Senal
@Senal@programming.dev
- Comment on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately 3 days ago:
Perhaps for the the style or complexity of the code you (and i) are seeing on a regular basis this is true.
I find, for low logical complexity code, it’s less about the difficulty of reading it and more about the speed.
I can read significantly quicker than i can type and if the code isn’t something i need additional time to reason about then spotting issue with existing code can be quicker than me writing the same code out.
Boilerplate code is a good example of this.
Though, as i said, I’ve found the point at which that loses it’s reliable usefulness is relatively low in the complexity scale.
The specific issue i have with people pushing LLM’s as a panacea for boilerplate code is that it’s not declarative and is prone to reasonable looking hallucinations , given enough space.
Even boilerplate in large enough amount can be subject to eccentricities of LLM imagination.
- Comment on What are the most useful things you've printed? 4 days ago:
A bunch of 10 inch rack minilab stuff.
- Comment on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately 4 days ago:
It’s a revolutionary tool in its infancy, and it’s already very useful on certain tasks.
That’s a bold and premature statement IMO, how many AI winters have there been before this one ?
I’m not even saying you’re wrong, but to assert it with such confidence sounds like crypto bro-nanigans.
i would argue that it’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but that’s subjective i suppose.
I’ll never understand the LLM hate on lemmy.
Speaking for me personally i don’t hate LLM’s i dislike the confidence with which they are being pushed and the lack of acknowledgement of their limitations.
You get statements like
“And most devs I know use it everyday”
Without context, and that feeds into the general propaganda feel of the sentiment, because people who don’t actually use them or don’t understand the implied context hear “LLM’s can do all the things, all the professional devs are using it all day”.
I understand it’s not on you to police peoples impressions, but trying to add actual context to those statements isn’t hate, it’s prudence.
Then again, that’s subjective too.
- Comment on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately 5 days ago:
It’s much faster to check code for correctness than it is to write it in the first place.
In certain circumstances sure, but at any level of complexity, not so much.
At some point it becomes less about code correctness and more about logical correctness, which requires contextual domain understanding.
Want to churn out directory changing python scripts, go nuts.
Want to add business logic that isn’t a single discrete change to an existing system, less likely.
For small things is works OK, it’s less useful the more complex the task.
- Comment on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately 5 days ago:
That’s a deep cut and I am here for it
- Comment on UK | Man arrested in dawn raid after sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action 6 days ago:
well…shit.
TIL
I was absolutely not understanding what that term meant, at all.
- Comment on UK | Man arrested in dawn raid after sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action 1 week ago:
Is Starmer a neoliberal though ?
Don’t get me wrong, (neo)liberals are politically their own worst enemy most of the time, but at least properly attribute their political shittiness where it belongs.
Starmer is a tory in a red jacket.
- Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online 2 weeks ago:
All the research I am aware of - including what I referenced in the previous comment, is that people are honest by default, except for a few people who lie a lot. Boris Johnson is a serial liar and clearly falls into that camp.
I believe that you believe that, but a couple of surveys are not a sufficient argument about the fundamental good of all humanity.
If honesty were not the default, why would we believe what anyone has to say in situations where they have an incentive to lie, which is often? Why are such a small proportion of people criminals and fraudsters when for a lot of crimes, someone smart and cautious has a very low chance of being caught?
I think this is just a lack of imagination.
i will go through your scenarios and provide an answer but i don’t think it’s going to achieve anything, we just fundamentally disagree on this.
why would we believe what anyone has to say in situations where they have an incentive to lie, which is often?
You shouldn’t.
Why are such a small proportion of people criminals and fraudsters when for a lot of crimes, someone smart and cautious has a very low chance of being caught?
A lot of assumptions and leaps here.
Firstly crime implies actual law, which is different in different places, so let’s assume for now we are talking about the current laws in the uk.
Criminals implies someone who has been caught and prosecuted for breaking a law, I’m going with that assumption because “everyone who has ever broken a law” is a ridiculous interpretation.
So to encompass the assumptions:
Why are such a small proportion of people who have been caught and prosecuted for breaking the law in the uk, when someone smart and caution has a very low chance of being caught?
I hope you can see how nonsensical that question is.
