Reddit would become just another instance with no API control

Being that large of an instance gives a lot of api control all by itself. Theoretically Chrome is just another browser and member of WHATWG. in practice, if they implement something it immediately becomes a de facto standard. Reddit would be the same.

I wouldn’t bet on Huffman’s exit doing anything of consequence either. Reddit is now under the control of investors who want a return. One way or another, monetisation of users will increase.

All well and good, but the term dictatorship here still refers to a situation where the state apparatus has complete control over the means of production, in other words a total centralisation of power. Indeed in Marxism-Leninism the dictatorship takes the form of a vanguard party forming a single party state. Whichever way you look at it, practical power resides with a very small group of individuals.

The contrast with the eventual stateless communist society, in which power would be completely decentralised, is quite striking. It’s not quite clear to me how Marxist-Leninist theory envisioned the transition from one to the other, although it seems to me there was a general feeling that central economic planning and industrialization would fairly quickly lead to the end of scarcity altogether, which in hindsight seems… very optimistic.

If you ask me, the ideals of communism mostly died around the same time as Lenin. Pretty much all communist states that have existed (and currently exist) are mainly interested in maintaining their own power structures rather than actually working their way towards the idealised communist society. Which pretty much just makes them dictatorships in the classical sense.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

One of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism is that a dictatorship is required to guide the proletariat to communist society (which would be completely stateless). So the dissonance is inherent in Leninist dogma 🤷

Might be talking about the United States specifically. IIRC the constitution denies individual states the right to mint coin or issue bills of credit, that is a prerogative of the federal government.

Come on. The way humans behave in groups is certainly part of human nature. And when we’re talking about solving problems of a society, it is the most relevant part.

What I’m hearing you say is, we can solve our own problems, we just need human nature to be different. Which, well… Good luck.

It really is as simple as blending rolled oats and water in a 1:4-ish ratio for 30 seconds or so, and straining the result twice. Adding sugar is optional. It stores pretty well in the fridge, maybe up to 5 days. Trust your nose!

Personally I don’t make it very often, as my main use for milk is in cappuccino, and plain oat milk doesn’t steam very well. The barista editions you can buy have some added extras (fat, sugar, proteins, stabilisers) to improve the characteristics for steaming.

I totally understand the convenience factor of store-bought too. If you don’t have a blender on standby it’s a bit of a hassle. And the store bought stuff is shelf-stable for weeks when sealed.

There’s a couple reasons behind this:

• Economies of scale. Oatmilk is not nearly as big of a market and therefore tends to be more expensive per gallon
• Dairy subsidies. Dairy farmers can be pretty heavily subsidized, depending on the country, making the milk artificially cheap
• Marketing. Oatmilk is mostly consumed by upper middle class (sub)urban folks who have enough disposable income to worry about things like animal welfare and the environment, and thus are willing to pay a premium for eco-friendly products. Companies know this so a lot of oatmilk is positioned and priced as a premium product.

In a way it’s sort of disgusting that capitalism is exploiting your desire to save the planet for extra profits, however that’s how it is generally designed to operate: nothing happens unless there is a profit to be made from it.

They know perfectly well, what’s going on, they just have different priotities. It so happens the state of Israel is important to advance US geopolitical interests in the region. And so that’s that.

Written on 1 April 1998. definitely a joke, though it does work.

I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think that excuses anything. If you bought a hard copy with the understanding that a digital copy came with the purchase and now they’re taking away the digital copy, that’s still a Darth Vader “I’m altering the deal” type move.

Often, licence agreements stipulate that they are not transferable and thus you have contractually agreed not to resell them. To what extent this is enforceable is… contentious. Different courts have struggled with the topic and have ruled both directions on the issue.

Copyright law as written was not designed for immaterial goods in any way, and the DMCA has done little to improve that. So effectively the judicial branch is in limbo. Corporate America is content to leave the confusion as is. They can just adopt an interpretation of the law that is maximally beneficial to them, and consumers generally don’t have the resources to challenge that interpretation.

at some point some proto-chicken ancestor laid an egg that was different enough genetically that it counts as a chicken. In other words, a non-chicken laid a chicken egg

This is incorrect. If I take an ostrich egg, empty it out through a small hole, then put a chicken fetus inside, it does not suddenly become a chicken egg. We must therefore conclude that “chicken egg” can only reasonably be defined as an egg laid by a chicken.

The proto-chicken ancestor can never lay a chicken egg, it can at most lay a proto-chicken egg which by some mutation contains a chicken. Therefore the chicken came first.

Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e are much faster to type than home/end and do the same thing (assuming a standard readline-enabled command line).

All the keys in the cluster above the arrow keys are really too hard to reach to be of real practical use, IMO. Actually that includes arrow keys as well. Just too far from home row.

Shin Ramyun black is a superior instant noodle IMO. Though personally I really like Samyang buldak hot chicken noodle.

I like to add a soft boiled egg and some sliced spring onion.

This is called a tray bake, and it’s great. I recommend chucking some (chopped) vegetables in with it: tomatoes on the vine, carrots, broccoli, asparagus, Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, onion, garlic… Limitless possibilities.

You can also do this with salmon (gotta be a bit more careful with timing on that). Or bacon. Or do sweet potato, or pumpkin.

The number varies a little bit (I’ve seen estimates 600-1200 kWh) but this is well within an order of magnitude of being correct. It’s the nature of the competitive mining network and the proof of work system: if you can spend more computing power (i.e. energy) than everyone else there are lucrative mining rewards to be had. At the same time adding more computing power to the network doesn’t add more transaction processing power, because mining difficulty is constantly adjusted to keep the speed more or less constant.

This naturally leads to exorbitant power consumption per transaction. Note that most of this power is not being purchased at EU exchange prices (mining naturally moves to where electricity can be had for cheap to maximize profits).

Mac users, and actually most laptop users, don’t give a shit about the things you mention. They buy it, use it for some 2-5 years, then sell it and get a new model. Upgrading hardware is way too complicated for most people. They don’t know or care what a BIOS is. It comes with the OS installed and that’s the only thing they would ever want. Turn it on, use Safari, outlook, and office 365, maybe some tool like Photoshop/Ableton/etc, that’s it.

I mean iPhones are the same right? They lock down everything so it’s idiot proof and they control the environment exactly so they can maximise the smoothness of the experience.

It’s not that deep. Here’s the two main critiques leveled towards the game in the article.

• you don’t always know the consequences of your actions, and they’re not always predictable: a seemingly sensible choice sometimes ends badly, and a seemingly dumb choice could get you a reward
• you can load a save and redo your things whenever you want, i.e. save-scum

These are both somewhat obvious just from the structure of the game. Ultimately the conclusion the author is shooting for is that this makes Baldur’s Gate 3 a bad game but a good piece of interactive fiction.

The author uses the mechanics of chess often as sort of an example of the pinnacle of game design which to me is telling. Video Games are much broader than that. Insisting that people should not call the thing you don’t like a game but instead “interactive fiction” is pedantry at best, and gatekeeping at worst.

Sure, if you view the game through the lens of chess you will come away with these flaws. But for example, if you always knew the consequences of every choice the narrative tension would be destroyed. Of course chess has no such concern, so if we’re looking at games through that lens then narrative tension is of no value. Ultimately I think this is just a very narrow viewpoint of what games should be.

I think there’s a group of people who are just going to avoid quality completely and have entire factories running at normal quality only. Kinda similar to how some people don’t really do nuclear.

If you don’t like the concept of going into space though maybe this expansion is not for you. I think the base game will get the bot upgrades for free anyways.