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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • That’s what Sweden has been doing yes. However it very much is a “mutual understanding” type situation where Sweden is very attached to the SKE and the EU just doesn’t really want to bother due to the situation being low-stakes high-friction. The UK also fits all criteria for “must use the Euro”, but would not benefit from the same “mutual understanding” that Sweden does because the stakes for the Euro would actually be very large. It is quite unlikely that the EU would just bend the rules and let the UK keep their own currency this time. It is also quite unlikely that the British public would even come close to accepting the Euro.

    Regardless of your position on the matter, remember that Brexit negotiations completely broke down multiple times over much, much simpler and lower-stakes questions. The British Ego is at least as large as the French’s, and if four years of Brexit should have taught us anything it’s that they have extremely unrealistic expectations and actually think that the EU should bend over backwards to have them back.


  • Like most conspiracy theories, there is a huge grain of truth there. Bush should have done 9/11 because it benefitted him in literally every way. Yet he did not.

    Today’s WaPo scandal illustrates the more real situation quite well: usually the billionaires take a mostly hands-off approach to owning a paper. They don’t need to meddle. The journalists are ontologically incapable of being truly disruptive regardless of if the paper is owned by Bezos or funded by an independent government committee. That Bezos presumably felt the need to prevent the WaPo from endorsing Harris was unusual and a big enough deal for the journalists to raise a big stink. And as someone who lives in a country that has a strong tradition of independent and state-funded journalism (that doesn’t shy away from criticizing the government)… I can tell you it’s not very different from the rest. Certainly not as left-wing as it gets, and just as vulnerable to the fallacies I described.

    That is not to say there is no outright corruption of big prestigious papers, or that oligarchs owning the press isn’t a massive, glaring threat to Democracy. But beware of oversimplifying such issues. For one because you might regret making such sweeping statements when the billionaires actually decide to wield their power, Murdoch style. And for two because you might be disappointed to find that prestigious independently owned papers aren’t so much better. Don’t expect them to start printing Marxist pamphlets any time soon if that’s what you are into.



  • The truth is not better but there’s some nuance. Major media do not usually care about being for or against fascism. They care about clicks, and following “journalistic ethics” that boil down to Enlightened Centrism™ and bothsidesism.

    Their billionaire owners don’t even have to interfere (most of the time). The system self-selects to make money through a shared set of beliefs in what constitutes “proper journalism”. This makes journalists, as a profession, ontologically incapable of fighting against fascists. They truly, honestly, firmly believe that “Fascist about to win US Presidency” is not a statement of fact.

    It’s the same ideological pitfalls that makes Serious Media pit science against whichever anti-science fad is trendy right now. Vaccines, “climatic skepticism”, etc. anything goes and the journalists in charge truly genuinely from their heart believe that is a fair and balanced approach.

    Not to say there aren’t actual conspiracies from time to time of course, but even actual independent traditional journalism has generally failed to accurately report on the rise of fascism.


  • Generally French speakers don’t consider English to be phonetically messy. Because when you pronounce every word with the thickest French accent known to man without any regard for correctness, suddenly the phonology becomes quite regular! (Side-effect being that native English speakers may not understand what the fuck a French speaker is saying, but that’s never stopped French speakers who famously disregard the English’s opinion on… well everything)

    What’s really annoying about French besides the needlessly complicated tenses is that it had a bunch of already archaic orthographic and grammatical rules 300 years ago or so, and at that point the aristocracy decided to freeze it in place. I won’t get on another rant about the Académie française but if a French word has an overly complicated spelling given its pronunciation, it’s these guys’ fault who have refused to enact any real reform since the early 1800s despite calls for it since at least the 1700s. Despite it supposedly being their jobs.


  • He was really popular on twitter, and if he says mastodon’s worse despite having a smaller audience there, I trust his judgement. Literally his pinned toot.

