Would they have called that constellation Ursa Major if not for the presence of bears in that direction? Maybe the constellation naming was like, “don’t go too far towards bear country if you don’t want to deal with bears that think of humans as food.” “Bears this way. Bears ahead.”

It’s has produces some games that are obviously labors if love, but it has also left players of some games with no content bug fix updates for literal years.

Deadlock is awesome. It combines some of the things I love most about playing boomer shooters–the movement tech and fast-paced gunplay–with the stuff I love about DOTA2–the build flexibility, character variety, and ability to coordinate timing spikes throughout the match. Unfortunately it also includes some of the stuff everyone hates about DOTA2, like inconsistent matchmaking and rude bigots with microphones.

I hope it ends up like one of those nature reserves with a 1,000 year lease and a charter that specifies how content creators and gamers can be treated.

It just seems like this system is capitalism with extra steps, but the extra steps involve replacing the exchange of money with the peddling of influence. The capitalists are replaced by administrators, the hierarchy of wealth is replaced by rank in the decision-making apparatus. I get that it’s supposed to be democratic and protect the interests of the public, but so too is our regulated hybrid public-private system and we see how well that’s going. It also seems like, where our market system began as distributed and decentralized, which was a strength, and began to be ever more concentrated as businesses consolidated and corrupted government, this new system starts consolidated and married to government. A lot of people would say this is too much power in the hands of the state, and ripe for theft by an autocrat. I’m not saying it’s impossible for this to work, but the systems I have seen work best are those where the market does what it does and the government reigns in its worst tendencies when the motive of profit conflicts with the needs of people.

This all sounds philosophical. How does this system actually solve problems in a society where scarcity exists? Do people still have property rights? Who enforces those rights? Who makes the decisions on where scarce resources are allocated? Our current system has answers for all of these questions, it’s just contaminated by the influence of powerful scumbags. The thing is, the powerful scumbags are going to be scumbags in every system, and at least a decentralized market economy limits the ease with which they can exert control.

I want to know where they think this will go, because there is an obvious and looming problem: the content–the library–wasn’t made or at least hosted for free.

Somebody set up a website to host the interactions between people who knew things and people who wanted to learn things. The people exchanging information often got as much as they gave, and the person hosting the forum typically sold ads or information about the people participating in the discussions. The result was a virtuous cycle where content gets made and everyone is happy.

Now all those sites are scraped, and their information is regurgitated by slop bots into a “zero click search” where the creators of the information have no role, the seekers of information never encountered the source, and the hosts never get their slice of the pie. OK, well that works for now, but what about when something new is made and there’s no forum to talk about it because all forums get scraped into the slop machine? How will the slop center learn? Are we supposed to expect the AI companies will spend time meticulously testing how best to DIY a mass spectrometer or whatever?

This is basically it. Classic liberalism is everything from Margaret Thatcher to Bernie Sanders. The MAGA movement has regressed to fascism–a form of corporate authoritatianism.

So are almost all progressives.

You can’t. He’s trying to use liberal as an epithet when he means neoliberal. If we’re being pedantic, liberal refers to the full gamut of people who think there should be an open and free society, which usually includes a market and certain property rights. The conservatives use liberal as an epithet to decry the left and now the left is using it to decry the middle.

It would be funny if it wasn’t being used to convince naive progressives to sit out elections and let fascists seize power because the center left “only” wants 85% of what they want. You’re seeing it really ramp up because the US is closing in on a big election, and convincing dipshits to sit out elections is easier than convincing anyone the right can govern.

They’ve really managed to enshittify the site beyond even what I expected back when the API changes went live. I guess it was expected. First Digg shot itself, now Reddit…

Not to “My generation good other generations bad,” but Millennials and Gen X really grew up with technology as it was becoming impressively capable, but required a lot of technical know-how to use. It’s really apparent in the workplace: our fresh-out-of-college guys and ready-for-retirement guys alike come to people around my age when stuff isn’t working. Everything’s too easy now, and it’s hard to look under the hood. (Of course, there are still exceptions for enthusiasts, but you’re never forced to tinker with a raspberry pi.)

And here I thought I was done with penis inspection day after I graduated high school.