Imagine not recognizing that central authority is the problem.

Discworld, no contest.

It’s those roughly squared off, dirty, slushy heaps of packed snow that were plowed out of the way after the snowfall and are the only thing left after the rest of the snow has melted.

And so on, and so on…

If my government the government that’s managed to weasel its way into power over the land on which I happened to be born proposed an initiative to tackle fraud, I would look for the catch, because it’s guaranteed there would be one.

Preach.

It’s not a coincidence that it was Democrats who coined the term “flyover country.”

And it’s not a coincidence that “flyover country” won’t vote for them.

And they’re okay with that. They’d rather lose than lower themselves so far as to associate with the unwashed masses.

This isn’t ignorance or missing the point - they know exactly what they’re doing.

I don’t have one.

I have a very simple process for dealing with all of this - I never check my framerate in the first place, so I never know what it is.

I just play games If there’s noticeable stuttering or lag then I maybe try to do something about it, and if there’s not, then I just play and don’t worry about it.

This has apparently become a new vector for transferring bribes - Trump files a suit, and then the corporation that wants influence pays a “settlement.”

Never loan anyone anything unless you’re willing to give it to them, because that could well turn out to be exactly what you’re doing.

ETA another one that just came to me, that I’ve always liked because it’s a witty turn of phrase in addition to being useful:

If you’re doing something that leads you to wonder if you should have some safety gear (gloves, particle mask, hearing protection, etc.), then the answer is “Yes.”

I’ve been posting on internet forums for almost 30 years now. It’s just a thing I like doing.

I’m here now because it’s the best place I know of at the moment.

I don’t want to hammer on this really, because I think you mean well, but…

You’re not condemning the specific assholes who treated you poorly - you’re condemning “men” generally. Your point and your focus isn’t that they were assholes, but that they were men, as if that’s the actual problem - as if their failure isn’t being assholes, but simply being men.

I don’t know if that’s your actual view, but that is the way it comes across. And broadly, that view is part of the problem, since it alienates men who deserve no blame and diverts attention from those who do. And that’s exactly what I meant when I said that countering misogyny with misandry is a poor strategy.

but I feel that it is important to recognize and call out the misogyny element in this story

I don’t.

I think that countering misogyny with misandry is rather obviously a losing strategy.

This broad dynamic isn’t new and it isn’t unique either to gaming or to men. Every single creative volunteer community on the net is filled with assholes and drama llamas, of any and all genders. It’s just the nature of the thing. You see the same things over and over with game modding, cracking, romhacking, emulation, manga scanlation, anime fansubbing, vocaloid production, mmd modeling, fanfic, fanart, and so on and on.

People often (generally?) are willing to invest the time and energy into whatever it is that they’re going to post online at least in large part because they crave the attention they hope it will bring, and specifically, they want to be lauded for their talent and skill.

And that often runs up against the fact that an awful lot of the responses they’re going to get are going to come from self-absorbed and entitled assholes bitching because they don’t like whatever it is that they’re getting for free, and think they have to be accommodated.

And very often, the response from the creator, unsurprisingly really, is to effectively (or even literally) say, “Fine then - fuck you all. I’m done.”

And 'round and 'round it goes, and has from the start, and likely will never stop. It’s just an unfortunate but pretty much inevitable clash between a personality type that’s likely to create and share something online for free and a personality type that’s likely to comment on something somebody else created and shared with them for free.

All I know is that Kagi triggered my scam alarms from the start, and moving into the browser market just made them ring even louder.

Very much so (and there’s at least one patient gamers community around, because I’ve posted to one).

The only advantage I can see to playing a game on release is taking part in that first rush of interest, but I’m antisocial enough that that doesn’t appeal to me anyway, so I’m not missing anything there.

Beyond that, I think playing a game at least a year or so after release has all of the advantages. The initial flurry of absolute love vs. absolute hate has died down so it’s easier to get a broad view of the quality, the game is more stable, the price is better, dlc and expansions are out and generally packaged with the game, and best of all, in this current era, I can most likely buy it from GOG and actually have the full game, DRM-free, on my system.

And there are a bajillion good games out there, just waiting for me to discover them.

Ah… yes. A lot of things just clicked into place for me, and not just regarding Vance.

Most notably really - trying to grasp the idea of “TheoBros” broadly - I wondered how such a thing is even possible. How can any even moderately intelligent person spend a great deal of time online and cling to a Christian belief at all, and much less a conservative one? There’s just far too much information out there that contradicts that view. Granted, there is of course content tailored to affirm it, but it’s essentially a specialist thing - not just a bubble, but a very specific and limited bubble, surrounded by a sea of contrary views and contradicting facts.

And then it clicked - the way to maintain a conservative Christian viewpoint on the internet is to be an aggressively censorious conspiracy theorist.

The only way they can face the sea of contradictory information is to ascribe it to some sort of ridiculously massive conspiracy by the forces of evil - such that the vast majority of what exists on the internet is the lies of Satan’s minions - and to establish little, aggressively monitored and censored enclaves in which their views and only their views are allowed, and everything else is condemned and preferably censored.

Their whole cognitively dissonant view on “free speech” - in which they somehow simultaneously cry about being “censored” generally simply for being massively downvoted and even as they, in their own bubbles, overtly censor any and all contrary views - suddenly makes sense. They explain away the fact that the vast majority of people disagree with them and even condemn them as a conspiracy to silence them, and create the illusion that they’re not merely a noxious and irrational few by aggressively monitoring and controlling their walled gardens, so that opposition is at least underrepresented if not silenced entirely.

It also explains their slippery relationship with truth, and specifically things like Vance clinging to the Haitians eating pets myth even after it’s been proven false. For them, coming across information that proves them wrong has to be an essentially daily occurrence, so they undoubtedly work out an approach to it, such that they, exactly as he’s doing, just flatly ignore the necessary ramifications of the truth and instead just blithely cling to whatever myth affirms their beliefs.

Yeah… suddenly a whole lot of previously inexplicable behavior and beliefs are making sense to me…

And frankly, while it’s notably pathetic and cringily willfully ignorant, it’s also scary. More on that later maybe…

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

People on every single relatively small forum ever in the history of the internet have gotten frustrated and angry when other people do that, because it’s spammy.

Do you not know the history of the term “spam?”

It’s from a Monty Python skit

That’s what the front page of a forum (or the inbox of an email account) looks like when someone “spams” it - like “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.”