Anomandaris

Anomandaris , 9 months ago

This is a horrible take. Absolutely awful, ultra-capitalist drivel. Why does every action or accomplishment have to be viewed through the lense of economic benefit? Not even holistic or utilitarian, just stakeholders and making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier... Who gives a fuck about space tourism? What the hell does that give us as a species?

The original comment about the importance of aerospace and space exploration is absolutely correct, but the idea that the end goal is space tourism is more than enough to make me turn against it also. The end goal is exploration, technological advancements, and a greater understanding of how our universe works. We should be taxing the ever-loving shit out of sociopaths like Musk and Bezos and feeding some of that in to NASA, and ESA, so scientists can make discoveries for us all, rather than businessmen making discoveries so they can exploit, gatekeep, and profit off it.

Anomandaris , 9 months ago

Obviously things cost money, you patronising jackass, but pining all your hopes on CEOs and the ultra-wealthy to cut in to their own profit margins for the sake of humanity makes you more braindead than I am. It's scientific innovation that drives discovery, cost reduction, and economic growth, not profit-hoarding conglomerates.

A large portion of our discoveries and inventions in the past fifty years or more are building on top of innovations made during the 60s, 70s, and 80s by NASA's launches. Electrical engineering, structural engineering, communications and data, materials sciences, all needed to be advanced for space travel. Handing this responsibility off to SpaceX just leads to all the data, discoveries, innovations, and corollaries being patented, trademarked, and locked away to make sure no competitor can take advantage of it.

Shell knew climate change was going to devastate the planet over 50 years ago. Did they capitalise on that opportunity to develop green and renewable energy first and completely dominate that market for the betterment of themselves and the planet? No. They locked down that information, spread misinformation for decades, and made short term profiteering decisions to advance their own individual careers. Now we're watching the planet slowly burn. So sure, let's trust the corporate pigs.

Anomandaris , 10 months ago

It seems like their economy is reliant on a series of short term fixes, and as each one winds down another bigger one needs to take its place.

12% interest is another example of this, it will improve things in the short term but has no effect on the underlying problems, meaning that in a couple of months or so something even more drastic will be needed.

Anomandaris , 10 months ago

It would be massively more simple, and more profitable to government, to simply levy a colossal tax on property owners who leave their rental properties empty for more than six months or so.

Anomandaris , 10 months ago

And the rest of the developed world is going to follow close behind as long as the wealth inequality stays as ridiculously broken as it is.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

gold checkmark identifying that the account belongs to a verified brand.

Blue checkmark and gold checkmark are different things.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they're barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.

The problem starts with corporate greed, hoarding revenue by keeping employee's salaries to the minimum acceptable, providing as little functionality as possible to reduce overheads, double dipping by selling a product/subscription and then selling their customer's data, and then complaining they aren't getting more money for what little they are doing.

Then inevitably a little guy like Kbin comes along and suffers because the internet is filled with soulless, ultra-capitalist corpo scumbags.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

They are absolutely not separate issues. How can I be expected to shell out $15 per month for 10 different content subscriptions if I can only just afford to put food on my table?

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

But a massive amount of them are. Small and solo creators on Youtube or Twitch need to conform to the rules of Google and Amazon, and even medium size creators are influenced and coerced by the precedents and market trends set by the much larger corporations.

And it doesn't matter if not all content is provided by large corporations, those large corporations employ the most people, and dictate in a lot of ways, the rules of the employment market. It's due to their habits and practices that wages are artificially low and expenses are inflated for record profits.

Until corporate greed is managed properly, consumers will always struggle to have enough expendable income to pay content creators, and therefore will always be searching for free content.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.

All are good choices.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

It's so weird to me, what do they expect to happen to the economy of their state when their workforce has such a poor education?

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

But the other side of that is no political accountability. There's no risk of punishment, so why should they care? Insider trading, corruption, nepotism, general lying, acting in bad faith, and intentionally misrepresenting facts to disrupt useful debate.

Politicians get away with all of that and more, and get paid massive amounts of money, above and below the table, while they do it.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

I've been thinking about an ARPG based around World of Warcraft's mythic dungeons.

Scalable, multi-player, enhanceable instances where completion of more difficult versions of the instance rewards in better gear and crafting options.

The idea is that the content is created for a 5-man party (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps) but you can try solo it, or bring up to 20 people to massively increase the difficulty and the rewards. Instances would follow WoW dungeon's formula of trash mobs (which drop crafting materials and have rare drop chances for certain gear) pathing you towards a succession of bosses with very different, complex mechanics with stages, signaled abilities, and skill requirements.

This would include a character levelling system to unlock new class abilities and mechanisms, a party finder system, certain dungeons locked behind character level and the completion of other dungeons at a certain difficulty level. Perhaps you could extend it to add in "world bosses", massive 200-man bosses with a chance at particularly unique loot, but of course that would require a certain level of infrastructure and a game population making it justifiable.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

I don't think so, the ARPG I have in mind wouldn't be open world, would have no campaign and much less focus on story overall, a much more detailed crafting system akin to Path Of Exile but perhaps less punishing, and much more focus on stacking up as many extra modifiers as possible rather than being limited, push your team to get the best rewards.

