daltotron

@daltotron@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oh jeez⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  america, home of the crybully industrial complex

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oh jeez⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, I think the main point in contention is mostly just that the experience of the American GIs are always centered in these tellings of the stories to american audiences, and obviously that’s going to whitewash a lot of the history and context of a conflict and just transform it into “I got stationed in a random place I hated for a couple years and then I had to kill a bunch of people for reasons I didn’t understand while they tried to kill all my friends and then I got back home and got jack shit for it”. And then on top of that, those movies are going to be a lot about the psychological trauma that’s inflicting on those particular american GIs, and often, again, without a broader context of what system they’re placed into, it’s just sort of like, turned into sanitized hollywood melodrama, much like how they’ll sanitize any historical fiction into being oscar bait.

  Obviously that’s not gonna really be the same experience as, say, some random guerilla fighter somewhere, or some random person who just lives in one of these places. About the only movies I can think of that actually attempted to expand on that particular perspective was good morning vietnam, where that’s touched on, but not explored, and maybe the breadwinner, which is a pretty good movie but also more just adjacent to what I’m talking about rather than directly in dialogue with it. I might be wrong on that one though, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it even though that movie is fucking good and you should watch it.

  That’s my recommendation. Go watch “the breadwinner”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ruby turds⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not really being rich, though. The guys on that list could theoretically buy whatever countries they wanted, hell, they could buy multiple, hell, they could just buy owning stock in every country by way of bribery. If you’re the leader of a single country, it’s as though your money is all invested for you already in that single country. You’re mostly locked down to wherever you are. But the Walton family, owning Walmart, last time I checked the third largest economy in the world, they can extract that money and pivot wherever they want, with basically no borders or limits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, do I have to say what you could just do to any senators which oppose you? It might be getting into coup territory, but eventually you’d probably reach a point where things just proceed as normal. Or you, as biden, could just take the L on it, make sure the newly stacked supreme court shuts it down, eat the, what, next 10 years of your life, if that, in federal prison or whatever it is, and blammo. Could probably even use the opportunity to step down but I imagine if he did some shit like that his approval rating might go through the glass dome protecting the flat earth aaaand post

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  the dems would never go for that, though, because then they’d actually be doing something. even if you took away oh no the two senators that somehow always conveniently oppose any action they take, you can be sure that they’d pull some other poor sap up out of the bowels in order to play the villain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So, what happens if the president is charged? Is he automatically ousted? I mean, apparently a felon can run for president, so does them being a state criminal actually impede them at all, or no?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay Mad⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  trains run on time

  I am here to regretfully inform you about the state of american rail infrastructure…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The internet connects people⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How are you hurt by alarms? Noise, high voltage, the fear of the things they indicate, or something else? legitimately curious, never heard of this phobia before

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Objectivity⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean I feel like I’ve seen him get smeared since way way before covid was happening, like, since the 2010’s at least he’s been getting heat for no reason, I feel like

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Objectivity⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No yeah for real. I’ve never seen him doing anything I would really consider to be annoying, or at least, more annoying than any other science communicator, and he constantly gets shit on for being like, too cocky, but then when you push back I never get any examples of things he’s actually fucked up on, just that he has bad vibes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom – Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, I dunno. I was sort of okay with the link’s awakening remake using this aesthetic, because it was a one off game, but it does sort of strike me as a very like, default, low rent kind of appearance, and the item and enemy copying ability also strikes me as something that’s not that interesting, and not as interesting as the normal zelda dungeon by dungeon kind of scheme. A good portion of the things you’re gonna copy are probably going to have exceedingly similar behaviors, they’re going to be functionally identical.

  It’s obviously a copy, ironically, or maybe an extension, of the design philosophy behind the recent two big zelda games, and this one’s adapted it to a lower budget 2D game. I dunno, I’m still not in love with the idea as a whole, and that’s kind of after two big games. I dunno if it’s really ever gonna be on the level of, say, portal, or something, right? Which is a weird comparison to make, but I do feel the need to make it. I’ve never really found physics puzzles to be that interesting, which is gonna be what a lot of games that try like, universal mechanics, are going to have to cowtow to, because physics systems are theoretically infinite even though they actually do have a relatively small set of constraints, right. I’ve also never really enjoyed stacking boxes on top of one another as a solution to a puzzle, despite that being omnipresent in every good immersive sim, which is weirdly what I would kind of peg the modern zelda design philosophy as belonging to.

