• 1 Post
  • 194 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 10th, 2023

help-circle

  • Are you trying to argue that laws and treaties are worthless unless enough people abide by them and are willing to enforce them?

    Because, yes, that is the fundamental principle of society: We need to work together to survive and thrive, so we agree on rules by which we work, and enforce them on those that break them. If you disagree with something but take no steps to oppose it, your disagreement is just as worthless as a law nobody cares to enforce.

    So what point are you trying to make here? “If China enforced their claim and nobody stopped them, their claim would be effectively valid”? How is that relevant to the situation if all they’re doing is protesting, but nobody else cares to back them up and they don’t actually take measures to prevent the passage?

    “If I put pineapple on my Pizza and nobody stops or punishes me, it’s legal”? Yes. Congrats. You understood the very basics. Want a sticker?






  • On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.

    Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.

    On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?

    So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.

    The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…

    (I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)


  • That’s not even correct. I said “not all that useful” and then “next to useless”. Never “absolutely useless”.

    It’s a simplification to condense the core point:
    People say “I like this! This is useful!”
    You say “It’s not all that useful”
    I reply “It is to me”
    You double down “next to useless”
    I say “For you maybe, but for me it’s very useful”

    The essence is that it’s not very useful to you, but it is for others. Yet you steamroll over that (subjective) take to double down on how shitty it is.

    The whole point of this feature is to provide something built into Steam that works without a whole bunch of fiddling like other recording software.

    It does. It’s a built-in utility to record gameplay clips. That’s neat.

    It currently fails at that on Linux because the implementation of it is half-assed.

    It’s lacking one feature, yes, but I’d not call that a failure if plenty of people seem fine without it.

    That is my position.

    Rich, coming from “You’re wrong when you say it’s useful”.

    End of conversation.

    “I’m right, you’re wrong and I refuse to hear otherwise”

    Alright then. I figured you were genuinely confused and thought maybe seeing the other perspective could help clear things up. Guess you’d have to actually look for that to work.


  • Your opinion is posited as an absolute: “This is useless” suggests you consider it useless in general. People arguing otherwise are challenging that general claim by providing examples where it can be useful.

    They’re not invalidsting your subjective perception that it’s not particularly useful for your primary use case. In fact, I’ve seen explicit acknowledgements that your use case will require different tools. If anything, your doubling down on the assertion that it is useless invalidates those that do find it useful.

    For contrast, consider the more personal phrasing “This isn’t really useful to me, because I generally clip conversations and it doesn’t capture my mic.” This both respects that other people may find it useful and makes it clear why you don’t.


    Aside from the semantics, you might be able to work around the issue by customising your audio setup, which is something I don’t know if Windows lets you. I don’t know what exactly it captures and what audio server you use, but if it can be pointed at a specific virtual device, you might be able to loop back your audio input to that device and use a combine-stream to route your other audio both to that virtual and your actual pysical output device.


  • Are you talking about in-game voice chat, that should be available to the game to record, or a third party tool that probably shouldn’t? If the game doesn’t need your mic, it shouldn’t access it; if it doesn’t access it, it’s not part of the gameplay recording.

    That doesn’t mean it’s “not all that useful”, Linux or otherwise, just because it doesn’t cover your specific use case. I can definitely see myself using it to record brief clips - on linux - without having to run OBS in the background.



  • “Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.

    The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.

    They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.

    The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.



  • Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It’s like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can’t really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

    That’s the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can’t start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.


  • I’ll plug an interesting blog post on the topic of using chemical weapons. The post concerns itself mostly with lethal weapons, but I feel like some of the points apply here as well.

    The essence is that for modern military systems, mobility and the relative cost of manufacturing, storing and employing (lethal) chemical weapons compared to protective equipment render them much less valuable than conventional explosive munitions. They see usage mostly between weaker static armies, which lack the equipment, training or command doctrines for modern warfare.

    The banning of chemical weapons was done because they weren’t generally very useful for the modern systems of the superpowers at the time. Russia cracking them out again suggests they no longer have all the capabilities of a modern superpower. Which probably isn’t super new for most people, but might be worth spelling out anyway.