HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
12d ago
To summarize: guy makes a popular window manager for what will be the new standard for Linux desktop window display software, the community around it is composed of half "programmer socks" trans people and half toxic 4Chan shitposters, the toxic parts of his community prompt a Linux dev with more privilege to get him declared persona non grata from working within the "mainstream" of this tech.
HalloweenSnarry
28d ago
Yeah, reading this post and encountering the section about the HRE, I'm surprised that Kulak did not simply predict that the US would devolve into a patchwork of "tollbooth kingdoms" just like what the HRE became.
Fundamentally, I think the challenge for the US in the future, and the solution to said challenge, ultimately comes down to culture, cf. the Noah Smith complaint about us not being a culture that builds. I think where I diverge with Kulak on this whole concept of "US dying of DEI globohomo" is that I think it eminently possible for culture to shift and for the US to get on some sort of "healthier" path of governance, of ditching unproductive ideas and ideological frameworks, before the US has to ditch them the hard way via total collapse.
HalloweenSnarry
28d ago
Per a comment on your Substack post, I think you missed a bit of a trick: the shrinking of the material power gap in the modern era bears a similarity to that of the Bronze Age, and will be why a coming decentralization era might be short-lived: say that the Western hegemony does collapse, the US Navy is longer able to project power across oceans, and all because of weapons most anyone can have, what does happen when the supply chains that made those weapons are thus destroyed by the very same?
Pickup trucks are fairly simple, but still rely on a somewhat complex supply chain of materials, parts, and even labor that might be difficult to piece back together after a collapse. Drones rely on tiny electronics that are not easy to manufacture, and microchips are horrendously rather centralized at the moment. And, of course, whither missiles and aircraft, you better hope you have some smart cookies in your area to be able to design these weapons. Manufacturing is more capable of being decentralized nowadays, but I think it's still mostly pretty concentrated in certain areas for good reasons.
ETA: I suppose, if anything, you could always go back to the trope, as seen in 40K and BattleTech, of old technology still being used that has been long out of print, but I imagine that, in reality, it's horrid to be in a state where you're relying on aging hardware with an ever-dwindling supply of spare parts.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
In some other contexts, I might agree with you, but I personally think that, in terms of both owner culture and user culture, Pixiv doesn't really deserve to be lumped in with the FAANG services. And, of course, it's hard to see how AI will help here, since Pixiv is an art site and AI art is still socially-unacceptable.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
I did watch a video (from a rather...polarizing YouTube channel) once that showed that, while Andy Dick does still kind of have a career, his life is practically ruined, being reduced to slumming it in a motorhome and being used for livestream views while his self-destruction is not being reversed.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
If we want to drill down to chargebacks, we could still argue at some higher level that society is too prudish around sex work, which explains the high chargebacks. Chargebacks presumably come from men ashamed about their porn habits, because society constructed things such that porn consumption is shameful (e.g. what if the wife looks at the credit card statements? Easy to just claim it was a fraudulent purchase and charge back, no?).
Much like with firearms, your interlocutors are probably coming from a different cultural perspective, where sex work and porn are normal and healthy, where actually paying for porn is something of a point of pride (in opposition to just getting it for free).
As for whatever links evangelicalism has to credit card policies...well, okay, you likely have a point, though I do wonder about the political donations of Visa and MasterCard, if any.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
Maybe not through Discord, but through text messages and physical proximity.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
I would like to agree with you, but I absolutely must push back on something:
We can't forget our technology, too much is recorded.
We can and we most certainly fucking will unless something is done in the near-ish future. Right to Repair is somewhat of a live issue now, and that it's a live issue at all is a sign of deep trouble--same with video games. We will actively create new problems or un-solve solved problems simply because it helps enrich the pocketbooks of executives. If anything, I expect a collapse to push us back to anywhere between the 1980's to the early-to-mid 2000's in terms of what technology will be left, and that's assuming things aren't quite so total that we can still set up factories and maybe reverse-engineer the more proprietary stuff.