  I dunno. I feel like the change in style has been kind of hard for me to pin down. It’s very obvious in a difference of feel, right, but in terms of formally locking down the actual difference, I can’t say I’ve really found much that’s all that weird about it. Sure, you can theoretically use whatever ability, anywhere, at any time, to make any vehicle, or scale any platform, stuff like that. But 90% of the time, it’s going to be totally useless as an ability. You’re going to fall into a couple of discrete, routine behaviors, even given an “infinite” ability that you’re just sort of, free to use and abuse like that.

  Compare this to a conventional zelda tool, which is not generally usable anywhere, right. You can use the hookshot to stun or damage enemies, right, you can use it to grapple onto a discrete set of platforms, but outside of that it’s not gonna be too useful. I don’t see that as being all that different from like. Ahh, well, with this ability, you can paste together two pallets! It’s effectively the same, they’re gonna come with a pretty similar set of constraints and behaviors.

  I feel like, to me, a lot of the fun of emergent mechanics comes from eeking out solutions to puzzles that designers probably haven’t thought about at all. Sometimes you can basically sidestep a challenge that otherwise you would’ve had to do, and in that way, it feels very much like a casual version of a speedrunning trick, or, it’s something that rewards your cleverness, or your understanding and mastery of the mechanics beyond even what the designers might anticipate. I like that much less when it feels like the designer doesn’t have a set, like, idea of a solution to a puzzle. When they’ve just given me all the tools, and then they tell me to go nuts, I don’t feel as though I’m circumventing anything, I just feel as though I’m doing the puzzle as god intended. There’s probably also some amount of, if everyone’s super, then no one is, going on there. If every puzzle is some puzzle I’m able to circumvent with clever rules lawyering or mechanics abuse, then it gets older, faster.

  So I dunno. I really like the third banjo kazooie game, it was probably ahead of it’s time, if this is the kind of direction we’re going in now, and obviously I have some level of nostalgia for it, because the 360 was my formative console, because I’m a zoomer. Feel old yet? At the same time, the first two games were probably just straight up better games, if I had to actually be honest with myself. They have wider appeal, and even if you just have an ability that you can only use on a specific pad, with a specific symbol, and 95% of the challenges can only be conquered how the game designer intends, it’s probably still gonna be better and have more broad appeal than having to either come up with a discrete set of vehicles, use the defaults, or else spend like 50% of your game time in the vehicle creation menu constructing increasingly niche vehicles to better perform the specific task.

  I dunno. You see what I’m getting at, though?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon reflects on e-sports⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They probably were in terms of viewing angles at the time of release, and probably were better if you had a technician which was able to come and adjust it or could adjust it at the store before it was sold, but I think the flatscreen CRTs have a much higher tendency for image warping over time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why isn't jerking off more valorized as an easy dopamine hit that's also literally good for you?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered multiple major branches of CBT

  I mean, both can be true, right. It’s not uncommon for pretty popular scientists to get into kind of the grift economy after a little while. Jordan peterson has how many citations to his scientific papers or whatever? But then he still rolls around and spews a bunch of bullshit that’s sort of framed under the guise of his psychological background, and you can still tell is pretty easily influenced by his jungian type bullshit. I dunno, been a while since I actually looked into him, but it shook my ability to trust psychology more as a field, after that one.

  I admire the skepticism but you haven’t read it and clearly haven’t taken time to fully understand it. he isn’t making prescriptive claims. he’s speaking on behavioral science. “A happens, then B tends to happen. C happens, then D tends to happen. do what you will with this info.”

