“Puritan” retains meaning beyond its historical context, since it was originally a descriptive term that became a term for a specific movement. “Fascist” does not, because it doesn’t have a (useful) descriptive meaning, it was only ever a symbol for a specific ideology.
The CCP has demonstrated that it’s not above killing tens of millions of its own citizens to achieve its political aims. I doubt they’d see ‘pacifying’ an occupied population as much of an issue.
The Russians lost control of the Black Sea to a country that doesn’t have a navy. Its naval incompetence is legendary. There is zero chance of them conducting an amphibious invasion against anyone any time this century.
You might think that those people’s opinions don’t matter, but it turns out that ‘lots of other people value me highly’ is in itself a signal.
And yes, it is horrible, but if you want to solve a problem, you must first understand the problem, and ‘some people are just born with Evil in their hearts’ is not a very good sociological model.
Yes, technically, having spare resources to devote to your own appearance is considered a positive signal, but it is an unreliable one, and often one not as valued by the people making the judgement. If there are many ways to signal wealth, a signal that has some intrinsic downside will lose its value if lots of people are sending the other wealth-signals.
That too is pretty obvious from the same perspective: Admitting you only care about someone’s genes is itself considered shallow, so people make up other justifications based on other, more accepted values.
Why should developers be on the hook indefinitely for content? Why can’t they just make a good game and sell it? If a game needs continuous ‘content updates’ to remain good, it simply wasn’t meant to be played forever. Not all games are.
Your argument seems to be “won’t someone please think of the poor defenseless billion-dollar international megacorporations?”.
Most roguelites use those patterns because they are fundamentally linked to slot machines. They may not be as predatory as money sinks, but they’re optimised to be time sinks as a method of promotion via word-of-mouth, streaming or activity indicators on social media.
There’s always a few people, saying this whenever the topic comes up, but as always, smarks are still marks. They want you to think you’re getting one over the system, because you’ll either cave, or advertise the game to someone who does. Even if you don’t, the marginal cost to them is essentially zero.
Nowadays, when I see someone with two dozen stickers on their laptop or pins on their lanyard, I see someone with two dozen hot button issues on which they’ll try to ruin your life over a differing opinion.
‘Responsible’ gambling is still morally irresponsible. People are walking adverts for their hobbies whether they like it or not, so people who engage with gambling will be indirectly encouraging other people to take up the hobby, many of which will ruin their lives. (Also some fraction of their losses will fund advertising that will similarly attract problem gamblers.) The low stakes recreational gamblers keep the system looking friendly and approachable. This is also almost certainly by design.
“Yes — I can imagine it. A simple sphere, maybe sitting in a soft pool of light.”
“I’m picturing it as a bright red ball, glossy and catching a bit of light on one side.”
Great, huh? Except that’s what ChatGPT said when I asked it those two questions. It certainly isn’t picturing anything. If a robot which only ‘thinks’ in terms of chain-of-thought of abstract tokens can act as if it truly sees things, what makes you think this test has any validity at all?
I didn’t even try to imagine anything. Apples are just conceptually red by default. I can also tell you that it was tart, and crisp. I didn’t imagine those sensations either, they were just the first words that came to my mind when thinking about apples. The table is brown. I didn’t try to imagine anything table either, but the table in my kitchen, where there might be apples, is brown.
It’s actually even worse than that. Not only am I unconvinced that aphantasia is real or merely a difference in the way people describe the same experience (either because of how they use language, or because of how their mental images are connected to their speech processing), but even if it were an experimentally verified phenomenon, people still talk about it like it’s a /thing you have/ instead of a /skill you failed to develop/.
I lack the ability to produce realistic images using sticks of charcoal, but I don’t consider this to be ‘acarbographism’ or something, I recognise that other people have put more effort into learning that skill than I have.
Don’t most ad platforms and search engines track bounce rate? If too many users see that generic opening paragraph, bullet list and scattering of emoji, and immediately hit back or close, they lose revenue.
This. AI translations are so accessible now that if you’re going to submit machine-translations, you may as well just write in your native language and let the reader machine translate. That’s at least accurately representing the amount of effort you put in.
I will also take a janky script for a game hand-translated by an ESL indie dev over the ChatGPT House Style 99 times out of 100 if the result is even mostly comprehensible.
Paste passages from Wikipedia featured articles, today’s newspapers or published novels and it’ll still suggest style changes. And if you know enough to know to ignore ChatGPTs suggestions, you didn’t need it in the first place.
There are people who start new projects in MATLAB in 2025 for reasons other than ‘our expensive bespoke libraries only support MATLAB and it’d cost millions to rewrite them’?
Spreadsheets are one of the ugliest pieces of software that we use. Pretty much all of the paradigms spreadsheets enforce would be considered abhorrent in any other context. Excel needs five hundred megabytes of memory just to load a blank sheet. Vendor lock-in is just tolerated as a fact of life, as is the lack of a real way to integrate with version control, and a lack of human-readable source files. If an engineer came to you and said “So for this project, I put all the code, input data, output data and comments scattered about one big two-dimensional array with no type safety, no portability, no scalability, no security, no variable names, no code re-use, no unit tests, no integration tests, no abstractions and no error handling”, you would fire him on the spot, but that’s basically normal for an Excel sheet. There is not an ounce of elegance in MS Excel, and trying to integrate with PowerApps, PowerAutomate or PowerBI only makes things worse.
When a member of a group says that a term used to refer to them is pejorative, is it now an acceptable response to simply say ‘no it isn’t’? That hasn’t been the case for decades.