SkoomaDentist
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
3d ago
Truly, the youth of today are uncivilized barbarians.
SkoomaDentist
3d ago
Do people even bother calling rats invasive?
They do on islands where they are an invasive species destroying the local ecosystem, such as in New Zealand.
SkoomaDentist
3d ago
How would I change the button colors?
I can never see if I’ve pressed the downvote button for a comment but have no such issue with the upvote button. I assume it’s because someone assigned stupid color to it.
SkoomaDentist
4d ago
With games it’s tricky because the set of your players who are mastery-oriented are going to overlap a lot with the set of loyal fans who set the culture and promote your brand, so you can’t suppress them and you will end up being disproportionately affected by their vision whether you like it or not.
Not to mention that quite often such players infest even non-gaming forums (including The Motte!) and viciously attack anyone who suggests that the non-competitive version of the game (usually the single player campaign) should not be held to the same artificial limitations put there for the competitive players (eg. making RTSes depend heavily on actions per minute because the player AI has been intentionally left braindead).
Let’s just say that I used to work as a developer for a large German company. Note past tense.
For the first year I could only install new software or drivers by making an official request and having the Indian IT support do it via remote access. You can imagine how well this worked for embedded systems development where you regularly need to use some new piece of external hardware or random IC manufacturer’s legacy software tool.
The best part? All of the daily work could have been done on a rando, burner laptop as email, team chat, source repositories and build system were all in external cloud services. Literally the only things I actually needed intranet access was to put my hours into the SAP system once per month.
SkoomaDentist
5d ago
Not if you want to keep highly skilled researchers and programmers working for you as it would mean locking down the systems so hard that it makes daily work a chore and the sorts of people you need for that level of work hate working under such restrictions.
SkoomaDentist
6d ago
OTOH, it’s established that collections of data (such as phonebooks) can be copyrighted. None of the individual data items are under copyright, but the collection itself is.
SkoomaDentist
7d ago
Now let’s not be hasty. Surely you have some less evil alternatives such as a high ranking Scientology cult operative, North Korean prison camp guard or perhaps a mass murderer?
I actually tried to find which mod made the announcement back when the forum was on reddit but couldn’t. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Zorba tho (which was my point).
TrannyPornO was one of the best and most interessting contributors The Motte ever had. He also had a tendency to sometimes use rather colorful language. The mods had a policy of escalating bans based on previous bans and their own internal notes and an overactive mod or two who give such notes very easily. This meant that unless you toed the imaginary line of that specific mod, you were more or less guaranteed to end up on the mods’ shitlist with every previous ban being used to justify you getting even deeper on that list.
Thus my suggestion that the most active mods not be allowed to moderate a small specific subset of users.
SkoomaDentist
11d ago
Us mods take such claims seriously. We would appreciate examples, and if it became clear that we were egregiously biased, we would seek to correct ourselves.
I've long thought that one simple additional mod rule would improve the moderation, and particularly complaints about moderation here significantly: The most user visibly active mod or two at the time (say for the last month or two) doesn't get to make or participate in any decisions about good but controversial contributors. Zorba banning the legendary TrannyPorno? Regrettable but kosher. Someone like HLynka doing the same? Not kosher (I hope I recall who was the most active mod at the time correctly).
From ordinary user perspective there seems to always be one or two mods who are way too trigger happy in non-obvious janitorial duties. This rule would IMO help quite a bit against that.
SkoomaDentist
11d ago
We've had the "the opinions expressed here are so repugnant, that I should not be expected to be civil" argument here before. Sorry, this isn't that kind of place, if that's what you want 4chan and KiwiFarms are still open.
I mean, you don't even have to be all that polite here and be ok as far as the moderation goes. The bar is really quite low.
SkoomaDentist
13d ago
I'm actually surprised at how effectively Stross keeps his leftist ideology from ruining the books entirely. It does make it through sometimes but generally can be ignored.
Just be sure to never ever visit his blog. That's woke leftist central to the power of one million.
SkoomaDentist
13d ago
For me effective suspension of disbelief comes down to whether or not the there's internal consistency. It's not about how outlandish or even stupid-on-its-face the impossible element is, it's whether or not the story acts as though it believes in that impossible element. As soon as the story stops believing its own impossibility, then how am I supposed to believe in it?
I keep being amazed by how few authors grasp this. A story should be internally consistent and stick to how things work in the real world except where explicitly noted in the text, as clearly (and largely unambiguously) established in the genre conventions or where the differences are gradually hinted at and revealed.
SkoomaDentist
13d ago
I’d expect a significant portion of even Mottetizens to scream bloody murder if European style education system was implemented as that would also mean getting rid of their precious liberal arts education system in universities.
SkoomaDentist
15d ago
So why did they build it? Is it just a stepping stone to the hydrogen bomb?
The first stage of a hydrogen bomb is basically an implosion type fission bomb. They may also be aiming for a boosted fission weapon to get into high tens / low hundreds of kilotons range.
SkoomaDentist
18d ago
The facts it got objectively wrong aren't accepted as objectively wrong by anyone except online far-right autists.
Lol, whut?
You might want to read what /r/askHistorians thinks of Guns, Germs & Steel and if you think that subreddit is full of ”online far-right autists” I suggest you check in for psychiatric evaluation for massive delusions.
SkoomaDentist
24d ago
SkoomaDentist
26d ago
Small changes in daily lived experiences can have an outsized impact. The crime rate can hardly budge on paper, but things that might poll as "crime" can increase exponentially in your daily life.
A sort of opposite example has been the homicide and violent crime rate in Finland up to the late 2000s or so. It used to be quite high officially. The country was also very safe in practise, at least as long as you weren’t a middle aged jobless alcoholic and didn’t start arguments at the hot dog stand queue after bars closed. There used to be a common joke that a typical Finnish murder was an alcoholic drinking at the cottage with his best buddy, getting into an argument, stabbing them with a knife and then calling the cops himself the next morning with no recollection of what happened.
Alas, then immigration and gangs happened and things aren’t as rosy anymore.
SkoomaDentist
27d ago
People in Europe have no problem towing their boats and trailers with regular cars.
Summer days 18-22 degrees and occasional clouds. Nights 10-15 with maybe light rain. Best is when there are only patchy very high clouds so the sun lights them up through the (very short) midsummer night.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
30 degrees is heat wave where the elderly and sick start dying. 35 is close to record temperature (and would be a new record if it happened in June or August). Most apartments don’t have real air conditioning.
Yeah, I live in Finland.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Now that I think about it, the 2 party system seems to have lot to do with it
I’m not so sure about that. Margaret Thatcher was known as the Iron Lady but I don’t recall her being particularly angry.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Just Midsummer 2025.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
I'd rather cut my arm off than touch VSCode.
Back in the reddit times, the only truly consistent thing was that a large majority of The Motte user base was anti-woke.
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