darthelmet

@darthelmet@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Divided and conquered⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The point isn’t to cede ground and compromise with them. The point is to try to show them that they’ve been duped about who their enemies are. It might still take some time to deprogram them, but if we could at least get them to put that all on hold and focus on the class issue, maybe we can actually get somewhere instead of spinning in circles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welp.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have less hope for two reasons:

  1. These are still capitalist countries and thus the incentive for fascism still remains even if it gets delayed a bit.

  2. The US is the largest, most dangerous military superpower the world has ever seen and it has shown time and time again that it’s willing to use that might to bully other nations into economic submission. No country is really safe if it decides to start going after them. The US hasn’t always won these wars, but even when it fails like in Vietnam or Korea, it does enough damage on the way out to cause massive destruction and suffering which has long lasting consequences. I seriously doubt the rest of the world is just gonna get to sit this one out and watch America self destruct.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The USA was always broken⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s Britain’s excuse then?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pills here!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a difference between conspiracy theories and having an analysis of incentives and structures.

  There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy for profit seeking corporations to decide not to invest their money into something they think won’t return as much profit.

  As for everything else staying shitty, why would corporations spend money on lobbying and campaign contributions if they didn’t expect it to make them a profit? Obviously those corporations want less taxes, less regulations that might cost them money to comply with, and the more of the economy that is privatized, the more opportunities capitalists have for making more profits.

  That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s a basic understanding of economics and political economy plus some history.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Interview: Alex Kurtzman on Section 31 and the "evolution" of Star Trek⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think what’s interesting about the conflicts that do arise in Star Trek is that while they often mirror issues we have today in some way, it’s being grappled with by people and a system that has purposefully turned away from greed and cruelty. They might not always get things right, but it’s not because of some special interests making it that way, it’s just because even in the future humans are humans and they make mistakes and have blind spots.

  For example, I was thinking about that episode of DS9 that dealt with Bashir being genetically modified. Obviously it’s some mix of discussions about GMOs, steroids, and one of those imperfect fantasy/sci-fi racism analogies. You’d kind of hope we have stuff like that sorted by the future, but it’s kind of understandable why they have this quandary. The reasons for keeping genetically modified people out of star fleet isn’t entirely without reason and is clearly not coming from a place of cruelty, but it’s also hard to get around the fact that this is still discrimination based on something someone was born with. But nobody really specifically stands to benefit from the status quo. So you just have the matter at hand with no clearly perfect answer getting discussed honestly by well intentioned people.

  Section 31 definitely doesn’t fit that mold. It’s some last vestige of a system that prioritized a self-serving order held up by force. I think to the extent that it has any place in ST, it’s something like how it was handled in DS9 where our characters were actively trying to uncover a rogue organization instead of it just kind of being a part of Starfleet like in Discovery.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wish I could charge $100 a call attempt to these people⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My parents have the longest, most obnoxious ring tones for texts on their phones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Large Language Models in Video Games?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do I think it’ll happen? Yes, even if it’s not good, because AAA companies are cheap and have no taste. They thrive on just spewing out more content than a smaller studio could make, quality be damned.

  That said, whether or not it COULD be useful in the future I think depends on the context and how well you could tune the models.

  I think it has absolutely no place in a narrative game where intentional authorship is what people come for. Even if it’s passable, I want to know that what I’m hearing or reading was something SOMEONE wanted to say.

  But I think it could be interesting in more open ended, replayable sim games where you want to be able to try a wide variety of approaches and have different experiences each time, but it would be impractical for a dev to implement all those possibilities to the point where players would feel like the game adequately responds to their actions. However, I don’t think you could just drop a copy of chat gpt in there and call it a day. You want different NPCs to be different and you want some consistent reality that they all exist in and respond to. So you’d probably need to put in some constraints based on some hidden file describing a particular world gen’s state. A basic example would be the NPC knowing that the town you asked about is to their north or perhaps an existing relationship between 2 characters.

