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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I guess it depends on the game, extremely so. Two main factors I can think of: Whether or not the game has been picked up as an object of hate by the “anti-woke” content mill, as well as the average age of people who play the game.

    Just for kicks I skimmed the BG3 forum and indeed there’s this recent post. Apparently unwanted exposure to Gale’s gayness can be solved by not interacting with Gale, who would have thought and that’s a perfectly valid solution for OP, but some users in the thread are clearly out for blood. Not getting terribly much resonance, though.


    EDIT: Apparently OP has changed the “accepted answer” to one of the worst comments in the thread. SMH. Comments proceed to tell OP they’re confusing friendship scenes for romance ones.


    And that’s like one thread in pages upon pages of threads. People predictably talk about general gameplay stuff (The Gale thread can actually be considered a gameplay question), mechanics, bugs, the usual.

    Bonus: A thread on Musk wanting to buy Hasbro for D&D. Now there’s plenty of stuff D&D players have to say and criticise about Hasbro, them having clear language about the misogyny etc. in the first edition is not among it. Licensing terms are a thing which can get the community riled up, but the “backlash” against inclusivity is, as usual, manufactured, and from what I see the thread is mostly Musk bashing. Thinking of, Shaun recently published a video on the manufactured outrage around Stellar Blade.

    Oh, the average age thing. Yeah don’t go to the LoL forums or whatever though without checking I expect them to be full of talk about the current meta. And people unironically using “gay” as an insult in <currentyear>, presumably because they’re too young to even know their sexual orientation.


    Overall trying to portray steam like some kind of second kiwifarms falls flat on its face for a very simple reason: Even if (and I don’t think that’s the case) there would be no moderation at all, the majority of users on steam will be talking game mechanics, about bugs, because they’re there to play a game and the reason you find yourself interacting on those forums is because you have something to say, or ask, about the game. That kind of talk will always drown out the angry goblins.


  • Experts recommend strategies like increasing workforce participation, particularly among women and older adults, and improving migrant integration.

    So we’ve given up on making family and career compatible, I see. Test tubes babies it is, then.

    Migration won’t help long-term btw the last big countries (e.g. Nigeria) are going to have their demographic transition around 2050, themselves starting to shrink. Ultimately there’s no way around getting birth rates up to hovering around 2, again, and with that I don’t mean “we can’t have fewer or more people on the earth” – both is absolutely doable. The issue is the absolute havoc that too large or too small (net, that is, modulo infant mortality) birthrates have on society: Either you have a young powderkeg, or old, stagnant, gerontocracy. Social stability (as in homeostasis, not stagnation) requires the birth rate to be within a sensible band.


  • The US dollar is backed up by you have to pay your taxes in US dollar so the US economy is going to accept US dollar, thus, if you have dollars, you can buy shit in the US. In effect, thus, the US dollar is backed by the US economy.

    There’s no such mechanism for crypto coins. If you now say “well the Fed can just print money”, that’s US policy. The Euro works differently, there price stability reigns supreme, in any case the policies of both Fed and ECB are well-known and people trust that they don’t change willy-nilly because neither the US nor the EU has any interest in the fallout that would cause. That trust is in no way weaker, less of a guarantee, wrt. giving a hint at the future value of the currency as the collective faith that props up crypto coins as a unit of account.

    And gold, btw, is practically useless as a commodity. Jewelry? Literally only used for that because it’s expensive. Technical applications? Do exist, but the amount needed is negligible. The value of gold relies on the existence of a luxury market.


  • Showing the most played songs and artists is not really a difficult analysis task that does not require any machine learning.

    You want to dimension reduce to get that “people who listen to stuff like you also like to listen to” recommendation. To have an idea whom to play a new song to, you ideally want to analyse the song itself and not just people’s reaction to it and there we’re deep in the weeds of classifiers.

