I don’t always even know if I agree with myself when I’m trying to figure out stuff that’s outside the edge of my own understanding, so regardless of whether you think you’re right I appreciate the constructive engagement.

One employment lawyer I heard an interview with once suggested something similar to but subtly different than what you’re talking about, that “woke” is actually a scheme by the ownership class to divide the working class by getting us to attack each other so we don’t work together to get better wages or working conditions from them.

It’s definitely a multi-faceted issue.

One of the keys is definitely that “woke” isn’t all progressive thought, it’s a very specific point, so to criticize the piece isn’t to necessarily criticize the whole.

On the matter at hand though, the fact that the accusations against Musk are very specific and in a very specific order really speaks to the fact that it isn’t really the author’s personal thoughts. There’s lots of things you can go after the guy for that aren’t in order “racist sexist misogynistic homophobic transphobic”. Much more relevant to the article would be that he often claims he’ll be able to do things he can’t, or he sets timelines he can’t possibly meet, or his whole fortune is based on a ponzi scheme where the world’s smallest car company has a market cap that dwarfs any other car company even when those other companies have entire product lines Tesla isn’t even involved in. Most people who play video games don’t play a game engine. Most people agree that once John Romero left id the company really wasn’t the same, and while Quake 2 is a technical marvel it isn’t nearly as fun to play or atmospheric as doom or quake. Doom 3 was also a technological marvel, but most people don’t remember it as a classic the same way they remember doom or quake. Doom 2016 was the first time in decades that id really hit the nail on the head hard, and it was thanks to real creativity and bringing new ideas into the franchise and in many ways into the genre as a whole.

That’s the actual problem with using AI to produce games, AI is an inherently conservative force – not in a political sense, but in that it is fed data and does a great job of creating permutations of that data. AI is incredibly powerful for creating something like what has already come before it, but true creativity brings something new. Someone writing about a feeling nobody’s ever written about that represents insight into the human mind, that’s something a human can produce, but not an AI.

Of Course I already had these games on gog…

Actually, I came up with a much better definition that I think fits.

"I found a paradox, that in a lot of ways wokeness is deeply, deeply conservative. There’s an orthodoxy, and all that matters is that you follow the orthodoxy. Everything outside the orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced, and anyone who isn’t strictly following orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced regardless of their alignment otherwise.

If progressivism is truly about challenging norms and fostering dialogue, then an orthodoxy should not exist. Instead, the rigidity undermines progressiveness by creating a new form of conservatism: a defense of the orthodox beliefs and existing hierarchies within the movement itself.

The foolish justification for this behavior they came up with of Popper’s paradox of tolerance relies on answering a paradox with one answer or another without realizing that the nature of a paradox is such that there is no cut and dry black and white answer.

My criticism here of paradox also applies to the paradox I recognized, by the way. You can’t change anything to resolve it in a simple black and white manner because the components that make up the paradox are required to have the thing in the first place and thus the question is complicated. Without some form of orthodoxy, progressive ideology that questions societal norms would immediately have to start questioning the societal norms it successfully installed, potentially just resulting in paralysis.

I wonder though if this framework helps explain the difference between “progressive” and “woke”. The former is a spectrum that most westerners are somewhere on, the latter is where you reach a highly dogmatic, highly self-assured spot on the spectrum.

Most people, even a supermajority of ideological conservatives, want social progress in some form. Anyone can see things aren’t perfect and want things to be better. It’s when you know exactly what needs to be done and it makes you a better person than everyone else and anyone standing in your way is the devil that it becomes (to use a bad term in context) problematic."

The dogmatic adherence to orthodoxy further fits with an analysis I did a few months ago about the movie Idiocracy. In that movie, the entire world is taken over by a form of populist, anti-intellectual idiocy. My criticism of the movie was that there are in fact multiple forms of idiocy. and today’s predominant form of idiocy is in fact elitist and pseudo-intellectual. As an example, instead of watching “ow my balls”, watching people watching “ow my balls” so you can point and laugh at the idiots watching the stupid show, as if that’s any better. Under such a form of idiocy, the dull end up using the trappings of intellect to try to act as intelligent people, similar to the cargo cults of the pacific islands. From this point of view, the strict adherence to orthodoxy is a requirement because such idiots can’t synthesize new ideas, they can only take ideas someone else created and pretend they came up with them, and any movement from that strict orthodoxy will not allow them to pretend they’re smarter than they really are.

Ironically, the phrase “anyone that says anything I don’t like is woke” is part of the orthodoxy of wokeness. It suggests that the author of the parent post won’t engage with my arguments in any real way, because they’re just reciting pieces of an orthodoxy they’ve been given.

My post didn’t call PC Gamer “Woke”, I called it “Dreck”. The problem with it isn’t necessarily that it has even performative orthodox progressive values, it’s that it has always been boring, lazy, and typically just an industry mouthpiece. I used to subscribe to PC gaming magazines, and there ere more entertaining magazines such as the legendary PC Accelerator, there were more engaging magazines that brought in industry experts like Ken Levine, there were more neutral magazines such as PC Games magazine, but virtually all of those magazines failed while PC Gamer continues on.

The fact that the article spends so much time in its introduction using orthodox buzzwords is evidence of what I’m talking about. The actual article appears to be “someone I disagree with politically is doing a thing. They are bad because I disagree with him politically.”

Yeah… It’s an actual shame that all the good magazines got shut down while dreck like this continues to survive.

Some people are calling this one “reddit mod isekai”, but that’s only because the MC looks like a reddit mod. The actual story is much more wholesome.