No timegating, no daily/weekly quests you must log in for, the only limitation is your skill.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Burning it would release too many fumes, sink the bastard and turn it in to a new coral reef for marine life.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

-50% ad revenue says otherwise

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Like most things, it's about balance. All changes to open source software must be approved by the community managing it, and if that community is lazy or poorly managed or simply too busy then there's an opportunity for new vulnerabilities to be created, either accidentally or maliciously.

But for well managed software, as other people have said you can get more changes more frequently, more security as many people are evaluating the code base, and greater attention to what users want rather than what's profitable. Whereas with closed source software there is a greater focus on profitability, and sometimes that leaves vulnerabilities open when development is rushed and/or vulnerabilities are not seen as important enough to justify the cost to fix, but sometimes that tendancy towards profitability can also ensure the product stays a market leader. Steam may be a good example of a good closed source product.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

It would be interesting to see exactly how Meta is managing to block VPN users. Is it simply a matter of looking up instagram or facebook account related to email addresses used to sign up? Is it evaluating some sort of browser fingerprint? That's assuming VPN users are doing so via desktop, if it's an Android device for example is the OS itself providing information that's not getting obfuscated by the VPN?

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

I don't know if I'd go that far. If you're talking about a quick script then sure, whatever gets the job done. But for any actual project the use of good, consistent typing does a lot for readability and future-proofing. And in strongly-typed languages it can have a notable affect on the overall functionality too.

If you can't tell from context whether something is a float or if it'll overflow the int max then you probably need to re-think the entire method.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Yeah man, let me just get my kitchen gun or my box shooter or my letter pistol.

Oh wait, sorry, it's not gun I'm thinking of that has many completely harmless uses, it's a knife!

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Calling a gun a tool is intentionally misleading. A gun's sole purpose is as a weapon, using it any other way is a misuse of that "tool". Whereas knives have various practical purposes. Which was obviously the purpose of my initial reply.

In some cases, yes, having a gun is entirely legitimate (assuming used safely) such as protection from dangerous wildlife. But the number of legitimate cases does not even come close to justifying the number of guns, or the gun culture, in America. Violence doesn't happen in a vacuum, no, the presence of guns, the acceptance of gun culture, and the normalization of gun violence are things that make gun crime so common.

The removal of guns, and restricting of them to legitimate use cases IS dealing with the underlying social issues. But definitely only part of the solution, that alone is not enough, but nothing else will have a strong effect while so many guns are on the streets and easily accessible.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Yes, technically weapons are tools, that's because the definition of a tool is so broad, just a device used to carry out a particular task.

That's why I never said he was wrong to call a gun a tool, I said it was misleading, which it is. When a reasonable person thinks of a tool they do not think of a gun, you think of a wrench or a screwdriver or a swiss army knife, or something like that.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Yes, technically weapons are tools

Again, I'm not arguing a gun isn't a tool. In fact, in the very comment you're replying to I said they are.

But all of this is besides the actual point, you derailed the point of gun culture and availability driving gun violence with an ultimately meaningless conversation about semantics.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

But it's definitely only part of the solution, that alone is not enough, but nothing else will have a strong effect while so many guns are on the streets and easily accessible.

No I didn't, I think I was pretty clear. We need to reduce the number of guns available, nothing else will be effective until we do. I do believe any solution that does not involve removing guns at some point is incomplete. But removing guns on its own is not enough.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Although it may very well be caused by Twitter running out of money, which would be corroborated by Twitter's lack of payment to various other parties. Giving Musk three options: Use more of his own money, admit defeat and massively scale back Twitter's functionality and availability, or try to scam money out of other people.

Clearly he's not willing to spend his own money, or admit failure.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Aside from email already being federated as others have said, there's a site called PrivacyTools with lots of links for the other things you talked about and lots more.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

Nice, thanks, I didn't know about this! I assumed the ads were just an unfortunate necessity to maintain the site, but you can definitely tell there's a bigger difference when you compare the two.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

It's also really weird. Elvis was around to see The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Jimi Hendrix, Queen, and technically Sex Pistols too although that was towards the end of his life.

Point is, he should have known about much "worse" musicians and music than The Beatles.

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

These events were the basis for the movie Amsterdam, which I enjoyed quite a lot although admittedly it has mixed reviews

Anomandaris , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I think the movie was intentionally a bit "Forrest Gump"-esque, we're not meant to focus on the Nazis, the Nazi sympathizers, or the treasonous business owners. We're supposed to focus on the human bond, the relationship between the main characters, and how it all comes together at the last minute to resolve the plot (and the Plot).

I'm of a mixed opinion regarding the marketing, on the one hand the plot they uncover is a fundamental aspect of the story and would have definitely drawn more attention, but on the other hand drawing attention to the Plot in the wrong way was exactly what they wanted to avoid, do they leave the Business Plot out of the marketing or do they give in and weaken the whole message of the movie?

Anomandaris , 1 year ago

Between normal people, or even minor celebrities, I would absolutely agree. But Farage is a notable entity in politics and journalism, one would hope that being accused of corruption, bribery, and treason would be ruinous for such a career. That is absolutely the sort of thing you would sue over, if you believed you had a good chance at winning.