The evolutionary argument goes like this: social animals have selection pressure for traits that help the social group, because the social group contains related individuals, as well as carrying memetically inheritable behaviours. This means that the most successful groups are the ones that work well together. A group first of all has an incentive to punish individuals who act selfishly to harm the group - this will mean the group contains mostly individuals who, through self interest, will not betray the group. But a group which doesn’t have to spend energy finding and punishing traitorous individuals because it doesn’t contain as many in the first place will do even better. This creates a selection pressure behind mere self interest.
That’s a nicely worded very bias interpretation.
social animals have selection pressure for traits that help the social group, because the social group contains related individuals, as well as carrying memetically inheritable behaviours.
This is fine.
This means that the most successful groups are the ones that work well together.
That’s a jump, working well together might not be the desirable trait in this instance.
But let’s assume it is for now.
A group first of all has an incentive to punish individuals who act selfishly to harm the group - this will mean the group contains mostly individuals who, through self interest, will not betray the group.
Reductive and assumptive, you’re also conflating selfishness with betrayal, they you can have on without the other, depending on perceived definitions of course.
But a group which doesn’t have to spend energy finding and punishing traitorous individuals because it doesn’t contain as many in the first place will do even better. This creates a selection pressure behind mere self interest.
Additional reduction and a further unsupported jump, individuals are more than just a single trait, selfishness might be desirable in certain scenarios or it might be a part of an individual who’s other trait make up for it in a tribal context.
The process of seeking and attention might be a preferential selection trait that benefits the group.
Powerful grifters try to protect themselves yes, but who got punished for pointing out that Boris is a serial liar?
Everyone who has been negatively impacted by the policies enacted and consequences of everything that was achieved on the back of those lies.
Because being ignored is still a punishment if there are negative consequences.
But let’s pick a more active punishment, protesting.
Protest in a way we don’t like or about a su, it’s now illegal to protest unless we give permission.
That’s reductive, but indicative of what happened in broad strokes.
Have you read what the current government has said about the previous one? :P
I’d imagine something along the line of what the previous government said about the one before ?
As a society we generally hate that kind of behaviour. Society as a whole does not protect wealth and power; wealth and power forms its own group which tries to protect itself.
Depend on how you define society as a whole.
By population, i agree.
By actual power to enact change(without extreme measures), less so
Convenient that you don’t include the wealth and power as part of society, like it some other separate thing.
You should care because it entirely colours how you interact with political life. “Shady behaviour” is about intent as well as outcome, and we are talking in this thread about shady behaviour, and hence about intent.
See [POINT A]
- Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online 2 weeks ago:
PART 1/2
What’s an area where something can be done maliciously or by accident? Car crashes? Workplace injury? Incorrect tax claims? Taking something from a shop? All of these are, to my understanding (and with decreasing confidence, but all have evidence - crime stats for the first, to, HMRC estimates and this Ipsos poll respectively) more likely to be accidental than malicious.
Is there a similar poll for political decisions and outcomes ?
Genuine question, that’s be super interesting, if so.
To me this is a general principle: human beings are social animals and have an instinct to be agreeable and cooperative, to live within socially-agreed rules, to tell the truth and not to fuck people over. Those who break the rules are the exception - otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense to have rules and to have society.
So my background assumption is that people are honest.
I think that’s where our difference in interpretation stems from , i think humans have the instinct for survival and reproduction, that agreement, cooperation and social interaction provided a better environment for survival is incidental.
Honesty is possible in a situation where survival isn’t on the line, in a life or death situation i think the person who would tell the truth knowing it will get them ( or more importantly, their family ) killed, is the outlier.
Outside of hyperbolous scenarios i think honesty is not the default in a situation where it doesn’t have a social/survival impact.
Such as a politician lying for fiscal/politician gain, knowing that there isn’t really any punishment for that.
because the nature of being in a society is that we point out and emphasise the times when people don’t abide by its rules; we have to use more robust methods to estimate its prevalence.
I also disagree with this, it’s a nice ideal and we should absolutely strive for this, but it’s just not how it works in practice, from my experience.
I think we disagree on what the rules are, it seems like you think calling out perceived injustices in fairness and corruption being met with punishment for the corrupt is what should happen.
In practice i think that only happens in the lower stakes, once you start pointing at people with wealth and power that rule quickly changes from “call it out and we’ll punish the offender” to “call it out and we’ll punish you for pointing it out and as a deterrent to others who might do the same”.
That’s not a society that honesty and inherent (relative) goodness as foundational concepts would produce.
