chonglibloodsport
@chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
- Comment on The guardian on Joe Rogan's popularity in Aus, and some peoples' reasons for listening. 1 day ago:
The most baffling thing about it is that Joe Rogan was a comedian for most of his professional life yet his show is not funny at all. The one thing I can say in his favour is that he gives his guests unlimited time and space to talk. So many interviewers talk over their guests and try to be the centre of attention I just hate it. But Rogan’s guests don’t interest me with all the kooky stuff they promote, and Rogan himself eats it all up.
- Comment on High-profile Dems warned Biden against preemptive pardons before giving Fauci, Milley passes 1 week ago:
Risking death for a chance at freedom. I admire their courage!
- Comment on High-profile Dems warned Biden against preemptive pardons before giving Fauci, Milley passes 1 week ago:
Only if they accept their pardons. I recall some inmates rejected their recent pardons on account of their desire to prove their innocence.
- Comment on LA is on fire. How will Australia cope when bushfires hit Sydney, Melbourne or another major city? 2 weeks ago:
Just move away from the fire zones? It’s like building sand castles among the reefs at low tide.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 weeks ago:
You have not denied that Rossmann engages in rage baiting. Everything you’ve said dances around that point. You’ve tried to make this a discussion about who is paying for it. THAT DOESN’T MATTER. It’s the subject matter which is toxic. And Louis Rossmann is guilty of it. I’ve watched plenty of his videos and they’re all the same. Endless rage masturbation. It’s garbage content. The modern day equivalent of Jerry Springer.
His activism could cure cancer and end world hunger but that wouldn’t excuse him for it, because others are doing the same activism WITHOUT THE TOXICITY.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 weeks ago:
You just named them yourself. FUTO. His company.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 weeks ago:
Without views he has nothing. It doesn’t matter who is paying him, he’s not getting paid if he doesn’t get views. The algorithm brings him views when he gives the algorithm what it wants. What does it want? Engagement. And the path he has taken to generating engagement is outrage, toxicity, and negativity.
He says “my finances don’t depend on YouTube” then why is he still publishing on YouTube? Shut it down! Oh wait, he can’t, because then he’ll stop getting paid by his sponsors.
YouTube has consistently reduced the amount it pays creators per ad view over time. Yet creators are making more videos than ever. Why? Because they make money through 3rd party sponsors. YouTube is a platform. The value it provides to creators is the audience it brings to them through network effects and through the algorithm.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 weeks ago:
I’ve already addressed Rossmann’s political activism in a previous comment. I appreciate all the work he’s done on it. But he’s by no means the only person fighting for right to repair. There are tons of others doing so as well, such as iFixit, the EFF, and loads of organizations representing farmers all over North America.
My criticism of Rossmann is specifically with the style of content he puts out. Negativity-based reaction videos are his bread and butter. That’s how he makes money. This puts an asterisk on all of the good things he does, just as MKB’s occasional soft takes put an asterisk on the work he does.
This kind of toxic negativity is heavily favoured by the YouTube algorithm and it leads people into mental health spirals. That’s my point. Louis Rossmann makes money by damaging the mental health of vulnerable people in his audience. None of his beneficial activism makes up for this. You can look at other right to repair activists and see that they are working towards their goals without this odious behaviour.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 weeks ago:
There are thousands of youtubers just like Rossmann. They sit there in front of the camera and react to other videos or news. People watch because they get a thrill out of seeing someone get angry and “pwn” the bad guys. There’s no creativity in it. It’s just emotional dumping. It’s totally toxic.
Louis used to be all about creativity. He used to make repair videos and teach people useful skills. He stopped doing those when he realized the algorithm would give him a bigger audience for these negative takes.
Call him a victim if you like. Algorithmic capture I’ve heard it called. Many many youtubers have gone down that road.
As for MKB. I like his videos because he’s a very good speaker, he puts a lot of thought and creativity into the whole production, and he is actually honest about the drawbacks in products he reviews. Is he perfect though? Clearly not. I would prefer if he didn’t interview Apple mouthpieces to let them deliver well-practiced marketing directly to his audience.
Sometimes I also think MKB gets a bit too starstruck because he can’t quite believe where he is and what he gets to do for a living. If you go back through his videos and sort by increasing date you can see his very first videos. It’s rather stark how far he’s come.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 weeks ago:
Both guys are in the business of self-promotion. One is based on positivity, the other negativity.
