killertofu's recent activity

  1. Comment on The lonely work of moderating Hacker News in ~tech

    killertofu
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    As someone with a long career in tech, but firmly outside the techbro-isphere, that pretty much sums it up for me.

    ...it has become a punch line and a punching bag for tech workers and engineers who see it as a locus of hubris, myopia, and exclusivity. A word that comes up frequently among its critics is “toxic.”

    As someone with a long career in tech, but firmly outside the techbro-isphere, that pretty much sums it up for me.

    26 votes

  2. Comment on Do children have a “right to hug” their parents? in ~life

    killertofu
    Link
    All this profiteering on prisoners and their families is so gross. It's like payday loans. Just truly soulless bottom feeding.

    All this profiteering on prisoners and their families is so gross. It's like payday loans. Just truly soulless bottom feeding.

    20 votes

  3. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I actually did install exactly one mod to skip the opening. It's said it was supposed to work fine with the latest patch, but who knows if that's what made it crash. But yeah, I think I'll...

    Yeah, I actually did install exactly one mod to skip the opening. It's said it was supposed to work fine with the latest patch, but who knows if that's what made it crash. But yeah, I think I'll just skip it and play something else until London eventually drops.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I also wanted to revisit this after the fantastic show. Or really, I very much wanted to play Fallout: London, but that's now indefinitely delayed thanks to an ill timed "next gen" patch. So...

    Yeah, I also wanted to revisit this after the fantastic show. Or really, I very much wanted to play Fallout: London, but that's now indefinitely delayed thanks to an ill timed "next gen" patch. So I just installed regular FO4. A few minutes in it crashed to desktop, and I'm not sure I'll bother opening it back up.

  5. Comment on Fighting cookie theft using device bound sessions in ~tech

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    I like it. With strong, unique passwords and a security key second factor on my most important accounts, I think cookie theft is probably one of the bigger vulnerabilities I have. Good to see some...

    I like it. With strong, unique passwords and a security key second factor on my most important accounts, I think cookie theft is probably one of the bigger vulnerabilities I have. Good to see some thought being put into this area.

    5 votes

  6. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    killertofu
    Link
    I bit the bullet and dropped $70 on Dragon's Dogma 2 and I've been having a lot of fun with it. I've kind of been wanting a big, open world fantasy game, but I'm also not good at action combat for...

    I bit the bullet and dropped $70 on Dragon's Dogma 2 and I've been having a lot of fun with it. I've kind of been wanting a big, open world fantasy game, but I'm also not good at action combat for the most part. This one has a nice balance where I can get a bunch of pawns that can do a lot of the heavy lifting. And overall the combats feel appropriately exciting and dangerous. Exploring is fun, nighttime and camping feels pretty good as a mechanic. I've been going with the flow in terms of just walking everywhere. I'm not too concerned about the microtransactions, as there are a bunch of mods to give you fast travel stuff if I get to the point where I want that.

    There's definitely a hint of jank, similar to the previous game. I wouldn't mind a few patches to tidy things up a bit (or perhaps mods to do the same). Overall I'm really enjoying it. I haven't had a game that I've looked forward to sitting down and playing consistently like this for a while.

    6 votes

  7. Comment on Why ban books when you can ban book awards?: Suburban Illinois district cancels youth chosen Caudill Awards in ~books

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    Imagine pretending you want a "neutral" list of books then mentioning PragerU. The proud ignorance is just so gross.

    Imagine pretending you want a "neutral" list of books then mentioning PragerU. The proud ignorance is just so gross.

    12 votes

  8. Comment on Has anyone here received any benefit as a consumer from algorithmic ad targeting? in ~tech

    killertofu
    Link
    I think the honest answer for me is very rarely, but not never. I think that's basically the whole idea of the system though. Sure, very often I'll see a remarketed ad for something I've already...

    I think the honest answer for me is very rarely, but not never. I think that's basically the whole idea of the system though. Sure, very often I'll see a remarketed ad for something I've already bought or don't intend to buy in the first place. I don't necessarily find that annoying, because I'm not super invested in the content of ads anyway. Yes, they're technically "wrong" in that I'm not interested in that thing, but if I think about it at least the publisher is making very, very slightly more money from that ad view.

    And then in a very small number of cases, I have genuinely been reminded of something I was interested in purchasing and ended up following through, or learned about the existence of a product I then purchased through targeted ads.

    I think that's the business model though. Those ads maybe have a hit rate of 1/1000 or 1/10000, but they tend to be more effective than non-targeted ads and so they're still valuable.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on The small company at the center of ‘Gamergate 2.0’ in ~games

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    Sure, and that strikes me as a great replacement type of panic. What if we're the ones who are marginalized? I'll be concerned about that when the positions of political and economic power aren't...

    Sure, and that strikes me as a great replacement type of panic. What if we're the ones who are marginalized? I'll be concerned about that when the positions of political and economic power aren't 80% white.

    14 votes

  10. Comment on The small company at the center of ‘Gamergate 2.0’ in ~games

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    I'm curious why you think brown or female characters in a video game are intended to be educational rather than just, sometimes people are those things. AAA games can be bad for a huge number of...

    I personally don't care about diversity itself (though I have doubts about its merit outside of media aimed at children, which only applies to some portion of gaming), but whenever I see some piece of media that feels like watered down, design by committee high-budget crap aimed at the lowest common denominator, but the one area where the creators obviously made an effort is perfect diversity and inoffensiveness, it evokes the idea that their priorities are completely lopsided and that they feel their customers need to be educated more than they need to have an okay game, or that they just don't care about quality at all and do diversity cynically because in a big part of the mainstream market it sells.

