hoverburger
No bio...
User ID: 776
hoverburger
24d ago
Assuming you're not asking for expert difficulty, I'll happily take the other side of that bet. Even if you are, I'll still probably take it - Through the Fire and the Flames is not a required song to beat the game. I think you're underselling the difficulty of older games, and I'm somebody who has cleared TtFatF on expert (barely - Rock Band 3 has much tighter timing and sells the song as DLC I can't do it there, so I'm not a god or anything). Battletoads is mean. Turbo Tunnel is called out as impossible even though it really doesn't take more than 10 minutes of practice if that (the final stretch literally just alternates up and down rapidly), but it gets so much worse later.
I'm highly confident that the average difficulty of reaching the end credits without modifying difficulty settings of a popular game from the 90s was higher than the same in the 2010s, though I can't find any studies saying so.
hoverburger
1mo ago
Neither left nor right nor black nor white nor lyrics nor beat shall move me - your essay has no impact on the likes of me.
I ask of music but one thing: give me a pleasing and memorable melody or leave my ears in peace. Hip hop seems disinclined to provide, so into the trash it goes.
hoverburger
1mo ago
It will blow over, because it is missing the primary ingredient that caused GG to explode: topic ban. GG got huge because there was a scandal (rightly or wrongly, not weighing the original spark) and people who wanted to talk about it were not allowed to - even on 4chan. This lent an air of "what else are they hiding" to the whole game journalism industry, and then it all snowballed. It always confuses me when people don't understand that part, or that phenomenon in general. This time, no dice. There's no undercurrent of hidden misdeeds, it's just a discussion about a disliked group doing disliked things in the (relatively) open.
hoverburger
2mo ago
A warrant lets specific authorities in to a specific place for a specific period of time. Unencrypted data doesn't know or care about the who or the when - it can be copied infinitely, in perpetuity. The risk profile is not the same. One single unscrupulous copy operation, or even a short residence on a machine that has a security hole and a curious onlooker, is all it takes for the genie to get out of the bottle.
hoverburger
9mo ago
Don't count Intel out yet. Institutional inertia at enterprise scale is a hell of a thing, and all it takes is one big breakthrough to get most/all of the performance- or value-conscious people to switch sides. They can coast for quite a few more years while they try to pull a miracle out of somewhere.
hoverburger
10mo ago
If this "nerd leer -> possible rape" behavior set is genetic, and if we shut down the rape with bullying early in the line, then how does the gene continue to propagate? Certainly bullying is now a much lesser force, but there were several decades with prominent bullying and yet the nerd behavior set remained ever present, if not growing.
hoverburger
1yr ago
hoverburger
1yr ago
The value of free speech is not allowing people to live in peace, it is enabling peaceful change. People may or not make use of that power, or they may otherwise be non-peaceful, but if you cannot advocate for [x], you cannot get x without violently taking it. Society will never be perfect, but it can get better IF (and only if) the people are allowed to ask for what they want.
This is what is valuable. And while not allowing people to say "twindlefrumst" is unlikely to get in the way of things, it sets a precedent that somebody is allowed to decide what you can or cannot say. If this is left unchecked then probability approaches 1 that eventually some other speech will be banned. No mob ever burned just one book. The slope is in fact demonstrably slippery, and every single despotic regime in history has made speaking ill of the leadership a crime. It is infinitely preferable to not risk anything like that by making speech restrictions categorically unacceptable, rather than hoping that THIS spot on the slope is firm enough to stand - and ALSO that everybody agrees with you and doesn't try to take one more step down.