    “First replies shown are the ones the author replied to and/or liked” seems like an obvious, simple, and transparent algorithm. Like youtube comments. Give lazy reply guys an opportunity to see without scrolling down that they aren’t as original as they think they are. The fact that this isn’t implemented in even a basic form is absolutely insane and shows a very fundamental ideological disconnect between people who want “open twitter with decent moderation” and whatever the fuck it is that the mastodon OGs/devs are trying to achieve.


  • At least these all have the same radical. Here’s the different radicals you can use in French for the verb “be”:

    • Être
    • Je suis
    • Tu es
    • Nous sommes
    • Nous étions
    • Je fus
    • Tu seras
    • Soyons

    The only common point between some of those is the letter “S”, which is not even part of the infinitive.

    (Not all tenses are represented because at least they share the radical with that list, but like Polish we have a bunch of tenses and the verb changes with plurality and pronoun).

    Anyway I don’t fucking know why everyone glamorizes French because as a native speaker please do not attempt to learn it, you will just hurt yourself.



  • Some people don’t want a suggestion algorithm but do want full reply federation.

    Alec from Technology Connections stopped using mastodon because of this, every post he made would get nitpicked on by 20 different people from instances who did not federate the replies with each other so each reply guy thought they were the first.

    I have a single user instance and I use a relay, but most replies are still missing if I click on a post unless I go to the original webpage.

    Lazy-federating replies when a post is viewed sounds like an obvious solution but AFAIK the mastodon devs are very opposed to this.


  • How is “they are responsible for their own actions” dehumanizing? If anything the person you are responding to is arguing that IDF soldiers have free will.

    Do not buy into the “we didn’t know!!!1!” and “we were indoctrinated!!!” bullshit. This is the exact same bullshit that “former” nazis sympathizers peddled after the war. It’s a lie. A transparent one at that.

    Yes, the nazis’ methods of dehumanization were very effective. But that does not, for even a femtosecond, absolve anyone of cold-bloodedly murdering a Jew (or a Palestinian). It didn’t happen on accident, that soldier got in that position through a long series of conscious choices, and it came down to it he chose to run over hundreds of people from the comfort of his bulldozer. That is both very human, and one of the most unspeakable crimes of hate. Human in all the worst ways our species has ever devised.

    Some crimes are just beyond forgiveness, because it isn’t in anyone’s power to forgive. Killing hundreds in an act of genocide is one such crime. To be human is many things, but being owed forgiveness is not one of them.

    I’m sorry for the emotional message, I am assuming you are playing devil’s advocate in good faith but I can’t just let the dehumanization of innocent murdered civilians be compared to the harsh condemnation of the soldiers who killed them.




  • Bro I wouldn’t trust most companies not to store their only copy of super_duper_important_financial_data_2024.xlsx on an old AliExpress thumb drive attached to the CFO’s laptop in a coffee shop while he’s taking a shit.

    If your company has an actual DRP for if your datacenter catches fire or your cloud provider disappears, you are already doing better than 98 % of your competitors, and these aren’t far-fetched disaster scenarios. Maintaining an entire separate pen-and-paper shadow process, training people for it? That’s orders of magnitude more expensive than the simplest of DRPs most companies already don’t have.

    Friendly wave to all the companies currently paying millions a year extra to Broadcom/VMWare because their tools and processes are too rigid to use with literally any other hypervisor when realistically all their needs could be covered by the free tier of ProxMox and/or OpenStack.


  • There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.

    The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).

    That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.


  • The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.

    To summarize:

    • The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that’s only around 1/3 total.
    • The reason the left proclaimed they “won” is they came “first” and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the “hard right” (welp)
    • That, in isolation (!), isn’t antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can’t work otherwise.
    • However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I’m not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn’t going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.

  • Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn’t do anything? Do you think it’s because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

    You are so haughty you’ve circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you’d hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.


  • Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

    That’s… not a war crime is. I don’t want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

    Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

    Now that’s fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there’s not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.