    Using LLMs in particular though is probably suit-driven development because when you’re trying to figure out whether a song sounds like pop or rock or classical then LLMs are, at best, overkill. Analysing song texts might warrant LLMs but I don’t think it’d gain you much. If you re-train them on music instead of language you might also get something interesting, classifying music by phrasal structure and whatnot don’t look at me I may own a guitar but am no musician. And, of course, “interesting” doesn’t necessarily mean “business case” unless you’re in the business of giving Adam Neely video ideas. “Spotify, play me all pop songs that sing ‘caught in the middle’ in the same way”… not a search that’s going to make spotify money, or anyone asked for.



  • There’s some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that’s called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people’s choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.

    In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying “there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith’s free market”, neoliberals say “there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn’t like monopolies but we do so let’s poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free”.




  • I think Europe and Ukraine would be happy with EU membership, or, failing that (because overall complicated and it’s gonna take some time) a way to extend Article 42(7) guarantees to Ukraine. Invite the UK etc. while you’re at it.

    Who should be shit-scared of that possibility is the US because it’d sideline them. Worse: It’s bound to come with “buy European” provisions (the French will insist and nobody’s going to bother opposing it harshly) and I’m not sure whether the US can afford its military-industrial complex without exports.

    So… did Trump already meet with Lockheed-Martin?




  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzSmug Viruses
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    8 days ago

    It’s a hostile instruction manual which learns, adapting itself to its surroundings, constantly re-writing and re-inventing how it interacts with the world. Which is more than can be said about most politicians. Forget about physical anatomy, for a second, and consider the species as an organism.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzSmug Viruses
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    9 days ago

    Of course it adjusts to its environment – it even uses it to replicate. Viruses are that branch of the genome which is being minimalist about its seed pods, other branches need all kinds of superfluous stuff like eyes and limbs and brains and whatnot. Complete waste of resources, having pods which can maintain independent homeostasis, what good does that for the homeostasis of the genome? Eh?



  • If you want to fix institutional racism in the US you need to fix social mobility because that’s the primary mechanism by which it gets perpetuated. For that you need educational status of the parents and their tax declarations, not skin colour. You need to stop financing schools from local taxes so primary and secondary education is as good or better in poorer areas instead of having quotas lowering standards for people who got a worse education because they live in the wrong neighbourhood. You need free tertiary education.

    Focussing on race is a convenient way to ignore actually addressing the issue and instead continue to deepen societal rifts and to breed resentment among non-racialised disenfranchised people.



  • Don’t get me wrong if they had those opinions and also posted other things, generally engaged with the community, was a part of it, I would be much more critical of a ban: It’d be shutting down conversation, as you say. But giving that kind of leeway to people who are doing, essentially, drive-by shootings effectively also shuts down conversation: People aren’t going to engage in earnest with that kind of thing, that thing being allowed would set precedence and sooner than later everyone’s on motorcycles taking strafes at each other. Can’t talk to people who aren’t willing to sit down for a beer, can’t talk to people who don’t engage in good faith, can’t talk to people who come barging in with a megaphone in hand. Paradox of tolerance, Nazi bar, and all that. It’s much less of a fickle balance than many (especially US) liberals assume.



  • Euro overtaking the dollar as reserve currency in 3, 2, 1…

    Thing is: Much of the volume of USD-denominated trade is habit and inertia, it’s a convenient unit of transfer and thus banks keep reserves of it to make transactions with. It took the US blocking a payment from a German customer to a Danish tobacco retailer for banks to switch Euro<->Kroner transactions to not go via USD (Those were Cuban cigars) as standard operating procedure for banks very much involves “don’t fix it if it’s not broken”.

    Thus: The more you stir the pot, the more people want to get away from your complications. On top of being a convenient unit of transfer the Euro is also backed by a similarly-sized economy as the dollar and on top of that much more price stable against that economy: The Fed is perfectly willing to inflate the dollar to influence e.g. employment, while the ECB is committed to price stability, rather telling member states to devalue internally if that’s what’s necessary the prices shall stay the same.