Moriarty would use Arch. He definitely has an “I use Arch btw” vibe around him.

*Night owl munches on a mouse while looking at meme in confusion

Yeah but it looks like this includes support for organization Office 365 accounts, so it’s not just something that only worked 20 years ago. If it only supported outdated Exchange servers that would be one thing, but it seems to support modern ones.

I’d seen a lot of posts from blahaj’s admin, @Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, and I really liked her admin/moderating philosophy (particularly this post, which I have bookmarked it’s so good), and it was also where the big /c/196 community was. I don’t like having to deal with a whole subset of online people, and Ada does a really bangup job of banning those kind of troublesome people before I ever even see them or have to interact with them. My personal blocklist is almost empty, because Ada does such a good job of preventing me from having to interact with those people. Anyway, thanks for all the hard great work, Ada! You make my Lemmy experience so much more pleasant!

37! My President sucked 37 dicks!

He’s focusing so hard on his themes being timeless that he’s no longer challenging the audience. Which is why they’re only winning visual art Oscars.

I mean he’s been using visual shortcuts to human emotional states instead of, you know, character development since fucking Titanic, if not before.

The obvious example to contrast the Avatar films with is District 9, which came of the same year as the first Avatar film. The “prawns” of District 9 are absolutely ugly to behold, but they are “humanized” through character development instead of shortcuts like giving them giant, dewy, innocent looking eyes and making them look like innocent animals like cats or dogs. Cameron make the Na’vi aesthetically pleasing to humans because it’s easier to make them the “good guys” this way than it is if they looked like District 9’s “prawns.”

I mean, no shade, Cameron is good at using the techniques he has chosen as a way to short circuit his audience into feeling the things he wants them to feel… but that doesn’t make them not cheap, easy, and overall weak compared to serious character development since it’s a complete reliance on visual shortcuts to emotional depth without the actual emotional depth.

That’s the way to do it, smart planning. I’m glad you were able to make it happen even if it set you back more than you had hoped.

I only wish I had money to get in before prices bump up. 😭

Being poor sucks.

I had never heard of this so went looking. Super useful stuff here!

A link for anyone interested: https://thingino.com/

Pretty sure there’s no nucleobases that start with the letter I though (although to be fair there is a single nucleoside, Inosene).

It can be both, you’re rejecting it because you fail to understand it. Dude, in a rationally organized world we wouldn’t need fucking charities, because things would just be funded by reasonable tax structures and governments that care more about taking care of their own people instead of bombing foreign nations. Why would we need charities if things were funded well enough as it is? You’re deliberately missing the point.

That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.

Why? It’s still bad. He still isn’t taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It’s a distinction without a difference.

Then why praise one for having a pet project just because it might help the environment? If it’s not a good thing that they exist, why does there need to be a caveat of “but he’s doing good things with his money.”

Erik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and very arguably the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn’t have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.

Exactly. Valve might have a “flat” management structure, but Newell hasn’t exactly re-organized Valve into a worker-owned co-op either.

If I recall correctly Newell himself has made comments on how scary brain interfaces become when the interfaces can start influencing the mind as well as reading it. Giving it positive signals in association with certain ideas or products, essentially a shortcut to what traditional advertising tried to exploit about human cognition, except now it could be forced directly, where you can essentially “force” people’s brains to be happy with a certain situation, idea, or product. He is at least cognizant of the dangers, but who knows how cognizant or how he plans to address those dangers.

It’s quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970’s was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn’t until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.

However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).

While all that is indeed good, we shouldn’t have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it’s also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It’s still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don’t. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do “for the future” are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don’t care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn’t mean the situation doesn’t still suck ass.