  No yeah for sure I haven’t read it, don’t claim to have read it, I’m just extremely skeptical of that kind of book, which presents science to the public at large, because most of the experiences I’ve had with that sort of thing have been damaging psuedoscientific bullshit that I slowly have to talk my friends out of. Which becomes much harder when they think they know things on a topic because they’ve read like one book about it. I don’t even try to talk them into a different stance, I just try to talk them out of the kind of, oversimplified takes which they tend to get from these types of books. Steven pinker type books, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” type books, “The Bell Curve” type books, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, “Poor Dad, Rich Dad”, shit like that. Admittedly not all of those are science guys, and some of that shit’s kind of old, but, you see what I’m getting at, it all blends together for the public. Pop psychology, that’s probably the term for that specific type of book, and uhh, yeah, that book gave me that kind of vibe.

  If I’m really being skeptical, than, not evaluating anything else, because I just got up and still haven’t finished my coffee, the first study at the end of your post has two experiments. The first has a sample size of 34, the second has a sample size of 44. I dunno if I would say that you can really extrapolate anything from such an incredibly small sample size, to be honest. Especially one that’s like, taken from standard college campus volunteers. I know there are lots of scientific studies that rely on sample sizes which are pretty small, and I would throw that criticism at those studies, too. Shit happens in nutrition and exercise science too, I know for sure, which is why you see shitty fad diets circulate so much. I dunno, maybe I’ll read the rest of the paper, but that’s just like my general, me throwing shit at psychology as a field, right? But, maybe more, like, maybe more to, I think, some sort of point, if I have it, right:

  and we humans clearly need treatment.

  Like what do you mean by this? Because you’re looking at this through “treatments”, right, and I dunno if that’s the correct lens with which to view most people’s problems that they have in life. I mean it’s not a fuckin, incredibly new take, right, but like, you have a society where you’re expected to work 9-5, probably more, hours, five days a week, probably go in on a rental with your significant other, or increasingly, with your significant others, for like, 60 something years of your life? It’s not a shocker when we’re experiencing increasing amounts of depression at large, then, to me. That people have problems with that. I mean like, does changing society at large, qualify as a kind of patient treatment? I suppose my problem, if I’m really trying to have one, is just kind of that like, there’s not really any amount of psychological help which makes it better that your fingers are getting crushed in industrial machinery. Psychological help, in that case, just looks like copium. I don’t think psychology can help a lot of those problems, I think the best it can do is put a band-aid over a crippling tumor, which is nothing.

  If you were to ask me what we were to do with the mentality I have, I’d probably want to incredibly balloon sample sizes and drastically increase the amount of evidence that we’re collecting, compared to just like, some guy’s written observations on like 50 people in some random experiment. Probably though, this is impossible, because school funding does not look to be going up anytime soon and google isn’t gonna share their massive amounts of data they’re collecting on people, and even if we had a glut of data to go through then we’d probably still be having to come up with and apply some sort of framework to it. At which point we just end up with a bunch of hacky bullshit, where you just take the noise and draw something in it and then say that this was somehow a natural occurrence, so you’d also need more rigorous standards for what conclusions we’re actually able to draw from the noise.

  Then, even if you were able to do that, you’d still have no real way of distinguishing, say, one set of noise from another set of noise, to compare the two and draw a conclusion, because we’re just playing with like, one set of data, in a vacuum, compared to another set of data drawn from a vacuum, and there’s too many variables which might effect one outcome compared to another. So you’d probably need to be gathering pretty rigorous data over the course of many years before you’d be able to draw a real conclusion. Even then, the data might not be good enough, I dunno if you’d have enough information.

  I’d maybe lean more into neuroscience to try and cut out some of the external noise, some of the factors that might fuck your shit up, but then that’s also not quite a good method because it doesn’t really cut out the external noise so much as ignore it, and you can still end up finding FMRI signals in a dead fish.

  So, I dunno, probably I’d just use science for maths and astronomy and physics, stuff like that, and then otherwise I’d dismiss it, in looking for philosophies and methods with which to live my life or shape my being around. Or, you know, try to take it as it comes, and not really accept claims at face value. I’ve tried mindfulness, and I’ve found it wanting, because it just caused me to dissociate whenever I encountered an outcome I didn’t really like, and then instead of responding to things naturally, and flying by instinct, it causes me to kind of be like, the guy who smokes weed and then becomes hyper-aware of everything they’re doing but then their actual behavior devolves into nonsense.

