Templexious
Stuck in time
User ID: 2308
Templexious
10d ago
My translation:
"We were just offered amazing tax incentives in Texas, and the fact checkers were really expensive. We really didn't want to decrease profit margins as user interaction on our website declines, and also please do not notice how we attempted to fill the userbase with fake ai users just a week ago. We think conservative users are particularly gullible to this scam"
You are not sufficiently blackpilled if you go to bat for Zuckerberg, of all people.
Templexious
14d ago
It's unfortunate that it doesn't. With the vast number of smaller tech companies, one would think a few would hit "defect" and do it, and gain even more long term employees.
Templexious
14d ago
The even crazier thing here is you often don't need huge wage bumps. In my experience, even a 10-15% raise is enough to keep people and keep them happy.
Job hopping brings with it a lot of unknowns, and most people would rather stay where they are comfortable, it's surprising companies don't take advantage of this. Give these persons a gesture of a wage increase and they will stay longer and be more picky in their hops.
Templexious
20d ago
I struggle to believe that bringing those into America is necessary to moving humanity forward, but I am an American who still believes in nativist superiority.
Templexious
21d ago
I am confused about the entire H1B debate.
Are there reasons Musk cannot just pursue cheap Indian labor on Indian soil? Software can be sent from India to USA without restriction, so what is the benefit of increasing H1B for him or any other tech company located in the US?
Templexious
22d ago
Under the assumption the h1b visa program actually does that, go for it.
Templexious
26d ago
Without waxing at length: Mario 64 (n64 and DS), Sunshine, the original NES and gameboy games, Super Mario World, A smidgen of the Paper Mario series (they didn't really catch my attention so never bothered completing them) and parts of the first Mario Galaxy, again not to completion. It's difficult to analyze exactly what was wrong with the Mario Galaxy games, but I suspect it had to do with the controls not being up to par for my tastes.
(Admittedly, the true fair comparison is Odyssey vs 64 vs Sunshine) Nintendo perfected the art of the dynamic difficulty curve without any actual dynamic difficulty. The difficulty is entirely driven by the player's desire for completion and challenge. They litter vastly more moons onto the levels than needed to progress, and the number is so high that 100% completion is an actual badge of honor and difficulty, but even just getting to the dark side of the moon is still an accomplishment. The difficulty curve has entirely to do with "I think I could get there..." and not arbitrary spikes midway through story progression.
Sunshine and Mario 64 both struggled not just with arbitrary and surprising difficulty spikes, but also slow gameplay and slow progression in comparison. That is to say nothing of the better precision of the pro and gamecube controller over either the n64 or the DS mario 64. The amazing thing about the mario games is in my more advanced age, I find myself unwilling to do collectathons and annoying puzzles- For example, dropping out of both breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom because they were tedious, but somehow, 3D Mario games have always managed to keep me playing longer.
No game isn't without its flaws, however: some things that are tedious about the moons are finding where some of them are, or the conditions for getting them to show. Luckily, obtuse moons can safely be ignored in favor of the more fun ones, and often while completing the others, the solution for a previous puzzle will reveal itself.
Templexious
27d ago
Been playing Mario Oddyssey. Took about two weeks between real life and and casually poking around. Oddyssey is the most entertaining Mario game in existence, and it perfectly strikes that balance between rewarding skill and being accessible.
Templexious
1mo ago
Please, do do a full write-up on why they are not, in fact, intelligence ops, and try and change my mind.
I'd much rather be reading about the netanyahu trials and discussing israeli due process, however.
Templexious
1mo ago
It was a fragment of a comment that I genuinely didn't intend to post.
Templexious
1mo ago
They're pretty clearly just regular drone exercises by the American intelligence corps. Not entirely sure what the purpose of the operations are.
It is a useful distraction from other things that would likely be in the overton window, though.
Templexious
1mo ago
Is there really a convincing utilitarian argument here that health insurance ceos maximizing shareholder value is a net positive?
I can think of much stronger arguments against vigilanteism targeting ceos than bringing up the maxim that ceos are more valuable than plebeians.
Namely, glorifying this guy invites the more lazy ones to act, and a single other targeted ceo will be used to justify additional civilian-focused surveillance.
Templexious
1mo ago
Current sentiment online seems to be positive- Kurds and Christians seem generally pleased with the current shakeup, reports of minor rapport-building.
At this point, it seems to be a waiting game.
