papasquat's recent activity
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Comment on Amazon Web Services crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright in ~tech
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Comment on Jenny Chase 2025 “opinions about solar” thread in ~enviro
papasquat Link ParentPeople often confuse efficiency for expense. Either that, or they use the colloquial usage of "efficiency", ie; cost effectiveness, in ambiguous situations where people are talking about...People often confuse efficiency for expense. Either that, or they use the colloquial usage of "efficiency", ie; cost effectiveness, in ambiguous situations where people are talking about thermodynamic efficiency.
Resistive heating is more thermodynamically efficient than gas, but it's definitely not cheaper in most places. I've found that when people are talking about household heating, they're more commonly talking about the latter than the former when they're talking about efficiency.
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Comment on Amazon Web Services crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentIf you're away from home or you never put your phone on your wifi (which apparently some people do)If you're away from home or you never put your phone on your wifi (which apparently some people do)
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Comment on Amazon Web Services crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentWhy the hell would you design an application, not just a bed, but any application to just assume you have internet access. Like yeah, a worldwide aws outage is rare, and if it's not mission...Why the hell would you design an application, not just a bed, but any application to just assume you have internet access.
Like yeah, a worldwide aws outage is rare, and if it's not mission critical maybe it doesn't make sense to plan for that, but losing internet? That happens to basically everyone a few times a year. For some people it happens constantly.
Designing a bed so that it gets boiling hot if there's no network crosses into gross negligence. A 13 year old first time coder could identity that as a problem.
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Comment on The same-name club made up entirely of Shirleys is dying out in ~life
papasquat Link ParentThe Muhammad club could form the 8th most populated country on earth!The Muhammad club could form the 8th most populated country on earth!
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Comment on 'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment in ~games
papasquat Link ParentI'm not at all in the streaming space so I don't know much about these people, but it seems to me that there's this genre of female streamer who deals with this kind of thing more than anyone...I'm not at all in the streaming space so I don't know much about these people, but it seems to me that there's this genre of female streamer who deals with this kind of thing more than anyone else.
It's that type of streamer who is attractive, but their attractiveness isn't the main thing they focus on, like they're not in a hot tub in a bikini or spinning a wheel or something. They're good looking, and focus on their appearance, maybe do some cosplay, but most of their stream is just talking or playing games. The only other one I'm familiar with is Pokimane, but I think that genre is pretty popular.
It feels like men without social lives who live on twitch tend to treat these women like para social girlfriends in a way that they don't with the hot tub titty streamers.
Maybe it's easier to convince yourself that this pretty girl who doesn't know your name actually loves you and cares about you if she's being a normal person instead of bouncing up and down and doing squats on camera for gifted subs.
Once people have that sort of delusion, then it leads to stuff like this.
I'm talking out of my ass of course, but I always hear about harassment of these types of streamers more than any other kind.
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Comment on 'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment in ~games
papasquat Link ParentIt sounds like the venue didn't get sued though. They banned the bodyguard to prevent themselves from being sued. From their standpoint, banning someone who holds someone for standing around is...It sounds like the venue didn't get sued though. They banned the bodyguard to prevent themselves from being sued. From their standpoint, banning someone who holds someone for standing around is prevention
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Comment on What is your 'Subway Take'? in ~talk
papasquat Link ParentI wonder if it would though. You can't really compete with coke and pepsi because everyone in the entire world knows what they are, since they spend billions in ads and product placement. If they...I wonder if it would though. You can't really compete with coke and pepsi because everyone in the entire world knows what they are, since they spend billions in ads and product placement. If they were just another drink in a grocery store, surely they wouldn't have the immediate emotional familiarity so many people have with them and if a smaller player could convince a store to stock their soda alongside coke, and it genuinely tasted better, it might have a fair shot at eating up some of its market share.
The stuff that gets the most advertising money are things that explicitly aren't quantifiable. Things like perfume, luxury brands, food and drink. Even things that have more quantifiable characteristics aren't advertised on that anymore. Car ads usually just feature some guy in a suit talking about luxury, or some guy in blue jeans talking about how tough a truck is. The major players are mostly on top because that kind of advertising stoak deep triggers in people that cause them to emotionally identify with brands.
Without that, maybe they wouldn't be so ubiquitous and they'd have to focus on making better products instead
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Comment on What is your 'Subway Take'? in ~talk
papasquat Link ParentI think the cultural appropriation thing is mostly a smokescreen over the true negative effects that they highlight. Like if a white person is praised for urban streetwear, and a black person is...- Exemplary
I think the cultural appropriation thing is mostly a smokescreen over the true negative effects that they highlight.