    I'm curious why you think brown or female characters in a video game are intended to be educational rather than just, sometimes people are those things. AAA games can be bad for a huge number of reasons, and yet it's never occurred to me to wonder if one of them was because too many development resources went into writing dialogue for ladies. In any case, plenty of the games SweetBaby worked on were commercial and critical successes and generally well-liked. Feels like diversity is mostly a carefully chosen scapegoat here.

    I'd love to see actual cultural diversity, videogames set in the middle east made in the middle east, Mauritanian videogames about the history of nomadic tribes in western Sahara and other media presenting truly different points of view.

    I don't see why games from the "US cultural hedgemon" can't be considered genuinely diverse. Brown people, women, gay folks, they live here too. They're part of the culture. They work at these companies. Part of what SweetBaby does is literally allow underrepresented storytellers to give their input. How is that not ok?

    Are some cases of diverse casting just box checking? Probably, but so is every other element of AAA game development. It's an always online looter shooter with microtransactions because they thought that's what would be commercially successful. I don't think the color of the characters' skin is what pushed things one way or the other.

    46 votes

  11. Comment on How American evangelicals use digital surveillance to target the unconverted in ~tech

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    I mean, arguably that's a secondary scam on top of the primary scam that is recruiting into evangelical Christianity and all the predation that entails. I just hope that they end up getting sued...

    I mean, arguably that's a secondary scam on top of the primary scam that is recruiting into evangelical Christianity and all the predation that entails.

    I just hope that they end up getting sued out of existence for careless collection and treatment of personal information. Not that I have tremendous hope in the US legal system in that area. But hey, maybe they'll make a good target for spam vandalism.

    11 votes

  12. Comment on The small company at the center of ‘Gamergate 2.0’ in ~games

    killertofu
    Link
    "Gamergate 2.0". Oh god, not these losers again. Can we just not? As if the poor folks who make video games don't have enough to worry about.

    "Gamergate 2.0". Oh god, not these losers again. Can we just not? As if the poor folks who make video games don't have enough to worry about.

    41 votes

  14. Comment on What irrational video game requirements do you have? in ~games

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    Oh yes, that's a tough one for me too. Sometimes mitigated if it's an old enough game for emulation with save states, but yeah otherwise major negative points.

    Oh yes, that's a tough one for me too. Sometimes mitigated if it's an old enough game for emulation with save states, but yeah otherwise major negative points.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on What irrational video game requirements do you have? in ~games

    killertofu
    Link
    It's not really irrational but it's an immediate dealbreaker for me: lack of pause in a single player game. I have things in my actual life that will always take priority over playing a game. I...

    It's not really irrational but it's an immediate dealbreaker for me: lack of pause in a single player game. I have things in my actual life that will always take priority over playing a game. I also strongly dislike the feeling of losing progress or time. If I'm going to get killed by random things in your game because the doorbell rings, it's not for me.

    65 votes

  16. Comment on Chinese gangs use cryptocurrencies to launder billions in ~finance

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    Yeah, no. This somehow implies anything that "hurts" traditional banking has "good parts". That's not nearly sufficient for crypto to be "good", and ignores the fact that many of the worst,...

    Yeah, no. This somehow implies anything that "hurts" traditional banking has "good parts". That's not nearly sufficient for crypto to be "good", and ignores the fact that many of the worst, predatory elements of more traditional finance, from banks to hedge funds to fascist billionaires, are neck deep in crypto.

    Cryptocurrency has been a solution in search of a problem for more than a decade. It's not, and is incapable of becoming, a consumer-level payment system. It's not going to be Visa; it's not going to be ACH. It does produce highly volatile speculative assets that can be transferred, with extreme inefficiency. And the main non-speculative use case for that is by people who don't want to or can't use actual banks: criminals, terrorists, hackers, child pornographers. None of that is hyperbole, just literal facts on the ground.

    4 votes

  17. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I didn't think this was my kind of game but now I'm very into it. I've been playing "one more hand" for days now and keep getting deeper. It's a really impressive one.

    Yeah, I didn't think this was my kind of game but now I'm very into it. I've been playing "one more hand" for days now and keep getting deeper. It's a really impressive one.

    4 votes

  18. Comment on Chinese gangs use cryptocurrencies to launder billions in ~finance

    killertofu
    Link
    Yeah, funding for illegal activities is basically the cryptocurrency use case. Buying in is basically helping some criminal cash out.

    Yeah, funding for illegal activities is basically the cryptocurrency use case. Buying in is basically helping some criminal cash out.

    19 votes

  19. Comment on Nimona in ~movies

    killertofu
    Link Parent
    Agreed. It's both a devastatingly effective allegory and an absolutely hilarious kids movie. Fun for the whole family that we've watched and rewatched a bunch of times now.

    Agreed. It's both a devastatingly effective allegory and an absolutely hilarious kids movie. Fun for the whole family that we've watched and rewatched a bunch of times now.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    killertofu
    Link
    Off the beaten path a bit, but I started replaying Planescape: Torment (Enhanced Edition). I'm using a pretty exhaustive walkthrough this time, since I've spent many, many hours in the past just...

    Off the beaten path a bit, but I started replaying Planescape: Torment (Enhanced Edition). I'm using a pretty exhaustive walkthrough this time, since I've spent many, many hours in the past just wandering and I'd like to actually get to the end this time. I'm just rocking a high wis build and enjoying the story and incredibly crafted city of Sigil.

    5 votes