Xhieron

Freight rail is still alive in my area–and that means commuter rail could be. But like a lot of places, the public has been duped into voting against their own interests. I don’t want to hijack the thread, but it’s an issue that–if you care about it, you should be voting for Amtrak Joe. Public transportation needs to be part of the nation’s climate agenda, and the Criminal Cheetoh wants to sacrifice us all on the altar of petrol.

The problem is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist, and introducing it is cost-prohibitive for large parts of the US. I would love to be able to take a train from my small town to the nearest metro area 30 miles away and then take a tube to a block away from my destination–but that’s just not going to happen in my lifetime, because the city can’t afford to install a subway, and the auto lobby won the war against commuter rail before I was born.

Could it be better? Sure. Might it become better? Maybe, but probably not in my lifetime.

In the meantime, people are de facto dependent on cars. Destroying infrastructure necessary to support the reality of how people must, through no fault of their own, travel punishes the traveling public without addressing the actual problem.

If we’re going to transition to better transit infrastructure, we first have to build the better infrastructure–and pay for it by eliminating unseating political opposition. Only then can we dismantle these kinds of monstrosities without disenfranchising the people who depend on them.

It was a disaster. Trump lied for 90 minutes straight, but he did it confidently, with a straight face, and without rambling. It was a vast improvement over his stump speeches. Biden mostly told the truth, but he meandered, stammered, got mixed up, and was obviously ill. That’s just what happened.

I’m going to vote for Biden anyway, because the old man stands for policies that actually benefit me personally (and a second Trump term is a threat to the existence of the Republic). But the debate was bad for him, possibly catastrophic. His campaign desperately needs an October surprise, and at this point it’s hard to guess what it might be.

The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.

Thanks to this post I now identify as a lost bat. I consider it a marked improvement.

Way to communicate contempt for your customers. If you’re in the business of selling decorative replicas of cartoon swords, you need to be in on the kayfabe. Nobody is expecting to take one of these to a real swordfight. What they are expecting, however, is to have a cool prop to show their friends, and it’s not unreasonable to expect the cool prop to feel like it’s not trying to fly across the yard if you swing it around.

If you don’t want people to touch the merchandise, the second sign is all you need.

Pennies on the dollar? I don’t necessarily doubt you, but where do I get that machine for less than 10 grand?

Common mistake: When you’re ascribing a bad quality to them, “millenials” means everyone born after 1960. If you’re ascribing a good quality to them, it only means people born between December 12, 1989, and December 14, 1989.

This last round was the line for me. Canceled the whole Hulu/D+ mess and haven’t looked back. My Jolly Roger is a little tattered these days, but I still know how to fly it.

🎶 Letting the days go by 🎶

This is very upsetting to me–more as a point of principle than in fact–but I appreciate that it doesn’t bother younger generations at all. I just had a small argument with my 11 year old about how not-a-big-deal-who-cares this is, and it basically ended with us agreeing to disagree since it’ll be his problem and his kids’ problem.

And the problem is normalizing the notion that an OS doesn’t need to include a non-subscription word processor. The entire point of this move is to shift the OS Overton Window in favor of consumers accepting and expecting that features like word processors, spreadsheets, etc., should be installed separately and paid for on a subscription basis despite previous iterations of the same software being feature complete on install and purchased at a set, non-recurring fee.

WordPad hasn’t been anybody’s first choice for a word processor in years, but it was included with Windows and did the bare minimum for unsophisticated users. Now we’re entering an era in which those users will as a matter of course buy off-the-shelf computers that come pre-installed without WordPad, but rather with a trial of Office Fuck-You-Pay-Me Edition. Those users may well discover that after their first six months with their new computer (that has made Microsoft more money selling their data than they paid for it), they suddenly get a pop-up informing them that their trial is up and MS wants $99.99 to release the documents they’re holding hostage.

It’s a step backwards for consumers in general, so even for the sophisticated of us who are least likely to be personally affected by this change, there’s definitely cause for alarm.

I was raised in an extremely conservative Southern Baptist Christian tradition, but I often recite the Hail Mary and/or the first line of the Shema (in admittedly very poor Hebrew) when I pray. There’s something about knowing that the same prayer has been prayed by millions and millions of humans through history that makes me feel more connected.

More and more I think that might be the point. In the absence of users having control over the content they see, the only users left will be the ones who are naive, not tech savvy, and who have very high tolerances for manipulation: people who don’t leave because either they don’t know how, can’t understand or remember a possible better alternative, or can’t muster the effort.

These are incidentally also the same people who are most likely to be unable to distinguish ads from content, most likely to click on ads, and most likely to engage with click- and rage- bait content. That is: people most vulnerable to corporate predation.

It’s just like scam robocalls. It’s bad by design, because half the point is to immediately weed out anybody smart enough not to fall for it.

Your guess is as good as mine. It’s basically a viral meme, far as I can tell.