Templexious
1mo ago
Sadly, selling out Americans and the working class has been a pasttime of the oligarchy for the last 60 years, agreed.
Hopefully tariffs will begin to reverse the trend, but we will see!
Templexious
1mo ago
If your reality predicts collapsism stemming from the Hunter Biden Pardon, go for it, it is your reality, and a useful rhetorical weapon.
Templexious
1mo ago
As i said, mostly noise.
Templexious
1mo ago
The uproar about Hunter Biden always felt farcical. From Clinton's emails to Mar a lago documents.
Temporary talking points and weapons that you're supposed to look down on for the enemy but the other way when it's your team.
Typical political shitflinging. It means nothing, was noise, is noise, and will continue to be noise. Useful for filling the air and giving the playmakers background latitude, however.
"Anti-woke" as criteria is the trouble.
The main game series we can consider "explicitly" anti-woke is the Postal series, and that devolved into cynical, low-complexity slop immediately. If the criteria of "anti-woke" was clearer, it would be easier to find a game that fits.
2016 Doom's main antagonist is a lesbianesque woman, and only the Doomguy can stop her, and Eternal even makes a few digs at hr wokeness with lines akin to "we like to think of the demons destroying earth as mortally challenged".
Relaxing it to 'games conservative white males can enjoy without feeling attacked for existing' widens those horizons dramatically.
Templexious
1mo ago
Do you consider Slay the Spire to be woke? Elden Ring? Bloodborne? Mario? Pokemon? The Persona series?
Where is the line drawn?
Templexious
1mo ago
It's a recent move, and the Left's grift is still there, however, they've started to tone things down in the advent of the ascending accelerationists. Granted, sites like Salon and NewRepublic seem to exist to prove the strawmen visions of the Democrats correct to a degree that feels deranged, even if one were to find the American Russophiles and Sinophiles unpalatable.
Templexious
1mo ago
How many headlines showed up, pointing to random studies, calling right wingers dumb or conspiracy-prone?
How many left figures show up now and imply that the left rejects grifters and grift in a way that the right does not? Perhaps this point is worth its own high-level post.
Templexious
1mo ago
Social media is an interesting case-study in "This is a thing everyone knows is bad, its structures are bad, and yet we do it anyway". A perfect example of a coordination problem, where due to competing interests no one actually exits the game, because there's just too much social consequence to exiting.
While most readers of my comment would assume I ascribe the detachment from reality that X is to Elon, it's not entirely true. Having watched Twitter's degradation from the early days, it was a blue-coded firehose of shit that went from being able to traverse in a sensible way to randomly interspersing bullshit regardless of how recent it is, to get you to click and spend more time on it.
So yeah, your ability to stay away from Twitter/X is to be lauded, and I make no excuse for my own bad social media habits, even if they amount mostly to browsing various hobby groups.
Templexious
1mo ago
The Instagram algorithm and general Zucksphere of platforms don't really appeal. The ideal platform is one which enables and promotes complexity. Either by promoting thinkers and posters of complexity or simply bruteforcing complexity by making the feed truly ideologically-diverse.
An intractable problem, but I'd at the very least like to avoid platforms that cave to foreign interests
Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become, I decided to visit Bluesky. Nothing serious- just a hope that the algorithm would be more curated toward centrism in a way that would prove refreshing compared to the assault on reality that X has become.
Agree with Hanania on the topic of not giving up on existing institutions, and that it is increasingly impossible to deny that X is deleterious to being anchored to earth, and wondering if perhaps Bluesky would be better?
Think again, motherfucker! For, immediately, on the front page (no account) you are assaulted with the culture war and the assumption that you've not just picked a side, but you've picked the woke side. Instead of re-anchoring and toning it down, the social media justice warriors are still out in force.
Within 10 posts, I counted 3 about trans issues, 2 about billionaires, one about gaetz, and another about hegseth. (Gabbard remains unimpeachable, it seems)
It took a bit of scrolling before actual breaks, like discussion of Disney soundtracks, or nasa space pictures, started to appear. If bluesky is to be the twitter alternative, then retreating entirely from internet social spaces is the likely path forward for those that don't wish to be swept up in the torrent.
In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.
The more I read of Hanania over time, the more respect I lose.
His opinions are all over the map and impossible to pin down. He's right about the gribblers and maga conservatives being and embracing stupidity, of course. But pinning himself in the neoliberal camp as a kind of anti-maga race realist zionist(?) is getting old fast.
More specifically, it's the smug eternal dunking that's been getting insufferable
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