Kickbacks to politicians in the UK are comparatively tiny though. Enough to motivate someone who’s already a grifter, but not enough to cause anyone but the extraordinarily stupid to be motivated by getting them.
That comparatively is carrying a lot of weight there and again i think we just disagree about this point in general.
You pushed back on this before but I genuinely think that the reason people think otherwise is because they just can’t believe that (for example) Tories actually believe that the country would work better by spending less on public services and benefits. The only remaining explanation is kickbacks by the direct beneficiaries of these policies. Even if your logic isn’t as formalised as that, I still think that on some level that is the feeling that makes you ready to believe that Tory politicians are so unlike the population at large - that is, massively more dishonest.
And again you are missing my point, that they believe or not it isn’t the issue.
I can say with full confidence i absolutely do not care if they believe it, or if they don’t, makes zero difference to me.
If a politician(or politicians) wants to run some shenanigans on PPE contracts, netting their friends x millions of pounds, it care not a whit if they believe in the general correctness of conservatism.
I will state it plainly, mark this as [POINT A] and point back to this, because it seems you are skipping this part entirely.
[POINT A]
If there is consistent historic precedent of a mismatch between stated intent and actual outcome by both the individual/institution and other related contexts then i will assume that behaviour will continue until proven otherwise.
It’s not “i don’t understand, so they must be corrupt” it’s “they have a history of being shady and incompetent, so I’m going to assume they will continue to be shady and incompetent”
Their belief is irrelevant, their later explanations of their intent is perhaps cause for minor adjustment.
Feel free to rephrase the same assumption again, i will point back to this explanation.
- Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online 2 weeks ago:
That proves it’s possible, not that it happened this time.
Yes, as I’ve previously pointed out, there are examples of this happening.
Can i prove it’s a majority, probably not and it seems like a lot of effort so I’m not going to, but I’ll wait while you provide the majority of examples proving incompetence over malice.
No, just because something is not objective does not mean that claims about at are baseless. Do you think that the article here “has no basis for saying it’s a bad idea”? Surely not. Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers. You say there’s a provable downside, but it’s not actually provable; it’s still theoretical at this point. We don’t know for sure whether anyone’s data will be leaked, for example. It’s in exactly the same realm as the potential upsides - it is likely (but impossible to quantify at this stage) that some people will feel curtailed in what they can do and say online, which will be negative for them. At the same time, it is likely (but impossble to quantify) that some children will not harm themselves because they won’t have seen encouragement online to perform acts of self-harm.
I’m not sure why you asked about how i do predictive analysis and ask questions that ignore the answer.
I’m not saying this specific action can be proven to be a bad idea before it happens, i have, many times said that i judge these things based on what has come before and the outcomes of those things.
Read the rest of my replies for examples of how this works.
Boris you’re probably right but I don’t think Sunak went into politics to enrich himself or to seek power. The rewards you get in the UK are just pitiful - Sunak did a hundred times better by marrying into wealth, and anyone could do better by getting a job in the City.
Again ignoring the idea of power as a motivation, but sure sunak probably had/has other avenues to money (and power).
I know dozens of people who earn more than an MP even if you count all the likely dinners gifts and cushy consulting jobs they’re likely to get. Why bother going to the trouble of getting selected, getting elected, and then having to show up for whipped votes, merely for a chance at some perks, when you could do better with less faff elsewhere>
If you are judging the potential benefits of being an MP/PM solely by the salary they pull in you have already failed to consider all of the relevant information.
You yourself mentioned corruption, and again the kickbacks and favours are well established.
I genuinely don’t understand how you think arguing this point and ignoring a large chunk of the salient information would work.
It might be interesting to listen to interviews with politicians from across the divide, preferably after they’ve left office. It won’t make you agree with their position, but it’ll make you see them in a different light when they’re able to explain their thought process (which the media culture doesn’t permit when in office) and the principles behind what they did.
You have to be trolling at this point, so I’ll say it once more and then I’m just going to point at this line again in the future.
The things that they say and the outcomes that resulted from that don’t match a lot of the time, after-the-fact explanations add flavour sure, but given how often this makes little difference this makes i will continue to base my predictions on what they stated they were going to do vs what happened.
Reading alexanders biography isn’t going to change the outcomes or the stated intents of the time.
Assuming he’s not lying or spinning, which is a big if given his track record, then i might get some insight as to his stated intention, which i will still judge against the outcome.