I'm not terribly, 100% convinced that we'll see the collapse of the USA in our lifetimes, but I can easily imagine that it will start, not directly via fire, explosions, coups, civil war, or turnkey tyrrany, but it will start with numbers on balance sheets and lines on charts going down, which will cause a cascade of various services mysteriously (heavy sarcasm tone indicators optional) becoming unavailable, as people in suits order servers to be shut down, following a cold, contextless logic driven by numbers and lines.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
HalloweenSnarry
27d ago
Is that all? I was taking the term "tollbooth kingdom" to mean that travel across districts and such was infeasible because of wildly-differing laws as well as literal rent-seeking behavior to fuck with outsiders.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
I think do_something has the more accurate perspective on this. Yes, the sorts of people raising hell about sexually-explicit LGBTQ educational books being challenged in libraries are ironically against many things that are sexual-but-anime-flavored (and Lord help you if you like lolicon/shotacon), but the truth is probably more that the ascended progressive movement has many facets to it, not all of which are on the same page.
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
This sounds like an excuse, it took me only a few minutes to read the whole thing and I could probably knock out a corrected version in an hour tops, maybe even less. I acknowledge that maybe the work of proofreading is harder than what I've dealt with as a student from kindergarten to college, but it can't be that hard.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
I dunno, maybe it is something with the background scripts on ACX, but I could swear the reason is "the page for any ACX post is like 43 times longer than any non-TV-Tropes webpage needs to be, because the comments section is not truncated like on any other Substack post."
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
If you're referencing the Indian Wars and the later...acquisition...of Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, etc., perhaps that just comes down to A: a slightly-different approach to government/nation-building and B: the natives of these places were just different somehow.
HalloweenSnarry
12d ago
Side note, why were Mac games seemingly so focused on story compared to some PC games? There's Marathon, Journeyman Project, Myst, that first-person game made by the lead designer of the original Rainbow Six (or was it the founder of Red Storm?), those HyperCard point-and-click games...was it just because Macs had more fixed specs and already had a GUI, focing devs to focus less on how to make tech-demo games and more on how the gameplay experience went?
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
I am going to join the others in disagreement and point out that it definitely seems like the Japanese have been pretty anti-war since 1945. Now, sure, attitudes can change, the Japanese aren't ignorant of the rising tensions and potential threats of the current age, and there isn't exactly a political monoculture, but one needs only to look at the freaking cartoons they make to see that the population seems pretty inoculated against the more warlike tendencies they had in ages past.
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
I think someone here linked this review (or linked to something else that linked to said review) of a book by Mao's former personal doctor, which detailed how closed-minded, filthy, perverted, and short-tempered Mao could be. As per Olive's reply, the totalizing ideology of Communism in China, paired with the general ability of the Chinese to go along with a proclaimed direction, would naturally have led to Mao dragging an entire country down with him.
HalloweenSnarry
25d ago
Just not doing it at all, but showing you a variety of sex scenes if you die
If you're talking about hentai games, some of those do have difficulty adjustments or at least aren't ball-bustingly hard--indeed, for some, you'd probably have to go out of your way to lose on purpose to see said scenes.
HalloweenSnarry
27d ago
Relevant OSD post that I only dimly remembered just now: https://opensourcedefense.substack.com/p/osd-137-centralization-and-decentralization
HalloweenSnarry
3d ago
The conflict can be brought to a close with the snap of the fingers of Gazan leadership,
Even this is charitable, because this assumes that the Gazans will actually listen and not just keep on jihadin' on their own. Maybe most will, of course, but "most" is probably not enough for Israel at the moment.
HalloweenSnarry
3d ago
You have it right on the last sentence; I could have just said "siloing," but that's already been used on different scales (like between platforms or categories, not necessarily between regions).
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
DLSite has always(?) had a points system, and as you mention, there's other payment methods, though a number of them are particular to Japan/Asia.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
Oof, didn't know Itch was forced into this kind of stuff, too.
Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.
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