We pay the cost of people sometimes misbehaving to guarantee we are still able to change. No other option exists. Either you bite the bullet of "bad speech" happening, or you risk the very concept of peaceful societal change - arguably humanity's second or third greatest achievement.
hoverburger
1yr ago
I agree they're powerful, and that's why they must be unrestrained. Granting any large body, government or international corporation, the power to censor (significant amounts of) speech is too dangerous to contemplate. So quite simply, it must remain free because any scheme where an entity is given power otherwise is not safe to try.
hoverburger
1yr ago
No, I'll bite the bullet here. Sometimes, people will coordinate and do something bad and you can't prevent it, only punish afterward. I do not assume it can't happen or is remote. I ACCEPT it as the cost of allowing free speech, and it is a cost worth paying because speech categorically must remain free for society to be worthwhile at all.
hoverburger
1yr ago
It does work. People can speak about being mean to you all they want. It's not until they do something that it becomes a problem, and free speech absolutism has nothing to say about what actions should or shouldn't be allowed.
This is not as hard as people like to think it is. Allow anyone to SAY "We should kill X" and punish whoever attempts to kill X. Speech is protected, easy peasy.
The only "hard part" of this is when people try to characterize actions as speech or vice-versa, and while it's not a completely trivial problem to solve, there are many ways to thread that needle.
hoverburger
1yr ago
So I'm getting an awful lot of responses in the vein of "of course they reacted like that, you responded with [logic] to [emotion] and that's no good" - ordinarily I would agree - case closed. I do get that, even if in this case I may have slipped a bit in practice. I'm generic nerd STEMy, not a complete sperg. That isn't the source of my confusion or the reason to bring it up. That's ordinary human dynamics 101 - and also not the reason I code the reaction as left.
I am confused by/reacting to/coding-as-left the specific reaction of "stop talking and let the marginalized speak" because in this case it demonstrably did not apply. Nobody marginalized spoke before or after about how they felt or what they thought aside from the literally singular sentence that maps to "I don't want to go out anymore because of fear of this" person.
THAT is what I code as left and am confused about. The idea of lived experience is not without merit. Some people have access to experiences others don't. But that's not the same as "always cede the floor, even if they aren't using it".
hoverburger
1yr ago
I would agree if I'd received more generic insensitivity responses, but I specifically got "good ally tips" about not talking. Which makes me think less of the people responding that way even if I did misread the situation.
hoverburger
1yr ago
Some rambling on modern attitudes found generally leftward which I strongly dislike. First, an anecdote:
There was recently a shooting at a gay bar. I share an online space with some friends and some acquaintances for general purpose discussion - no specific focus other than a general lean toward our mutual shared interests, which are unrelated to the shooting or what follows.
One person posted an article about the shooting and then something roughly equivalent to "thoughts and prayers" for the victims, and a follow up note that Bigotry Is Bad. No problem, I'm on board. A second person posted that, as a sexual minority, they are now afraid to go out. They have updated based on this attack to think the world is not safe enough to enjoy. I interjected with something along the lines of "hold on, attacks like this are less likely to get you than car accidents or [insert whatever mundane thing] - yes they're flashy and scary, but you really shouldn't update based on them - they're statistically insignificant AND if you want to view them as terrorism then you living in fear is letting them win - you shouldn't do that"
The response I got was a gentle dogpile (they did start with "I know you're just trying to help, but..." and such), saying that I shouldn't be trying to tell marginalized people how to feel about things and I should let them have space to process their trauma and etc etc, much insistence on "letting the victims speak" (by which they mean indirect victims - people that share a class with the victims, not the firsthand victims) and being a good ally by listening. I pushed back for a bit saying that I'm not making any claims about the general safety of LGBTetc folks (though they are still safe enough to not feel so afraid of the world around them if they live somewhere like the US, this was left unsaid) and that I'm only saying if you previously had the courage to face the world, the shooting shouldn't have changed that and we explicitly had a person saying exactly that they were now afraid based on this event...
But eventually I got the sense they just didn't want to hear me. I gave an apology in the vein of "when people are afraid is exactly the BEST time to reassure them, but clearly I am failing to do that, so I'll back off" and they spent a few seconds talking about how important and good it is to let LGBT voices speak first (of which there were several available in the space, many of which were in the dopile). After those seconds, we have had 24+ hours of silence. Not a word on the topic from any involved or even any spectators, though they all continued talking about unrelated things in other channels of the space.
