@c0dec0dec0de@pluralistic Ender's Game kept me from suicide when I was a kid behind the Iron Curtain. It was for the first time it have occurred to little me a gifted, bullied child could be valued. It is easy to pontificate from the armchair of a professor in a free country.
@chx neither I nor the author of this critique say that there is no value or appeal to the book. It captures well the feelings of childhood victimhood and powerlessness. There’s a cathartic element to seeing surrogates for one’s tormentors or oppressors laid low by a victim figure. The issue is that the use of overwhelming and lethal force is presented as somehow literally perfectly moral and blameless based on Ender’s status as a victim of abuse and his intention to prevent abuse. @pluralistic
Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. There's plenty of good reason to hate both – they're run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees. But if you think that Microsoft will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.
@RommelRico@pluralistic no, the quote is in there. And Cory goes on to point out that Microsoft made nearly identical promises about Zenimax when it acquired them and broke all of them.
@RommelRico@pluralistic also, more to the point, MS seeks to be a monopoly in the games sector and the whole point here is that monopolies are almost universally bad - and where MS has achieved monopolies in the past it has a proven track record of being spectacularly bad.
Finally listening to Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works and it is just wonderful. I wanted to squee when she described Boston's Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge as a "charismatic megastructure". It's just a great book.
Recommended to me (not personally) by @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/
It is really perverse the hoops they make you jump through to get #ADHD medications refilled when they absolutely know that you have issues with both focus and memory.
Just learned that you can split a document into multiple source files, so now my resume has a Makefile and is easily rearranged. And because I'm a software nerd first, I've got Document Viewer open and ran git ls-files | entr make to auto-rebuild any time a tracked part of the document is saved. Who needs WYSIWYG?
Idle, delayed realization: transitioning to thinking of energy as unlimited/renewable and material as the limiting factor will require a serious change for petroleum refineries. Like, their whole operation uses material (crude oil) as both energy source and raw material for product. From the economic of a refinery owner, buying a whole lot of electricity to heat the fractionating column and cracking and reforming reactors instead of burning crude is just not going to be attractive.
I posted a web log thing!
It's niche and stupid. If you use JFrog Artifactory and a Red Hat-based Linux and want user-specific credentials for use with dnf, I know how to do that and you can too:
Mid-life “crisis”: as emphatically not-a-car-guy, I am possessed of a desire to build a car. This is facially absurd. I don’t possess the necessary skills, don’t have a garage to store a partially-constructed vehicle, and definitely don’t have the time or funds to spend on such a venture.
I’m not building a fiberglass facsimile of an ‘89 MR2. But I kinda want to. Maybe make the lines just a touch sharper - and the cabin a touch bigger to accommodate my height better…
No. Silly. Frivolous. Nope.
@scudderfish oh, I watched a video about making fiberglass car bodies. It looks like an insane amount of work - although I could probably make if less work because my desired shape includes a lot of planes and fewer swooping curves. https://youtube.com/watch?v=xhtIVXgEt18
Unfortunate, but entirely expected:
NH Republicans defeat all gun control bills in party-line vote. At least one of them complains about not helping suicidal people, but I can practically guarantee that person’s voting record includes defunding or rejecting money to increase outreach or assistance of any kind for people in mental health crisis. https://www.wmur.com/article/new-hampshire-state-senate-defeats-gun-control-bills/46808201
automated wireless intrusion in the setup environment. Don’t have an internet connection? Don’t worry; we’re sure we can break into one of these networks! #Windows#Windows11#Security#joke#satire
A spokesperson for Microsoft denies that the Windows installer hacks into people’s WiFi networks saying:
“It doesn’t do that. Any wireless decryption or cracking routines only come into play if the password spraying attempts all fail - like the one that we were breached by last week. So, really, it almost never happens.”