monotremata

@monotremata@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not real... *for now*⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a British TV anthology series similar to The Twilight Zone, but most of the episodes are about technologic dystopias

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not real... *for now*⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It was in Black Mirror years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So, is the USA screwed?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Citizens United would be a decent candidate. Once it was established that donations were protected political speech, it effectively legalized bribery, and made oligarchy essentially inevitable. Most of the missteps since then have been motivated by folks trying to simultaneously play to populist talking points but also placate billionaire donors. The left needed an actual positive message, like the kind Bernie Sanders was pushing, that would energize folks and unite the overeducated with the working class, but that was never going to be acceptable to the donor class, and so candidates like him always had to be shoved aside for someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs. And someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs was always going to be a really tough sell and not really a solution to the needs of the moment.

  That doesn’t really account for the rise of the tech bro fascist accelerationists like Mencius Moldbug and the Dark Enlightenment, which is a big part of the current moment and accounts for how the far right was able to hoodwink some billionaires into voting for a social collapse that seems very likely to hurt them also. But Citizens United still seems like a fair candidate for a point at which some of the last paths away from this outcome were foreclosed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Putting the die in diet⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s plausible for cooking in general, but boiling vs poaching is a pretty fine distinction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Putting the die in diet⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m also intrigued as to why they think hard boiling vs poaching the egg has any bearing on its calorie content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Average Arch user:⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  At this point I actually wonder whether Steam Deck owners might represent the majority of Arch users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you want me to heat that up in the "Michael Wave"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Clearly something is pushing in the direction of voiced instead. The ultimate form is presumably “lambdop.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anons make the worst game ever⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I had something like this with Final Fantasy IX. Like two-thirds of the way through the game, there’s a minigame that crops up where you have to use a chocobo to walk around these tiny scenes and peck to try to echolocate hidden treasures within a time limit. And I don’t know why, but I got totally addicted to that stupid little minigame, to the point that I kind of broke my brain and had to stop playing the entire game. I did later see some dorm mates in college getting frustrated with that task and get to just zip right through it for them, though, which made it feel slightly less like a savage waste of my lifespan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon gives a piracy history lesson⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My first home computer was an Apple IIgs. It had no hard drive. You need to use a “boot disk” that loaded the operating system, and then once that was in RAM, you could swap out that disk for the one with your program on it. The OS looked a little like early MacOS; it was called ProDOS. You could technically use it to copy floppy disks (the program for that was “Copy II Plus”), but it took forever, because the copy program had to copy a chunk of the disk into RAM, then get you to swap to the target disk, write that chunk, get you to swap back to the first disk, load a new chunk, get you to swap disks again… It generally took about 40 swaps for a 3.5" high-density (by which they meant 800kb) floppy. It was incredibly tedious. If you had two disk drives, though, it could just work continuously without needing to wait for you to swap disks all the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm just gonna stick to slotted, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One issue is that it can be leveraged to maintain a monopoly. Microsoft famously made a bunch of small modifications to the HTML standard, so that web sites that wanted to work with MS Internet Explorer had to write custom versions to be compatible. But because so many people just used IE because it was bundled with Windows, those “extensions” started to become their own standard, so that then other browsers had to adopt MS’s idiosyncrasies in order to be compatible with the sites, which in turn harmed standardization itself. They even had a term for this technique: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.” It nearly worked for them until Google pushed them out with Chrome. Microsoft tried to do the same thing again with Java until the government got involved.

  It’s complicated, certainly, but there are legitimate cases where “just a little tweak” can be quite a big problem for a standard.