KoboldCoterie
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
Kobolds with a keyboard.
- Comment on Meta shareholders vs Mark Zuckerberg in $8 billion lawsuit 1 day ago:
$8 billion lawsuit
They want Mr Zuckerberg and his co-defendants to reimburse the company for more than $US8 billion ($12.2 billion) in fines and other costs Meta paid following the controversy.
So… a $12.2 billion lawsuit, then?
- Comment on Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed 2 days ago:
I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but one compelling reason I’ve heard is that adult content has a considerably higher chargeback rate than other content, making the risk much higher for payment processors. This makes sense - I could absolutely see some horny person buying some adult content, getting off to it, then doing a chargeback in their moment of introspection.
- Comment on Grandma is on her own 1 week ago:
True equality!
- Comment on What is wrong with being "Black Pilled"? 1 week ago:
The term is connected to misogyny. If someone just wants to give up dating and that’s the end of it, there’s no reason for anyone to be ticked off by that idea. It’s the doomer attitude surrounding it and the effects of it that cause problems. You used the term ‘black pill’, which has specific connotations - it’s not simply choosing to give up dating.
- Comment on What is wrong with being "Black Pilled"? 1 week ago:
The term black pill, first popularized in the 2010s on the incel blog Omega Virgin Revolt, refers to accepting the futility of fighting against a feminist system. Blackpilled incels are encouraged to either commit suicide or “go ER”/be a “hERo,” referencing Elliot Rodger’s 2014 Isla Vista murder spree that has been called an act of misogynistic terrorism.
(Source: Britannica
- Comment on Grandma is on her own 1 week ago:
I’ve said this before (and caught flak for it) but I think the solution to this is to apply a heavy additional tax to vacant homes (as defined as any home that isn’t occupied by a permanent resident for more than 6 months a year), and increase the tax exponentially for each residence beyond the first owned by the same company or individual.
At some point, you make it so expensive to keep unoccupied properties that they’re better off letting people live there for free than continuing to let them go unoccupied. Use all of the proceeds from this tax to assist homeless people or build new dense housing developments.
“But Kobold, what about soandso with their summer home?” If you can afford a second home, you can afford to pay a bit more tax on it to benefit the public good.
“But Kobold, a lot of those homes that are vacant are run-down, or are in places nobody actually wants to live!” Doesn’t matter. If they’re vacant, tax them. Use the money to build dense housing in the places where people do want to live. If the place is too run-down to be occupied, the owner can tear it down and do something else with it.
- Comment on China's Humanoid Robot Soccer League Kicks Off with AI-Only Matches 1 week ago:
This seems like a novelty that people would watch one time and then promptly forget about. Where’s the appeal in this at all? Not even from an “AI BAD” standpoint, but just, like… why?
- Comment on Millionaire homeowners sued the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, arguing a 10 square mile town whose new zoning plan to increase density had no plan to expand the roads 1 week ago:
The city should just put forth a new plan that involves taking those specific homeowners’ land via eminent domain, and using it to install new parking lots or roadways or whatever will fit to accommodate the new requirements.
- Comment on Corruption fetishists 2 weeks ago:
Terraria
- Comment on I honestly think they're impossible to understand 2 weeks ago:
No, but a multiplayer game which starts with, for example, 4 players could be reduced to 2 players before it ends, so they have to specify ‘begins with’ to keep that multiplayer game from also being a two-player game at that point.
And this really sums up the level of semantics and minutia that requires a 299 page comprehensive rule PDF for a card game.
- Comment on I honestly think they're impossible to understand 3 weeks ago:
Or any interaction that requires understanding layers.
- Comment on I honestly think they're impossible to understand 3 weeks ago:
In all fairness, the instructions you actually need to know to play the game could be summarized in a single page (with the caveat that there will be a lot of edge cases that won’t be adequately explained there); tournament judges and, to a lesser extent, tournament players are the only folks who need to know the majority of what’s in that PDF.
That said, the game is super archaic and hard to learn, and any player who thinks otherwise is probably either playing only at a super basic level, or just isn’t considering how long they’ve been playing and how much nuance they’ve accumulated. Sorry you had a shitty experience; your friends absolutely should not have tried to throw you into the deep end like that. You sound like you already know, but to reiterate it, this was absolutely not a failing on your part and was 100% your friends’ fault.
If you actually want to try the game (and I completely understand if you don’t), you can go to a game store that sells MtG products and ask for a (free) intro deck. They’re small decks with simpler cards and a booklet explaining the basic game rules that can be helpful to learn the game.
