Notices by Chris 💾✒🚀🍕🎮🔧📵💻 (suetanvil@mastodon.technology), page 11

I feel attacked.

@enkiv2 @theoutrider

They're basically spammers, calling everyone even remotely in the field they're looking for (and usually know nothing about) in the hope that they reach someone who wants to do their exact thing.

I'm generally polite, if for no other reason than I don't want to alienate a potential job opportunity in the future, but I don't take them seriously.

@bgcarlisle

I just realized I hadn’t heard about that guy for a while. It felt really nice.

@ajroach42

The problem with the modern web browser is that it's become a software runtime. This is handy for writing lightweight(ish) clients and games but 95% of the web is just documents.

So every document is potentially a program without looking like one and a huge amount of effort goes into (semi-successfully) trying to keep those secret programs from harming us.

So I say cut the Gordian Knot: use a document reader when reading web pages and the app runner ONLY on websites you trust.

@WAHa_06x36

I’m not sure that disputes my point though. Even if we ignore the fact that the guy DID get caught, his scheme doesn’t seem any easier or more effective than hiring poor people to do the fraudulent voting in person.

And given that mail-in ballots can bypass certain voter-suppression strategies, you can’t really say that they’re not a net gain for democracy.

@janne

I don’t think the invaders *should* be relatable. Their alienness is a great thing about the game and making them into characters diminishes that.

(Which is not to say that it’s not a great game otherwise.)

@ajroach42

Everything except for client-side scripting and stuff that is only useful with it, automatic loading of pictures or other embedded elements unless hosted on the same server as the page and the expectation that the client faithfully follows the style sheet.

Fixed a bug in Relarn where the cause-of-death codes and monster IDs overlapped. This is a problem because the end-of-game code interprets a monster ID as "killed by creature X".

In particular, a demon prince had the same ID as the code for "won the game".

Praying too much at an altar can summon one of those, which meant that some players were winning the game via prayer.

@WAHa_06x36

Just? 45 is only the latest product of an extended campaign to undermine the democratic processes of the US that mail-in voting had nothing to do with.

The current system has a lot of economic barriers in place that dramatically skew the results toward one side already. Mail-in would do a lot to lift those barriers while still being difficult to subvert.

So yeah, I argue that it would make the US more democratic than it is now.

So a think I don't like about War of the Chosen (the XCOM 2 Expansion) is that the new villains behave like... well, villains. They taunt you and bicker among themselves.

Which I think really diminishes them. Up until now, the aliens have been this mysterious threat whose motives are unknowable (well, until the end anyway) and that makes them so much more menacing.

(The new factions are cool though, but I've gone back to Vanilla XCOM 2 as a warmup. The extra options are kind of overwhelming.)

@WAHa_06x36

To swing an election by mail fraud, you’d need to either forge or steal a large number of physical ballots AND convincingly fill them in in bulk AND send them from plausible locations AND keep the original voters from the physical polls. That sounds really difficult

Ditto buying votes; large-scale bribery would get noticed.

Compared to the existing problems, mail-in seems like an improvement.

@natecull

The world-changer rhetoric persists because the jocks find it useful as a motivator and/or they want to believe that their shitty hookup app idea is just as significant as the microprocessor. But it’s just capitalism co-opting a less-virulent form of capitalism.

@natecull

I tend to think of it in a jocks vs nerds way. Nerds found a way to get to the cool table (i.e. rich) by inventing things. Jocks (aka business students) saw this and tried to do the same thing. Because their skills are financial, it’s all monetization instead of tech but it uses smart phones so they call it tech.

The jocks have an advantage, though because they already know the investors from football practice so they crowd out the actual innovation.

@natecull

I tend to think of it in a jocks vs nerds way. Nerds found a way to get to the cool table (i.e. rich) by inventing things. Jocks (aka business students) saw this and tried to do the same thing. Because their skills are financial, it’s all monetization instead of tech but it uses smart phones so they call it tech.

The jocks have an advantage, though because they already know the investors from football practice so they crowd out the actual innovation

@natecull

One thing I’ve noticed has changed since the late 90s is the sort of things being funded. It used to be new technologies (e.g. computers, networking gear, etc.) but it’s pretty much become nothing but monetization strategies for existing tech (e.g. Facebook, Uber).

I think what’s happened is that the engineering founders have been replaced by finance guy founders who want in on the action PLUS. They have an advantage cuz they know the investors’ culture already.

@SarcasmKid

That’s not a nice thing to do.

@Jason_Dodd @cwebber

Until I visited Germany a couple of years ago, I assumed it was just something my German immigrant Mom did and that nobody else did it because it stretched the socks.

But the hotel laundry did it so I gave it another try and it’s awesome.

@Shadi

That was a horror fave, BTW.