Arotrios

Arotrios, 10 months ago

One more day until Reddit Isn't Fun... :(

It's been a good run, but without RiF the site is worthless.

That being said, it paves the way for the Fediverse to grow, so rather than celebrating the end of an era, I'm enjoying the birth of a new one.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

This is significant in terms of precedent - if the ruling stands, it's dramatically less likely the argument will work in his other lawsuits.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

If you liked Portal, any of the games that run on the source engine would be a good fit for you. Half Life 2 has an amazing single player story in FPS style and is on sale right now for $.99. Left for Dead 2 is another classic - probably the best zombie shooter of all time (and has a world of third party content) - also on sale right now for $.99. Straight military, go for CS:GO, or Team Fortress II if you prefer more of a Fortnite style game. All of these are older games, so run amazingly well on even the most mediocre hardware.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

I trying to think which devices can't run VLC and all I've come up with are a pager and a Blackberry. Does anyone have any idea what he's talking about?

Arotrios, 10 months ago

I think that while Reddit's user count has been rebounding since the blackout, their level of content submitted has cratered as a result of the admin actions. All of my feeds that didn't participate in the blackout have slowed and/or stalled there. I believe Huffman made everyone rethink about posting there, and as the content dries out, so will the userbase.

Once the third party tools die next month and the ability to sift through the content drought is reduced to the standard Reddit interface, we're going to see a black hole effect that will accelerate the slow heat death of r/all. The content submitters are clearly moving to other platforms, and the explosion of content and users on kbin and lemmy is a testament to this dynamic.

It's clear that admins are re-submitting popular content to try and blunt the fallout, but it speaks to greater failing - Reddit no longer has the trust of its users, and the sense of a coherent, save community space to contribute to has been broken beyond repair.

You can't replace that with AI, but it's pretty funny to watch them try.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

Holy fucking shit I'm dying. That's fucking hilarious.

I now want to make a bot that detects bots, grades their responses as 0% - 100% bot, posts the bottage score, and if they determine bottage, engage the other bot in endless conversation until it melts down from confusion.

We can live stream the battles. We'll call the show Babblebots.

Any devs interested?

Arotrios, 10 months ago

Ruski Fucker Kennedy strikes again...

Arotrios, 10 months ago

The first rule about poop club is we don't talk about poop club.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

I never found /r/Piracy to be useful for anything other than making memes about piracy. There's very little actual information on how to pirate.

After one day in on Kbin, I found this handy little breakdown, which provided me with more resources than I'd ever seen listed on Reddit during my entire time there.

This is a prime example of the slow heat death of Reddit - now that they've forced people to start looking at other alternatives to their communities, they're beginning to realize how restricted and frivolous most of Reddit has become, and what a poor information resource it actually is. When information is presented and moderated as entertainment, it's quality invariably suffers. While it may be a bit to early to tell, it feels like Reddit's failures are instigating an internet Renaissance in the federated space, which has the openness and freedom to allow that kind of a movement to grow.

On Reddit, like my link above, it would be removed for violating the TOS.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

lmao - I didn't realize that. My snark stands corrected.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

If it's a houseboat, then the boat. Otherwise I'll get more use out of the car.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

There's a fundamental disconnect in how the economists in this paper view profit and how companies view profit. Essentially, their theory is that if we raise interest rates, this will subdue demand, and thus tame inflation as companies drop prices to compete for a smaller market share.

The problem is that the companies that control the core essentials - food, energy, and to a growing extent housing - are effectively monopolies. Markets that had hundreds of competitors in the past now only have a few dozen at best, and they actively use their vast power and influence to reduce the capacity of any smaller players to participate, let alone compete in the market.

You can't reduce demand on core essentials, because people can't do without. As a result, in a monopolistic market, an interest increase only harms the consumer when it comes to core essentials unless a company decides to reduce prices and subsequently their profit.

There is no publicly traded company on earth that will voluntarily decide to lower their profit. The only way they'll do it is if it's hurting their bottom line - aka through competition. With no competition to reduce market share, effectively the company can simply keep pace with interest rates by continuing to profiteer, especially when they're operating in markets without price controls. In those that do, the companies often engage in aggressive regulatory capture to ensure a steady profit margin well above cost, regardless of the market conditions.

