Stop buying the games. It's really that simple. I can't understand the people who say "well, I'll try this game out but I hope they fix it next time". That's not how business works.
373 karma · joined November 16, 2022
> In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect
Could always pick up a copy of IDA...
> In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
As a side note if you want some fun you should fire up wireshark when you're playing a game and watch how much "metadata" is sent from your PC to the game company. They know more about you than your doctor in some cases. EasyAntiCheat and Denuvo seem to be the worst offenders.
There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
So why doesn't that matter? Because the "employed" are not gainfully employed. They work longer hours for less wages. Longer hours because the competition pool is larger, and less wages for the same reason PLUS inflation.
The average joe may not understand this. But he certainly understands that he can't take vacations, he can't get sick, his electric, gas, and food bills have all doubled or even tripled (in some regions). Despite working, objectively, harder than ever he seems to only get further behind. This makes Joe angry. When Joe can no longer blame the government either due to perceived incompetence or manipulation by think tanks, he is soon to blame his neighbor.
This is the secret of the majority of "extremism" that makes the news. They will certainly sell it as racism, or sexism, or fascism though.
Or we could just say people on the internet are assholes and you need thicker skin. Would you be okay with government ID required to sign up to any website? If so, I can see why you have a vengeance complex.
To be clear they were not accused to of being anti-social. People who don't want gun manufacturers sued for what is done with their guns were called child killers, "sandy hook hoaxers", etc. The Bloomberg (yes, it was Bloomberg) money machine paired with the noise machine that is Mom's Demand Action has absolutely dominated the narrative around this.
You are correct if we treat social media companies as content curators. If we treat them as speech platforms you are wrong.
Regardless of your belief a "speech platform" (email, etc) can and honestly should allow these things in the spirit of actual free speech. If it is a content curator, then yes, one can infer that by curating so-called hate speech they are indirectly promoting it.
This difference is lost on people. Personally, with the amount of censorship and ads I am fine treating social media companies as curators and treating them appropriately. There are billions currently flowing into congress to stop this. Primarily from those social media companies that want to censor but still be called a "speech platform".
People often conflate their feelings with law. There is no law stopping you from going into a park with a megaphone and spewing what some people may consider hate speech. Consider even how vague the term "hate speech" even is. If I "believe" in two biological genders this, according to some, is the same as denying the holocaust. To some, criticizing the effect asylum seekers from certain countries has had on my country is consider not only racism but "hate speech". We have to be extremely careful what we consider "hate speech". Because the current definition of "hate speech", "disinformation", "misinformation", etc all center around one idea: "things I don't like should be banned, and things I do like should be promoted". This is party-neutral. Both sides of the coin want the other side to be considered hate speech mongers.
In America there is a concept of "zero tolerance" that keeps the bullied compliant and the bullies in charge. It was not until I started to get very violent that the bullying stopped. I would fight at a moments notice even sometimes in classrooms. Spent a lot of time suspended and my parents had conferences. I never lashed out at anyone. Though if someone tried to insult me, push me around, etc I would immediately switch modes and start swinging. As I got bigger and stronger it became less of an attack of weak punches to full blown knockouts.
The only way we can solve bullying is by teaching our kids that violence is not only necessary but expected. Teach them to be violent, and teach them to control it. You must defend yourself from these people. Enrolling your kids in an actual martial art (some combination of boxing, bjj, muay thai, etc) will help. When they break a bullies nose/arm/etc and get suspended you should not only encourage them to continue you should celebrate the victory. You can't win with bullies by "being the better person". Bullies aren't beat enough at home, so it's your job to bring the beatings to them. School systems are DESIGNED to protect bullies and subjugate the bullied. In America, they are prisons. The sooner children realize this the sooner they realize the methods to staying alive aren't much different.
"If you are not capable of violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless."
Through extremely tough laws streets become safer. It's opposite most of America in the sense that we have a large degree of leniency built into our laws that seems to be getting more lenient every election cycle. Stuff like no bail, letting people off with warnings, "court dates" that you're responsible for showing up to would NEVER fly in Japan. Statistically criminals will commit crimes again if let out even on minor infractions. Japan seems to have realized this and capitalized on it. Speaking of capital...their capital punishment system is pretty crazy. Their prisons are also draconian even when compared to the garbage prisons we have in the US. Their closest approximation may be Russian prison in it's style of punishment. The sheer level of fear people in Japan must live with when faced with these punishments is clearly enough to keep society polite.
Japan is one of the ultimate "tough on crime" examples in a western-approaching nation...and it works. Well. People have this idyllic view of Japan for some reason and it's understandable why. From a distance it's beautiful. I'm not convinced the tradeoffs to achieve their society are worth it (extremely tough anti-crime law, collectivism, salarymanship, etc). Moreover, I don't think the people who idealize (really, fetishize) Japan want these changes either.
Hilarious, really. It goes along with the almost metastatic, terminal, pseudo-intellectualism this site is known for.
So, instead, they hold foreigners hostage (in all but the most literal sense) with poor wages and the "promise" of citizenship eventually.
No one wins - except of course the megacorps.