This is the same method i would use for all political biographies.
If you say something is true, then you should be able to justify it…
If i say something is absolutely true, then i should back it up with absolute proof, this applies to everyone.
If state something is my opinion (or it’s clear that it is) then i should provide the information i can to show my working and how i came to that opinion, that gives others the opportunity to examine my reasoning and thought process and then perhaps question parts of it they disagree with.
This is how debate style conversations generally work.
Politics is not the realm of headcanon
I am legitimately unsure how you came to the conclusion that a discussion around politics (especially modern politics) has no room for the inclusion of the public opinion and perception of the politicians.
I mean, go up a few lines in your response for this banger :
Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers.
You can’t have it both ways.
Without objectivity you are left with subjectivity, also known as personal opinion and perception (headcanon)
- Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online 2 weeks ago:
But you haven’t provided any reason to believe it’s self-serving (other than it is actually quite popular, so it will probably help to get them re-elected)
I can list examples of politicians promising things and then backtracking or making decisions that benefit them or their retinue directly but it’s so entrenched in the zeitgeist I’d be genuinely shocked if you didn’t know any examples yourself.
I agree. In that case, the tagline was objectively false and it was printed anyway, so we can conclude pretty safely that the people in charge of making it were lying.
So we’ve established a baseline of possibility, we can work from here.
That’s not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success.
Yes, politicians are people too, there will be disagreements between them, most have no idea what they are talking about with regard to this so that discussion probably won’t actually help anyone, but such is life.
it is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success.
Same with brexit, popular support isn’t necessarily a good indicator of idea.
Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact
Agreed
not only can we not see the future, there is also no objective way to balance the benefit of decreasing harm to children by preventing access to harmful content with the cost of preventing their access to useful information and the cost of increased friction and privacy breaches to everyone else.
Indeed, and by that rationale there’s no basis for saying this is a good idea with regard, specifically, to the protection of children.
Which is why many people say this isn’t about the protection of children, because they have no way of proving it, or really even a vague idea of how to measure it , at all.
There is however precedent for this kind of attempt at control to be poorly implemented and abused in other areas, such that there is a provable downside.
So if there’s no provable upside but there is a somewhat provable downside, which option should be used.
If there’s a 0.01% chance of photographs of people’s IDs being leaked online due to this, but a 90% chance that more than 100,000 children will be prevented from seeing content advocating suicide, is that OK? We don’t know if those are the correct percentages and, even if we did, that is a moral question, not a factual one.
That’s a different discussion, but yes, ethics, morals etc.
The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.
It’s a different scenario yes, but it proves the possibility of that type of action, which it seems you were denying by saying “they’re just idiots they couldn’t possibly be doing bad things”
There is an example of action not based in incompetence.
Citation needed.
Indeed, this is personal opinion/anecdote.
I can give you examples of shady politicians doing shady things but probably not enough to demonstrably push it over that 50% line.
In the same way you can’t prove incompetence over intentional malice.
People don’t go into politics to line their pockets - not in the UK anyway. It’s just not that lucrative. People go into politics mostly for the right reasons (that is, they want to change the country in a way they believe will be better - even if you disagree about that) and some of them are natural grifters who try and make a quick buck off it as well.
That level of naïveté is staggering ( and also conveniently skips over power as a motivator )
Even if we don’t agree on the percentages i think we can agree that there is a level of political corruption, a quick buck doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak from recent memory, i could probably dredge up some more.
Again, nobody in this thread or elsewhere has provided any evidence that this is not their intent. The only argument put forward comes down to “it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.” But that is not how it works. People can disagree about things and on this particular matter most people disagree with you (and me.)
That’s why i stated it as me saying, not as an objective fact, though i see that might not be clear.
Also remember the predictive analysis based on previous actions.
I the absence of hard proof i’m pretty sure you’ll agree that opinions can be formed using predictions based on past actions of the person and similar situations and scenarios.
as i said earlier, it’s not
“it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.”
so much as it is
“Previously, on multiple occasions they have proven to not be doing things for the stated reasons, it’s perhaps reasonable to work under the idea that they may be doing this again”.
- Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online 2 weeks ago:
They are not. Both are deviations from stated outcome, but not stated intent.
That’s fair, there is still an onus on proof of incompetence being the driver of the outcome rather than some other reason.