Like if a white person is praised for urban streetwear, and a black person is shunned for it, the problem isn't that the white person is praised. The problem is that the black person is shunned. To me, cultural appropriation being framed as a bad thing addresses the former, not the latter.
Similarly, with the situation of Native Americans being separated from their families while white people wear beads. The problem isn't the white poeple wearing the beads. It's the forced separation.
I get that seeing white people doing something that you were shamed for rubs salt in the wound, but it's not the wound. Without the wound, salt is just salt.
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Comment on What is your 'Subway Take'? in ~talk
papasquat LinkMy hot take: advertising should be illegal. Before you blow up on me, I haven't really thought this through much as far as enforcement, what counts as advertising, blah blah blah. However, it...My hot take: advertising should be illegal. Before you blow up on me, I haven't really thought this through much as far as enforcement, what counts as advertising, blah blah blah.
However, it seems to be the root of so much that is wrong with modern life. Clicks get farmed to show ads to people. Every square inch of public space is monetized with ads. Profiles are built for every person on the planet, cookies track us, our time is wasted, we're manipulated to want and buy things we don't need. Ive never met anyone who was like "ads are great!". Even with things like taxes, people will say "yeah paying taxes suck but we need them". No one says that about ads. Basically everyone agrees that they're a blight. Why haven't we done anything about them?
A lot of people say that lots of business models just wouldn't work without them. To that, I say that if your company supplies a product that no one finds valuable enough to actually bother to pay for, then what does that say about your product?
I think without advertising there'd be a shift in people's perception about things like that. Right now, paying a few cents to view a website sounds preposterous to most people, but that's because we're used to advertisers subsidizing it all, at the expense of our time. I'd love to browse the internet knowing that the costs are paid for and without running aggressive ad blockers. Walk through the streets of a city without garish lights directing me to look at a billboard. Pump gas without some loud ad being blasted in my face.
They're totally unproductive, don't improve anyone's life, and actively make most people's lives worth but they're a trillion dollar industry. Get rid of them.
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Comment on What is your 'Subway Take'? in ~talk
papasquat Link ParentI would agree with you there. I think it would be distasteful either way, because most people dressing up as native Americans are using religious and ceremonial stuff like headdresses to do it. I...I would agree with you there. I think it would be distasteful either way, because most people dressing up as native Americans are using religious and ceremonial stuff like headdresses to do it.
I don't think incorporating native American asthetics in your everyday garb is deplorable at all, but dressing up as another ethnicity of person as a costume is... yeah, pretty bad.
Like, "I'm black guy" as a costume if you're white is pretty fucked up. Wearing streetwear isn't.
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Comment on What is your 'Subway Take'? in ~talk
papasquat (edited )Link ParentThe way this historically worked (and in my opinion should still work) is that you have two types of development. Urban and rural. Urban development takes place within cities and towns. Taxes pay...To be fair, the math doesn't really work for the cities either. "Nice" suburbs don't pay for themselves in property taxes. Low density and spread-out infrastructure are expensive to maintain.
The way this historically worked (and in my opinion should still work) is that you have two types of development. Urban and rural. Urban development takes place within cities and towns. Taxes pay for municipal services like sewer, water, schools, fire, police and so on. Cities and towns have defined borders and are relatively small areas, which drives up land cost and encourages density, which makes those municipal services affordable.
Rural development takes place outside of the limits of a town or city. They're handled by the county government, which will have a sheriff, fire department, and a few other services, but other than that, the rural folks are on their own. They don't get municipal water service, they use a well. They don't get sewer service, they use a septic tank. When they call the sheriff, they don't expect them to be there for an hour or more; they take care of their own defense for the most part. There are schools, but they're small, and far away. There are roads, but most of them are dirt. Because of all these things, it really only makes financial sense to live out in the county if you need to; ie, you're a farmer.
The problem is that we've done a ton of development where people want to live out in the middle of nowhere, away from cities, but they still expect city services. We've tried all sorts of things to make this happen. Expanding city limits, consolidating county and city governments, HOAs. None of them can change the laws of physics or economics though. The cost of infrastructure is far more dependent on distances than it is population. It costs largely the same to provide infrastructure for a thousand people in one place as it does for a handful of people miles away.
As a result, cities go bankrupt playing this losing game of trying to support all of this extremely expensive infrastructure, and the costs are borne by the people who still live in the cities and are cheap to support (ie; poor people).
