darthelmet

@darthelmet@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Clearly this just means that Silksong IS Half-life 3.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But yes.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not spicy. Everyone knows nuclear power is lemon-lime flavored.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Only have a beginner perspective, but in school I did really well in intro CS class that used Python. 2nd class was in Java and it almost broke me I was so confused.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Serious statement: I don't understand the argument that not voting for Harris was the morally correct thing to do, because of Gaza. Why does anyone believe this?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a philosophical and a practical side to this:

  Philosophically, the core of a democratic system is the peaceful transition of power. The idea that you won’t just try to force your will over people with violence and will respect the will of the populace. This is a fine principle in a proper democracy with a fair process and political outcomes that fall within acceptable ranges. If you wanted more money for the trains and someone else wanted more money for the busses, that’s a disagreement you can live with. And if the voting system is set up so you had equal chances both to introduce topics/candidates and vote on them, then great. By accepting the election and not trying to go outside the system to get your way, you keep the peace and allow for that process to be a viable vehicle for change.

  If this is a requirement for democracy, then the converse is that if a system isn’t fair and produces unacceptable results (eg, Nazis and genocide), participating in it merely legitimizes it. Obviously nothing physically stops you from organizing, but symbolically you’ve shown that you view the system as the sole legitimate way to exert political power and garner authority. And people will then turn around and say you should vote instead of doing xyz actions. “I don’t agree with your methods.”

  On the practical side of this: people put a lot of time, energy, and political capital into supporting candidates in these elections. It eats up the public bandwidth, crowding out other forms of political participation. In addition, once someone works hard to get their candidate elected, there is an impulse, an incentive, to defend them. The people who said to suck it up, vote for Biden, then push him to the left turned around and chastised leftists for protesting over things like the continued anti-immigration policies or the support for Israel’s genocide. US electoral politics is a team sport. People get psychologically invested in their team. They don’t like it when you criticize their team. This makes them resistant to change even on policies they nominally support. I think encouraging people to maintain that emotional investment in elections is harmful. It hinders organizing efforts. It hurts attempts to build class consciousness because it gets people to think about their fellow workers as the enemy and capitalists as potential allies. And the corresponding obsession with 24 hour news cycles turns politics into a TV show. Trying to talk to libs about any history older than like a week ago or maybe at most a presidential term is impossible. If it wasn’t on their favorite TV show it doesn’t exist.

  We need to be drawing people’s attention to actual types of political participation. Elections don’t just distract from that, they make people think they’re doing the right thing. It’s a release.

  All that said, that’s not to say there’s never value in any part of the electoral system, it’s just very limited. Bernie’s attempts at running were part of what got me more engaged in politics and shifted me from being a progressive-ish lib to being more of a socialist. Important to that though was not just the policy platform, but the structure and messaging of the campaign promoted the importance of mass political participation. I ended up meeting some local socialist groups in the process of going to campaign volunteering. However, most of the time and energy still went into the election only for the system to block us at the end and Bernie to give in. Tons of hours of volunteer time went into doing little more than getting people to sign ballot petitions. We weren’t getting those people into a union or a mutual aid group or anything. We basically just tossed our energy into the void.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Serious statement: I don't understand the argument that not voting for Harris was the morally correct thing to do, because of Gaza. Why does anyone believe this?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For me: Voting represents support for both the process and the government that results from that process. By voting you are essentially expressing that you submit to the electoral process as the sole means for the exercise of political power. Even if you don’t like the results, you’ve agreed to accept it because the rules are more important than the results.

  Some obvious problems with that: What if the process itself isn’t fair in the first place? We don’t really get to choose our leaders. We get presented with a set of options which are acceptable to capitalists and are asked our opinion on which we like more. You could write multiple books on the ways the US electoral process has been structured to disenfranchise people and reduce the impact they can have on their government, but fundamentally it comes down to the fact that the government doesn’t represent people and that’s a feature, not a bug.

  So we end up with a pair of awful candidates who both have done and will do more awful shit. If the election randomly fell out of the sky without context, sure, you could argue about one being technically better than the other. But it didn’t. It’s this way for a reason. It’s this way because people are willing to cede their expression of political power to it despite the fact that it’s clearly unaccountable to them.