You want to fill your life with negativity? Go ahead. I’ll pass.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 weeks ago:
I’m a big fan of right to repair and I appreciate all Louis Rossmann has done for the movement. Having said that, I wouldn’t say he’s strictly a pro-consumer guy. He’s a professional gadfly.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 weeks ago:
I dunno what it is, and I’m not saying the person you’re replying to is doing this, but tons of people seem to throw shade at MKB. Like they think he’s being sneaky or is in any way untrustworthy. All I’ve ever seen the guy do is be honest with his opinions. Yes, he is generally a very tech-positive guy. But he’s not afraid to explain in detail why he thinks a product sucks.
- Comment on UK government hires ‘nudge unit’ to help dispel heat pump myths 3 weeks ago:
Those debunks are misleading. Each one uses a different set of assumptions. In one they claim that you don’t need good insulation to use a heat pump. In another they claim that heat pumps work fine in very cold temperatures. But their source for the second claim is from countries like Norway, Finland, and Sweden which have the best insulation in the world. If you combine bad insulation with very low temperatures then the system cannot keep up.
People always worry about the worst case scenario. If your heating system is working fine for 364/365 days per year, that is a failure. On the coldest day of the year, when the temperature inside the house is dropping to uncomfortable levels and everyone is shivering while the heat pump is running at maximum (and making a lot of noise while doing so) then people will report a bad experience and clamour for their gas boiler to come back.
I have the luxury of having a dual system (gas furnace and heat pump) and I can tell you that on the coldest days of the year the heat pump cannot keep up, the furnace gets turned on automatically. The heat pump is also very noisy when it is working at full capacity. This is not the case most of the time (during shoulder seasons) but it definitely occurs during the heart of winter. My house is extremely well-insulated (though still well below Nordic standards).
- Comment on UK government hires ‘nudge unit’ to help dispel heat pump myths 3 weeks ago:
Heat pumps are great… if your house is well-insulated. I’ve heard that many houses in the UK are quite old and would need expensive insulation retrofits to make a heat pump viable. The issue is that while a heat pump is extremely efficient it is very slow at pulling heat out of cold air. This means it needs to run for very long cycles (up to 24 hours continuously) in order to slowly warm up the house.
If the house is poorly insulated and draughty then you may be losing heat faster than the heat pump is able to replace it. This would cause the heat pump to run nonstop as the temperature in the house gradually falls.
- Comment on We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition. 3 weeks ago:
Almost nothing in evolution happened sequentially. We almost certainly didn’t start creating music before our brains were equipped for it. Instead these things would’ve evolved in tandem. Each one driving the other, in a virtuous cycle.
- Comment on We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition. 3 weeks ago:
I think this is getting it backwards. Here I’ll go (warning, evopsych style speculation follows):
Our brains are great pattern recognizers because it makes us better at learning music (and other structured forms such as poetry). Music is older than all the civilizations on earth. We learn music because it’s an incredibly powerful aid to memorization. Memorization and oral recitation is the oldest form of cultural transmission we have.
Culture is the secret of our success as a species. It’s the original problem solver that gave us so many tools and techniques to survive on every continent on the planet (except Antarctica of course). Culture is the reason we learned to prepare so many foods which would have been poisonous otherwise (such as cassava).
- Comment on Visa Exec Confirms Payment Processing Services Being Halted For Japanese Retailers Selling Adult Content: "It Is Necessary To Disallow It To Protect The Brand" 1 month ago:
Yeah. High chargebacks and fraud (both actual fraud and fraudulent fraud reports) on adult content. I think a lot of it has to do with the “spouse factor.”
- Comment on Silenced and erased, Hong Kong's decade of protest is now a defiant memory 1 month ago:
I would suggest avoiding news altogether. Look into hobbies and find other ways of spending your time. Doomscrolling is like a trauma addiction. There are tons of great people in hobbies who are so nice and helpful and they’re just really glad to share their passion with you.
- Comment on Despair in Sweden as gangs recruit kids as contract killers 1 month ago:
Try Wikipedia:
An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for its normative problems.
- Comment on Despair in Sweden as gangs recruit kids as contract killers 1 month ago:
JD Vance is an intellectual. Doesn’t mean he’s a good one nor does it mean any of his ideas are any good. Hitler was an intellectual too. It’s a very low bar!
