dawnbreez

That's a bit more accurate, though it still sweeps a few edge cases under the rug.

Choosing phrases and words that more clearly express what you mean is a good thing. Communication is hard enough under normal circumstances, and on topics like this, things get even more complicated because of groups who are trying to conflate seemingly-innocent phrases with their own arguments (both to make their own arguments sound like there's already widespread support, and to make their opponents seem unreasonable, as I described above). You should try to be sure that you're saying what you actually mean, and try to avoid unintentional meaning from phrases that have been coopted by others.

On the other hand: Why, exactly, does it matter whether biological sex is binary or not? The other half of trying to say what you mean is understanding what you actually mean. What are you arguing toward?

This sounds like you're conflating biological sex (i.e., having both breasts and a penis) with gender (i.e., person IDs as female). I understand why; they use almost the same terms. However, it is important to note that, if you are describing a person who was assigned female at birth, and continues to identify as female, that's entirely describing their gender, not the state of their biological sex characteristics.

In other words, if a person experiences DSD, but self-identifies as male or female, what you are describing is not proof that sex is a binary, but rather proof that a person with DSD can experience gender dysphoria.

The trick here is that we're looking at dogwhistles.

To someone outside the theater of culture-war this takes place in, this looks like a series of perfectly ordinary statements. Of course sex is binary, and that statement doesn't sound like it conflicts with gender being a spectrum, because sex and gender are obviously separate.

However, to someone who has lived within this theater of culture-war--who have been dealing with this rhetoric as rhetoric, which is what it is--this is a red flag. "Sex is binary" is the opening salvo in a common rhetorical strategy, which goes "Sex is binary, you're either male or female" -> "I'm just stating a fact, no need to be defensive" -> "See, this is why I don't trust trans people" -> "This is why you shouldn't trust trans people, they contradict basic facts like sex being binary". Notice the magic trick here--by picking phrasing that's plausibly deniable, and then framing any reaction to it as "disagreeing with Science", this guy can make it look like he's disagreeing with trans people, and make it look like trans people are somehow in the wrong for this, without ever actually having to stop and explain why.

That's not even getting into the fact that, frankly, "sex is binary" isn't actually correct. There are plenty of examples of species that don't actually fit into a binary sex model correctly--species which can reproduce both sexually and asexually, species which can change sex in order to find mates more reliably, and even cases where more than two sexes can be observed (such as in bees, for whom "worker", "drone", and "queen" all have different sexual characteristics). This goes against what most of us were taught when we were young, but that's part of the rational approach to the world: sometimes the model that we were given when we were in elementary school is wrong, and a newer model is a more accurate description of what's going on.

And that's part of the goal, here. "Sex realism", here, has nothing to do with reality, just as "religious fundamentalism" rarely has anything to do with the fundamentals of whatever religion is involved. Rather, "sex realism" is a rhetorical strategy which uses the aesthetics of skepticism to make one's argument seem sensible, polite, and rational. It relies on the audience never actually questioning whether the "sex realist" is describing reality, or reading beyond the face value of what they are saying.

The especially insidious part of this tactic is the way it weaponizes the reactions of people who understand what the dogwhistle means. People like me, who have spent hours upon hours discussing these things, immediately recognize the tactic at play--and more often than not, react loudly and angrily. After all, I've seen this conversation play out over and over, and invariably the guy claiming to just be a sex realist turns out to be an asshole, just like how the guys who claim to be "race realists" inevitably start citing things like the 13/50 argument (which is a whole other can of bad-statistics worms). But that's part of the plan--when I or someone like me says "What the fuck, get out" in response to the initial statement, that's when the sex-realist turns to the audience and says, "See how upset this person is over these definitely true things I just said! Clearly, if they're losing their cool this badly, I must be right!" And this works, because it short-circuits past the part where the sex-realist's argument is evaluated. By framing things in this way, the sex-realist can convince members of the audience to trust him before evaluating his argument, which lets him avoid actual scrutiny of what he's claiming.

TLDR: Wright is framing a simplified, not-really-correct statement as absolute truth, and then framing the people he opposes as unreasonable and irrational, to take advantage of the fact that human beings use trust to save processing power and avoid having to actually evaluate arguments.

I mean, I agree with you, but that's kind of a non-sequitur? The reason I want control over my software/hardware is not the same as the reason I want to own a firearm.

I guess you don't have the context of what the commit message means. "Leftoids" is a derogatory slang term for people who aren't politically right-wing, and deleting the CoC like this while kicking everyone else out and declaring that the project has been "reclaimed from the leftoids" reads less like a prank and more like someone wanted to kick political opponents off the project.

