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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • “Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.

    The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.

    They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.

    The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.





  • Part of the issue is the push by many left-wing voters to get actually progressive politics on the table after years of alternating between regressives and complacent centrists* that prefer making small concessions to the right over big steps to the left. They don’t want another presidency marked by lukewarm promises kept poorly. They’re tallying up all the ways in which Harris still isn’t as good as she ough to be.

    For Trumpers, he is good enough. He is everything they want: A public role model enabling them to be an absolutely shameless asshat.

    The complexity arises when people advocate voting for a third party instead. By and large, no third party has the traction to beat the Republicans. You’d need to get the entire Dem voterbase and then some. If that fails, you’ve split the non-Rep voterbase and the enabling asshat gets the plurality. On the other hand, there’s a risk that leaning too far left in the attempt to keep the progressive voters may lose the centrist* voters, which is a gamble whether that will end up a net positive. Harris has a tough job: walking a political tightrope, particularly if it’s consistently being tugged at by people.

    And there are good reasons to tug on that rope. You’ll find some in these comments: Settling for “Good enough” doesn’t help getting actual change. For the ultra-rich, on the other hand, progressive policies are a detriment, so they’ll want to tug it the other way. The left doesn’t want to cede ground and keeps pulling. The centrists* that don’t like Trump but also fear dramatic change pull her to the other side again. The “centrists”** pull just to see her fall.

    And that’s exciting! That’s an actual conflict of ideologies! That’s her having to work for her voters’ approval! You’ll see the complaints flying left and right, see her try to keep an ever-shifting balance, see drama and tension! People love drama and tension. Corporate media loves drama and tension because it gets attention, clicks, revenue, all that. “Assholes still support Asshole” just isn’t as interesting as “<prominent person> criticises Kamala for <policy>, calls her <incomplete quote>”.

    Also, splitting the Dem voterbase serves the corporate executives and shareholders that want the right-wing tax breaks and erosion of worker protections because it makes them even richer. That’s probably not a coincidence.


    *Centrist as in “I don’t want things to radically change”, not as in “I think both parties are equally bad, so I’ll sow dissent in the Dem voterbase, pretend that I’m not helping Trump with that and get to feel superior to both”.

    ** The latter group of the above footnote. It doesn’t really matter whether they’re intentional agents of disunity or idealists that care more about voting with their heart than the actual outcome. The result is the same: At best, they’ve achieved nothing. At worst, they’ve contributed to Trump’s victory.








  • At the point he’s talking to me, it’s too late for stealth. Besides “Mace to the Face” has a much more personal touch. Alternatively, stab him with a dagger and yell “sic semper arrogantibus!”

    For those that don’t know: The assassination of Julius Caesar was done with daggers and accompanied by the declaration “Sic semper tyrannis”, meaning “Such [will] always [happen to] tyrants”. I’ve just replaced tyrannus with arrogans, which unsurprisingly is the ancestor for the modern “arrogant”.


    It should be noted that “tyrants” didn’t quite share our contemporary definition and simply referred to autocratic rulers that had come to that power through non-constitutional means, and had no inherent valuation. A general staging a coup and usurping control could be a “good” tyrant if they were popular.

    The Roman conspirators’ concern wasn’t necessarily with Caesar being a cruel warmonger, but with him twisting a tool designed for a short, crisis-time intervention to effectively supplant the Senate’s and the ruling elites’ control. The Republic was a useful system for those wealthy enough to afford entering a political career, so one of them holding all the power was understandably unpalatable.





  • Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that’s one of those cases where you either add support yourself (provided you have the time, know-how - which most already don’t - and commitment) or wait until hopefully someone else does. Or - like me - you curse and go back to X11 until something gives you enouhh confidence to try Wayland again. I think I read somewhere on this platform that there will be (or was?) some Nvidia driver update that should help with Wayland support, but I haven’t looked into it.

    I don’t have much experience with laptop hardware. I did have one elderly laptop running Ubuntu, though it probably would have been served better with something more lightweight (I just didn’t know much about anything at the time). But that wasn’t doing anything intensive, just some Uni exercises. I think a simple neural network was the most challenging thing it ever had to handle.