Why not just say the n-word instead? He sucks, right. So call him a n****r. Pick your favorite slur.

Maybe, just maybe, we can find a way to insult mother fuckers without attacking other groups? Hmm?

Good on “Andrew” for walking away.

But people do need to understand: Just because you aren’t working for Evil Corp doesn’t mean you aren’t working for Evil Corp. Some people get a paycheck for Evil Corp. Others contribute to work that eventually finds its way to Evil Corp.

A great example being that 10-20 years ago, the new hotness in computer science research was “big data” and “graph analytics” with EVERYONE scraping twitter and the like to prove that their algorithm was faster or to correlate data faster. Plenty of people insisted they were doing “pure research” and… I should not need to explain the uses for rapid analysis and clustering of social media data.

Because the reality is that you aren’t getting money to make teddy bears (well… some people do). Because, at best, you are getting paid to make some asshole a bit richer. More likely you are getting money that has been laundered a few times but is going toward “National Security” and that is true no matter what country you are working in.

I very much spent a few years “developing the Death Star” as it were. And I don’t at all regret it. It was some of the most fulfilling research of my life and it taught me a lot of useful skills and has informed my life view. But I’ll also always remember what one of my mentors explained to me before putting me in for certain paperwork: Anyone with a soul turns to either activism or alcoholism. And… I am definitely a bit of column A and a bit of column B if you catch my drift.

So yeah. Follow your morals. But understand that ALL people who work in science and engineering are Chris Knight. And even if you do get your popcorn house moment… that death laser is still up there and someone else will find a way to improve on it.

Calling it now:

We are all getting distracted by his broken dick. The reason why he uses in vitro is because it isn’t even his sperm. That is why he hates all his kids prior to Human Shield with grimes. Well, except Vivian, he hates her for somehow even more hateful reasons.

Yes and no.

I am a big fan of block buttons and use them quite liberally (if someone responds to me in a manner that makes it clear they have no intention of having a conversation? I never see them ever again).

But the problem is that it only blocks it for the user who blocks them. So harassment is still a thing and now even fewer people are likely to flag it for moderation (to the extent that works).

There is obviously room for abuse but I am a firm believer that any block feature must be bidirectional. If user A blocks user B then A and B can no longer see each other or interact. Which would be a fundamental lemmy feature which makes things difficult.

But “just block them” is good for people who are annoying. Not for people who are abusive. And while the latter isn’t SUPER common on lemmy, there are still a good number of people who respond to the simplest of things with “Fuck you you fucking moron and you should go kill yourself”

The “Fuck Cars” crowd basically just regurgitate what they hear a ridiculously rich youtuber who lives in one of the higher cost of living cities on the planet say. So take anything they say with a grain of salt.

What they ACTUALLY are saying is that the average person did not need a personal vehicle (whether it is a horse or a car) until (guesstimating) the 1950s/60s. Not because public transit was so much better but instead because people basically never left the couple mile radius of where they were born. Catching a bus To The City was a big deal and people who actually moved long distances away from family were 'strange".

Then, for whatever reason, people learned there was a big wide world and the cost of cars dropped drastically. So it became much more common to want to make that dream trip to The City a monthly or even weekly trip and people increasingly would move tens or even hundreds of miles away from where they grew up… in part to be able to buy a house and have their own family.

But it isn’t that infrastructure was “changed” so much as use cases were. And people stopped being willing to spend an entire day traveling to go visit their sibling one state over.

The aspect which HAS changed in “living memory” is the decline in “walkable cities”. The idea that you would have a corner grocery store every couple miles and would never even need a car. And… anyone who is even slightly aware of logistics and shipping can understand why that is also not really feasible. Because having pantry staples and “the basics” at Fred’s Grocery down the street? That is… depending on where you live that is feasible.

But… there is a reason fricking kei cars exist. Because you are not going to have a butcher or a giant produce stand or whatever on every street corner. You can’t. There will be MASSIVE food waste if you did. So people still tend to have to travel a bit even just a few times a month. Some people do that by public transit and are the people with five bags of groceries on the subway. Many people rapidly get that car for the weekend grocery trips and so forth.

At which point… if people are already going to drive to get groceries… why would they go to the corner store anyway?

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE a walkable city and I was probably the happiest for the five or so years I lived in The City and would hit up a medium sized grocery store while walking back to my apartment from the subway station. And getting GOOD meat was 30 minutes away by train. But I am also not privileged enough to ignore the existence of small towns or the tendency for the people who WORK in those grocery stores to live in said small town where it is an hour commute and having to stay late for 30 minutes adds another two hours to their day.