  Then, when I got farther than that, and I started to observe that behavior in the abstract, then it just sort of struck me as like, none of this realistically gives you a particular value judgement, right. It’s fine enough to just say, like, ah, well, think about it more, evaluate your life more, think about the long term consequences a little more. But, that train of thought doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be making the correct judgements, and even over a lifetime, it might very well be that I could try everything and still come to the wrong conclusions, wrong judgements, or the right conclusions and right judgements, or whatever. I could be a hyper-conscious CEO evaluating my own life totally inaccurately and still be getting by fine and dandy, and I could be a homeless guy with accurate takes but still have a shit life. It’s basically nonsense, to just be like, oh, well, think about it a little bit harder, just be a little bit more conscious, because that isn’t nailed down to anything in particular.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Futuristic movies timeline⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, we’re never gonna get to idiocracy. The movie’s premise rides on the idea that intelligence is a heritable trait, or a measurable quantity. It is more the case, I have observed, that people are idiots by necessity. You know, it’s uhh, difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. It’s pretty easy to just call everyone stupid, and then move on, but it’s much harder to understand specifically why they’re stupid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why isn't jerking off more valorized as an easy dopamine hit that's also literally good for you?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean that’s definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though. Psychology, along with nutritional science and some other softer, more survey-based fields, has been suffering a pretty massive replication crisis, where something like 50% of papers are totally incapable of being replicated, depending on the journal and subject.

  So I dunno, I’d generally be pretty skeptical of anything a book like that says about how you have to live your life or what you should be doing or how you should be doing it. Even if it’s something like “mindfulness”, right, generally thought to be a therapeutic practice, which we’re extracting from zen buddhism or whatever, just like carl jung travels around and extracts a bunch of “archetypes” from other cultures and then supposes that they’re universal when really it’s all just kinda some schizo bullshit canon he’s coming up with on the fly.

  I uhh, I don’t like the scientific paint that is painted onto psychology and psychotherapy, is I guess what I’m saying. The attempt at formalization. What is just as good for one person, to be mindful, is probably something that someone else should rather not think about at all. Maybe even as a functional adaptation, a functional delusion that they can go on believing, and still end up having a fulfilling and uplifting life for everyone around them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon pirates a game⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not available on my android device, and I don’t really use other computers, so I dunno. I think onetab is supported on both, but I haven’t used that one too much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon pirates a game⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have like 300 tabs open at any given time, I have never had this problem. I also recently downloaded an extension for tab groups and making it so tabs get suspended after 15 minutes of inactivity, but I’m not really sure that was necessary at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is skibidi toilet? [Serious]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  damn that actually sounds like a great read, never heard of that one before

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is skibidi toilet? [Serious]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I think this problem is mostly solved if people were more willing to take their obviously highly produced and edited scripts and just make those publicly accessible with sources and whatnot, which they presumably need to basically do anyways in order to have good captioning on their video. The main problem isn’t so much that they use videos, to me, but that we have no way to sort through leagues of text documents and blogs now. Harder for me to subscribe to and read a blog in a dedicated fashion, I guess. I dunno, I guess ultimately I’m just saying that the two mediums need more connection, which would be mutually beneficial, I think.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon wants to ride a zeppelin⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean they’re probably fucking better than the unholy helicopter, to be honest. I’d probably like to see more research generally into hybrid airships, they’re kinda sick. I dunno, I mean, on one hand, if we’re all constantly complaining about jet fuel consumption being such a big issue, but still want air travel to be a thing, that seems like a pretty good method even if it’s slower by some order of magnitude. I might be wrong on that, though, who knows, maybe the tradeoff is worth it, maybe big intercontinental ships are more efficient. Maybe there’s some mass market hydrolysis rocket fuel jet idea, that someone might propose, and then it would get used as a way to greenwash basically what would be a normal jet that just runs on hydrogen derived from natural gas.