  Idk how technically feasible this would be, but it’d be a cool tool in the right context if done right. I think the key here is it can be good when it enhances what you want to do and you put in the effort to make it work vs just using it as a lazy shortcut.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How This Billionaire Couple STOLE California's Water Supply | The Class Room ft. ‪@SecondThought‬ [08:08 | DEC 20 2022 | More Perfect Union]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  owned four San Francisco’s worth of farmland.

  I’m not from California. Could someone convert this into the standard American measurement: Football fields?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Improve your Wi-Fi with this one trick⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tbf, it’s not like physics stuff is always obvious, especially when dealing with relativity or quantum mechanics. It just feels obvious if you’ve already learned about the research that’s already been done.

  It isn’t even remotely intuitive that light should have a max speed that can’t be added to by moving its source relative to other things. Plus, light does interact with matter, but it can only be slowed down by it.

  So less a stupid question and more just one that isn’t educated about something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Performative Perp Walk⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Kafka wrote stories about confusing, impersonal bureaucracies. So people will describe something as Kafkaesque to convey that sense of being lost in a system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Understandable. It got pretty frustrating for me too at various points. I’m kinda bad at this kind of combat in general. Most of what motivates me to push through it in games like Dark Souls or Tunic is being interested in the world. But sometimes not even that’s enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tunic.

  The one thing I think is worth “spoiling” just to save you some pain:

  Tap for spoiler

  If you find a room with a bunch of curtains and bells, it is NOT A PUZZLE!

  I also second Outer Wilds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Witcher 4 has entered full-scale production, CD Projekt has confirmed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Aside from doing the work to maintain and update your own engine, there is also the problem of onboarding new hires. If you use a standard you can go out and hire people already experienced with working on the engine. If you use your own, you have to teach a new hire to use it before they can be any help.

  I read that this caused a lot of development woes on Halo Infinite for example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Trump's Tariffs Could Cost Gamers Billions⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a shame. Seeing the bullshit companies have done to games for the sake of profit ought to be a pretty easy on-ramp to anti-capitalism. But just like in the real world, racist shit distracts them from any of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why people consistently vote against their own interests to benefit the rich?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the rich do a LOT to make it turn out that way.

  • News is largely controlled by capitalists.

  • Education has been gutted in a lot of places to make way for private schools.

  • Corporations can contribute tons of money to candidates. Setting aside the possibility that these are effectively bribes, even if that weren’t the case, the candidates who get that money get to put out more ads and have more campaign infrastructure such as travel funds, staffers, etc.

  • Various kinds of voter suppression.

  • From the very founding of the country, the election system and government has been set up to hamper political participation. Obviously there was the fairly narrow franchise at the start. But even with that expanded, we have the electoral college, unequal apportionment, gerrymandering, first past the post, closed primaries, a court that’s specifically there to slow down popular will, etc.

  • Just being a representative “democracy” puts a barrier between people and the policies they want. You rarely if ever get to vote on policies. You have to vote for a candidate. And the candidate is a whole bundle of policies, but also a record, a personality, etc. So there can be all sorts of political messaging about candidates which has nothing to do with what their policies are. Because of the duopoly party system that is all but ensured by the aforementioned voting system, you aren’t even going to have a candidate you can vote for that will represent your interests. And after all that, even if you manage to vote for someone who says they’ll do the things you want… then they get into office and you’re back on the sidelines. They go and do whatever it was they actually wanted to do, and you have fairly limited recourse for holding them accountable. The most you can do is decide to vote against them next election, but now you’re back to square one.

  • Broader, more participatory forms of political organizing have been violently repressed. Just look at the history of union busting or the police violence during the civil rights movement or even now, etc. In the workplace, where you’re most likely to find others who share your class interests, your boss has a lot of control over you and it’s in their interest to make sure employees don’t talk politics and view each other as competition rather than potential allies.

  • Along similar lines, racism has been used as a tool to divide people who would otherwise share class interests so they wouldn’t focus their attention on capitalists.

  Moral of the story: There is a long history of people struggling against capitalists for a better life and an equally long history of capitalists using every trick in the book to keep them from that goal. The political landscape you see today is the result of that history. Learn from it.

• ⁨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'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But yes.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even for the single player games?