In our current situation, interest rate increases will do little to nothing in the short term save to tighten lending and push home ownership out of reach of the middle class. We will not see drops in prices, only a leveling off from increases, as consumers have come to accept them as the new normal. Rate increases do nothing to address the core issue, which is that the extreme consolidation of wealth in a handful of companies has given them a power over our economy far greater than the central banks that claim to run it. If anything, those rate increases encourage the same consolidation of wealth and monopolistic markets that have led to our current economic state.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

My personal opinion for the current situation would be to keep rates where they are to avoid further wage suppression. Let the PPP money and COVID impacts move through the economic system without increasing the cost of borrowing further. A statement by the IMF and/or Fed directly admitting that the current inflationary trend is due to corporate profiteering, not wage growth, could prompt stricter price controls and regulation across multiple governments. In a perfect world, this would result in criminal cases and prosecutions of the worst offenders (I'm looking at you, egg producers), but I think we all know that's not going to happen.

My feeling is that the economy really just needs some breathing room to be robust enough to deal with the next climate and/or political crisis. Raising rates feels like a self-inflicted wound meant to shore up the profits of those who made out like bandits during COVID at the expense of everyone else who was just barely making it through.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

That's right troopers! C'mon, you wanna live forever?!?!?!!!!

Arotrios, 10 months ago

This is actually a surprisingly good series. The plot is well written, the acting is solid, and it's exceptionally well paced. I'm hoping to see a second season - there's a lot of potential here. The CGI wasn't quite where shows like the Expanse are at (clearly the show didn't have the same budget), but they did a great job with what they had. I'm hoping for a 2nd season.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

I've been observing the creation, expansion, and slow heat death of Reddit for a long time now (had accounts there since it opened). I think that Reddit's decisions here accelerated a decline in content quantity and quality, but the trend had been happening for a while.

I think that the biggest issue behind this decline is infrastructure based. Reddit was designed around the basic concept that the desire to post and contribute to the discussion would be reward enough to drive participation. Karma is the point system for this participation, a number that only speaks to popularity, not the quality of a post or a contributor. When the community was small, this non-specific variable served the purpose of identifying content trends, but karma is very poor at describing WHY a post or comment is popular. Eventually, instead of karma being an indicator that someone had contributed to conversation, it's only meaningful metric became one of popularity or notoriety.

This meant that where once Reddit had been a haven for enabling discussion on any topic, it became a shouting match between who could get the most upvotes. This cultural shift became very apparent after the Digg exodus, and the trend accelerated as other social media copied Reddit's voting and karma system. Of course, Reddit began feeding off of their content, which was also popularity driven, and once the content algorithms started coming into play in the mid-2010s, it created a feedback loop of popularity driven schlock that drove most real discussion to fringes of the site.

We've recently seen this dynamic start to even affect Google, whose search results are getting hammered due to Reddit's blackouts, and whose search results have been significantly dropping in quality over the last few years.

As for myself, I still browse certain reddits that I haven't found equivalents for in the Fediverse, but it's pretty clear to me that Reddit's not really a positive place for contributors - whether they be moderators or posters. To some extent, I'll miss the reach of Reddit's audience, but lets face it, most of that audience is just shitposters and bots.

Will the same trend happen in the Fediverse? Possibly, but I think there's more potential here for positive change than there ever will be in a company led by the likes of Huffman, or for that matter any company or centralized authority. Besides, it took about 15 years for Reddit to condense from being a cool place full of new ideas to the condensed black hole of regurgitated shitposting it's become. I think the Fediverse has a bit more potential longevity than that.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

Welcome to the Federation, and thanks for doing your part!

Arotrios, 10 months ago

This is probably the best breakdown of public perceptions of her record:

A close examination of Harris’s record shows it’s filled with contradictions. She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent. She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.

But what seem like contradictions may reflect a balancing act. Harris’s parents worked on civil rights causes, and she came from a background well aware of the excesses of the criminal justice system — but in office, she played the role of a prosecutor and California’s lawyer. She started in an era when “tough on crime” politics were popular across party lines — but she rose to national prominence as criminal justice reform started to take off nationally. She had an eye on higher political office as support for criminal justice reform became de rigueur for Democrats — but she still had to work as California’s top law enforcement official.

Her race and gender likely made this balancing act even tougher. In the US, studies have found that more than 90 percent of elected prosecutors are white and more than 80 percent are male. As a Black and Indian American woman, Harris stood out — inviting scrutiny and skepticism, especially by people who may hold racist stereotypes about how Black people view law enforcement or sexist views about whether women are “tough” enough for the job.

Still, the result is the same: As she became more nationally visible, Harris was less known as a progressive prosecutor, as she’d been earlier in her career, and more a reform-lite or even anti-reform attorney general. Now critics have labeled her a “cop” — a sellout for a broken criminal justice system.

Sauce is Vox