- Comment on I honestly think they're impossible to understand 3 weeks ago:
Wow. If you told me this was satire, I’d 100% believe you.
- Comment on I honestly think they're impossible to understand 3 weeks ago:
“Here, just use this easy quick-reference PDF.”
- Comment on Might be time to find another job 3 weeks ago:
Come in with some bolt cutters. Free the milk.
- Comment on Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books 3 weeks ago:
Really, the whole basis for the anti-AI arguments seem to boil down to “It feels wrong that a billionaire’s corporation should be able to take the work of artists and writers and, without paying them for it, use it to create a tool that is then used to put them out of work.” And that’s absolutely 100% true, but it unfortunately doesn’t hold any legal weight, and the terms we currently have to describe intellectual property theft simply aren’t sufficient to describe what’s going on here. Until new laws are passed, I don’t see any of these attempts to stop AI going anywhere, but I’d love to be proven incorrect.
- Comment on Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week 3 weeks ago:
“Technology is gonna work to improve us, not just the people who own the technology and the CEOs of large corporations,” Sanders said. “You are a worker, your productivity is increasing because we give you AI, right? Instead of throwing you out on the street, I’m gonna reduce your work week to 32 hours.”
0% chance this wouldn’t also come with a 20% pay cut.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
The question wasn’t, “Could this be used as evidence?”, it was “Would this exonerate you?”
Maybe we’re answering two different questions, but I don’t see this being enough to exonerate anyone without some supporting evidence to go with it.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
It’s like saying you couldn’t have committed a crime because your TV was on at the time; it seems too flimsy to even be usable if you didn’t have some other form of evidence supporting that it was actually you using it to go along with it. I’m not a lawyer, so it’s possible I’m totally wrong, but surely no competent lawyer would expect that to work and no judge would take that as evidence on its own merits.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
It wouldn’t exonerate you, unless you could prove beyond a doubt that it was you using the phone. It’d be easy, if you were planning a murder, to give an accomplice your phone and have them use it all night to cover for you. It might be able to be used in conjunction with other evidence, though, to assist in your defense.
- Comment on Oh to go back... 3 weeks ago:
I remember when I was in middle school, I saw my older brother working on a Unix system and it looked like he was some elite hacker. Now, it’s the same look I get from my kid any time he sees me doing anything in the terminal.
- Comment on Oh to go back... 3 weeks ago:
Maybe I needed to add a \s to that. :D
- Comment on Can confirm 3 weeks ago:
Well, now I feel like I need to provide a picture so folks don’t get the wrong idea!
- Comment on Oh to go back... 3 weeks ago:
Swordfish was always one of my favorites.
- Comment on Can confirm 3 weeks ago:
I have a giant Chillet plush that I sleep with. It’s basically a body pillow. It serves this function admirably, and goddamn is it cute.
- Comment on Oh to go back... 3 weeks ago:
Hacking scenes in old movies are ridiculous to look back on. Always some crazy GUI-heavy pseudo-video game with people clattering away madly on keyboards and tense music playing. So unlike hacking scenes of today, which are obviously much more realistic to appeal to a refined modern audience. We’ve truly come a long way.
- Comment on What are your approaches to donating? 3 weeks ago:
I have heard that small recurring donations are more helpful in general than larger one-time donations, so that’s what I tend to do - small recurring donations to services I use or creators whose content I consume. I tend to only do this when the service or content is primarily donation-supported, though.
This is also easier for me to manage, because it becomes a monthly recurring cost and I can see easily how much I’m spending on donations and adjust them as needed, whereas with larger one-time donations, I tend to lose track of how much the total is in a given period.
- Comment on So um, america just started another war in the middle east. We're going to need a shit ton more memes to distract americans from the nightmare they are enduring. Thanks in advance... 3 weeks ago:
I believe their meaning was, ‘Do you have to see boots on the ground before you call it a war?’, not accusing you personally of wanting war.
- Comment on Make dinosaurs weirder 4 weeks ago:
At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.
I want to live on that planet. It can’t possibly be doing worse than we are.
- Comment on New report suggests third-party Switch 2 game sales are "below estimates" 4 weeks ago:
Looking at this list of 3rd party games, I wonder if the reason for this is that most of these games have been available on other platforms already for quite some time. If you were interested in e.g. Hades 2, unless you just didn’t have a PC available, you probably weren’t waiting for an at-the-time unannounced Switch 2 to play it on. Heck, Cyberpunk is 5 years old at this point. Street Fighter 6 is 2 years old and was on a lot of other platforms.
I expect we might see different results when we see more 3rd party games getting simultaneous launch on Switch 2 and other platforms.
