• 4 Posts
  • 2.88K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

    It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

    But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.




  • I use pycharm at work for most things. Work paid for it. It has some nice stuff i like. I’m sure other editors do all of this, too, but nothing’s been causing me enough pain to switch

    • Database integration. Little side panel shows me the tables, and I can do queries, view table structure, etc, right here
    • Find usages/declaration is pretty good. Goes into library code, too.
    • The autocomplete is pretty good. I think they have newfangled AI options now, but the traditional introspection autocomplete has been doing it for me.
    • Can use the python interpreter inside the docker container
    • The refactor functions are pretty good. Rename, move, etc
    • Naive search is pretty good. Can limit it to folders, do regex, filter by file name, etc

    It does have multiple cursors but I’ve rarely needed that.

    I use sublime for quick note taking. Mostly I like that it has syntax highlighting, and it doesn’t require me to explicitly save a tab for it to stay open


  • There is some merit to this point. People are emotional creatures first, and sometimes exclusively. It often doesn’t matter if you’re right if the other people feels bad about it.

    This is a really immature, unsophisticated, way to engage with the world, but it’s the reality for a lot of people. Honestly, it happens to all of us sometimes. Some people seem to rarely rise above the gutfeel level, though.

    It does kind of suck that we have to cater to the most simplistic ways of engaging with the world, because if we don’t they’ll form a far right party and do some genoide.





  • There are some people who want to be wealthy to the tune of flaunting it, making other people figuratively or literally bow down to them. Those people should not be allowed to have power.

    If I was somehow a billionaire, I like to think I’d be spending my money on socially useful stuff. More libraries. More infrastructure. Housing. Can an ultra rich person essentially run public housing and transit, at least on a city-wide scale? Probably. but the kind of person who gets to be ultra rich is probably an asshole.


  • One of the… quirks… of humans is that often we’ll feel one thing, but say another. So someone might say “I just don’t like that she’s so rich”, but what’s actually happening under the hood is they don’t like a woman having power. They might not even consciously realize this is happening.

    We all do this to some extent. We feel things, and then reach for explanations. Preferably socially acceptable justifications. Someone might say they don’t like a neighborhood, that it feels tacky and unsafe, but you’d have to do some digging to unearth “because black people live there”.

    At the same time, there are people who know their belief is socially unacceptable, so they’ll intentionally reach to reasons the other people might accept. So you’ll get someone who hates women saying things like “i just don’t think her music is good”, or “she seems bossy”, or other lightly coded phrases.

    This is all really confounding because it’s very difficult to tell the difference between that first category, the second category, and a third category of “legitimately doesn’t like her music.” Sometimes there are signs, like they’ll say “I just don’t like that she has so much money” but then never, ever, comment on similarly rich men. (I’m not saying this is you, specifically. But if it is, maybe give it a think.)

    Also most people are, frankly, fragile little cowards that can’t accept a threat to their ego. Faced with admitting “I did a sexism”, they’d rather lash out and blame everyone else instead of giving it a think and trying to be better.

    The oatmeal did a comic on this, or at least a closely related concept: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe



  • I kinda like this idea that the players will be so responsible and active over their own entertainment that they’ll pick something to actively do to make something happen

    This is the dream.

    Sometimes I get players that have ideas, but then they’re like “oh that sounds too dangerous, nevermind”, and I’m like “it’s not going to be much of a game if we don’t take any risks”

    It’s probably partly my fault for making the dangers clear to the players. I wanted them to have an understanding of the risks and factors!

    Like one time, the players were told another faction would only help them with their problem if they dealt with a vampire that was in the local cemetery, and his little cult. This was a game of Mage, where even starting tier characters have a lot of strong options. One of the players just was like “you’re asking us to punch Cthulhu in the face! I don’t understand what you want us to do!”

    I was like … there are so many options. Your character can literally control flame, a major weakness of vampires. You also have a strong alliance with a paramilitary group. You can go during the day. You have 3 other party members. One of them can open portals. Like, to places where it’s daytime. Trust me, you can win a 4 v 1 fight. Maybe deal with his cult first if you don’t want civilian casualties. Or maybe talk to him and see if you can negotiate.

    But she just wanted to spin her wheels and complain. Worst player I’ve ever had, honestly.


  • There’s some ambiguity in English here.

    I think it’s okay to be neutral on Beyonce. I think it’s okay to prefer silence over her music.

    Some people are weirdly active in their dislike of her. That seems strange to me. Like they have an active, motivating dislike of her.

    (Unless you’re coming at it via “no ultra wealthy”, then I kind of get it, but I feel like people who got wealthy from performing music are lower on my list of problems than other ultra rich)






  • “Hypothetical people misuse the word nazi” is a very small problem, especially in today’s context. You are wasting time and energy and making yourself look like a nazi defender, even if you are acting somehow in good faith.

    The argument you are making often comes up as a distraction. Someone will be like “The republicans wanting to put out-groups into camps is seems like a nazi thing to do” and someone like you will pop in with “well actually” and it’s not helpful. Unless you want to keep people unfocused and bickering so they can’t actually organize and cohere around fighting the villains



  • I want to play again with a group that comes up with reasonable plans that play to their competencies.

    I think a lot about how in a modern day magic game, the players wanted to contact another (NPC) group. They learned the NPCs were like double warded against magic, but spent a lot of time trying to punch through the wards to teleport to them. After two expensive, failed, attempts I was like “do you want a clue?”. They were like yes. I was like “if you just want to talk to them, why don’t you try calling them on the phone?”