  Somebody else said they could be a good alternative to cargo ships, which may or may not be the move over land, but I dunno, still probably trains beat them out on that 99 times outta 100.

  I dunno, maybe if we get graphene, we’ll be able to make the big vacuum bubble airships, and that would be really cool, but if we have graphene then we’ve kinda won a lot of other cool things too, so that’s maybe one of the lesser theoretical technologies. Or maybe aluminum solves this?

  I think what I’ve learned from the domestic train industry in america and from listening to podcasts about supersonic jets in the 50’s is that none of this is so much a huge technological issue, as much as it is kind of just a political or purely cultural decision. We could have CRTs again, if we really wanted, or even plasma screens, right, but fuck that, you’re getting LCD and LCD derivatives now and you’re gonna like it. Maybe one thing or the other is “less efficient”, right, but that doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s like freedom, it’s a meta-value, it’s a proxy for your actual values. If the thing you value most is like, disseminating durable displays all over the place, at a low cost, with low weight, then you’re going to opt for LCDs. But if you were more into video quality or motion clarity or a more optimal contrast ratio, you might very well decide on another approach. If you want to read outside without taking a book, you go with e-ink, you don’t go with LCD, you know? If that’s your priority, if that’s your value, if that’s your value as shaped by the context. So just saying that zeppelins are “less efficient” than planes is kind of reliant on like, an unspoken definition of efficiency. It’s just a simple matter of priorities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hotwheels sisyphus⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You know it’s kind of funny but at the same time I do think it’s somewhat dystopian to see like, a natural phenomenon, right, a creature, and a creature that we need a name for, named after a brand of toys. Whenever I see this stuff it’s funny but it’s also sad and kind of dystopian, and kind of undignified. It’s like, I dunno. Imagine a kid points to a picture of a spider in a little book and asks their parents what the name of the spider is and instead of being like “that’s a tarantula” they gotta be like “yeah, that’s the hot wheels spider”. It’s a shitpost, it’s funny, it’s existentially hilarious, but it’s also so fucking depressing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we associate reverby electric guitar with the ocean?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_music

  Seems like your question contains the answer that you seek

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Couldn’t the republicans just do the same thing and remove it when they get a 51% majority

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iron⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  imagine, over the centuries of blood donation, the sword slowly grows from a knife, into an absolutely huge dragonslayer behemoth

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iron⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fucking awesome, exactly the comment I was looking for in this thread

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iron⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe the sword is just the product of a small cult which drains blood to create it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The second matchup of the tournament⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought they tried reintroducing wolves to yellowstone, no?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The second matchup of the tournament⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s established as a draw since hydrogen bomb blew themselves up

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The second matchup of the tournament⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wolf. It’s a singular wolf, so it honestly cannot beat me if it tried. Even if we assume the other two are more docile, all they need to do is try and I would be dead.

  lol at this

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The second matchup of the tournament⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But, like, a man could still kill you, right? Is that better than being eaten?

  I mean generally being eaten entails entrails leaking out, whereas getting killed could entail any number of things. Neck snap, choked out, slit throat, whatever. I dunno if your average idiot man is gonna be as proficient of a killer as a bear, even if they happen to be a murderer or like, just evil, right, so, I dunno. Kind of a toss up. Me personally, I would rather not have my guts spilled out, ribcage crushed, spine snapped, bones gnawed on while I’m still conscious, slowly lose blood and lose consciousness over the course of 30 minutes to an hour. I mean I guess theoretically a man could do those things too, but I dunno many men that could. Maybe like, the mike tyson of 40 years ago?

  I guess the argument I’m making hinges on the idea that humans are generally bad at killing in a physiological sense, and their need to kind of, up themselves in the game means that they tend to get filtered into a bunch of more painless and efficient approaches relative to the kind of uncaring cruelty of nature more generally. But then I dunno, humans also have a capacity for needless cruelty and torture, so I’d also be betting my chances that I don’t get shafted and stuck with like, a super jacked serial killer that can torture me with their bare hands, which there’s probably only like 2 or 3 of in the world. Maybe more if you include government contracted ones.