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inkywatcher

33 karma · joined June 18, 2021

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inkywatcher··on Men, where have you gone? Please come back
The dashes thing is really only a tell for high schoolers and obvious illiterates –writers can and do use them. Next we need to teach GPT about interrobangs.
inkywatcher··on Make Firefox Private Again
I would very sincerely ask what places and what quality?
inkywatcher··on Make Firefox Private Again
Nor quality, unfortunately.
inkywatcher··on Are We Watching the Internet Die?
Reddit also occupies the space that otherwise might permit a more useful, benevolent internet platform. From a certain perspective, Reddit is standing in the way of an internet that better facilitates the enjoyment you describe.
inkywatcher··on Bandcamp support is faltering – maybe you should download your music now
Broken on purpose in this case, I am sure, for the same reason Spotify doesn't deal with FLAC.
inkywatcher··on BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product
BBEdit is invaluable to me and I will use it forever. That said, it has some persistent window focus bugs that spill over into finder that I dearly I wish that they would iron out. Otherwise, it is one of the most stable, reliable, and useful pieces of software that I have ever touched.
inkywatcher··on Google contractors vote to unionize in historic landslide election
Ah, so the American worker analogy remains accurate.
inkywatcher··on Microsoft Edge is leaking the sites you visit to Bing
Respectfully, I disagree. Google and Bing both deliberately pollute their own search results based on advertising and SEO. This is a user-hostile practice that they can get away with because of inertia and oligopoly. At some point, they will become so user-hostile that an alternative will become appealing.

For example, a search engine that made a good-faith effort to filter out SEO-optimized junk like listicles and slideshow "articles" would be extremely interesting to me. Bonus points for allowing me to permanently blacklist entire domains from search results.

inkywatcher··on YouTube, the jewel of the internet
You say "socialization" but I think the real word is "conformity".
inkywatcher··on Listen to Steve Huffman tell the story of how Reddit got started
While I am very ready to be critical of Reddit, including its creators, community, interface, and aesthetic, I am not personally offended that a couple jabronis posted a bunch of stuff to build up some initial momentum.
inkywatcher··on Listen to Steve Huffman tell the story of how Reddit got started
When you put it like that, I really prefer some of the precursors.
inkywatcher··on Most of my skills are now worth nothing, but 10% are worth 1000x
Those are interesting examples, in that they are both commercially successful despite conventionally poor writing. In literary circles, King is often regarded as somebody who could write well but chooses not to because it would be less lucrative. Clancy is bad enough that criticism seems unnecessary. AI could certainly write a Clancy-esque Dad Fantasy.
inkywatcher··on The world is run by people no smarter than you
Please demonstrate that it "never" works.
inkywatcher··on Overwatch 2 will require a phone number to play
In the case of Apex Legends, I think the experientially high incidence of cheaters and persistently active cheat manufacturers (as well as almost-cheats like using mouse and keyboard on consoles for superior aim assist) are both a compliment to the game and a side effect of battle royales. Larger lobbies and survival of the fittest equates to a higher likelihood of encountering the cheaters that exist. Even if less than 1% of players cheat, it is quite possible to encounter one during an evening of play. And it sometimes seems like the cheating comes in waves, where a new one will be wildly popular for a while before the team in charge of it catches on.

All that is to say, additional identifiers might be against the hacker ethos, but hopefully not the gamer ethos.

inkywatcher··on Twitter Appears to Shadowban Videos of Italy’s First Female Incoming PM Meloni
Ask a gay person in Orban's Hungary what respecting the will of the voters is like.
inkywatcher··on The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web
I find it interesting that your way of proving anti-Zionist sentiment is to demonstrate that there are quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia. That does not demonstrate your thesis of anti-Israeli bias. Plenty of people who at least claim to be leftists are profuse in their support of Israel.

Neither should it surprise that a scholarly endeavor for bored young people on the internet tends to tilt leftward: there is a big education differential between political poles, and a strong demographic tilt based on age. To put it in a nutshell: if boomers spent their time writing citations instead of pounding out all-caps screeds about ivermectin in the comments sections of local newspapers, there would be a more robust wikipedia contingent.

inkywatcher··on Please don’t let anyone Americanise it (1992)
> surely

Would you mind substantiating this?

inkywatcher··on Sex workers can't order DoorDash because of cross-platform surveillance
The premise that reading someone else's thought would be horrifying to the point where you would stop loving or respecting them dates at least to Young Goodman Brown, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Not very long / worth a read.
inkywatcher··on The welfare effects of eviction policies
First, density is obviously cheaper, and many people already begrudge homeless people sleeping outside even though that doesn't cost anything. Second, even if a person is addicted to drugs, they still need a place to live. So evicting them doesn't actually solve anything except your business risk. Third, NIMBYism is almost omnipotent as a political force in most parts of the US worth living in. You aren't going to convince people to let poor people or people with problems live near them. They will fight like hell to stop it, and many will be wealthy or influential.
inkywatcher··on What 3°C of global warming looks like
No amount of living parsimoniously or adopting neoprimitivism will address the pollution caused by others who are not doing the same. Individual actors do not move this dial. No amount of me eschewing jet travel will reduce carbon emissions from the Pentagon or change the supply chains incentivize coal power in developing economies.
inkywatcher··on What 3°C of global warming looks like
I think the lack of uniformity is a big part of many peoples' climate skepticism. Certainly it is a talking point. It seems like many people have too little imagination to comprehend climate science, much less the appetite to learn something inconvenient.
inkywatcher··on What 3°C of global warming looks like
You are confused why people do not want to discuss pulling levers attached to arguably the most complex system of which we are aware? Especially if it is going to be the same caliber of person pulling those levers as allowed it to happen in the first place?
inkywatcher··on What 3°C of global warming looks like
What do you suppose will happen when hundreds of millions of people find that their local geography no longer supports human habitation? They will be welcomed into neighboring regions with open arms?
inkywatcher··on What 3°C of global warming looks like
Not every historical system has privatized profits with socialized costs. With regards to climate change, it is a vitally important blind spot.
inkywatcher··on What 3°C of global warming looks like
It is absolutely taken as a given, especially in discussions involving people who might make money from such projects.
inkywatcher··on Amazon’s HR Failures
Agreed. It's more like 90%.