• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • The competitive scene happened. Can’t have meaningful competitive matchmaking against the same 100 players. People don’t just want to frag noobs, they want to grind the ladder to be able to say “I’m GE and you’re Gold, therefore I know for a fact I’m better than you”.

    This is a global phenomenon. Even goddamn chess has this, first thing players ask each other nowadays is “what’s your chess.com ELO”.

    I’m not a competitive player myself but I get why people rush after ELO progression. And it’s not much of a stretch to say CS, Valo, and especially chess wouldn’t have seen such widespread success without competitive ELO-based matchmaking.


  • France’s historic language policy is certainly highly problematic yes. Although the point is not genocide but class warfare and/or colonialism, not that it’s much of an improvement.

    And now do Belgium. French is the language of the elites (the monarchy and, historically, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) but also a minority regional language. Is Flanders banning French on public signage a form of oppression? I personally think it’s stupid Flemish nationalism but I wouldn’t call it oppression.

    So how about we stop making blanket statements. Moscow’s erasure of Belarusian identity is at least oppressive and imperialistic and follows a long history of oppression. IDK if that qualifies as genocide (IMHO that undermines the gravity of something like the Holodomor), but something not strictly being genocide doesn’t make it unimportant.




  • Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:

    Tracking consent prompt with only an "Accept all" button

    Where’s the button to reject tracking? It doesn’t exist.

    For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral’s own website:

    Tracking consent prompt with a "Reject all" button next to "Accept all"

    First time I see GDPR violation this brazen. While writing this comment I finally figured out how to reject consent (clicking on “Purposes” and manually deselecting each purpose).

    I double checked with remote debugging, the button is not just hidden in CSS; it’s missing entirely:

    HTML source showing no reject all button

    For some reason I don’t get a consent prompt at all from my desktop even on a brand new firefox profile – perhaps because of my user-agent?

    Anyways I felt motivated today so I’ve sent an email to their Data Protection Officer and set a reminder for next month in case they ghost me.


  • Yeah as I expected you’re projecting right wing talking points on what I said and answering those instead of anything I -at the very least- meant.

    I just do not think that, in a frictionless vacuum, one can completely dismiss the idea that there can be some, however microscopic and inconsequential downsides to immigration (through no individual fault in the vast majority of the population).

    Do consider that at the very least if Europe hypothetically did away with border checks entirely and strived for massive immigration, the ensuing brain drain would wreak havoc on the Global South (even worse than right now, kinda like happened within the EU with the former eastern block). Regardless of the exact mechanism, mass migration has long-lasting sociocultural impacts and to say these are only positive is pure globalist ideology.


  • You gloss over the part where even with the best intentions imaginable European immigration would have killed 90 % of American Natives with their new pathogens. No matter which way you slice it that is a scenario where European culture becomes the dominant culture, though it would certainly be nice not to have overt genocide and oppression sprinkled on top.

    (Of course that’s not the case right now and the great replacement theory is a fascist invention, if that needs saying)

    Also be careful not to infantilise immigrants. There is a marginal but highly visible issue happening for example where Saudi Arabia is funding Wahhabit (i.e. highly orthodox) mosques and imams in Europe that when combined with depressed socioeconomic opportunities fuels religious antagonism/radicalism particularly amongst particularly vulnerable teenage second generation immigrants. Is it an existential threat to European hegemony or something Europe is incapable of absorbing? Certainly not. Doesn’t mean it’s an issue we have to refuse to acknowledge in the name of our own leftist orthodoxy.




  • Don’t you see how that’s such an obviously ugly and mathematically unsatisfying retrofit to make your shit work?

    B2 B1 1 2 3

    vs

    -2 -1 0 1 2

    And what the hell do you even do in a situation where 0 is at street level but -1 opens on a backyard or something. It’s clearly not a basement, but it’s clearly not the ground floor either.
    Or do you never build an elevator in such buildings in order not to trigger massive cognitive dissonance?

    EDIT: Holy shit there is another layer to this hypocrisy cake. Americans swear up and down that they have to write “12/11” because they say “12th of September”, but their floor notation is literally “B1” for “First Basement”. Clearly the only rule they follow is that they’ll do whatever is least logical and convenient just to piss off everyone who is forced to work with them.