  Voting is just supporting the system that’s deprived us of any real democracy while normalizing fascism to protect itself. Voting is a fairly low information form of political expression. You don’t get the choice to be like “Oh I’ll begrudgingly support this candidate, but this this and that are things I don’t like and want them to change.” You get two boxes. Each one represents EVERYTHING the candidate stands for plus the implicit choice of accepting the process in the first place.

  If people want things to get better, they have to organize and take real, tangible actions rather than just begging capitalist politicians to do stuff for us every 2-4 years. People should be doing this regardless of who’s in office, but let’s put a fine point on it: People are worried that Trump is gonna be fascist, take away people’s rights, and end democracy. Are you just going to accept that because he won the election? Are the rules that bind the process more important to you than the results? If not, you should be willing to do what it takes to stop him instead of chastising that people didn’t show up to participate in a sham of an electoral system.

  For what it’s worth, I actually did go to the polls to vote specifically on an equal rights ballot measure in NY. At least that has a semblance of direct democracy. There I’m explicitly saying “I support this policy specifically” instead of supporting a candidate who just says they support those things while also doing awful shit. It passed, so that’s nice. If anything I’m more pissed at Californians for voting against a measure to END SLAVERY than I am with people who didn’t want to vote for a person currently engaged in supporting a genocide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Somewhat relevant today⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  50% of the time it happens 100% of the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do Republicans bring up Kamala's "lies"/shortcomings as a way to claim Trump is better?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s just what you do when your side doesn’t have a justifiable platform on it’s own merit: See: All the people who keep telling us to ignore all the bad stuff corporate dems do because Trump would be worse.

  IF you could actually run on things people liked, you’d talk about that and perhaps only call out your opponent’s opposition to the things you support or show how they might be lying about claims that they want similar things.

  But when your core platform is “let rich people keep doing what they want,” you have to find ways to deflect from that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Commie trek⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like at different times either the Klingon or Romulans kind of stand in for the Soviets. Certainly TNG onward the Klingons shift in their representation and the Romulans stay as that analogue to a secretive geopolitical rival that they maintain an uneasy peace with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Commie trek⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah I guess. Although I guess the question is how much energy does warp drive use or how much energy does the engine output given some amount of dilithium or whatever? No real way to know since it’s sci-fi. As far as I know the only physics we have on this is that paper that showed you’d need negative energy to make warp happen. Which is obviously not super helpful for figuring out what it would be in the hypothetical world of Star Trek where they found some way to make it physically possible.

  I just imagine that their energy production has to be absolutely insane for warp travel to not only be feasible, but a fairly common thing more akin to launching a boat than a NASA mission.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Commie trek⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah this feels like a critique from someone who’s never watched Star Trek.

  The bit about the food is pretty funny. Like sure, a few times people have mentioned liking some non-replicated food better, but in general it seems like it’s about as good as the real thing and you can get ANYTHING you want anywhere you have a replicator without needing the skills of a chef.

  Then there’s Voyager where the crew prefers to use their limited replicator rations rather than eat the slop Neelix makes lol. Actually, that’s something that never made sense to me: Why were they so limited on replicator usage? Doesn’t it just convert energy into matter from the reactor powerful enough to power a warp drive? In general I find it kind of silly when they turn off the lights and stuff to “conserve power” when there’s trouble. Like the lights are drawing any meaningful amount of power compared to warping the fabric of time and space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The links didn’t work either. But thanks for the suggestions. I’ll look into other app options.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends. Usually I’m just looking for some game or show I like. The few of those I’ve looked into that have a community have like a handful of users, infrequent posts, or auto-posted threads with no comments beyond the bot post.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The only real issue I have is that there aren’t that many active communities for more niche topics. I hope it’ll get there someday, but for now we have Linux or Star Trek, take your pick. :P

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm tired of every game being live service⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s mostly just finding some reviews/word of mouth sources that you trust and which align with your tastes.

