I have no diagnosed neurodivergence and I’m looking at that list with surprise. Like, you know how fucking hard I’m working to pretend I can do that stuff?

A person who can do all that shit looks like a superhero to me. No talent… fuck… if that list had telekinesis on it’d feel about the same to me.

Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.

Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!

I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.

HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.

That is the traditional argument. I saying that game budgets have passed the point where it is responsible to use them for marketing tools and they have to be products in their own right.

Those insomniac leaks show that Sony is feeling the squeeze and is looking to find ways to make its first party offerings cheaper (strategic layoffs). When you need to sell 10s of millions of copies for the product to be successful, platform exclusivity is going to be a tough sell in the boardroom. Especially when the hardware wars has already been fought and Sony won it by a lot.

I think it will be a few years before the rest of the business catches on, but I actually think he is right about this. If you spend 100s of Millions on a game, you need to make money on it. It’s not some cheap thing you can use as a loss leader to sell some hardware. Winning the console war is no longer as smart of business as it was in past decades.

You have to look at the other platforms as retail partners instead of competitors. Game budgets are way too big to justify exclusivity in 2024.

The real charlatans were the “the technology has promise” people. No, the technology was dumb.

That is a valid take. You could also say that all the VC was transferred into payroll for ordinary folks without any return to the SV billionaire club.

Totally different industry, but my company took a huge swing a few years back that blew up in their faces. It’s been rough since then but I put a LOT of money in my pocket during that period and I’m certainly better off than if they had prudently managed on austerity budgets the whole time.

I haven’t chased down sources but I saw a claim that the industry added net 20k jobs in 2023. This might really be more realignment than bloodbath. Anyone who was debt financing payroll has to make changes asap, but the industry still generates tons of revenue and grows YoY.

I think that is a microcosm of the whole business right now. Very low interest rates meant that VC were taking bets like this all the time. Which allowed devs to finance expansion well beyond what their revenues would allow. The free money tap turned off and now everybody has to adjust back down. Low interest rates are an engine for growth. Raising rates is meant to crush investment and employment.

Macro economics is bullshit and not empirical at all but, the monetary policy levers do what they are supposed to do.

If these people robbed the most litigious company in the video game space, I bet it works itself out. Pretty sure Nintendo lawyers have got this under control without any help from XxTwitterSlueth420xX. If there is a case, there is a case.

Corporate fanboys prosecuting the case on social media is some of the saddest shit. Seeing this forum full of communists, anarchists and evangelical pirates get exercised to protect the sanctity of corporate intellectual property is fucking killing me.

It’s an interesting argument but I think it is stretching things too far. Also isn’t a little anthrocentric to assume that our relationships are unique and different than all other living things here.

A pine tree drops needs that are so acidic few other plants can grow near it. Is it damaging the ecosystem?

Our relationship with bovines is weird right. probably the most successful large mammals on earth. Their success is completely due to being a great machine for turning grass into human food. It’s symbiotic in a lot of ways: we clear pasture and kill predators for them, but also, we eat them. Great for the cows and us, sucks for the trees and wolves.

Ants and aphids have a similar relationship. Great for the ants, and the aphids, not so much for the plants.

If you want to conflate human economics with the natural world, you would have to admit that nature is the domain of the most ruthless of capitalists. Christ, the whole point of a lot of leftist thinking is that we must “rise above” our animalistic nature.

What annoys me about this meme is that it is the same relationship that underpins all business relationships. I understand you are not happy with the state of things but showing a drawing of “capitalism” at work in nature isn’t really making the point you think you are making.

This might as well be a pic of two guys in suits trading on a stock exchange floor with the same caption. Or add this to a caption to a pic of a lion eating a baby gazelle while its mother watches from the tree line. What point are we even trying to make here??

Studying evolutionary biology in my undergrad had a big impact on how I look at systems. Judge them by their effect, and not their parsimony. If the mess inside starts to negatively impact efficacy, it will almost always get replaced and almost never get fixed.

Getting obsessed with “how the sausage is made” is a pointless endeavor. If it’s good, eat it, if not make something that tastes better.

Criticism of Israel and Hamas seems pretty neutral. Praising Israel seems pretty Islamophobic and praising Hamas seems pretty antisemitic.

When we start making excuses for violence we abandon any hope of a peaceful world. There is always some slight that requires reprisal which will begat further reprisal. No party in this conflict has the strength to resist. No part has the moral high ground.

Might as well hunt down Churchill and Truman’s descendants and murder them to avenge their grandfathers casting the first stones in this conflict.

Did we used to conduct war in a way that was safe for civilians? I’m not aware of that history. The war in Gaza looks like war to me. The same way we have been practicing it since we picked up our first sticks in anger. Murdering civilians is a consequence of war. The “good guys” fire bombed Dresden and nuked Japan.

I would give more examples but being honest I am straining to think of other wars in human history that were worth fighting. I am drawing a blank. All of it is pointless slaughter. At least in Gaza you can understand that the Israelis were provoked to war. Can’t say the same for the US in most of our wars.

Nicely said. I feel like I have been trying to organize similar thoughts for a while now and failing every time. European politics is a bad set of tools for sorting through American factions. There are not Europeans factions that map to the social justice part of the American left. They don’t have that.

I’ve sort of lost touch with Nate in the last few years. He got way angrier about Covid than I was prepared to put up with. Kind of turned into a whining asshole to be honest. We got some things wrong in the public health response to Covid. But getting things wrong trying to save lives seems better than trying to not save lives. Get over it Nate!

This is a good article though, salty side comments about Covid notwithstanding. The left coalition is at a turning point and MAGA is the only thing holding it together. I’m not probably as much of a “moderate” as Nate but I am losing my patience with the increasingly authoritarian tendencies in parts of the left. And I’m kind of aghast at middle class white kids chanting “from the river to the sea”. Y’all know what that means right? If so… fuck! If not, maybe stop saying it.

The long game. I like it.