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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • What are some examples of things you don’t like? That’s really necessary to give examples. Science fiction usually has technology in some form or another. Sometimes it’s the focus of the story (eg The Last Question or Permutation City). Sometimes it’s a tool for the story (eg The Expanse or Neuromancer_). Other times it’s set dressing like magic in fantasy (eg Dune or Book of the New Sun). Outside of hard SF and beyond Golden Age SF you run into more “tech as device or background.”


  • This is why you can’t use The Independent for shit especially during election season.

    “I haven’t seen the joke. Maybe it’s a stupid racist joke, maybe it’s not,” Vance said.

    “I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke, but I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m just I’m so over it.”

    If you send this article to someone who wants to vote for Trump, they are going to correctly excoriate you. I know this because the last time I used The Independent this was was 2016 when Trump first and The Independent couldn’t back up its headlines then. In the last eight years it still can’t. If we take Vance at face value, which we know we can’t but we have to since that’s the quote The Independent chose to use to create their headline, it’s fake news.

    In general, The Independent generates clickbait headlines that pull in a specific group of people that want to agree with the article and won’t verify who then send it to another group of people who will engage with the content to try and verify. This increases their engagement while spreading a mix of blatant lies and loose misinformation. Your life will be better if you filter out The Independent (something I haven’t yet bothered to do on Lemmy but did immediately on a new Reddit account; election season might finally change this) especially if you’re the audience for the headlines.



  • I think it’s a terrible decision because of this. The whole point of hubs is to get players together and interacting. Putting AH and mail around hubs requires many players together. Giving folks a mount means the hubs stop being hubs and contributes to the continued decay of the multiplayer aspect.

    Take this with a grain of salt. When I last played hubs still mattered. If that isn’t currently the case this is just old fart complaints.









  • It could also be manipulated by someone who reports the dark patterns are inaccurate. If it were run by a single org or person, it could get sold to a company interested in gaming the ratings or used to bash things the owner doesn’t like. I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Every way to set this up is subject to bad actors. There are some checks and balances present in the website. Why are they inadequate and why should we not trust this site? Are you, perhaps, an industry dark pattern plant trying to get us to avoid something that could deter dark pattern usage?





  • Interesting. I was able to access the linked whitepaper and repositories without trouble and the 3rd party stuff too. Do you have local config preventing you from downloading the source code to review?

    While I can respect your distaste for non-libre software, you’ll need to back up the malware claim. There are real security concerns out there in common non-libre; labeling things that are not libre as malware solely because they are not libre muddies the waters and makes your message much less palatable.


  • This is complicated to unravel and has lots of similarities to the Tri-State Crematory Scandal.

    Who owns a dead body? Does the state? Does the family? Take religion out of the picture for a few minutes as well so we can properly separate church and state. Someone dies without (available at that moment) relatives or a will defining what happens with the body. Alternatively someone dies and has not actually paid for the stuff stipulated in their will and does not have the resources to do so. What should happen? Something possibly like, in order,

    • The family owns the body
    • The facility where the person died owns the dead body
    • The state owns the body if those fall through

    Dead bodies can’t just sit around. They can cause serious health and environmental problems if not properly disposed of, so something has to be done. Remember, we’ve set aside religion, so a dead body is literally just a resource. It can be turned into cremains, it can be buried, or it can be sold for various uses. What should the state regulate here? What’s wrong with the state turning a dead body into some money? How much responsibility do families have in respecting last wishes? How much time and effort should the state put into investigating those? Do dead bodies really matter? How much land are we willing to turn over to cemeteries today? In ten years? In one hundred years?

    Now if you bore with me this long and agree that dead bodies can be sold, I also strongly feel like there should be compensation to these families with interest for that shit. If you steal my resources and don’t tell me, the state already requires repayment. That’s what should happen here. It gets murkier once you add religion back in because you can’t really undo a lot of these things.

    Dallas County is doing something wrong. But it’s way more complicated underneath the hood than normal Texas government shenanigans.


  • Boeing execs said they held nothing back. The union members took that to be threatening. I genuinely wonder how much profit was actually reserved and how much executive comp is still available to drop into the pool. To me, “holding nothing back” means the company genuinely cannot to fund anything else without going into the red. Holding nothing back means fat was cut, executive pay was reduced, and shareholders understand their dividends are gone because the people that make them money need to get some too. Holding nothing back means some rainy day assets are sold and corporate, non-union members experience some austerity (granted you have to remain competitive so as to not lose your value creators so you can’t cut everything or they’d leave; executives are almost never value creators so they can have austerity measures). Holding nothing back means jobs could be cut if more hardship appears.

    Something tells me Boeing was holding stuff back with that offer. It could be all the deferred stock executives have or the lack of shareholder expectation management. Not sure! We’ll never know.