I used to have something similar to this, as a teenager. I pretty quickly realized I was drawing arbitrary lines delineating things that I found cool as being better than things other people found cool, treating other people's interests as somehow more embarrassing than my own even though I was a textbook cargo-pants-wearing wannabe-hacker nerd. Between that and my struggle with depression, I ended up deciding that it's more important to enjoy things than to look cool.

Anyway, to answer your question: I'm not sure there's any personality traits I would call "embarrassing". There are some I would call harmful, sure, and there are some that are associated with being socially inept or less cool, but I don't think there's a category of personality traits that are just embarrassing.

To your specific example: Being enthusiastic about things isn't embarrassing; it invites others to share that enthusiasm, either because of a shared interest or simply because watching someone be enthusiastic about something is enjoyable.

I'm pretty sure it also got bad initial response because of their pricing plan. I have no idea why Google thought it was a good idea to charge both a subscription fee and a purchase fee per game in a world where services like Game Pass only charge the subscription fee; it's like they just assumed there was no competition.

It's really funny hearing someone ask if this is the hand-off to the new generation, when the fact is that furries were working on the internet well before anybody else cared. Furcadia came out in 1996!

[edit] Oh, right, I should explain what Furcadia is. It's apparently based on Multi-User Dungeon type technology, but has a graphical frontend and was driven by user-generated content. Essentially, it was Habbo Hotel for furries, four years before Habbo Hotel even existed.

I'm...not sure why it would be embarrassing? People have things they're interested in that aren't related to work, and besides, the suit-and-tie image of the workplace is deeply rooted in a load of nonsense (nonsense which ought to be recognized as nonsense, but which is often confused for professionalism).

Another useful feature of the horizontal desktop design is that putting the monitor on the case brings it closer to a comfortable viewing level.

If I had a gun to the head of everyone in town, and everyone in town mysteriously agrees to sell their labor for free, does that mean that cost of labor is fair?

There are circumstances outside of the price which affect the fairness of the price.

But why not? Why shouldn't there be a process for renegotiating a contract? Especially in cases like this, where the employees are still producing things for the management--I would understand if you were renegotiating JUST on an existing product, because renegotiating on a deal that's already over makes the deal drag on unnecessarily, but these people were probably working on a new game while talking about renegotiating their contract. They weren't just talking about their compensation for the game they'd already finished; they were talking about compensation for every game they'd make in the future with that publisher.

Shit is not a social construct. A human being can produce shit without the cooperation of any other human, no matter what language that human uses to describe it. Bathrooms are a social construct; we had to all agree that it's not acceptable to shit in the sink.

Games SHOULD be a solved problem. There is no good reason for us to have to reinvent the wheel over and over. There are compsci white papers that neatly solve all of the big problems games run into.

But games are not a solved problem. There are multiple overlapping reasons why.

One is that gamedevs often just don't do the research. Why would they? The deadlines loom, the milestones have to be delivered, nobody cares if it's a hacky mess right now, surely management will give us time to fix it once they realize that it's broken--but if we don't deliver anything, the publisher cuts our funding.

This overlaps with scheduling and management issues. It turns out that writing good software takes up time[1], and the problem with games in particular is that they don't make money until they're released.

You don't write games like you write business software, where the other company paying for your milestones is the company that's going to use the software; that company usually has a revenue stream even without your software, so they don't have to care as much. For a game, though, there IS no revenue stream until the game launches. Every year that a game is in development without a release is a loss, and that pisses the board of directors right the fuck off, so that means the game needs to be out ASAP.

Because of this, games are often not given enough room in the development schedule to be made correctly. There's no time for research, testing, planning, or any of the other important parts of software engineering--we have to write this code NOW, or it doesn't ship. And if you read that source I linked in the footnote, you'll know that this produces rotten software.

This is compounded by the kind of one-upsmanship that is created by such an environment--leading to a phrase I've heard from friends in other companies: "Very optimistic people who are no longer with the company made this decision". You get into a situation where people made promises to impress the publisher, claiming that they can turn out a game in an impossible timeframe, and that got them fired--but now you're stuck cleaning up the mess, and the publisher has already wasted a lot of money on the years spent thinking it wasn't a mess.

Mix in the siloing of information (because all of this shit is proprietary) and, despite all of the problems being solved on paper, nobody's solved video games.

[1]: https://jacobian.org/2022/sep/9/quality-is-systemic/

I'd argue that's part of what makes it work. You can get ten people into one meeting room (or one zoom call) and still be able to talk to each other clearly.

I mean, you can call it IP theft, I can call it wage theft. The article quotes one of the devs as saying they had "unpaid milestones", which reads an awful lot like the "major publisher" he didn't want to name for legal reasons had violated the one term that mattered: the part where they pay for the game.

