cygon

Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you're even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

I liked that about the comic.

Our society has adopted this expectation that once a relationship has turned into love, it must remain that, and if its not eternal soul mates in total devotion, it's not true love. You're not allowed to dial it down, take a break from it or return to being friends, or it's a "failed" relationship.

The message of the comic subverts this, showing that without such baggage, you could just change the relationship to something else and still be happy.

Instead, we assume from the beginning that the relationship is forever, throw our households together, and when the point would be right to return to normal friendship, we force ourselves to stick close until we can't stand each other anymore.

I liked agile as it was practiced in the "Extreme Programming" days.

• Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.

• Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.

• Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.

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But it's just a corporate buzzword now. "We're agile" often enough means "we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow" or "we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers."

Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the "project owner") are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.

Maybe we need a new term or an "agility index" to separate the cases of "incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning" from the cases of "project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team." :)

I assume this is about the physical connections.

It could be for monitoring (even with unbroken encryption, the routing information and time/server correlation can shed light on social media influence campaigns or where VPN beachheads are located). This information could probably be gathered with ISP cooperation, too, but private business and Russian money can be a problematic mix.

It could also be preparations to isolate Russia from the internet when/if their war expands into Europe. Russia has done the reverse already in 2019, BBC: Russia 'successfully tests' its unplugged internet, probably either to stop Russian people from getting news outside of government-controlled media if the tide turns against Putin or to fend off the possibility of Western countries turning the tables and running disinformation campaigns inside Russia.

Incomplete map of internet crossover points to Russia (sorry, couldn't find a better one, it had low resolution and I upscaled it):

Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I've read that people used to say things like "I'm not rich enough to vote Republican" or children shouting "last one in the house is a dirty Republican"). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick's "2010: The Year we Make Contact" (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a "hate object" worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of "proof" online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the "hate object" over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, ...)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for "anti-conservative t-shirts" (if it's too tiny, try it yourself - they're all anti-liberal):

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there's no tomorrow. They're installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

• Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: "Reds" welcome, "Blues" not, "Anti-Blue Propaganda" on public view screens)
• Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone's lives completely
• Claims current capitalism is only bad because it's "woke capitalism" which he claims the "ruling class" is pushing
• Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

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In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

Ich, Anfang des letzten Paragraphen: Wow, Respekt, obwohl Axel Springer sieht der Mann das Problem, politische Parteien und Gegner können durch KI die sozialen Medien in ungeahntem Maße beeinflussen, unermüdliche Troll-Armeen die gnadenlos jede ungewünsche Ansicht automatisiert totdiskutieren.

Ich,Ende des letzten Paragraphen: Oh... ... ...er denkt dass die KI-Copyright-Thematik die Regierungen dazu zwingen wird, noch üblere Urheberrechts-Daumenschrauben einzuführen und daß er dann wieder Geld von Verlinkungen und Suchmaschinen einklagen kann.

That was my impression as well. Everyone you meet seems to be some frontier redneck, either mining, farming or hunting outlaws. It could be a serviceable backdrop if you were just passing through, chasing the action, but somehow, most of the quests and plot feel like a chore in slow motion.

I wasn't trying to throw shade on the subgroup that does act in the face of climate change, it's just my impression that they're intentionally guided down paths where they fight their fellow citizens and burn themselves out instead of achieving something.

• For example (depending on the distance of your workplace), biking is certainly less convenient in that it takes more free time out of your day, requires you to bother with rain clothes, proper winter clothes, a place to store your bike while you work (which is surprisingly harder than parking a honking car) and more.

• Buying sustainable meat or eggs means they're more expensive and in noodles, pizza or cheese, it becomes either impossible or reduces your choice to one or two products which will usually be marketed as super premium. Meat industry spokesmen: "we're just giving people what they want, if they want sustainable, they need to vote with their wallets."

• Avoiding plastic packaging also carries extra effort. You need to locate a store that offers bring-your-own-container beans, rice, oats and so on, which is nigh impossible in some places and requires visiting an additional market with a price premium in others.

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I'm not trying to make a case for "oh, I can't do it because it inconveniences me, someone else fix it please," I'm observing that those of us that do care enough are (and have been for decades) too few to reach critical mass. For example, we won't fix the micro plastics in our oceans and food chain problem by calling for "personal responsibility" and sputtering on in that mode for the next 30 to 50 years (like it happened with fossil fuels).

Or, similarly, the entire recycling system is largely busywork for eco conscious people, considering that, still, >90% of trash ends up in landfills, burned or dumped. That is the point where I believe regulation with teeth needs to be established and where instead calling for "personal responsibility" is merely a diversion to tire out people willing to act while everything stays the same.

A point I really think deserves awareness as well:

6. Personal responsibility: It StARts wITh yOu!

Another trick to fend off regulation. Companies rail against regulation, saying that the options are already out there and that now it's the consumer's choice, i.e. as an individual, spend extra time when shopping to find greener products, pay more and try to get others to do the same.

You are now disadvantaged (higher costs, more effort, time spent evangelizing) and tiring yourself out, seeing no progress around you. Others may even perceive your advocacy for less convenient life choices as droning and obnoxious, which is a view gladly pushed behind the scenes by the industry trying to resist regulation.

See Coca Cola's "Anti-Litterbug" gambit (they funded "keep the environment clean" campaigns to resist bottle deposits), or how Prius drivers (an early electric hybrid vehicle) were depicted as holier-than-thou types, a cult, arrogant and elitist (I believe this even found its way into a few South Park episodes).

If, instead, regulators brought the hammer down from the beginning - like they did with Asbestos and CFC - products meeting the new guidelines would automatically become mainstream and cheap. Of course, it would also cut into the profits of established brands and potentially even shake up their power structures (as niche brands already meeting the new guidelines might make gains while big companies struggle to adapt their large production/supply structures).

It did change on thing for me: it made me drop support for Oculus in my game dev project.

I still own an Oculus DevKit 2. But after wildly succeeding with his Kickstarter, the founder has done nothing but jerk moves. First he silently dropped Linux support, then he funded a pro-Trump troll army on Reddit and finally he sold his entire VR company to Facebook/Meta, which then did its own jerk move by rendering everyone's hardware useless if they didn't sign up to Facebook/Meta. My Oculus account was forcefully obliterated just a week ago.

What a complete nosedive that was.

They had the nicer tech (Oculus uses infrared LEDs around the headset that are filmed by special cameras to track your orientation, i.e. it's steady state -- HTC Vive / Valve Index have light-sensing diodes on the headset itself and their lighthouses swipe light curtains horizontally and vertically through the room, with an annoying whining noise and all the wear & tear from constantly rotating parts), for a while, Meta even had John Carmack polishing the system.

I still hope VR will not completely die. Half Life: Alyx was fun, some archery, zombie shooting and climbing games were highly enjoyable and I could well imagine getting into sculpting / 3D modelling that way if only the tools were better.

But if, as the HTC exec in the article says, Meta has defined the "market perception of what this technology should cost" (and they're producing at a loss, too), then Meta has walled off most of the VR market to Facebook boomers (sorry, Meta boomers) and is hogging the more robust tracking tech for itself, too.

Maybe at some point, his best buddy will decide that he's more useful as a Martyr, rather than having him slowly drag down his base as he falls. I can imagine some good headlines already "Orange guy murdered by secret cabal assassins. have Antifa Super-Soldiers returned?" 🙃