‘I just need to make the numbers look good until I can quit this company and level up. Apre moi, le deluge.’ - capitalists without capital

‘I just need to keep things flowing toward me until I can quit this world and level up. Apre moi, le deluge.’ - capitalists with capital

Anyone with a scintilla of awareness knows it has limits, but you can’t ‘level up’ in capitalist games by accepting them.

The point was not that empire is not villainous, simply that the ‘history will not be kind to’ sentiment is mostly pointless ressentiment. All it does is mollify the slave with the pretense they will get their reward after death and the oppressor will get their punishment. The empire does not care. The ones that care about history will write the history they want the world to remember after their death and live the life of the wealthy conqueror until they do.

A certain subset of people do. There are still lots of Brits who not only don’t hate the idea of empire but think it should come back. There are even people in the former British colonies that romanticise that history. There are people now, and will continue to be, who look at the history of empires, conquerors, and tyrants, and cheer for the ‘great men of history.’ Maybe one day that might change, but it’s going to be a while, if ever.

Sure. Just like how we all villainise Rome, the British empire, the Khanates, and other violent militaristic cultures of conquest… and, of course, no one would look back fondly on governments that enacted policies of hate and murdered their citizens and others… Oh, wait… /s

Use the words that you believe will form the desired image in the listener’s head. If the image you want to convey is closer to the listener’s concept of little boy than any other, use those words, regardless of what an uninvolved third party might think. It is better to speak the language of the listener to the best of your ability than to try to speak every language at once or just speak your native tongue louder, if that makes sense.

From Fdroid?

• IED
• Simon Tatham’s puzzles
• Luanti
• Endless Sky
• Gurgle
• Gridle
• unciv
• Mindustry
• Tessel

I also have Mitch for itch.io games and Lemuroid for emulating older systems. There are a lot of fun things to emulate.

A bunch of games but also

• Leon - URL cleaner
• Acode - code/text editor
• syncthing - file sync
• automation - simple task automator
• redmoon - darkens and tints screen in runup to bedtime

No. What you are looking at is more important than the screen you see it on.

Those who know will not tell you, lest you become competition.

There is some research into the concept of travel time percetion. Subjectively, for me, no more than 15 minutes is ‘close’ for me. 15 minutes feels like it’s not too bad of a time regardless of method, distance covered, etc. I suspect it’s because I have a sense of 15 minutes being the smallest usable amount of time. Less than 15 and it feels like there’s little I could use that time for that isn’t just scrolling something on my phone.

Horrifying.

Then probably, yeah. Most people are still worried about backlash so your average antisemite won’t just come out and say it but if he’s making a habit of ‘noticing’ then he’s already falling off the edge. ‘Noticing’ is not noticing. It’s implying importance. It’s a suggestion that the individual in question’s Jewish-ness is somehow relevant, which is because of conscious or unconscious of racist essentialism. For anyone else, Jewishness is a banal fact of ancestry. It’s only for the racist that ancestry becomes sufficient cause of someone’s antisocial behaviors.

It’s not a matter of a word or follows. It’s how he treats the classification. Does he treat Jews as a stereotypical mass? Does he think simply being of Jewish descent causes certain behaviors? Does he think Jews are interchangeable? Does he think Jews as a whole are a ‘problem?’

Another little reminder:

• if you play games, do not buy microtransaction items or, if possible, games that try to sell them.
• If you are a parent, do not let your kids buy microtransaction items or games that try to sell them.
• If you know a parent who is not a gamer, share these concepts with them. They won’t have these sorts of things piped into their bubble under any normal circumstances.

Or a Barry.

Installing windows for most of that time hasn’t been a thing people do. They bought a computer and it had the internets (the picture with the blue e) and the word (the picture with the paper and a W) and that was pretty much them sorted. We’re weird for knowing the difference and that’s not a bad thing to be.

It’s December already? When did that happen?

Basically Dan Olsen’s entire channel - lots of good stuff

RAGS shadow data extraction from LLMs - a horror movie for anyone who cares about data security in a world where people/organisations use LLMs

At least there’s a chance to warranty it. If you buy the knockoff stuff, you can go back a month later and that manufacturer no longer exists under that name so they have no responsibility to service a warranty.

The big problem with cheap Chinese knockoff crap isn’t that it’s crap, but that it’s that it’s highly variable. With some things, who cares? Getting a spatula for half price that will, even at the worst quality, do basically the same job and last years, won’t be a problem. Getting a badly made computer component that fries some other component, or a storage drive that craps out after 6 months and takes your data with it, is a different matter. You won’t have any recourse. Same with cheap batteries that either ruin the experience by needing constant charging or by being actually unsafe. QA is expensive, but it’s worth it when the object is also innately expensive.