The lesson to take away here, for management, is that you can't get away with everything forever. Whether you view the actions of 2015 as IP theft or just desserts, the fact remains that it wouldn't have happened if the team had A) gotten paid and B) gotten the terms they asked for. I'd be demanding a better deal, too, if my publisher mysteriously forgot to pay for a milestone.

"The workers are easily replaced" and "Their compensation is fair" are two different statements.

A website is a social construct because it can only function by the agreement of everyone involved (i.e., we all agree on how to parse HTML).

The individual site may be constructed individually (maybe) but it can only work if the society of people-who-use-the-internet all agree to follow a series of conventions about how websites work; you can't start using \<soul\> instead of \<body\> and expect everything to work as normal, because the reason the \<body\> tag is used to define the body of a page is because we needed a way to make sure people can use a webpage without having to define an entire new language for each one.

...in a lot of the cases I ran into early on, the rust compiler literally told me what to change.

Not wanting to be scammed is not gatekeeping, in the same sense that not wanting to be defrauded is not gatekeeping.

Also--you say that other gamers are happy with microtransaction-heavy games, but that begs the question: Is it because of microtransactions? Or is it because they are able to enjoy these games despite the microtransactions?

I would not be surprised if the ads are placed at the current price tier, honestly. It wouldn't technically be lying; they're delivering a cheaper tier with ads, and a more costly tier without ads, just like they said they would! It's just that "cheaper" in this case would mean "cheaper than the new higher subscription tier", not "cheaper than the previous model".

Netflix says it lost 200k subscribers--but I have to wonder, is that 200k people who were paying for a subscription, or is some percentage of that number actually people who were sharing an account, stopped watching when Netflix started threatening people who share accounts, and are now being counted as "lost subscribers" (because Netflix expected them to start a new account)?

Begging the question, what part of the Apple app store prevents a bricked phone, and why would that not be a feature of non-Apple stores?

I'm primarily concerned with the study, since A) that's the topic at hand, B) it involves technology and privacy, which I care about, and C) people keep comparing this to pentesting, just like last time, and I also care about security research.

I apologize for assuming that you were defending the study; I figured that was the topic of conversation, after all.

If there is nuance, but it does not apply to this situation, then it is worth saying that this nuance does not apply to this situation--so that I'm less likely to misinterpret what you're saying.

As I understand it, from a legal standpoint, storing it for operational purposes is equivalent to storing it for any other purpose.

Also, even if you only store the information for 24 hours--how many users are on Hackernews in a given hour? How many of them click through the top links? Certainly enough that some sites have crashed under the load, which makes me think that the number is higher than 50K. Congrats, you're now storing 50K IPs, despite having an automated system to delete them in a day.

(I don't even wanna think about the headache it'd cause if you got dragged to court over this. I don't know how many judges will understand that you delete the list every 24 hours to avoid being liable for storing it, not to get rid of evidence.)

One of the biggest issues with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is that it was never designed for a world where Siivagunner[1] exists. On a fundamental level, it was built on the assumption that everyone involved can litigate--which means that the widespread ability to edit, remix, and review things has created some unfortunate exploits and exposed serious oversights in how the DMCA functions.

[1]https://youtu.be/rEcOzjg7vBU

I am making the argument that a company that already has lawyers on retainer for this occasion is not suffering the same harm that someone who does not have a lawyer on retainer does. Similarly, someone who can't afford a lawyer at all is disproportionately likely to be harmed compared to a company that has competent legal staff.

Also, "privacy laws create victims" is--to use your own phrase--a very tortured version of what's going on here. The people affected by this study were threatened with legal action. That is what they are victims of. Regardless of what law was used as an excuse, threatening someone with frivolous legal action is as bad as threatening someone with SWATting.

> am i missing something? i don't see anything about research or studies in the original email.

That is, in fact, the entire problem. The researchers doing the study lied about who they were and where they were from (in another case, they claimed to be from France; in this case, from Germany) and did not tell anyone it was a study until after some subjects contacted lawyers.

Also the CCPA isn't supposed to apply to hobby/no-revenue sites, but one of the things that qualifies you for CCPA is having PII from 50k Cali residents, so if you log IPs in just the 'right' way and Hackernews finds your site you may end up qualifying overnight.

Not a lawyer, but I'd imagine the most useful point to make is that the researchers misrepresented their identity while sending these threats. Lying about who you are while trying to sue someone is a pretty big no-no.

As has been pointed out elsewhere: "Consent" here is the correct term. This was a study, and studies are supposed to gather consent from participants before they start (barring certain very specific examples).