People on your side of this seem to think that, because politicians are saying that something will happen and you disagree with that, they must actually also believe that the outcome will be as you believe, but are lying about it.
That’s a bold and incorrect assumption, i do disagree with the act because it’s stupid and doesn’t do anything the might be even remotely constructive but i don’t hold them to an imaginary belief system that adheres directly with my own, as stated in the first response, my predictive analysis of what i expect to happen is based on their prior history and the outcomes of their previous decisions.
It’s not “I believe this thing so it must be true”
its
“Their recent (and somewhat mid-term) track record points to them making decisions based on deception and self gain, so i would guess that trend will continue”.
If you think past behaviour as a partial basis for predicting future behaviour is poor reasoning, I’m not sure we’re going to agree on much of anything here.
I think you need a good reason to conclude that this can’t possibly be a case of politicians disagreeing about the outcome
** gestures vaguely at recent historical decisions in general and multiple attempts at this type of control specifically **
and no-one has come up with such a good reason - no-one has said, “actually, the minister for DCMS was reported to have met with the bosses of Google, Microsoft and Facebook and a source in the department said they lobbied for age-verification”.
I’ve specifically said i don’t think big tech is the emphasis here, so I’m not going to provide proof of a position I’m not taking.
All anyone has given is the same argument I have been pointing out:
age verification is bad
politicians must know it’s bad OR politicians are corrupt
therefore politicians supported this for corrupt reasons.
I’ve done no such thing, I’ve specifically been talking about the prediction that politicians are generally untrustworthy (and also incompetent at it) based on past behaviour.
Can I walk you again through how this argument does not work?
If you want to spend time arguing a point i wasn’t actually contesting, feel free.
I’m legitimately up for discussing this point instead, but I’m not sure it’ll be worth anyone’s time if we fundamentally disagree on what constitutes poor reasoning.
- Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online 2 weeks ago:
By that rationale you world also need to prove that they are misunderstood upstanding citizens.
Because both interpretations are deviations from the stated intent and outcome, why would yours not also need journalistic rigour?
Just because yours is a slightly positive spin doesn’t mean its not conjecture against the provided facts.
- Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online 2 weeks ago:
Politicians are people too, sure.
Doing a bad job of implementing a self serving plan doesn’t excuse the self serving plan.
That’s some ‘boys will be boys’ nonsense.
Take brexit and Alexander as example, his intent was to do something shitty for self gain, he’s not an idiot no matter how it seems.
There’s no chance he believed that ridiculous tagline about the NHS funding and Europe, even if he did, someone at some point would have pointed it out to him.
He did it anyway, that’s intent.
Regardless of the outcome, he did something he knew was shitty, for whatever reason he had.
These people might be idiots, but their intent is usually to do something shady, that they are incompetent and do a shitty job of it isn’t the point.
Wrt to the America thing, I agree, I’m not saying the government is working with tech companies, im saying their intent usually isn’t ‘save the children’, at that point we absolutely should be hunting for the reasons, because if it isn’t the reason they have stated, what are they hiding?
- Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online 2 weeks ago:
Are you judging the motivation purely based on the effects? Otherwise, how are you working out what goes on inside people’s heads?
A combination of the effects, the prior actions, reactions and consequences of the subject and others in similar categories/contexts (to the extent i actually know/pay attention).
I don’t know of another way of performing predictive analysis.
Also that didn’t answer the question.
I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better. It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.
I’m genuinely not sure what you are saying here, but i’ll go line by line, tell me if I’m reading it incorrectly.
I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better.
I don’t know what this means, there are voters who genuinely believe this, yes, i think i follow that bit.
I’m not sure what you think is crazy here (i’m not disagreeing, i just don’t understand) , do you mean to say the politicians do or don’t know better ?
It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.
This i agree with, i can also anecdotally add first hand experience of the consequences of such lack of understanding.
Not sure how it ties in to the other sentence though.
- Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online 2 weeks ago:
It being a real and powerful motivational force means it’s one of the more useful covers.
Just because it motivates the voters/customers doesn’t mean it’s the genuine reason behind a decision.
I cannot think of a single recent “think of the children” based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.
Can you?
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 4 weeks ago:
Hey now, that’s a lot of animosity for a statement that doesn’t do much to make a good point.
The original question was
Show me a ban that didn’t came with 10x problems
I posited a conjecture based guess with some basic reasoning and as i said , it was opinion more than provable fact.
