The problem with health insurance as a metaphor is they have real costs… The insurance company does pay out real money every time you use your policy, and that makes it easy to muddy the issue

Let’s take the coffee metaphor further. They say “you can drink up to 400ml of coffee, past that we’ll add an extra fee. But don’t worry, no one does that”. Then they refill your coffee without saying a word, they won’t tell you how much you’ve used unless you ask, and they won’t stop refilling it unless you tell them not to

The reason the coffee metaphor is great is because, while it’s a real thing, it costs them basically nothing. Just like the extra electricity to send your data costs basically nothing

The cost is the number of coffee pots, the labor, the restaurant - all things that don’t change in cost no matter how much coffee you drink

Coffee works because the nature of the transaction is the same

Cyberpunk is basically futuristic GTA in a first person view, saints row 4 was basically GTA with superpowers, spiderman is basically GTA as Spider-Man

Even in this one format, there’s endless room for creativity and innovation. It’s a formula for a fun game…

But where I loved cyberpunk, watchdogs was similar in many ways and I just couldn’t get into it

The problem is that they want to shove slop in proven molds and get a winning game. It’s still slop

Mismanagement. They keep trying to make 9 women deliver a baby in 1 month, and switching out mothers mid pregnancy - some of these games have 20 formerly independent studios churning out content for the same game. That creates a need for a ton of oversight and coordination, and leads to a ton of wasted effort

I believe them when they say their costs have ballooned…I also know the tools have become extremely powerful, and that far smaller studios are creating far better games for a fraction of the cost

Ironically, he picked a metaphor that doesn’t support his point at all

If you go to a Starbucks, it’s like you’re buying a set amount of data. You don’t expect unlimited refills, because that’s not how the transaction works - you buy the coffee by volume. It’s yours with no strings attached

If you go to a restaurant, you buy access to coffee. I do expect unlimited coffee, I would be livid if they charged by the cup. However, you do not get to expect to take any coffee with you - you’re using their “infrastructure” to hold your coffee, and you don’t get to walk out with the cup. You don’t get to share it with the restaurant or the table - you’re burying a personal “subscription” to coffee for the duration of your stay

Coffee, like data, is effectively free at a restaurant. They must pay for the infrastructure, but after that each additional pot only costs a few cents. They must make at least 1 pot a day, and a human can’t safely drink more than a couple pots in a day (which is an obscene amount only the heaviest caffeine addicts could tolerate). You get it one small cup at a time, if you bought a second cup you could double the rate of coffee delivery… They might even just give it to you for free, because it costs them so little and they want you to come back

You purchase access to coffee for a time, or you purchase coffee by volume. They shouldn’t be allowed to charge for both - maybe if you’ve drank 14 cups and others want coffee, they should be given priority during lunch rush as the rate of coffee production is limited by infrastructure

It’s actually a pretty decent metaphor, it just doesn’t support his argument at all

Well Google was basically that - it revolutionized search, which made the Internet accessible for casual users

And it worked - Google put more into R&D moon shots than anyone… Except the economic META has changed, and everything innovative just ended up in the Google graveyard before it had a chance to mature

Bell Labs worked because they threw excess piles of money at the best people they could find, and they gave them autonomy. They gave them time, and let them build things with no clear application for their company

Today, that money goes into stock buybacks, executive bonuses, and buying out promising startups. Stock prices this quarter are all that matters, and R&D only raises stock prices when it promises insane growth or quick monetization

This is the answer. Blocking them does nothing to them, banning them lets them feel like the victim and let’s them do mental gymnastics to learn the wrong lesson

No, we live with these people. We’re connected to them in many ways, and cutting this one link to them is just ignoring them until they do something we can’t ignore

We don’t need to make them quit - we need to make them run away. They need to feel the community rise up against them. They need to feel mocked and hated for their words. They need to feel anxiety before they say hateful things - online and IRL

They need to learn. And when they crawl back, censoring themselves and making an effort for the sake of acceptance, we need to be kind and show them the road back. Eventually they’ll understand, or at least they’ll understand how to act

We need to fix their behavior, and this is a constructive and morally justified way to let out all your frustration and anger

Under soul crushing crunch? Sure.

Under micromanagement, design decisions led by the finance department, story led by consultants, and multiple formerly independent studios retasked with churning out parts of games like an assembly line? Not so much.

People make games. It’s art and craftsmanship - if you design your games by committee, they’re going to be soulless and flat. If you don’t give your people autonomy, the details won’t get the attention they need to mesh together. If your turnover is high and your morale is low, everything will slow to a crawl no matter how many people you throw at it

And ultimately, the people making the game won’t understand the vision. They won’t get emotionally invested, they won’t take risks, they won’t fight to fix problems early

They won’t try to make a good game, because they already know they’re being ordered to make a bad one

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Just started taking magnesium glycinate, and it’s only been a few days but I must’ve had a bad magnesium deficiency.

The last few months my meds have barely helped, I’ve been tired and unmotivated, and already I’m waking up earlier and focusing better - it was a night and day difference

It might be worth getting bloodwork done - certain deficiencies mirror many symptoms of ADHD. And if you have ADHD and a deficiency, meds alone aren’t going to help nearly as much

Or you could just try magnesium glycinate if you struggle to set up appointments (I know I do), apparently most Americans don’t get enough magnesium. The other forms of magnesium also work as laxatives, so I’d specifically go for that. Vitamin B is another one that can cause similar symptoms, I think zinc as well, but magnesium seems to have been my issue and wasn’t on my radar until my neighbor mentioned it

Systematic problems require systematic solutions

Because hashes are deterministic one way functions - they’re generally one way only

Let’s say I hash a picture. It could go from 14MB to 128 digits of base 64 - there’s orders of magnitude less information in the hash than in the source data

Now - with that hash can you rebuild the picture? You’ve lost a great deal of information, you don’t necessarily even know the size or the format of the input.

