BellyPurpledGerbil

Everyone I need to talk to is in my contacts. If you're not in my contacts, my phone doesn't even ring. You go straight to voicemail.

I was fine with phone calls when I was younger. Now it's mostly spam robocalls or scammers or both. Nobody seems interested in solving those problems.

The Dead Internet conspiracy theory was written with total crackpot paranoid thinking about ruling elites, likely antisemitic undertones, and general tinfoil hat reasoning about AI. Plus generative language models were nowhere near advanced or skilled enough at the time the conspiracy was purported to be happening.

But it was accidentally prophetic in at least two ways by 2024:

1. Corporations have completely strangled online social spaces to the point that most people only visit about 1 to 3 of them, and
2. Online discourse in those social spaces has been absolutely captured and manipulated by multiple governments trying to manipulate other countries and stir them into pointless ragebait frenzies.

It wasn't due to the illuminati, the Jews, or anything weird and bigoted conspiracies of old have traditionally blamed. It was thanks to billionaires, corporate and government espionage, AI grifters, and unregulated scammer networks (digital currency counts too) jumping onto the same technology at the same time and ruining everything on the Internet in similar ways.

I use a similar example.

If I went to a restaurant and ordered a 3 meat sandwich, and they gave me a hotdog, I'd be fucking pissed. Likewise if I ordered a hotdog and they gave me a taco with solidified beef and relish, I'd be confused, and concerned that I got somebody else's weird special taco order.

Categories aren't limited only to the forms and functions, but expectations. You can redefine or consolidate terms all you like but all you're doing is causing confusion. If that's what people are after then good troll I guess.

Wait a minute. Was this sarcastic or do I get to lore dump? In case you weren't aware, Intel has been doing this shit to AMD for decades. And so has Nvidia.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna33882525

https://www.neowin.net/news/eu-fines-intel-400-million-for-blocking-amds-market-access-through-payments-to-pc-makers/

https://www-purepc-pl.translate.goog/intel-oraz-nvidia-mieli-wewnetrzna-umowe-ktora-blokowala-tworzenie-laptopow-z-amd-renoir-oraz-geforce-rtx-2070-i-wyzej?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

Like this was a 3 minute Google search adventure.

I got this kind of support from my parents nearly 20 years ago. It was absolutely lucky and I got access and care in ways others didn't. It made me feel guilty the older I got and the more trans friends I made, who didn't have anything close to what I had. I feel very sad about it. My life wasn't perfect, I still have problems, but probably way fewer than the alternative.

In my day to day life I try to make up for it by helping other trans people. I become the support that I always had. It's not as easy as it looks. Hope you're doing well and I wish for you and others reading this to find support where you can get it. I know I'm trying to pay it forward. And so will others. Look for the helpers.

I'm reusing a blade server I managed to snag from a company I worked for in 2008. It's perfect as a media server for friends and family. It is only recently degrading slightly but hey, it lasted a long time!

Point is you can use almost anything. Do your homework on compatible parts and make what you can afford

This is exactly right. Taking obviously thoughtless statements/insults seriously is a stupid move. It gives a bit more life to lies and accepts completely baseless criticisms as debatable. In debate club you might earn a lot of points. In front of a bully, you're reacting exactly how they want you to react. You're giving them the attention they want. Hitting the bully back is common sense. And that's why they're whining. The bully always cries when you fight back. Don't dish out shit if you can't take it.

Your favorite album

I don't disagree with there being tradeoffs in terms of speed, like function vs network requests. But eventually your whole monolith gets so fuckin damn big that everything else slows down.

The whole stack sits in a huge expensive VM, attached to maybe 3 or 4 large database instances, and dev changes take forever to merge in or back out.

Every time a dev wants to locally test their build, they type a command and have to wait for 15-30 minutes. Then troubleshoot any conflicts. Then run over 1000 unit tests. Then check that they didn't break coverage requirements. Then make a PR. Which triggers the whole damn process all over again except it has to redownload the docker images, reinstall dependencies, rerun 1000+ unit tests, run 1000+ integration tests, rebuild the frontend, which has to happen before running end to end UI tests, pray nothing breaks, merge to main, do it ALL OVER AGAIN FOR THE STAGING ENVIRONMENT, QA has to plan for and execute hundreds of manual tests, and we're not even at prod yet. The whole way begging for approvals from whoever gets impacted by anything from a one line code change to thousands.

When this process gets so large that any change takes hours to days, no matter how small the change is, then you're fucked. Because unfucking this once it gets too big becomes such a monstrous effort that it's equivalent to rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.

I've done this song and dance so many times. If you want your shit to be speedy on request, great, just expect literally everything else to drag down. When companies were still releasing software like once a quarter this made sense. It doesn't anymore.

Some stay dry and others feel the pain

I don't know how seriously to take this kind of discussion sometimes. I can rationalize that a person can do awful things to people in a fictional setting and it's not a commentary of who they are as a person. On the other hand I cannot escape the feeling that I am replying to a genuine sadistic monster, based on everything you just said in this post. Forget all of that. Unnecessary commentary when there's a point I want to make.

There's a crucial difference in video games vs more free-form varieties like TTRPGs: You're on The Rails. Video game RPGs are almost always on the rails. There's no real sandbox game anywhere. Like there are good attempts, but at the end of the day, any game has programmed expectations for your inputs and what it can output. Video games can't possibly fathom how deeply evil you could actually get. It would be a developmental and technological nightmare to try programming in all of your awful choices and how they could spiral the narrative. They have to do their best within the limitations of how much could possibly fit in a game. And I'm assuming the game companies also have to take into account the ratings system, and PR. Even if you could play the game any way you want, good AND bad choices, you're going to get odd looks from people if they know the game allows you to sexually abuse NPCs, or enslave people through extortion. You know what I'm getting at? The real limitation isn't the technology, even though that's already a big one. Even in virtual, completely fictional settings, being allowed to play that shit out is wholly monstrous. And I can't imagine the toll it would take on designers who would be tasked to write it.

So if you really want all of that and accept the risks, make your own CRPG where you can go all out on Evil. Being critical of developers and designers for not being willing to go as far as your twisted mind can go in a video game is a wild take. Go play in an evil TTRPG campaign if you want to get those kicks. It's way easier.

I'd say for myself it's a tit for tat situation.

If the company I hypothetically pirate from is a total prick, mistreats their employees, donates a part of the money they earned from my purchase to lobby to my government to reduce the rights of minorities, I won't give a single fuck. I may even just never touch their product out of spite.

Are they inoffensive and fairly neutral? I likely won't pirate if I have the means to buy it.

Are they basically ConcernedApe? I will follow them to the ends of the earth showering them with praise and riches. Never pirate and would actively shame those who do