  On the review side of things Second Wind covers a decent spread of indie games. I also occasionally see some new stuff from streamers, but that’s more of a toss up since there’s a lot of sponsored coverage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War Ragnarök - PC Launch Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Even for the single player games?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Kamala Harris being held at such a higher standard than Trump this election?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  2 things:

  • Remember 2016 when the media gave Trump an absurd amount of free publicity by covering every stupid thing he said and did then he won? It wasn’t the only reason, but it clearly didn’t help.

  • People know who Trump is at this point. He’s awful in a way that’s really easy to see and either you’re someone that’s a problem for or you’re someone who loves the awful.

  Whoever is the current corporate lackey being put forward by the DNC is the one that needs to claim to be the good one, co-opting the language of progressives while taking corporate money and maintaining the brutal status quo.

  So for people who come looking for someone who’s gonna do good, the bad stuff represents inconsistencies with that narrative and despair at a lack of representation in a supposedly democratic system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DuckDuckGoose⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe they’re raising an army of nature’s angriest animal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elden Ring is "the limit" for From Software project scale, says Miyazaki - multiple, "smaller" games may be the "next stage"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because when I explore I want to go see something new and interesting. Half the time in Elden Ring I’d just run into something I’ve seen before. It made it not feel good to explore.

  I don’t blame them for this, but this is the reality of making a project this big in scope. You can’t possibly fill it with good content. They made one of the like top 3-5 best open world games, but it’s still stuck with all the same drawbacks as open world games.

  I just want them to go back to making more focused content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨answer = sum(n) / len(n)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Idk. There’s something going on in how humans learn which is probably fundamentally different from current ML models.

  Sure, humans learn from observing their environments, but they generally don’t need millions of examples to figure something out. They’ve got some kind of heuristics or other ways of learning things that lets them understand many things after seeing them just a few times or even once.

  Most of the progress in ML models in recent years has been the discovery that you can get massive improvements with current models by just feeding them more and data. Essentially brute force. But there’s a limit to that, either because there might be a theoretical point where the gains stop, or the more practical issue of only having so much data and compute resources.

  There’s almost certainly going to need to be some kind of breakthrough before we’re able to get meaningful further than we are now, let alone matching up to human cognition.

  At least, that’s how I understand it from the classes I took in grad school. I’m not an expert by any means.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn’t like Elden Ring⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I like the games in spite of the dumb stuff like this. I fully recognize a lot of it is really bad design.

  It is very frustrating though. Setting aside the silly NPC quests, it’s so disappointing finding some cool looking item or spell only for it to be practically useless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Star Trek Adventures first edition Core Rulebook pdf free for Saturday, June 22⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it just me or do Lemmy communities tend to skew left wing? Why might this be?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.

  But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed that it’s something I need to overcome. But I still think collective action is the only way forward. Half our problems stem from everyone acting as individuals divorced from community.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Admittedly not much anymore. It’s hard organizing people in the face of systemic opposition under the best of circumstances, but I’m also incredibly unhealthy. Socially awkward and anxious is only the tip of the iceberg of the personal problems I have that make it hard for me to engage in real life activism anymore. I’ve tried, but it’s not really something I can do at the moment. I can barely do anything at the moment for that matter.

  That said, there is some small value in trying to convince others to think about these problems and develop class consciousness. I’m not claiming it’s much and it’s stressful/depressing knowing I’m not doing more, but at least I’m not trying to get people to stick their heads in the sand. I’m not actively making things worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We’ve have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:

  • In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.

  • In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.

  • In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.

  • Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn’t upset advertisers.

  Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn’t allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.

  It’s suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don’t really know what to do about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why has no one thought of this before?!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just like the Simpsons or XKCD, there’s always a relevant Star Trek episode. It’s unfortunate none of my friends have watched any.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zero to hero⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well I’m convinced. That was a surprisingly well reasoned video.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zero to hero⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Does “nothing” “exist” independent of caring what there is nothing of or in what span of time and space there is nothing of the thing?

  There’s always been “something” somewhere. Well, at least as far back as we can see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘We deserve more’: US workers’ share of the pie dwindles⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, how we got here probably can inform us as to how we proceed. But ok, fine. Ignore the first part. Answer the 2nd part.