By “worked out” i meant the overall situation is better after the ban, despite the negative consequences.
It seems that was lost on you, but now you know.
So let’s address your reasoning, such as it is.
People died from tainted drugs before the ban, probably a lot from tainted drugs of the type in the ban.
Unless you have any evidence those numbers changed significantly after the ban, I’ll chalk that up to your opinion.
Not a very reasonable one to my eyes, but such are angry people on the internet.
I was not aware i needed to provide an example of a ban that resulted in everything being completely fixed after the fact (mainly because that’s not how the question was worded) but if that was, in fact, the requirement, my bad.
If I’m a monster (in your opinion) because i think the reduction in access to terribly addictive drugs might have overall brought down fatalities and other negative consequences, then i can live with that.
- Comment on "We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal 4 weeks ago:
Fair enough, came in a bit hot there, my bad.
I’d argue that it not being a legal threat doesn’t matter too much in this case because they aren’t looking for legal control, so much as “effective” control.
If they can stop you without needing for it to be signed in to law, then they’ll take that, if they can get a law as well, then I’m sure they’ll take that too.
Don’t get me wrong- its not that I don’t care about censorship, its that I don’t really view this as censorship because the consumption and purchasing of the “censored” product is still completely possible. Contrarily, if this were signed into law I would have a big fucking problem with it.
Censorship isn’t a binary, but we can agree to disagree on that one i suppose.
To this part though
purchasing of the “censored” product is still completely possible
Not really, there are numerous titles available exclusively on itch.io and steam, those are effectively censored by your rationale as you can no longer purchase them at all.
Honestly steam gift cards don’t work at all here because it’s not a ban on buying the games using a card, it’s a ban on steam listing the titles at all, on threat of losing the payment services.
Crypto cash and gift-cards are great if you have effective access to them.
- Crypto is out for most people for obvious reasons (technical knowledge, dearth of places that actually accept crypto)
- Cash works until it doesn’t and governments and big tech are trying their hardest to make it as difficult as possible, there is a big push to go cashless.
It’s not that people find cash less convenient because they are lazy (some are i suppose), it’s because it’s being purposely deprecated as much as possible, or just straight up doesn’t apply to the paradigm, such as online purchases.
The reason I brought this up is because I have seen it proposed that this issue will expand beyond the scope of digital marketplaces, which I find downright laughable.
As i said, this already happens, it’s weird in how it’s applied tbh, but that’s neither here nor there.
www.adyen.com/legal/list-restricted-prohibited
Mastercard just says : “brand-damaging Transactions” and doesn’t elaborate, at a quick glance.
A good example of this is casino’s and other gambling related physical locations, there are a lot of hoops to jump through to get a payment processor to work with gambling, assuming they even give you the time of day.
People WILL stop using visa cards if you can’t use it to buy condoms and there’s an ATM in the gas station.
Sure for that specific thing, hard to pay cash at amazon or other online only retailers.
I firmly believe that if this issue is pressed further, at the very least Valve will js stop accepting payment directly through payment processors.
That i’d be interested to see tbh, because as i said there isn’t an equally available alternative to card payment processors (and it’s not even close).
If they did go crypto only for instance, there’d be a big move to crypto for some, but that’d be a significant loss to take on principle alone.
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 4 weeks ago:
I’d tentatively say, casually available heroin, morphine and laudanum/opium.
It obviously caused problems and pushed the market underground but it seems to have worked out.
I’m not aware of any studies in to this though, so it’s only conjecture/guesswork.
I’ll also clearly state I’m not putting them on the same level as this current dystopian bullshittery.
- Comment on "We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal 4 weeks ago:
I do not believe “what they define as NSFW will expand!”
And that’s the core of your problem, puritan activists don’t generally have the capacity to think “actually, the thing i wanted other people to not be able to see is gone, i think I’ll leave it there” because the censorship isn’t the goal, the goal is control.
It’s even worse with organised puritans , because even if a few hang it up you’ll always find a few willing to just go a little further or have differing opinions on what is “acceptable”.
I would lay good money on this not actually being as far as they originally wanted, it was just what they could get for now.
I don’t understand why people are bitching that the companies that they choose to use have so much power over their purchasing decisions. “First this, next sex toys! Then contraceptives!” Like Jesus fuck bro have you not heard of cash?
Firstly, it’s the payment processors, you know the monopoly of companies that you need to take payments from regular people.