It's something you can't come up with a clever solution for. The only real solution is to go back to strictly enforcing the city limits, shrink cities back to their more historical footprints, and force the people who live in these far flung exurbs to pay the true costs of the services they consume. It would make it far more expensive to live as inefficiently as they do, and result in more density in cities, the way they should have been all along.
So I'd agree with you, your HOA probably is required. I'd go even further though, and say you should probably just be incorporated as a town or village. There are costs that you're still likely consuming an outsized share of. For instance, I don't imagine your community has their own school, fire department, police department, courthouse, sewers, roads, and so on. Even with HOA fees covering things that would traditionally be a citys responsibility, there's a good chance you're still consuming more than you're contributing to the citys budget.
It's just a really expensive way to live, but it gets subsidized by debt and poor people, so most people don't even think about the true costs.
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Comment on What is your 'Subway Take'? in ~talk
papasquat Link ParentI agree with this, and I live in a house with an HOA. The issue is that most of my neighbors don't. Most people who own property are older, wealthier, and like the suburban police state. The fact...I agree with this, and I live in a house with an HOA.
The issue is that most of my neighbors don't.
Most people who own property are older, wealthier, and like the suburban police state. The fact that if they don't like some kid playing on the front yard, they can make the homeowner's life hell, and they get an outsized say in what other people do with their own lives isn't a bug, it's a feature.
Any HOA can be dissolved if it's members vote to do so. Most of the people that live in them, and especially the ones that are involved enough in them to actually show up and vote don't want to.
All of the things about HOAs that people complain about online are the things they like. They like that they
can fine people for not having the chance to mow their lawn on a given weekend; they're retired and mowing their lawn to compare to other people's lawns is their main hobby. They like that they can fine people for having cars in front of their house; they don't have friends that come over to visit so there's no reason anyone else would ever park there.Basically, the whole point of them is to force everyone in the neighborhood to live lifestyles similar to theirs, and punish them if they don't. They enjoy this aspect of them, so even if there were county wide votes to abolish them, they're not likely to pass.
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Comment on What is your 'Subway Take'? in ~talk
papasquat Link ParentDreads really are gross. The ones that black people have do often seem to be less gross though, and I don't know if that has to do with the kind of care they tend to put into them, the kind of...Dreads really are gross. The ones that black people have do often seem to be less gross though, and I don't know if that has to do with the kind of care they tend to put into them, the kind of black person that's more likely to have dreads vs the kind of white person that's more likely to have them, or the texture of their hair, but they do seem to be nicer.
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Comment on What is your 'Subway Take'? in ~talk
papasquat Link ParentI don't know that a Halloween costume would necessarily even fall into the category of cultural appropriation. The point of a Halloween costume is to dress up as something you don't normally dress...I don't know that a Halloween costume would necessarily even fall into the category of cultural appropriation. The point of a Halloween costume is to dress up as something you don't normally dress up as, so anything you wear as a Halloween costume is kind of inheritely something that you haven't appropriated.
I think it's a dick move because you're using something that presumably a religious symbol as a costume; I'd feel the same way if someone dressed up as the pope or Muhammad.
Where I think the prevailing opinion goes wrong is that a white person wearing feathers in their hair or native American beadwork or mocassins is somehow wrong. That meets the definition of cultural appropriation, but there's no real harm there, and people don't own their cultural trappings simply because they were raised in them.
Most cultural phenomenon wouldn't even exist if no one shared and appropriated parts of other cultures. There are no cultures that exist in a vacuum, not today or ever.
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Comment on What is your 'Subway Take'? in ~talk
papasquat Link ParentIn all of these examples, I don't see any actual harm done. The people in all of them are profiting off of ideas foreign to them; what's the issue there though? It doesn't seem particularly...In all of these examples, I don't see any actual harm done. The people in all of them are profiting off of ideas foreign to them; what's the issue there though?
It doesn't seem particularly relevant that the kimono was made in a seat shop either. The blue jeans that the guy in the example are wearing are likely also made in a sweatshop. The issue is the sweatshop, not the kimono.
Like, is it annoying when people suddenly start eating a food or drinking a drink or listening to music or using language you've used your entire life, way before anyone in the west heard of it? Yeah, but it's annoying in sort of a hipster, "I was doing this before it was cool" way, not in an actually harmful way.
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Comment on Looking for feedback on a homelab design in ~tech
papasquat LinkHonestly... I would take a step back and ask yourself if this is something you really want to do. I've gone through ebs and flows with homelab stuff, because some of the stuff it does is useful...Honestly... I would take a step back and ask yourself if this is something you really want to do.
