chonglibloodsport
@chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
- Comment on Women's razor ads use bare legs but cleaning products don't use clean floors. 4 hours ago:
Ahhh so you would say some sexual fetishes are stigmatized rather than taboo? Like if someone walked in on a person doing various sexual acts, the situation would be embarrassing regardless but only certain things would be scandalous.
- Comment on Women's razor ads use bare legs but cleaning products don't use clean floors. 6 hours ago:
I’d never even thought of this before. Can you explain the difference between taboo and stigmatized? I thought you generally risk being stigmatized any time you break a taboo.
- Comment on my daily reality of 'old man screaming at the clouds' is far different than i expected as a youth 3 days ago:
How about the rename of Office to Copilot 365 app?
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 3 days ago:
I explained why it needs to be left running: because opening it is too much of a hassle to even bother with. Thus I don’t, and I don’t plan to open it any time soon.
GOG Galaxy is a nonsequitur. I’ve never installed it and it’s never been required to download or play any game. I use GOG’s website to buy and download games. Galaxy might as well not exist and I’m fine with that.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 3 days ago:
It kills my laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if it’s not using much CPU, it keeps the CPU from sleeping and thus wastes a ton of battery. This is a well-known problem with software that uses its own timers and doesn’t optimize for battery life. Thus I do not want to leave Steam running all the time and so my experience is degraded. When I want to play a Steam game that uses DRM I need to start up Steam, log in, do multi factor authentication, then wait for Steam to do all its updates, then restart while the patches are applied, then finally get to my library so I can start the game. It’s like a 10-15 minute process that is usually enough to kill my desire to play the game in the first place, so I don’t bother.
As for DRM, well none of the games on GOG have DRM. Some Steam games have DRM, some don’t. If Valve wanted to, they could decide to stop offering DRM and then they’d be DRM free too. If developers didn’t want that they’d have to take their games off Steam and lose those sales. This would incentivize more developers to go DRM free.
But they don’t. Thus Valve benefits from DRM and so they deserve blame for it, not just the developers. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 3 days ago:
I find it very hostile compared to, for example, GOG which lets me download games DRM free and run them without running an app.
Steam is a battery hog and is designed to entice you to keep it running all the time. I hate leaving it running which means I don’t have access to most of my library.
- Comment on People espousing that unions don't work should have a look at police unions. 3 days ago:
That’s not true though. I’ve talked to plenty of working class people who hate unions and hate dealing with union workers due to perceived laziness, bad work ethic, and the inability to fire bad workers.
Also plenty of unions are full of rich and powerful people: pilots unions, doctors unions, actors unions, sports athletes unions.
- Comment on People espousing that unions don't work should have a look at police unions. 4 days ago:
People aren’t opposed to unions because they think unions aren’t powerful, they’re opposed to unions because they’re powerful.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 5 days ago:
None of what I wrote was intended as a defence of Epic. I don’t like the company at all these days. The last game of theirs that I played was Gears of War. I loved the original Unreal but that was so long ago they might as well be a completely different company.
Anyway I think Valve has some kind of gamer reality distortion field going on. Gamers step up to defend it the way Apple fanboys defended Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. Have people forgotten that Gabe is a billionaire who just got another megayacht?
Proton is a really cool project and Valve has contributed a lot to it but it’s not charity. Valve profits a ton off Proton because it supports game sales on Steam. Linux and SteamDeck users buy a lot more games because of it, games they otherwise couldn’t even run.
The fact that Proton is open source was only partly Valve’s choice. The project is based on Wine which has an LGPL 2.1+ license, which requires Valve to release the source code to their modifications of Wine itself. The extra Proton parts don’t have to be open source, but in practice it creates a lot more work for Valve if they have to maintain their modifications as a fork rather than upstreaming as much as possible.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 5 days ago:
Not sure why “direct profit” is important.
Proton is basic infrastructure for Steam Deck (which runs Linux). Valve has sold millions of units that I doubt would have been sold without Proton. There’s just a ton of games that will never be ported to native Linux.
Proton isn’t only Valve’s doing though. It’s heavily built on top of Wine which is a very mature open source project that has seen extensive leadership and contributions by CodeWeavers.
- Comment on 'Go Back and Play Morrowind and Tell Me That's the Game You Want to Play Again' — Former Bethesda Veteran Delivers His Verdict on Potential The Elder Scrolls Remasters - IGN 5 days ago:
Well for him, thousands of people is basically nothing. Skyrim has sold over 60 million copies.