Secondly, payment processors can and will stop providing payment services for shops that carry physical goods they deem unacceptable.
(yes crypto exists, no it’s not equivalent yet) (yes steam cards exist, no it’s not equivalent and unless i’ve missed something itch.io doesn’t have an card system)
As far as cash goes, is there a new slot where you can put the cash monies directly in to the pc/console and it credits your account ?
Or do you mean, go to the store and buy a physical copy of the hundreds of thousands of games that don’t have physical editions ?
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
I think you meant to reply to the other person.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
If you’ll notice I mention the biggest offenders and/or the the underlying management infrastructure.
Private jet owners getting systematically luigi’d would also fall under that remit, I was just using data centres as an example.
Oil rigs, Nestlé, blackrock etc would also all work , with varying degrees of efficacy and difficulty.
To address your argument directly, before you get all preachy think of the actual consequences of major data centres going down, all the critical infrastructure running on said data centres would also go down.
That’s air traffic control, shipping and logistics ,and yes, agriculture; any system relying on cloud services running those data centres
If you pick the right ones and do it properly (a competently executed strategy, if you will) then you could cripple most industries, with all the consequences that brings.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
Just to be clear you are saying you didn’t provide a claim of truth with no supporting argument because, and I quote
what i said were all truth claims.
no argument at all is needed.
I know you aren’t going to understand how your reply doesn’t make sense but if in the future you come back to this , this kind of thing is what people call mental gymnastics.
It kinda feels like punching down at this point so I’ll leave you be.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
Point to the advocation.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
Indeed, but the definition does, I don’t care at all about this hill, but not being about to understand the application of the definition of words is going to make conversations difficult for you.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
I would assume a competently executed strategy of eliminating the worst offenders (and/or the managing infrastructure thereof) would probably have more impact, they probably meant legal things though.
For instance, a solo campaign of taking out the biggest data centers would probably work. Difficult though.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
Stating something is true with no supporting argument other than “I said so” followed by some shaky(at best) logic doesn’t leave much in the way of conversation points.
But lets give it a go.
Firstly there was no demand or proposal for any demographic to partake in the activity mentioned.
Secondly, assuming the first point wasn’t true, by your rationale there would be no way to mention any activity without it being a suggestion that all current recipients must immediately perform said activity, which it patently ridiculous.
Thirdly, the suggestion that you are a best in class mental gymnast isn’t a thought terminating cliche, perhaps you could claim ad hominem but as I said before ,“I’m right, because reasons” doesn’t leave many conversational avenues open.
- Comment on Someone should make an anticapitalist Dexter. A serial killer who kills evil rich people. 1 month ago:
The rookie was the most blatant example for me and i was incredibly disappointed , because i like Nathan Fillion.
I heard it got less bootlicky later on but i never made it that far.
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 2 months ago:
Absolutely agree with this but there is no denying the innovation levels at spacex are higher
Undeniably, they’ve been doing amazing work (at least from my rocketry technology peasant point of view).
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 2 months ago:
They landed people on the moon and then did fuck all for decades.You mean the SpaceX that existed significantly before musk and that he bought his way in to and in addition bought the founder title.
Indeed, all i was saying is that they were capable given budget and circumstances.
That budget and direction comes from the government.
When Musk started SpaceX he was not well known yet, SpaceX came before Tesla.
I will admit, i thought spacex was just another company he bought his way in to, like tesla, seems i was mistaken about that.
He was able to get into the businesses he has because he was rich yes, but you can find many accounts of engineers that worked under him speak of how good he was at finding ways to cut unnecessary costs.
And you can equally find many accounts of having to distract him from the day to day operations because he’s unreliable , unpredictable and chaotic (none of those meant in a good way).
He’s also know for buying good press and using litigation to silence people.
He’s not a technical genius that’s for sure. But he has been a good CEO for SpaceX.
I doubt this, but that could just be bias, i don’t have any actual evidence of the long term impact of him as CEO.
Recently though, he’s provably been significantly more of a liability than a benefit, even if just from a PR and public sentiment point of view.
But I refuse to simply wave away his achievements simply because I don’t like him. I can not like someone and still acknowledge they have done something good.
Indeed, i push back on the myth that he’s some self made tony stark genius, but it isn’t like he’s not achieved anything.
I would personally attribute most of that to neptoism, wealth, luck and opportunity, but that doesn’t remove the achievement itself.