So. What happened here? I feel like insistence on sitting down and letting marginalized voices be heard is frequently insincere, as it happens even when nobody marginalized (or indeed, anybody at all) has anything to say. It is a "shut up" button, to be deployed whenever somebody says something you don't like that's adjacent to [minority issue]. Even if that isn't how they feel about it, that is functionally what is going on.
Superweapons are bad.
hoverburger
1yr ago
No, this is the baker and customer both happy but the storefront the baker is operating in saying that flavor of cake can't be served because they don't like it. The artists already drew it happily, now they just want to distribute their work.
It's analogous to facebook deciding that a perfectly legal gun store cannot have a facebook page. The various layers of services in between a producer of some thing and a consumer of that thing are getting more and more deeply enmeshed in all our lives, and along the way being given more control over what can be produced/consumed.
Many more things should be common carriers. Payment providers included.
hoverburger
1yr ago
I think the background of the work is incapable of mattering - it cannot modify the experience of a blind sampler, and so it cannot reliably impact the experience of consumers in the future when the background or context may be lost or warped. Or even now when the seller can just lie about the background. The product is as good or bad as it is with zero context. Sure, you can use the context (assuming you trust it is accurate) to predict salient facts about it, but that is not the same as those facts being modified by or dependent upon the context.
The structure of a book is perceivable "blind" so it can easily be considered - it is part of the work. The vintage of some wine? No. The author is dead. Embrace that and don't fool yourself into disbelieving your own senses because of the prestige of the product. Does it have desirable quality A, or not?
If you don't like a passage of Shakespeare given to you unlabeled (and you didn't recognize it), then you ought not like it in the alternate setting where you're told the author. All else is pretentious hogwash.
hoverburger
1yr ago
The tension is easy to resolve, and Reddit of all places almost had it with the quarantine idea. Whatever would have been taken off the platform is instead put behind a "whoah there, are you sure you want to see whatever nastiness the unfiltered internet can come up with?" button. The default feed doesn't have to change a single iota from today (moderators can even continue exactly as they are, but rather than remove/delete the content they flag, it just goes behind the barrier), but so long as people who want to see Alex Jones or whoever CAN do so by seeking him out and following/subscribing/whatever, then the promised freedom is there.
hoverburger
1yr ago
Below. The scores are now below the posts, which is marginally better with increasing effect as posts get longer (but never a very big effect).
hoverburger
1yr ago
Y'know what, fine. I'll bite. I'm cut, my son is cut, it seems pretty simple to me and I don't get why some people make such an enormous deal out of it. In general parents make irreversible decisions about their children all the time. Pros and cons for their future are weighed, their autonomy is not. This is no different.
Cons:
Potential complications
Potential trauma/brain effect
Reduction in sexual pleasure
Pros:
Less work to clean
Reduced odds of STD transmission
Reduced odds of penile cancer
Reduced odds of phimosis/related issues
Women's preference
I throw out potential complications, as I think is generally safe to do for procedures with low rates of complications - this is not isolated. What's that tongue flap clipping procedure called that potentially avoids speech complications, sometimes done very near birth? Lingual frenectomy or something? My son had that done as well. Unless a procedure is noted to be a risky one, it's not worth worrying about. Given the enormous number of men circumcised in the US and the lack of any widespread trauma or brain effect anybody can point to, that is either unrelated or incredibly low odds. Again, throw out. This leaves reduction in sexual pleasure as the sole con, and yeah, it's pretty much impossible to compare directly since very few men have experienced both sides, and arguably going through puberty already cut is different than being cut as an adult. Without a direct comparison or real data to work with, we have to cobble together some kind of reasoning here. Here's what I've got - premature ejaculation is an order of magnitude more common than male anorgasmia. Supposing the effect is significant, it's more likely to be beneficial than a hindrance.