  • It’s not about the bindings. It’s, as always with kernel devs, about gatekeeping and unprofessional if not outwardly hostile behavior.

    Maintaining bindings is a hard problem for sure, but no hard problems have ever been solved by the key stakeholders refusing to partake in honest discussions. Asahi Lina’s breakdown of her rejected contributions to the fundamentally flawed drm_sched, which do not involve a single byte of Rust, demonstrates an unwillingness to collaborate that goes much further than the sealioning about muh bindings.


  • IMO the proper thing to do is to answer the question and make damn sure the poster isn’t falling for the XY Problem.

    Sometimes the weird solution is justified by a weird context, and we gotta treat people like adults. But also, you’re probably asking the wrong question.

    Like, I can tell you how to disconnect your bike’s brake lines, but if you’re asking how to do that with no context I would most definitely like to know what problem you think you’re solving.


  • It’s so easy to tell this map was made by a Brit. Wales gets its own color (despite largely not speaking Welsh) but Belgium and Switzerland are monochrome (despite having multiple federally recognized and geographically partitioned monolinguistic regions and their own flavors of historical-but-rarely-spoken language)?

    Only the Bri’ish would be haughty enough to assume their flavour of federal governance is so unique.

    (I don’t actually care, it’s just very interesting how even such an innocent map actually shows a strong political/cultural bias)


  • … What’s that about culture war bullshit? Whatever corner of Xitter that youtuber went scurrying under, there’s like a couple dozen people there.

    Some people (conservatives and some absolutely brainrotted terminally online leftists) love attributing sales data to Wokism or Wokism being Defeated. thisengineiswoke.jpg.

    Literally no-one actually cares, not even conservatives, because they sure as shit play Elden Ring despite the character creation presenting gender as “A” and “B” or whatever. It does not matter. “Go woke go broke” is a literal fucking meme. If people actually cared about gaming politics then FIFA wouldn’t be one of the top selling games every year and reddit would have killed pre-orders as a practice 10 years ago.

    The game is bland, a cheap knockoff, already very old-fashioned, infinitely too expensive, terribly marketed and uniquely non-appealing. That’s it, no need to bring weird politics into this.


  • You underestimate the sheer volume in my hippocampus dedicated to tracking tabs.

    … Kidding, mostly. Because generally tabs are grouped together in a way that makes sense so it’s easy to remember. These 10 tabs are me researching a new tool… A couple tags for articles I will surely get to… Then these 15 tabs are documentation for XYZ… Those 5 tabs are YouTube videos I want to watch… These are three Wikipedia searches that popped in my head and oh look a couple songs I want to listen to before adding them to my playlist.

    If I want to find a tab and they are fully minimized then I click on the group with the relevant icon then I Ctrl+Tab through them until I find what I want. Perfectly reasonable.

    I swear it makes sense and bookmarks are not an adequate replacement.


  • Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.

    However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to “workers don’t feel represented by socialists”.

    • The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I’ve had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I’m afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
    • Conversely the “center-left” socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
    • The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as “pro-immigration” during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
    • Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).

    Fighting fascists with “but socialists good for proletariat” is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that’s kind of the problem because they feel it hasn’t helped. People don’t have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.



  • To your last point: I don’t think it’s hard to figure out.

    Unlike many people I don’t always have an inner monologue. Like, right now I’m writing so I “hear” the words I’m putting on my screen. But if I’m programming or doing some other complex abstract thought? No sentence there, only a flow of abstract thoughts (words, images, nameless concepts, feelings, intuition, all meshing together in a way that is unique to my brain and would take several paragraphs to adequately explain). This occasionally makes it… challenging to communicate an idea I just had, because my thinking runs parallel to my formulating and going from one to the other is a significant mental overhead.

    For sure language does play some structuring role in how I see the world. But there are lots of thoughts I have which aren’t ever framed by language, and I imagine if I didn’t speak any language that’s how all my thoughts would be. Although that would obviously be very limiting, it certainly doesn’t sound alien to me.