Which is why I REALLY dislike the “Fuck Cars” “movement”. Because, at best, it is a bunch of privileged people saying “fuck the poors”. And… the idea of never needing to travel more than 5 miles from where you live feels like some backdoor rightwing bullshit to isolate people and Make Xenophobia Great Again.

Trust me. You do NOT want to go on a long distance road trip in a kei car. Even if you are super short.

Kei cars are amazing for commuting and grocery store trips. They are horrible for basically anything beyond that so you are still getting that chair delivered and so forth. Once you start cramming it full of luggage or camping supplies you will rapidly feel the claustrophobia.

112 miles is perfect for driving around a city or going to the park on the weekend or whatever. 40 minutes for 10->80% is a bit… ouch. But if you can charge it over night (with even an L1 charger) that doesn’t matter for day trips and… trust me when I say you want to take a long lunch and stretch your legs if you are taking a kei car on a road trip.

Which… also speaks to how consumer vehicles “should” be treated. Get something with great efficiency for your commute and every day driving. Rent a car for long range driving. First off… if you actually take wear and tear into account it isn’t THAT much more expensive to drive a beater for your 500 mile road trip. Second it means that you are saving a LOT of money on your commutes and normal shopping trips and can drive something optimized for that which reduces pollution considerably.

I mean… even in Japan (basically the mecca of public transit), you need a car for a lot of “last mile” transit to smaller towns. And you want a car for many (most?) towns because there might only be two or three buses per day.

Makoto Shinkai’s movies LOVE to focus on this as a way to build tension. Have one of the characters spend two or three days taking a long chain of trains and buses to reach the one that they love only to have to spend the night at a motel in a nowhere town where they can then have a heartfelt talk about what they are actually looking for.

And if you actually go there (or to “Western Europe”) and want to go somewhere other than the most touristy of places? You rapidly realize how true that is. Less so the “talk to the friend who is taking off work to help you check in on the girl you used to body swap with” part and more the idea of needing to transfer to three different trains and run to catch a bus because the alternative is you are waiting for 3 hours at a tiny 7-11 and then spending the night at the bus station when you arrive.

Been a minute but I only remember that being bad for the fight

. But I ran a wizard MC so I had CC and light nuking down by then and my party was mostly handling positioning and meat shielding.

What? You aren’t a fan of a mandatory minigame that can cause instant failures at any moment and is all but guaranteed to during the lead up to the penultimate dungeon (note: Fail states on that can and should be disabled)? Or are you talking about said penultimate dungeon being nothing but translucent enemies with mind control who respawn unless you do the exact opposite of every other battle in the game and rush in to take out their spawners?

In all fairness, you can trivialize a lot of the hell in Kingmaker just by metagaming and preparing for the endgame early. If you don’t… yeah.

Whereas WOTR’s ridiculously plentiful enemy type(s) are much less obnoxious (and very clearly telegraphed the entire game) and they got rid of said endless failstates.

We went through this the last time.

These were the Best and Brightest. What comes next are the people dumb enough to get on the backstabbing conveyor belt.

And I am sure that has absolutely nothing to do with tariff hell, financial insecurity, and repeal of the de minimis exemption that temu and the like required to function.

To clarify:

Rogue Trader is Owlcat, not Larian. They are also gods of CRPGs and tend to have really good dialogue and character writing. But Larian’s thing is more the environmental systems whereas Owlcat tends to prefer to go REALLY hard on the core rulesets as well as the way branching narratives work.

If you like RT, check out Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous. It definitely appeals to those of us who grew up on 3(.5)e D&D (since that is basically Pathfinder) but a lot of people (self included) will regularly argue that it is in the running to be the best CRPG ever made. Yes, that includes Planescape.

Oh incels are a massive problem. But younger millenials and genz and the like got radicalized by reddit and twitter and the like, not 4chan. And then they just went straight to 8chan if they left their festering grounds at all.

Just remember that the vast majority of those users are in their mid-late 30s or even early 40s. Zoomers and even younger millennials never gave a shit about 4chan.

I don’t even know what would be “best” for Kilmar considering he came to America to flee gang violence in El Salvador so…

On the one hand: It is very probable that they just don’t have any records. And it is finding one guy based on a photo of him from a month or two back in a giant mass of “hispanic men”. So it is going “block” by “block” to line everyone up and compare them to a photo. Keeping in mind that his appearance has likely changed due to having his head shaved, stress/terror and, likely, violence.

And the other is that he is probably dead. Because he was thrown in a “maximum security” concentration camp with many of the gangs he fled from.

A bunch of chuds got angry that they were banned because they went brigading against LGBTQ+ folk.