I agree lots of the pros are pretty miniscule. The numbers are not very significant for STD reduction in places like the US, penile cancer is incredibly rare to begin with, women's preference is an ephemeral social fact, not a hard medical one. Then there's what I'll call near-elimination of phimosis/smegma/etc. Sure, they still could happen, but they're essentially non-issues for the circumcised. That's not much given their prevalence/ease of avoidance, but it's not nothing. Lastly there's less work to clean. People talk about how trivial this is, but it's honestly a bigger deal than it's given credit for! If you save yourself thirty seconds a day, that's something like a week added to your life.
I see a number of doctors advocating for it, a number of (small) positives, and only one real proposed downside worth considering (reduced pleasure) - even that may be statistically more likely to help than harm if it's a big enough effect to meaningfully change your experience.
It very much seems like a far, far, FAR overblown issue with very small effects either way (but that I happen to see as weighing slightly more positive than negative).
hoverburger
1yr ago
Untrue. Again efficacy debatable, but the argument is made that circumcision reduces rates of penile cancer and STD transmission.
hoverburger
1yr ago
I can accept just about any progressive result, so long as I'm still allowed to speak freely saying why I disagree with it (if I even do). I am okay with higher taxes. I am okay with gay marriage. I am okay with trans people using the bathrooms that they want to. I am okay with... a lot of things! But when there does happen to be something I'm not okay with, it is a requirement that I be able to say so clearly.
The modern left has lost this, and so they've lost me. I don't know what I "should" call myself, given that I align with lots of progressive goals and am not bothered by many others, but the talk about speech creating unsafety or harm and therefore needing to be blocked HAS to go. An inability to talk about something is an inability to take a step back if you're wrong, and that can't be allowed to stand. We must be able to realize when we are wrong and correct course, or else we can become permanently wrong and never fix our problems.
Letting people say stupid and wrong and even hateful things is the price we pay for the ability to change ourselves for the better, because obviously the powerful will immediately abuse any system that silences people (even if ostensibly for good reason) to silence those who challenge them - and they can do that even if no real harm or hate was there, because they are the powerful and can bend the rules to their whims.
This is so completely blindingly obvious to me that I am baffled every time a progressive friend of mine says we need to deplatform so-and-so. And every time I try to explain, they refuse to entertain the possibility of abuse. "No, no, we will only censor the bad people, don't you get it?" No, I think you are the one who doesn't get it.
So I get off the train. I'll vote for measures and policies that do progressive things, but I won't vote for leaders who don't understand the value of free speech - lately, that means I don't vote for very many on the left. Maybe that means I can't count myself as a leftist anymore, but I certainly don't think it makes me a rightist.
hoverburger
1yr ago
If we aren't better than... THAT, then we must become so. Both A and B should be punished for breaking the rule, damn the difficulty of doing so. True, you won't ever construct a system that is fully and completely 100% objectively impartial and fair to all, but that's no reason not to strive for the ideal.
Don't give up on a beautiful shared world because it's hard. Realize that literally everyone benefits from fairness and impartiality and pick up your tools alongside others who realize that to work towards it. No matter how dispirited you are by the current state of things, we are - even now! - more fair and impartial than we were a thousand years ago. How did we get there? How can we go further?
By building, maintaining, and respecting systems that are more impartial than the last. I would love to work with you to punish the defectors, but that's hard to do when you're explicitly stating you don't believe in working together with those not of your tribe!
hoverburger
1yr ago
I'll second memory management, or more broadly understanding pointers, as being an important boundary.
There is nothing fundamentally lost moving from machine code to assembly - one's just shorthand for the other. Transforming C mechanically into assembly by hand is not hard, just pointless and tedious. But languages "above" memory really truly do lose sight of something. There is nothing in the Haskell Man's conceptual toolbox he can use to get a handle on the memory of the system he runs on.
I'll grant it's not often important, but there is a real line between "languages which require memory awareness" and languages that do not, and it's not arbitrary. A real aspect of system execution and performance is totally lost.
Join the Federation, circa ~2360. Excellent fit, and a good measuring stick besides. Would somebody be uncomfortable as a member of Picard's crew? If so, they're not likely to be an ally to you or me.
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