jkf
1yr ago
I have "Highlight new comments since last visit" enabled in user settings, but it doesn't seem to do anything -- it's very possible that I'm missing something here, but if not this should be a high priority feature given the nature of The Thread.
jkf
1yr ago
Pretty sure I'm not getting shit at the moment:
Good to know that it's somewhat working for others; I'll do some more troubleshooting and make up a bug report if it's not a me problem.
jkf
1yr ago
I love that his rifle is sprouting mini-mottes -- we have more mottes than you can imagine, motherfucker.
jkf
1yr ago
I was reading a thing (probably from one of the pro-Russian sources, so salt to taste) that both sides have discovered a winning tactic that works well in this war along the lines of "temporarily occupy small village that you don't care about with an unsustainably small force -- when the enemy 'retakes' the village, quickly withdraw and level the village (plus enemy troops) to the ground with artillery".
The Russian source claimed that the russians picked this up in the early days from the Ukrainians -- so it remains to be seen whether they would fall for something like this again.
The part about "using your own villages as bait to draw the enemy in and then destroy the whole shebang" is kind of novel from the Ukrainian side -- I presume that is why the Russians were signal boosting it (make the Ukrainians look like assholes) but the fact that the Russians are now doing it right back (with some success) and Twitter is aflame whenever one side or the other "takes" some podunk town makes it noteworthy, I think.
jkf
1yr ago
"Just ignore them and shell the village yourself with your numerically superior artillery" seems to be the Russian approach -- remains to be seen how well this works (and it's certainly not winning any popularity contests), but tends to explain all the news we hear about this or that farm town "changing hands" near a relatively static front.
jkf
1yr ago
jkf
1yr ago
Probably just eliminating the (redundant) icons under each comment plus some css (I'm using the template somebody posted because I'm lazy) to remove excess vertical whitespace would go pretty far -- I think Reddit has a bit more horizontal whitespace between the sidebar and the comment text, which is nice for desktop users. (ie. landscape)
Re: another comment, I actually like the up/down vote buttons better on the bottom -- maybe it will encourage people to, like, read the comment before voting?
Best luck with the config, things seem to be going very well so far IMO.
jkf
1yr ago
Avatars are suddenly yuge for me this morning -- like, full size of what ever image people are using!
Anyone else seeing this? Do we even want avatars? Seems suspiciously "fun", but does help with user recognition.
jkf
1yr ago
They have not yet begun to cringe -- not sure if the issue is localized to me, but I just blocked all motte-hosted images and readability is much improved even over the thumb-sized avatars; they just take up too much space.
I suppose there could be a "more fun" switch in user settings?
jkf
1yr ago
There was (scale: .25), but removing that line still leaves inconsistent sizing (some way too large) for me; I'm very happy with display:none on .profile-pic-20 however!
Thanks for the tip!
jkf
1yr ago
Sounds like he's going with Charles III as well -- which is potentially portentious.
jkf
1yr ago
Huh -- somebody gave me his most recent book (which is true crap), which prompted me to reread some of the old ones in my library, just to check that I didn't used to be insane. Unfortunately somebody stole my copy of Neuromancer at some point, but the rest of the Sprawl series are still very very good IMO. My recollection at the time is not thinking that they quite measured up to Neuromancer; I'll have to give it another read somehow.
I also had a few of the 1990s-2014 books on hand, and blazed through them; not great but not terrible -- definitely had moments of spirit. I think Trump (or something) broke his brain -- the only reason to read Agency is as a kind of meta-analysis of why the other books seem good but this one is bad. (plotline is pretty standard Gibson) There's significant woke pandering, and I gather he still won't get a Hugo for it on account of wrong gender.
jkf
1yr ago
Adoptive parents invest significant effort to earn the title of mom/dad -- it's certainly not uncommon for a kid to reject a (bad) step/adoptive parent and refuse to call them that.
"Because I say so" is certainly not a good reason to call somebody by the title they prefer.
jkf
1yr ago
"Sir, this is a Wendy's Culture War thread"
Maybe next time post something about the Culture War?
jkf
1yr ago
Someone was explaining the difference between triple parentheses and European quotation marks.
jkf
1yr ago
If someone spends years medically transitioning and jumps through legal hoops, doesn't the comparison to adoptive parents get off the ground?
I don't think it does -- raising, feeding and clothing a child has immense benefit to the child. (also a smaller but significant benefit to society, in that somebody needs to raise orphans)
Going through a difficult medical procedure has no benefit whatsoever to me (and is probably a net drain on shared resources, but no need to go there); so it doesn't follow that anyone should be expected to confer the 'title' of women upon somebody else for that reason. If one's adoptive mother were trans, maybe there would be a sense of duty there -- but I don't see any way it exists by default.
jkf
1yr ago
Disagree -- it's very useful to be able to collapse a thread once you've read into it a ways and discovered that it's not worth continuing -- bigger separation between the toplevel lines would address your concern I think.
jkf
1yr ago
I also encountered a GMO astroturf account on an low-traffic local sub -- I'm fairly sure it was a real person, and it did encourage organic response from IFLS types you describe -- but if you looked at the post history it was all "arguing about GMOs on obscure subreddits".
I'm shocked that anyone finds Reddit important enough to run this sort of op on, but I'm pretty convinced that some people are either paid to do it, or both organized and ideological enough as a group to spend time repeating talking points.
Another example -- I have it on reasonably credible authority that the youth wing of the Liberal Party of Canada distributes specific talking points which its members then astroturf on the national and provincial subs whenever there's a controversy; you can see this because it's usually some legalistic nitpick that's repeated word for word by different (legitimate seeming) user accounts to create the impression of "politics as usual, nothing to see here, Conservatives are just too dump to understand what's happening".
I doubt that the LPC can afford to hire Chinese bot/troll farms -- but they don't need to because they have a readymade group of youngsters who care enough to do it for free. The key is the coordination of responses to create the impression of a reasoned consensus; again I don't see this as worth doing, because Reddit's userbase is overwhelmingly aligned with Young Liberals anyways -- but somebody important enough to coordinate this appears to disagree.
I am open to the possibility that better-resourced actors do something similar with for-hire agencies -- although this does seem like something that would eventually come to light in the form of "I was a Reddit consensus-manufacturer, AMA" type exposes.
jkf
1yr ago
Most people do not care that much about what others do.
I reject your premise -- most people care a lot about what others do; it's just that previously they haven't had the power or the social acceptance to enforce their will on the masses. We are at a dangerous juncture.
jkf
1yr ago
I'm not sure this is right; there's an (older?) sense of the word in which an older person develops a (non-sexual) relationship with a younger (too young to consent) person, and then scoops them up for a sexual relationship once they turn 18. (or whatever)
So the drag-queen thing can be viewed in a similar way; get children who are too young for sexual purposes inculcated into your personal fetish, which will increase the supply of adults for you (and yours) to sexually exploit down the road; "stochastic grooming," if you will.
jkf
1yr ago
Again, this is an argument that trans-surgeons are/should be proud of their hard work and consider the end product a "real woman" -- this makes sense and is probably even true.
It's not an argument that anybody else should agree; in art, nobody cares how hard you worked -- others will judge you by your end product.
Yes, and?
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