This was the end result

There are two ways to really interpret that:

1. What was previously at the discretion of different orgs (with a strong suggestion to use burners) is now official policy.
2. This now applies to personal devices

I used to do some work for the US government and even going to the frigging UK we would always have a “private meeting to go over logistics” a week or two before going over where we would be told that we need to request and use a burner phone and laptop. Never in writing because the UK was our closest ally but anyone who tried to bring their “real” work devices would rapidly be told that something went wrong with their paperwork and they can’t go on that trip anymore.

It is important to question what you think a boycott will do.

Do you think you are going to make a giant movement that changes the world? If so… you should stop eating those lead paint chips. Consumers, historically, will only engage in a boycott if there are alternatives. Shop at Walmart instead of Target. VERY short term you might get someone to boycott Amazon for a few days but… just check “leftist” forums like resetera for everyone immediately losing their shit over how a few older activision games they will never play are on sale.

Video games, contrary to what people will say, don’t really have alternatives. We’ll joke that The Last Descendent was “waifu frame” but the people who love Warframe very much have reasons for not wanting to play TLD and vice versa. Let alone games like Call of Duty where there really is nothing close to an alternative.

So “boycott to fix the world” (and I am gonna expand on what THAT would be shortly…) ain’t a thing.

So… now it is up to why? Personally, I “boycott” Ubisoft and have for the better part of a decade at this point. I think the last game I bought “from them” was GR Breakpoint and I got that years after the game was basically dead and on a hefty discount (see: lack of alternatives). I am under no illusion that my wallet is going to lead to yves et al leaving their own company out of shame for their role in enabling a culture of sexual harassment (and allegedly more). But I do know that I feel a lot better when I look at myself in the mirror and most games I am interested in DO have alternatives.

So do you think you are going to change the world? Cue Nelson Muntz. Do you just not want to contribute to the culture of loot boxes personally? Go for it. And it doesn’t matter what people on not-reddit tell you.

As for what you think will happen: I think we can all agree that Nintendo upping the… Err, let me rephrase that. I think we can all agree that any company other than Nintendo upping the base price of a game to 80 USD (pre-tariffs…) is REALLY bad for the industry. But… inflation IS a thing and while game sales have skyrocketed… game dev has too. Money has to come from somewhere. And RMTs (lootboxes, cosmetics, etc) and constant flows of DLC have actually been great for the industry. It, for two decades or so, stopped the endless “ramp up, ramp down” model where people would be hired to work on a game, fired when it went gold, and then hired again 6 months down the line if it got green lit for an expansion. Get rid of RMTs and we go back to that for all but the largest studios because you don’t need artists when you are fixing a bug in Batman’s cape and so forth.

So, personally? I buy and play games that I like. And a lot of that does have to do with the monetization model. Something like Warframe is RMT based and has some sketchy purchases but also is (mostly) playable as a free game and is built around “free” content. Whereas something like Genshin Impact is marketed as “you never have to spend a dime” but… yeah. So the games that “do it wrong”? I am… kind of already “boycotting” them because I am just not interested in them.

Not to mention companies like apple that actively lock down their replacement parts to prevent people from having a spare whatever.

The thing to understand is that it is not about improving developer efficiency. It is about improving corporate profits.

Because that engineer using “AI”? If they are doing work that can be reliably generated by an AI then they aren’t a particularly “valuable” coder and, most likely, have some severe title inflation. The person optimizing the DB queries? They are awesome. The person writing out utility functions or integrating a library? And, regardless, you are going to need code review that invariably boils down to a select few who actually can be trusted to think through the implications of an implementation and check that the test coverage was useful.

End result? A team of ten becomes a team of four. The workload for the team leader goes up as they have to do more code review themselves but that ain’t Management’s problem. And that team now has saved the company closer to a million a year than not. The question isn’t “Why would we use AI if it is only 0.9x as effective as a human being?” and instead “Why are we paying a human being a six figure salary when an AI is 90% as good and we pay once for the entire company?”

And if people key in on “Well how do you find the people who can be trusted to review the code or make the tickets?”: Congrats. You have thought about this more than most Managers.

My company hasn’t mandated the use of AI tools yet but it is “strongly encouraged” and we have a few evangelists who can’t stop talking about how “AI” makes them two or three times as fast and blah blah blah. And… I’ve outright side channeled some of the more early career staff that I like and explained why they need to be very careful about saying that “AI” is better at their jobs than they are.

And I personally make it very clear that these tools are pretty nice for the boiler plate code I dislike writing (mostly unit tests) but that it just isn’t at the point where it can handle the optimizations and design work that I bring to the table. Because stuff is gonna get REALLY bad REALLY fast as the recession/depression speeds up and I want to make it clear that I am more useful than a “vibe coder” who studied prompt engineering.