One of the problems with growth in popularity is a growth in expectations. A Morrowind remaster that sold even 1 million copies would be considered a failure.
If they revisit Morrowind, they need to go ALL IN on it. Keep the setting and themes but redo everything else. I love Morrowind as a world to get lost in but the combat gameplay in particular is quite bad, possibly the low point of the entire Elder Scrolls franchise.
I enjoy the combat in Oblivion, Skyrim, AND Daggerfall more than Morrowind, simply due to the feel of weapons connecting with enemies. Daggerfall probably feels the best, due to the crunchiness of it and the way you can do different types of swings in rapid succession.
The exploration stuff in Morrowind is just amazing though. Some of the dungeons are like Russian dolls of awesomeness! Also just love the music. So relaxing!
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 5 days ago:
They developed the Unreal engine. Not sure how “like Proton” you meant, but it’s used by lots of games and is quite a complex and well-regarded 3D engine.
- Comment on The people like AI because they treat it like a search engine. 6 days ago:
Oh this has been going on for centuries. Technology is always changing and so is culture! I think it’s usually the case that technology changes first and culture takes a while to catch up.
- Comment on The people like AI because they treat it like a search engine. 6 days ago:
Oh interesting. It should do this by default then.
Defaults matter. They normalize patterns of behaviour. People who are normalized not to care about citations are being trained to blindly accept whatever they’re told. That’s a recipe for an unthinking, obedient, submissive society.
- Comment on There are people out there who could utterly smash world records but no-one will never know as they haven't taken up that sport. 6 days ago:
Right, Todd Reichert raises another question: do we consider removable devices to be part of our body or not?
I think the ostrich question you raised has a bit of a simpler answer: does it have the mind of a human or the mind of an ostrich? That’s only a temporary reprieve though. Once we get into brain augmentation we have a whole other set of issues.
But even if we disallowed any augmentation whatsoever, there’d still be the issue of reproduction, selective breeding, and genetic engineering. Maybe you disallow gene editing and CRISPR, but how do you disallow selective breeding? It’s as basic as having the freedom to decide who to form a relationship with.
- Comment on The people like AI because they treat it like a search engine. 6 days ago:
They get an answer but unlike a search engine, the AI doesn’t show its work. I want a citation with the answer, I’m not taking your word for it!
- Comment on There are people out there who could utterly smash world records but no-one will never know as they haven't taken up that sport. 6 days ago:
That’s a lack of imagination. Why couldn’t we give a human legs like an ostrich? Maybe not achievable right now, but would you bet against it being achieved within 1000 years?
Or would you say that person with ostrich legs is no longer human? That gets to the deeper questions we inevitably get to with sports: what is fair? What does it mean to be human?
I really hate that Oscar Pistorious decided to become a murderer. His inspiring achievements with prosthetic legs actually were raising the above questions. I don’t think anyone questioned the fact that he’s human, but they definitely talked a lot about what fairness really means in sports.
- Comment on There are people out there who could utterly smash world records but no-one will never know as they haven't taken up that sport. 6 days ago:
I didn’t say anything about natural selection, I said evolution. Humans evolve by more means than natural selection. We also evolve through culture, through technology. And of course we still do evolve by natural selection, it’s just hard to see because the pace of technology is so rapid.
Take birth control as an example. It’s very recent technology. A blink of an eye in natural selection terms. You might think it would wipe us out by causing population crashes. But culture is evolving to counteract it. Cultural norms have already begun to shift heavily against birth control. I think it’s fairly easy to anticipate a future where birth control is not used very much.
- Comment on There are people out there who could utterly smash world records but no-one will never know as they haven't taken up that sport. 6 days ago:
Humans are not set in stone, we’re constantly evolving. An ostrich can run 70km/h on 2 legs. Who’s to say we won’t one day have humans running that fast?
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 1 week ago:
I think they’re trying to kill Patreon for some reason. Maybe they’ll launch their own Patreon competitor? Maybe they noticed developers were giving away iOS apps and getting crowdfunded on Patreon?
- Comment on Most of the misery in the world is the direct result of too much money in too few unscrupulous hands. This is not only the cause of the vast majority of human suffering, but also of climate change, wh 1 week ago:
That’s simply not true. We don’t even have the technology and resources today to achieve a zero carbon economy. We need a ton of new investment across a ton of industries.
I think the average person believes that we can just switch gasoline cars over to EVs and we’re done. That’s not even close! Less than 1/6th of emissions come from transport (all cars, trucks, trains, and ships combined).