I've gone through ebs and flows with homelab stuff, because some of the stuff it does is useful (home assistant mostly), but other things become a huge pain in the ass at inconvenient times for me.
Right now I run a kind of complicated setup with proxmox hosting my pfsense firewall and a few other things that require me to pass network interfaces around, tag ports with different clans and so on.
It's kinda grown that way to meet a bunch of different needs and it makes sense if you understand it, but if I don't pay attention to it for a few months and something suddenly breaks, I'm banging my head against the wall for hours trying to fix something.
The advice you get online about how to prevent stuff like that is often misguided too, and only works in a theoretical perfect world where your setup is exactly the same as the developers of thousands of little components envisioned when they were writing the components your lab relies on.
So my advice would be to take a step back and ask yourself if investing a lot of ongoing time and money into this project is really worth it to you, like, is it something you'll continually enjoy doing even if a lightning strike knocks out a NIC, or a volume that you were accidentally not monitoring fills up and bricks your hypervisor, or a bug in some random component causes your whole setup to crumble and you have no idea why. Because each of those things are a minimum of several hours to fix, and if your household relies on those services, it's several hours of not having it.
Personally, I'm very hot and cold about it. Sometimes I love messing with the stuff, often times, I wish I'd ripped all of it out, used a Netgear router and just paid for apple cloud storage.
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Comment on Grand Theft Auto made him a legend. His latest game was a disaster. in ~games
papasquat Link ParentYeah. As much as people like to pretend that executive leadership are just fat cats lounging around and being unfairly rewarded for the work of the people under them (and in some cases thats...Yeah. As much as people like to pretend that executive leadership are just fat cats lounging around and being unfairly rewarded for the work of the people under them (and in some cases thats true), management is a true skill set.
This idea we have that just because someone is a brilliant programmer, or amazing artist, or even a talented middle manager, that they'll be able to step into an executive role and be successful. They're totally different skill sets, and require a personality that allows you to make compromises to juggle many different competing priorities, instead of having those priorities laid out for you.
That's what I see as the fatal flaw of many of these celebrity game designers. Their vision is the thing that matters the most to them out of any of their priorities, and that's just objectively not the case. They're essentially too close to the work and not able to step back and understand that if you don't release a playable game that people enjoy in a reasonable timeline, the company will go out of business.
They end up spending so much time on perfecting a vision or trying to do something radically new that the economic realities sneak up on them and then they have to rush to ship something that's always half baked garbage.
Having a detached executive that can say "enough is enough. Cut out the overambitious features and ship this thing" seems necessary for any large scale software project, but especially for AAA games.
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Comment on Reusable rockets are here, so why is NASA paying more to launch stuff to space? in ~space
papasquat Link ParentI think there are a few factors here. One, crewed spaceflight is obviously far more expensive, the risks are far higher, and they're far more publicized. If you lose a probe, no one aside from...I think there are a few factors here.
One, crewed spaceflight is obviously far more expensive, the risks are far higher, and they're far more publicized. If you lose a probe, no one aside from scientists really care. If you lose an astronaut, the American public will want someone's head on a platter, and political careers will fail.
Secondly, crewed spaceflight is mostly a publicity stunt. It doesn't confer significant scientific advantages over unmanned missions that justify its massively larger expense and risk.
The reasons countries fund manned missions is so they can say they have; for bragging rights. That means that those missions are inherently highly political. Their political usefulness are the main reason they're greenlit in the first place.
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Comment on YouTube has a new video player in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentMaybe, but I think that may be both overestimating googles technical competence and long term planning skills. I don't really think that if Google had some foolproof way to stop people from being...Maybe, but I think that may be both overestimating googles technical competence and long term planning skills.
I don't really think that if Google had some foolproof way to stop people from being able to download their content without inconveniencing their legitimate users, they'd hesitate in deploying it.
I just think it's a very difficult, if not impossible problem to permanently solve, but they spend lots of engineering time trying to anyway.
I'm quite sure that a product engineer working on this has raised the question "what happens if the Internet goes out?". It was probably just ignored and brushed under the rug by the product owner because it would slightly impact their ROI. Losing connection to their servers isn't a corner case. It's something that literally happens every day for anything deployed to a few thousand customers.
It's not like they're too busy to think about these things, it's that it gets in the way of their profits.
Right now, with a large scale outage and a news story highlighting their lack of care, it's going to turn out that they probably should have taken a little more effort performing that risk analysis.