Ooh, I like this
Edit: I think part of why I like it is that it’s evocative of both “construction” and “destruction”, and civil engineering necessarily involves aspects of both. Like, even when there isn’t existing infrastructure to demolish, there’ll still be tasks such as digging into the ground to anchor support structures, which I could consider to be a kind of destruction
If they were, it would be extremely foolish to answer your question honestly.
Even if they did say yes, you wouldn’t believe them anyway, so what’s the point in asking?
The bucket is clearly still functional enough to be used, otherwise the other bucket would be difficult to carry due to lack of a counterweight. Of course the metaphor doesn’t work when you distort it as you have — the flowers clearly are meant to represent something unexpected and positive that arises from a minor fault in an item. If the person in the comic had a wife who was allergic to flowers, then the minor flaw would be recontextualised as a major flaw, and in that scenario, it would be the silly person at fault for continuing to use a functionally dangerous tool.
I’ve got two words that I’ve coined that I use to describe this stuff.
“Para-productive” tasks are like what you describe. Usually procrastination related, but in a useful way. Examples might include tidying up my desk rather than starting the essay I need to do. For me, that kind of thing helps me to gear up towards the proper task. Random reading of fun stuff also helps me to focus better when I get onto the task. I find that I work best when I do a sort of task “circuit training”, where I have an array of tasks that I cycle between — and some of these tasks need to be fun for it to work.
“Psuedo-productive” is similar, except bad vibes. It is often associated with unhealthy avoidance towards tasks that I’m dreading, or an excessive level of procrastination. This word is mostly just to distinguish between the good and bad kinds of procrastination.
“My point is that it’s not that there is no reason to not put a network connection on a fridge. It’s that capitalists can’t be trusted not to enshittify whatever useful smart feature they implement.”
This is eloquently phrased, and I will probably borrow it when arguing with people in the future
Corporations are not our friends, even when they seem friendly, like Steam. However, they can be useful allies, so I’m glad to see this response from Steam.
I love that you have multiple people replying to you asking for technical details on how you ranked the flag entropy. This is how you know that you are amongst your people here <3
Were you running it with the unofficial patch? I don’t remember what it was that was causing me problems, but it’s possible that was it.
"I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine. […] I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.
In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.
This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”
Idgaf about silly mods like this, but this is iconic
To be fair, the first part of the game is by far the best. The unofficial patch adds back in a heckton of content in the late game, but even then, it feels sparse. I have very fond memories of exploring Santa Monica though. The game felt huge and exciting, even playing it for the first time in 2019.
Damn, I should try install it again. I’m running Linux now, and if I recall, I had some problems getting it working. I should take another crack at it.
I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.
I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.
I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.
That’s a cool way of thinking about it.
It reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend the other day. I was trying to ascertain whether other people experience mild, easily dismissable intrusive thoughts, as I do. It feels weird to call them intrusive thoughts if they’re easily dismissed — I feel like that phrase better describes thoughts that stick around and cause distress due to not going away. What I experience is fairly frequent thoughts that are like “imagine if you did [awful thing]”, and then I mentally reply “yes, that would indeed be awful, which is why I have no interest in doing that”, and then I’m fine.
I like your framing of it as self check diagnostics. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but that feels like an accurate description of what goes on internally for me.
Whenever I see that happen, I think “wow, thanks for showing why this community needs that rule in the first place”. If dudes were more chill about women trying to build their own spaces, then perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary to have such a hard rule.
Man, I feel so much nostalgia over Halo, especially Reach. It was the first campaign I completed on Legendary. My brother and I used to play the Swat game mode a lot, and we made one hell of a team. It was a nice contrast to arguing all the time. I enjoyed when I was in the zone and reacting so quickly that salty people would accuse me of using aimbot. That’s the highest compliment one can receive in an online shooter.
"taint’ is an informal word for the perineum
Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.
I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.
I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.
Something that I’m disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.
I’ve not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn’t diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.
Glad to see People Make Games cover this. They have a lot of reach
So many people outside of academia are gobsmacked to learn the extent to which academic publishing relies on free labour, and how much they charge.
To publish a paper open access in Nature, it costs almost $7000. And for what? What the fuck do they actually do? If you want to make the data or code you used in your analysis available, you’re the one who has to figure out how to host it. They don’t provide copyediting services or anything of the like. I’d call them parasites, but that would be an insult to all the parasitic organisms that play important roles within their respective ecosystems.
Perhaps once, they served an essential role in facilitating research, back when physical journals were the only way to get your research out there, but that age has long since passed and they’ve managed to use that change to profit even more.
Sure, the individual researchers are rarely paying this fee themselves, but that’s still a problem. For one, it gatekeeps independent researchers, or researchers from less well funded academic institutions (such as in the global South or emerging economies). Plus even if the individual researchers aren’t paying directly, that money still comes out of the overall funding for the project. For the cost of 4 papers published in Nature, that’s an entire year’s stipend for a PhD student in my country. I’m using Nature as an example here because they are one of the more expensive ones, but even smaller papers charge exorbitant amounts (and don’t get me started on how people who justify the large fees charged by more prestigious journals don’t acknowledge how this just perpetuates the prestige machine that creates the toxic “publish or perish” pressure of research)
he most offensive bit though is that if you are doing government funded research, then you have to pay an extra fee to make that research available to the taxpayers who funded it. It’s our fucking research, you assholes! How dare you profit off of coerced free labour and then charge us to even be able to access what is rightfully ours. France has the right idea here — they have legislation that mandates that all government funded research must be open access. That doesn’t solve the root problem of needing to eradicate the blight of the academic publishing industry as it currently exists, but it’s a start.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but once I started writing, my rage overcame me and it was cathartic to scream it out from my soapbox.
If more people had this attitude, we’d have a world where people would have more space to address the other kinds of “being shitty” that you describe (and potentially prevent ourselves from developing bad habits that lead to cycles of shittiness).
I’m sorry that we live in a world that makes it really hard to not be shitty, but I’m glad that you try to avoid being shitty to other people. That’s infinitely more important than the other kinds of shittiness, in my view.