hungariantoast's recent activity

  2. Comment on Tech workers rebel against a lame-ass Internet by bringing back ‘GeoCities-style’ WebRings in ~tech

    hungariantoast
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    TheTrove is yet another example of why archive sites should regularly be made available as torrents. Seriously, every time an archive site adds new content, or at least on a weekly basis, they...

    TheTrove is yet another example of why archive sites should regularly be made available as torrents. Seriously, every time an archive site adds new content, or at least on a weekly basis, they should release an updated torrent of the site's content. You can't DMCA the swarm.

    Also 5etools went down recently too, though thankfully there's a mirror up, it's self-hostable, and the sauce is on GitHub.

    It's pretty fuckin sad that by far the most complete and best tool for referencing D&D content is a fan made, and according to WOTC, "copyright infringing" website.

    Honestly I wouldn't be so miffed if WOTC would stop locking so much systems content behind paywalls. No, I am not going to spend dozens of dollars on a fucking book just so I can get the stats for a monk subclass.

    They should just publish the adventures as paid modules, and release the extra systems content, such as gameplay mechanics, classes, etc. for free.

    8 votes

  3. Comment on China erases billionaire actress Zhao Wei from history in ~movies

    hungariantoast
    Link Parent
    I mean this thread is already properly trashed so I guess I'll come in and be the pedant who points out that "massive societal change" is pretty much the defining summary of China's past one...

    I mean this thread is already properly trashed so I guess I'll come in and be the pedant who points out that "massive societal change" is pretty much the defining summary of China's past one hundred years...

  7. Comment on Alphabet’s drone delivery service Wing hits 100,000 deliveries milestone in ~tech

    hungariantoast
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I could imagine in the future it'll be possible to build larger drones that can carry and deliver multiple packages, maybe even eventually up to or exceeding the capacity of something like an...

    I could imagine in the future it'll be possible to build larger drones that can carry and deliver multiple packages, maybe even eventually up to or exceeding the capacity of something like an Amazon van. That feels like something we might see in a decade or two though.

    As for flight versus driving, yeah, I feel like electric delivery vans or trucks would consume less electricity than a fleet of drones. I'd be interested in reading someone's conclusion if they (could) do the math.

    The only advantage I can think of for drones versus what we have now might just be that they can fly instead of driving on roads. They might eventually be, by far, the fastest way to get a package to someone, both cross-country and last-mile.

    Overall though I kind of hate the idea of having at least a dozen drones crossing over every small American town, every day. How would you limit noise pollution? How would it affect wildlife?

    What happens to activities like paramotoring? Right now you can fly around just about anywhere in the US with minimal regulation. What happens to that when the sky is filled with ultra-capital-company-number-ten's fleet of delivery drones?

    5 votes

  8. Comment on Online trolls actually just assholes all the time, study finds in ~science

  15. Comment on Simon plays The Witness in ~games

    hungariantoast
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    My heart sank when he walked off that mountaintop. I guess now I have to subscribe to his channel so I can watch him inevitably discover the thing in part three.

    My heart sank when he walked off that mountaintop. I guess now I have to subscribe to his channel so I can watch him inevitably discover the thing in part three.

    5 votes

  16. Comment on Polarization, pedantry, and pugnacious behavior in ~talk

    hungariantoast
    (edited )
    Link
    First and foremost, I just want to share here a message I wrote back in July about Tildes: If anyone is going to bother replying to this, don't reply to the stuff I quoted above, those are old...
    • Exemplary

    First and foremost, I just want to share here a message I wrote back in July about Tildes:

    I think at this point it's fair to say that Tildes is suffering evaporative cooling. Not just of nice people, but left-ish and trans people too, because the "jerks" aren't being reigned in by effective moderation and, perhaps most importantly, the site has stopped growing, so the "jerks" aren't being drowned out like they could be, and new nice, left, trans people aren't arriving to replace those who leave

    It's a slow death spiral towards a "slightly less techy Hacker News" and that really fucking sucks

    If anyone is going to bother replying to this, don't reply to the stuff I quoted above, those are old thoughts, respond to what I have written below instead.