Since CO2 emissions grow by about 0.9% per year, even if we eliminated all emissions from transport overnight (but did nothing else) it would buy us less than 20 years before emissions were back where we started.
There’s no silver bullet that billionaires are somehow hiding from us. Curbing emissions is going to take huge investments across many different sectors of the economy and new technologies in many different industries. Take solar panels for example. We could not have achieved their modern levels of efficiency and production capacity without going through decades of advancement in semiconductor technology. No one was holding that technology back. It has seen enormous investment since the mid 20th century for the development of faster CPUs and GPUs. Solar simply rode on the coattails of the computer revolution. It could not have advanced the way it has on its own.
- Comment on From on high 1 week ago:
That explains everything! I guess I came across it too late…
- Comment on Transistors are probably a bit reason we don't live in a steampunk world. 1 week ago:
We didn’t have a steampunk society at the time the transistor was invented. We were already post-steam with internal combustion engines dominating the vehicle market, including on rails with diesel-electric locomotives (diesel-powered internal combustion generator that produces electricity to run electric motors in the wheels).
The problem with steam is that it’s highly corrosive. High temperature boilers and steam parts and fittings require a lot of expensive maintenance to repair pinhole leaks that cause loss of steam power and pressure. Internal combustion engines don’t have this problem because they keep the heat contained inside the engine cylinders which are surrounded by a jacket of constantly circulating water-based coolant (that sheds heat through the radiator). The useful power that leaves the engine is purely mechanical, transmitted into the crankshaft and then the transmission and driveshaft. These parts are lubricated with oil and low maintenance due to the low temperatures and low friction of the system.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 2 weeks ago:
That’s a really good point too. Belief in conspiracies and other junk beliefs can be a surrogate for agency.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 2 weeks ago:
For some reason thats always how it is.
I think it’s because the obvious answers aren’t interesting. A big thing for conspiracy theorists is that they are part of a group who knows the real story. It’s as much about feeling like they belong to something important and exciting as anything else.
It’s like the people who believe the apocalypse is coming soon. Well if the apocalypse happened 1000 years from now that would be pretty soon (a geological blink of an eye) but it wouldn’t be anywhere near to falling within the lifespan of the believers. That doesn’t work! These people need to feel special, to feel important, to believe their life is meaningful for no other reason than to be alive when an important event happens.
- Comment on You can count past 1,000 on your fingers by using binary, instead of just 10 2 weeks ago:
It’s your super power! My pinkie finger and ring finger are linked. I can’t close my pinkie all the way while keeping the ring finger straight.
- Comment on Credit to u/donner1701 on Reddit 2 weeks ago:
The biggest change happened during TNG’s run, when Roddenberry left the show due to declining health and subsequently passed away in 1991. The writers on the show had long been frustrated by Gene’s insistence that federation officers rise above petty interpersonal conflict. They felt this limitation made it extremely difficult to write compelling drama since all of the main cast had to get along all the time.
The later introduction of characters such as Ensign Ro demonstrate the first fruits (or first cracks) of the move away from Roddenberry’s philosophy. By the time DS9’s cast had been developed, the “no interpersonal conflict” rule had been completely subverted.
The funny thing is, many fans actually prefer DS9 for this. I think it makes the show a lot more relatable. Of course I’d rather live on the Enterprise than on DS9.
It should also be noted that these creative differences aren’t specific to Roddenberry and his new staff, they’re reflective of generational divides that began during the Cold War and really culminated in the 1980s. The exuberant optimism of the counterculture (Roddenberry’s kindred) had long dissipated and the slow demise of the Soviet Union revealed widespread disillusionment with the tenets of communism. In many ways, Star Trek pivoted from communism to full fledged neoliberalism in the 90s.
- Comment on Ending a relationship during the dating phase is a positive outcome. 2 weeks ago:
Every relationship would work out if not for all the red flags. It’s the Anna Karenina principle:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
This applies to all kinds of situations where success depends on avoiding a wide variety of critical failures, leaving a pretty narrow space of variation among the successes. Rocket launches are another nice example!
- Comment on Most mouse pointers designs assume right-handed users 2 weeks ago:
I remember seeing a lefty coworker who had done this at a previous job and it broke my brain just to watch him use it. So cool and so funny how a minuscule change like that (literally flipping an image that’s just a few pixels) can make such a but mental difference!
- Comment on You can count past 1,000 on your fingers by using binary, instead of just 10 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, and ultimately it’s rather silly to practice because it’s not that practical anyway, especially when everyone has a calculator on their phone.