what they're complaining about comes more from a place of "the woke mob is ruining books" rather than anything I would say is a more complete or salient examination of how we collectively relate to the art of the past.

rwhitisissle ,

Sure. These things are products to be purchased, after all. Regardless of how you feel about the content of the books themselves, I'd be extraordinarily annoyed if a company could just edit on a whim the content I had paid for and expected to have in perpetuity. That said, you should never realistically buy anything from an online publisher that doesn't let you save a static text copy of the book as a PDF or other file offline. More generally, if you want to buy a book, the best thing to do is to buy from a used bookstore, if you're able. Not like Amazon needs any more money.

rwhitisissle ,

I don't see how they can be releasing a Nintendo Switch 2 when they just released the Nintendo Switch like....a year or two ago. Wait...when did the Switch come out? March of 2017?! Holy shit it's been 7 years.

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/0c08d067-e28b-44c1-8cd8-4ad46fa57011.webp

rwhitisissle ,

Isn't it great that the only way the supreme court can be recused from a case is if they decide they have a conflict of interest? You know...because the fact that Trump appointed 3 of them and the wife of one of them actively participated in an attempted insurrection don't qualify as "conflict of interest." What a fucked institution the Supreme Court is. Who could have predicted this would happen with a branch of the government defined by "all power and no accountability?"

rwhitisissle ,

 

A for effort.

rwhitisissle ,

Absolutely horrific. This man committed a terrible crime and murdered an innocent woman, but the world gains nothing from the state murdering him.

rwhitisissle ,

Gaming, like all software development, becomes plagued by popularized anti-patterns every so often. Remember back in like 2010 and every. single. fucking. game. had unskippable, frustratingly difficult, often instantly fatal should you fail them, quicktime events? Because I fucking remember. And now those are nowhere, because they're terrible. And, yes, the use of AI is not a game design pattern so much as it is a development tool that will be used to fastforward development and decrease costs around, presumably, asset generation, but to some extent that was always going to happen. Any time a tool comes about that fundamentally reduces human labor, it always sees widespread adoption. Eventually it'll be industry standard, and it'll be...fine. It'll suck for people with aspirations around graphic design and 3D modeling, but those are just the first places there will be cuts. Eventually you'll have the physics engines, game systems, state management, etc. and other core components of game design automated via AI processes, which will kill a shitload of dev jobs. And eventually the people who make these AI game engines will, instead of selling to a studio who will parameterize the AI with prompts, will automate the prompting process with AI itself, so instead of selling to studios, they'll just have an AI service that will take your description for a game that you want, run it through a bunch of canned AI subroutines and it'll crap out a boutique game of your design that they technically own and have full copyright over and which is just incredibly derivative of a ton of other IP - imagine every single game being Palworld, "like X crossed with Y with a bit of A and B thrown in." That's right: eventually the end user will design the games themselves. A world in which you never have to consume any game, or probably eventually any media of any kind, beyond the one you already liked and wanted. You'll never have to be challenged more than you would like or experiment with different forms of media. It'll be a brave new world, filled with brave new games.

rwhitisissle ,

Yeah, and people fucking hate it. It's a blemish on an otherwise okay game.

rwhitisissle ,

A lot of companies overhired during COVID, Trump basically turned the Federal Reserve into an unlimited money hack for banks and other companies, the tech sector is particularly sensitive to boom and bust cycles of mass hiring/layoffs every few years, there's been Fed rate hikes recently, and other factors. Your more conspiratorially minded would say it's a concerted effort to make people too afraid to unionize by making them think their jobs are in danger.

rwhitisissle ,

The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies. Almost every "alternative" browser is chromium under the hood. Google's next big plan is basically constructing a walled garden around the internet (at least the HTTP part) via complex DRM. Eventually, if you want to access an actual web page, it'll have to be via a Chromium browser. Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don't fucking render correctly and I'll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them. That's only going to get worse with time.

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