    Reflecting on that message, I do not think the immediate issue is as much that certain behaviors and interactions aren't being moderated, but rather that there are not enough of the right kind of people to drown that stuff out. I think by far the best and easiest solution would be to 'just' bring in more users. I'm not even sure we need to worry about bringing in the 'right kind' of user because historically the site did pretty well at self-selecting for really excellent people.

    It's just that the growth stopped and almost all of those really excellent people left because the site became an 'attritioning', exhausting experience for them.

    Of course, we don't want Tildes to have to constantly grow just to not attrition excellent people though, so effective moderation is absolutely an important part of reversing this course.

    Of course of course, it could also just be that Deimos is relatively okay with the way things are now, or that he doesn't see the issues you do, and it could just be that in the end you and I are not the kinds of users that this website ended up being for.

    I really hope that isn't the case. I hope the few users who I have come to find annoying over the past year and a half because I've been stuck inside this website box with them and decreasingly anyone else, I hope they eventually (and I guess I as well) get drowned out by a torrent of new people excited to participate on a website that's refreshing and nothing like the current hellscape of for-profit social media.

    As for how to bring in more users, Deimos wrote out some of his own ideas on the subject back in... October 2019:

    https://tildes.net/~tildes/ig7/what_is_this_place_in_need_of_right_now#comment-42a1

    I know this comment hasn't really addressed directly any of the things you've brought up here, and I am sorry for that. I guess I'm just trying to write out my thoughts for a high level solution because wow, I really do want this site and community to succeed and for people like you to be a part of it.

    There are some nice people in the world. I mean nice people, the sort I couldn’t describe myself as. People who are friends with everyone, who are somehow never involved in any argument, who seem content to spend their time drawing pictures of bumblebees on flowers that make everyone happy.

    Those people are great to have around. You want to hold onto them as much as you can.

    But people only have so much tolerance for jerkiness, and really nice people often have less tolerance than the rest of us.

    The trouble with not ejecting a jerk — whether their shenanigans are deliberate or incidental — is that you allow the average jerkiness of the community to rise slightly. The higher it goes, the more likely it is that those really nice people will come around less often, or stop coming around at all. That, in turn, makes the average jerkiness rise even more, which teaches the original jerk that their behavior is acceptable and makes your community more appealing to other jerks. Meanwhile, more people at the nice end of the scale are drifting away.

    https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/

    18 votes

  17. Comment on Taliban enter Afghan capital as US diplomats evacuate by chopper in ~news

  18. Comment on Taliban enter Afghan capital as US diplomats evacuate by chopper in ~news

    hungariantoast
    Link
    I wonder if forty-six years from now the image of the Chinook flying over the US embassy in Kabul will be remembered as well as that infamous photo from Saigon in 1975 is today. The situations...

    I wonder if forty-six years from now the image of the Chinook flying over the US embassy in Kabul will be remembered as well as that infamous photo from Saigon in 1975 is today.

    The situations aren't the same. Afghanistan is worse in some ways, better in others, but I would not be surprised if it is that image that becomes the defining picture of this situation.

    In the last 180 years three superpowers have attempted to take control of Afghanistan five times and five times they have been defeated.

    9 votes

  19. Comment on All Good Things… (Leaving Mozilla) in ~comp

    hungariantoast
    Link Parent
    Sure, I also don't want Firefox to go away any time soon

    Sure, I also don't want Firefox to go away any time soon

    5 votes

  20. Comment on All Good Things… (Leaving Mozilla) in ~comp

    hungariantoast
    Link Parent
    To be fair, writing a new web engine from scratch, getting it to feature parity, and keeping up with the other major engines, is an impossible task for all but the largest organizations. I'm also...

    To be fair, writing a new web engine from scratch, getting it to feature parity, and keeping up with the other major engines, is an impossible task for all but the largest organizations.

    I'm also not convinced that only having three or four usable web engines is such a bad thing. I think the biggest problem is that the by far most popular engine is controlled by a single for-profit company.

    7 votes