Let’s set up an equation - x is the input (the photo), so hash_func(x) = hashx

There are multiple, maybe infinite (depending on the hashing function) values of x that will solve our equation. In the case of the photo, most of it will be random combinations of pixels that mean nothing to a human. There could also randomly be things that appear meaningful, but without knowing more about the original you could never be sure if you have the correct answer

Now, passwords might actually be shorter than the resulting hash, but we salt them so each password hash function works differently, and can still destroy information from the original password. Part of the password and the salt are then used as basically the seed for a deterministic random function to generate this extra information

Again, you have the dual problem of a huge problem space as well as an inability to be sure you have the original input or just another solution

Ultimately, everything is defeatable, and if you can narrow down the problem space (say, by knowing the length of a password, having enough known before and after data, or finding a bias in the algorithm), you can reduce the needed computations by orders of magnitude and make it feasible. Quantum computers also grow exponentially with chained qbits, so I expect someone clever will figure it out sooner or later

…Do you not think corn can be turned into a carcinogen?

… So a short form video platform is more dangerous than a dubitably secure group chat app?

That’s comparing apricots to ocelots

There’s different types of hacking. Finding and coding up an exploit? That takes skill

Then, they post it in a corner of the Internet somewhere to get appreciation for their achievement, or maybe even sell it on the dark web (or someone else sees it and packages it up in a state to sell/share)

Now, using the exploit? That’s pretty easy. It requires some technical ability, but not much. It’s just installing and configuring stuff, then using an app

So here’s what I think happened. Someone found the exploit, and posted about it in a hacker community off the beaten path. One thing led to another, and somehow a group of edgelords get a hold of it. As a group, they manage to get it working, and act like edgelords

The original hacker might have been related, but real hackers are cautious or quickly caught - they probably solved the puzzle, maybe played with it a bit, then posted their findings and moved on to the next puzzle

That was my thought… Since the compacted soil is held in place and can’t escape laterally, it’s basically a wall in the middle of the pile

I’m not sure how much it’d do, but it’d do something

I don’t think so… Intelligence isn’t required for consent, it’s informed willingness in the absence of coercion or manipulation. The other factor is the likelihood of harm - I think that covers the full ethics of what beings you can ethically fuck

There’s a few ways to look at it

One of my parent’s dogs once had sex with a handyman’s foot to completion… By the time he realized what was happening it was over, and the dog wasn’t very bothered. The guy was also very nice about it, but I bet he stopped wearing sandals to jobs

What if he was into it? It’s not like the dog would care… He clearly knew what he was doing. If we’re just horny dogs humping their feet, it’s not like they’re doing anything wrong by not kicking us off

It also reminds me of a YouTube skit where an 18 year old boy goes to an adoption agency to find a 16 year old girl to adopt, with clear implications. It’s a dark joke, but I think it lines up with this nicely

Let’s say there’s an alien species far more advanced than us. We’re too dumb to even understand the basics of their technology, so to them we’re basically pets - they can keep us around, but we’re at their mercy. Now, there’s an issue - a human could believe, even falsely, that we have to have sex with them or there will be consequences. We could even believe it’s expected of us - and that’s not coercive

Now let’s say that same species came to Earth, guaranteed the health and happiness if every human, and made tinder for humans who want to have sex with an alien. In that case, if you handle it correctly, you can minimize or eliminate coercion from the act

Maybe the aliens don’t even have sex… Maybe they just think humans are cute, and they enjoy making us feel good the way we enjoy petting animals

I don’t think intelligence plays into any of this - consent isn’t about intelligence at all. It’s about willingness in an uncorrupted state

The funny thing is, my friend is LGBTQ - it’s not at all a dog whistle for them. It’s very real frustration at beloved games and IP being ruined

But they hear “go woke go broke” so often that they’ve been trained to look for inclusivity to blame. We like talking about topics like this, and each time I have to walk them through it again - “yes, the game is inclusive, yes, the game sucks. Let’s be precise and critique it, why does the game suck? What systems and processes keep causing this?”

I think my friend is doing this on purpose to help process the emotions, because it always ends with the same conclusion

"You think it’s a bad game because it is, you feel like it’s an attack because they went online and said you’re a bigot for thinking it’s bad, and we’re all biased but you’re self aware and this is coming from propaganda and very valid frustration, not hatred.

“Now let’s talk about the mechanisms through which consulting companies ruin everything we hold dear, and brainstorm ways to mitigate or fix these systematic problems. And would you look at that, you’re sounding just a little more like a leftist each time”

Identify the problem, trace it through the system, find the root cause, and brainstorm solutions/work arounds

There’s just not true. The orange guy isn’t a billionaire

We all thought human creativity would separate us from the machines

It turns out, humans just aren’t very creative

It keeps traveling. If you splash some water, where does the wave go? Same question - it terms into something you can no longer see or hear… It never goes away. It becomes part of the world, forever

Music is what you hear - but it was only ever sound waves