On the contrary in the case of HN it fits most criteria perfectly
1. Elevation of someone to diety status (Graham, <startup founder of the week>)
2. Shunning outsiders (mocking redditors, another cult)
3. Enforced group think through shame rituals ("As a..." response posts, downvoting).
4. Belief that the HN system is superior to all other systems
HN, like nearly ALL modern startups, would qualify as cults. Remove the downvoting enforced groupthink and maybe I'd be inclined to agree with you. Until then, I refuse to. Upvote/downvote culture enforces the exact behavior required to punish and shame people with differing opinions into conforming. It's a sinister assault on human psychology and all sites doing this (HN included) should feel deeply ashamed. For being an alleged "libertarian/liberal" oasis in the middle of a barren internet desert, this place is far more like Jonestown than, for example, the philosophy department of a top 10 university despite seemingly every poster here believing truly they have 9e40 IQ and are one self help book away from unlocking literal gigabrain magic.
Anyway I keep getting downvoted for this which is hilarious. It's obvious people have virtually no idea what musical talent sounds like. Talent is not what you like, it's legitimate hard earned skill. Sampled trash and top 40s 4x4 beats augmented by auto-tune and filters is not skill no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig. Neither is shouting into a microphone behind overdriven noise-music. Being avant garde also doesn't imply skill, the relationship is not a bijection.
Energy-wise, yes, but the devil is in the details. If I had to infer the meaning here it's that high protein = constipation = not good. Vegetable calories include fiber which is important to insure you're processing things efficiently. Additionally, good vegetables (unfortunately not the ones you can get at the store usually) contain lots of great vitamins and minerals. I would be curious if they mean a typical American chain store vegetable which demonstrably has almost no nutrition compared to it's natural counterpart.
Modern music is watered down and simple. The drums are all 4x4, the chords are all the same, the progressions are predictable, etc. I'm not talking about just a genre using a particular set of chords, I am talking about literally being able to predict the next note using only 10 seconds of audio. Moreover, there is so much tooling around making absolutely talentless hacks sound good (auto-tune, quantization, very clever filtering) it's hard to actually know if someone is even real sometimes.
More than ever I've also noticed modern music videos are simply advertisements for luxury brands. I just think the new generation lacks the sophistication to enjoy good music. Every generation since the invention of arguably the highest most supreme form of musical arrangement, orchestral arrangement, has resulted in slowly stripping away any sort of intellectual endeavor listening music had held. There's a reason classic rock is called classic rock and stuff made in the 90s onward doesn't qualify. It was probably the last period of time where music actually required talent rather than a ghost writer and an advertising deal. This isn't just my age speaking. I suspect in 50 years people will still remember Zeppelin, but no one will remember Jay-Z.
If I am paid $10/hr for my work I can't eat. My incentives are not aligned. You dont pay me enough to eat.
If I am paid $xxx/hr for my work but I am bound by NDA and non-compete, don't get bonuses in line with product sales (N% of sales go to my check), etc I am not aligned.
The only people "aligned" are the most useless. Sales. Yes, things need to be sold but if the people laboring are not incentivized sales will be useless along with the entire C-suite.
There is no such thing as a "sufficiently incentivized" laborer unless you're paying them a chunk of sales (see: a co-op). Hence why anti-work is such a popular concept even among the highest paid cohorts. Even as developers, we are being robbed blind and are worth far more than they pay. There's a simple test for this: if you work 20 more hours next week will your check potentially go up significantly? If not, your labor is being stolen from you.
Every new medicine, every name brand medicine, every generic is paid at an exorbitant rate in the US which allows companies to provide cheaper medications to other countries. Every new surgery, every new technique, literally every part of the medical process is subsidized IN FULL by Americans.
Put it simply - if the US decided collectively we will not pay any more than cost for generic medication the entire world's healthcare system would collapse overnight. Most of the west would no longer be able to socialize their healthcare. 3rd world nations would likely halve their life expectancy. This is why, in my opinion, the US will never be able to do a medicare-for-all type situation. It's already unaffordable on the current tax basis strictly to take care of Americans. The unmentionable cost of subsidizing literally the entire planet's medical system through paying insane prices for everything makes it unaffordable even in some fever dream scenario.
When you're getting your cheap healthcare and free medicines take the time to thank your nearest American. They are dying so that you can afford to live. Your insulin is only cheap/free because some poor sap in America is paying quite literally 1400x your cost. The taxes other countries pay into their medical system pales in comparison to the amount of money Americans pour into their healthcare to keep it cheap everywhere else. There is simply no comparison to how badly Americans get bent over.
So Amazon, like every other FAANG, is very bloated. I've yet to experience any sort of major layoff in the industry at large. They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat. It is sort of icing the fungibility of jobs for now but not in a way that I am at all worried about.
I tried prime video once and the way it locked down my computer to guarantee so-called "rights" was stupid. I tried Netflix, same thing. I'm slowly but surely trending back to unabashed piracy because it's the only way I can own anything anymore - and that's sad. I will happily spend hard earned money as long as I can own something. At the very least I'd happily donate to my local library if they didn't spend time enforcing the will of some faceless multinational publisher.
Shockingly, as I've gotten older I seem to own less and every year the apes we elect take more of my rights away.