Basically all you have to do is think about society’s issues and come up with your own solutions which you traditionally would publish in a book. Vance wrote a book though it was as much a memoir as a meditation on society’s issues (in his view).
- Comment on TURKEY POWER 1 month ago:
Time zones probably help with that!
- Comment on Is the Wii good? 2 months ago:
I have a Wii and a whole bunch of games just collecting dust. Even now that I’m reminded of it I don’t have any desire to play.
I do really want to grab a CRT TV and a NES and SNES. I miss those games far more than anything on the Wii!
- Comment on Apple's controversial iPhone accessory may have been discontinued 2 months ago:
You can sell out on anything, no matter how unpopular it is, if you don’t make enough of them. How many of these things did they actually make?
- Comment on 'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers' 2 months ago:
That’s an interesting take! I’m getting to be an aging gamer myself and I no longer really play story-focused games. I play Roguelikes which I can pick up and drop any time, 5-10 minutes at a time, here and there. These games are designed to have maximum replay value. So even though I don’t have a lot of time I spend it on replaying rather than playing new games!
It’s an interesting difference and I think it depends on what we both look to get out of games.
- Comment on 'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers' 2 months ago:
I think it was inevitable. Before HL2 we had Deus Ex. It was glorious. Fans loved it. Game devs looked at it and went “F*%@ that! We’re not making 3 games worth of content when you’re only going to see 1 on a given play through!”
So that defines the basic tension. Gamers love replay value and multiple paths and different character builds and tons of secrets to explore. Game devs on the other hand want players to see every little blade of grass and tree they worked so hard at placing in the game. I think they also have a lot of data from achievements that show most gamers barely finish the game once, let alone discover all the secrets and alternate endings etc.
- Comment on Warcraft 1 and 2 Remastered and the long-awaited 2.0 patch update for Warcraft 3: Reforged have just launched on PC for Warcraft's 30th anniversary 2 months ago:
I read a piece not too long ago by one of the developers of WC1. He originally had it so you could select all your units at the same time and just order them to attack. The lead designer said that was too boring and easy, so he had him limit the unit selection to groups of 4.
After trying it both ways, they agreed the smaller group limit made the game more skilful and interesting to play. Ever since then RTS games have gone towards increasing the selection cap more and more! I think it’s a mistake.
- Comment on Warcraft 1 and 2 Remastered and the long-awaited 2.0 patch update for Warcraft 3: Reforged have just launched on PC for Warcraft's 30th anniversary 2 months ago:
I loved the first one so much. I’ve been hearing the remaster for WC1 won’t have online multiplayer. That’s a huge disappointment for me. Hardly anyone ever got to experience that game multiplayer. I played it with my friend exactly once, when I brought my computer over to his house. It worked over LAN and I think also modem, but not the internet.
- Comment on Optimisation is a Slow Process 2 months ago:
Silent? No no no. The gaping hole makes loud chewing noises while the nostrils merily chat away in a sing-songy, whistly voice!
- Comment on In the context of the leaked Warcraft II remake, do you still trust Blizzard to produce good games? 2 months ago:
I don’t think trust is at issue here. If the game sucks, don’t buy it! There’s millions of other games to play.
There is reason to hope Blizzard will turn around. Bobby Kotick is gone. Microsoft owns the company now. Say what you will about Windows but Microsoft tends to take pretty good care of the gaming franchises they own. I think a lot of AoE fans are pretty happy with how that’s going. I could be wrong though?
- Comment on M4 Mac Mini Power Button Has New Bottom Location 2 months ago:
How often do you use it, if not every day? Once a week? Once a month?
I use my laptop every day so it makes sense that I don’t use the power button even though it’s right there. I also have a raspberry pi set up to run Retropie that I only turn on once or twice a year when I have an old friend in from out of town. In that case I use the power button every single time but I don’t mind that it’s kind of finicky (I have to turn on several other devices with it as well as a power strip to power them all) because I don’t use it that often.
I could see the new Mac Mini being a bit annoying with its bottom side power button if you’re using it every other day. But honestly I would be more annoyed at the boot time taking 30s than the 2s it takes to reach under the case and power it up. If I had one I would probably just get the keyboard with built in power button and finger print reader though. I use the finger print reader on my laptop all the time because it unlocks my password manager.