Nevertheless, if you’re wondering how you can get involved, don’t worry. If you’re here, you’re already on Team Beans.

I mean–that’s kind of already happened, hasn’t it? The whole business with beehaw defederating is really just the first shots of the Instance Wars, and that’s not even mentioning the pejorative view a lot of folks have for some instances (ahem, furries). I was accused of being a right-winger for even broaching the subject that beehaw defederating might not have been for entirely altruistic reasons.

I think we can expect to see a lot more of this in the future, especially once corporate players throw in their hats and realize they can weaponize human sociology as part of their EEE strategy. Once you have most of the users and most of the communities, just wall off (defederate) anybody you see as a threat to hegemony. Sure, people can migrate, but there’s a mental cost associated with that that many aren’t willing to pay.

Begun, the Instance Wars have. Beans.

Proof is in the pudding. There’s a reason we’re talking about this here instead of on Reddit.

The mods are getting concessions (if they get anything–it’s yet to be seen whether anything actually comes of any new promises) because the Reddit admins realize that they need the free labor. They don’t need users, because they believe–rightly or wrongly–that nobody else can get enough market share fast enough to actually matter. People will give up on projects like Lemmy and begrudgingly eat whatever ad-friendly shit Huffman feeds them. The users are the product Reddit has to sell to its advertises, and they think they can always make more of those. Mods, on the other hand–those are part of the infrastructure, and they don’t make money. They cost money. So Reddit really, really wants those mods to stay/come back and keep working for imaginary internet clout (and the occasional corporate bribe), and they’ll pitch whatever lies they can think of to make that happen.

The worst future for Reddit is the one in which subreddits have to be moderated by actual paid employees–employees who do things like adopt statements of end users and expose Reddit to potential liability.

The problem with defederation is the same problem with the position you’re taking, that it conflates all opinion with whatever worst thing you can imagine, enabling you to insist that because some people are awful, everyone who doesn’t agree with the proposition is (or in beehaw’s case, everyone who doesn’t join their walled garden). This isn’t a case of “they don’t permit sexism.” They didn’t permit sexism when they were still federated. Defederation is an extra step–they want you to use their server or otherwise not participate in their communities at all, and the explanation for why is that the people on lemmy.world are sexist. Maybe they’re authentically overwhelmed, and it’s certainly their prerogative, but one would be wise to examine their stated basis more critically, because heavy handed owners of platform infrastructure are why Lemmy is in this position in the first place.

Okay. To be clear, I wouldn’t automatically assume anybody who wants to be free from hate speech has bad intentions, but I also think it’s fair to be critical of any effort to stifle dissenting opinion–even uncomfortable opinion–with the justification that the censorship is to a third party’s benefit, and it’s immaterial whether the third party is children, a historically disadvantaged group, or any other class. That is, I don’t say all this to accuse beehaw of ulterior motives–but I also wouldn’t put it past anybody, and skepticism is appropriate (like always). More and more frequently, “safe space” really just means: We want an echo chamber, but it’s okay because we know best. That’s a red flag.

I mean—maybe? That wouldn’t necessarily be malicious, but I think it’s fair and appropriate to apply a healthy amount of skepticism and suspicion to their purported goals and reasoning. Beehaw is a self-proclaimed “safe space”, and unfortunately that term has become a kind of dog whistle for militant identity politics.

Particularly in instances, like this one, when thinly veiled patronizing is wielded to preemptively paint a large group of strangers with a very broad brush in the purported aim of protecting marginalized persons from “malicious” outsiders, my cynicism radar tends to beep very loudly. It may well in fact be true that the current suite of mod tools makes beehaw’s managers powerless against an overwhelming tide of new traffic, but that wouldn’t automatically rule out competitive motives.

Federated or not, Lemmy represents an opportunity for wealth for whoever is best positioned if it ends up being a successor to Reddit, and what we’re going to see is a round of jockeying and vying for position in the coming (ongoing) chaos. I’ll admit that like many of us I’m very new to this platform, but the fact that defederation is possible at all leads me to believe that less scrupulous individuals in positions of ownership could with only small effort leverage it to enlarge their influence at the expense of competing servers.

Maybe I’m dead wrong on a technical level; maybe I’m full of shit–I’ll admit I basically don’t know what I’m talking about except in the broadest possible terms, so somebody please correct me if I’m wrong–but I wonder if this isn’t so much about creating an echo chamber as incentivizing people who identify with beehaw’s stated ideology to come under its umbrella (with supposed protections for hate speech), and defederation is just a way to force people to make the same kind of unhappy, unnecessary choices many of us just made with Reddit.

EDIT: I really can’t thank y’all enough for this. It feels like I’m right back on Reddit. From the accusations that I must be a secret conservative because I dared to question motives to the folks unable to actually engage in discourse without manufactured disdain, it’s like nothing has changed at all.

Maybe beehaw doesn’t have an axe to grind, but somebody sure does.