A lot of fascists don’t realize they’re fascist.

Mussolini once said “Fascism can be better described as corporatism, the combination of state and corporate power”. Under fascism, everything and everyone is socialized under the state, and everything becomes a tool of the state. For this reason, some historians call fascism “State Socialism”, contrasting Hitler’s “Racial Socialism” or Marxism’s “Class Socialism”, each of which use a totalizing state to socialize everyone into one group. So a government official putting pressure on a corporation to silence speech the state doesn’t like is openly fascist, and many people think they want that sort of fascism.

In my book The Graysonian Ethic, I talk about why people think they want fascism(though they might call their fascism something different because they want to pretend they’re not calling for fascism) but they actually don’t:

“The truth is, everybody thinks that they want fascism because they imagine that fascism will do exactly what they want and nothing more. They look at all the groups of people that they do not like and they imagine that the fascists will go and clamp down on those people and then just stop. Reality is not so kind. Yes, the evil empire did go out and do reprehensible things to the group that they identified as causing the problem. Of course, you do not need to make any kind of choices to whether someone of that particular group caused any problems to realize that most people within any given group are not responsible for the actions of the few. Within any given group there are lots of people who are just trying to sit back and live their lives without hurting anyone. Despite that, this great evil empire went out and exterminated a people. They did not stop there though. To them, even amongst the people that they claimed to protect and try to save there were two sorts of people: those who supported the regime and those who did not. For many of those who supported the regime, they were given the means to gain tremendous wealth and power in a very short period of time. For those who did not, they had their livelihood stripped away, they were shunned, in some cases they joined the groups who faced extermination.”

I binged “The Do-Over Damsel Conquers the Dragon Emperor” yesterday, I found it kind of cute. I like that the MC is the goddamned god of war (figuratively). It reminds me of “7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!” the light novel series (Apparently there’s an anime of that one too but I’ve only read the LN), but it’s cute, the story of two kind autistic people trying to lizard-person their way into falling in love.

There’s this one and “let this soul rest in peace” or whatever, and I thought the latter was going to be more like the former. I’m finding this series really entertaining.

The two top ones host invidious, searx, and yacy on one and lotide (what I’m talking to you on) and matrix on the other, they both have Intel Atom D2550s. The bottom one has an Intel Core i5-4570TE, and hosts basically everything else including my reverse proxy server.

At some point I’d like to move to low-end ryzen embeddeds, because they are either as powerful or more powerful than anything I have and remain fanless, but one step at a time (and finding something that powerful that’s inexpensive and scavenged from a roadside sign is tough sometimes)

https://lotide.fbxl.net/api/stable/posts/165851/href

My whole empire, made almost entirely of parts scavenged from roadside signs. (not a single fan on the whole setup)

The obvious point being that if they’re not going to even run their own mail server, they won’t run their own fediverse server.

Isn’t electricity in Australia still something like 40 cents a kilowatt hour?

Apparently not too much solar power to drop the prices a bit.

“that’s the great part – you don’t!”

But Honestly, it’d be pretty damn cool. I wouldn’t be too surprised to find they don’t even run their own mail server though.

Holy moly, the orange box was the second game I ever activated on steam, way back in 2008, 16 years ago.

Protip: You can see when you bought different games by using the link https://store.steampowered.com/account/licenses/

Kind of a trip down memory lane, and a real reminder of how far the gaming industry has fallen. 2013 was just page after page of great games, 2014, still lots, and slowly it peters out until the last few years fit on one page on the screen. I bought games in the years before that, but many of them were just catching up with the banger years around 2013!

In Nantucket, shards of fiberglass covered the coast for miles after a blade exploded on an offshore windmill, leading to widespread ecological damage. Admittedly it isn’t a common event, but it does show the capacity for pollution from wind turbines:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/climate/wind-turbine-breaks-nantucket.html

The effects on the lifecycle of offshore wind on aquatic life including whales is a subject of ongoing research:

https://tethys.pnnl.gov/summaries/underwater-noise-effects-marine-life-associated-offshore-wind-farms

It’s known that there’s a major impact of wind turbines in general on birds, confirmed by several studies:

https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/

There is also a risk from operational fluids within the wind turbines, and part of the ongoing risk analysis of one wind farm was a scenario where 20,000 litres of dielectric fluid were released into the ocean:

https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/offshore-wind-spill-exercise-held-northeast-region

The nature of the ocean is such that there’s a potential to pollute a large amount of water and coastline, making the risks unique to offshore wind, where they would be much more localized in an onshore wind farm.

That being said, it is fair to point out that all forms of industrial scale electricity generation, no matter how “green”, will have a potential environmental impact simply by the nature of how massive such operations need to be, so the question is always about finding the least bad option rather than pretending there’s any one option that is perfectly positive for the environment.

To be honest though, offshore wind projects don’t make any sense in a free market. The cost per MW is significantly higher than the market can support, so the only way to have these things is to take money from someone else to pay the difference. For example, the average wholesale price of electricity in America in 2024 was between 30 and 60 dollars per Megawatt. The cost of offshore electricity is closer to 200 dollars per megawatt. The difference is made up with government grants (which aren’t free market) or by power companies charging customers using other forms of electricity more to cover the difference (which is only happening due to regulations and so isn’t really a free market mechanism)

This has occurred elsewhere too. In Ontario, many people applauded the massive increase in solar generation, but the price was that the electrical companies paid over 80 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity they then sold at wholesale for closer to 4 cents per kilowatt hour. The difference was paid for by a “global adjustment charge” which massively increased first retail consumers electric bills, and later when that was rescinded somewhat could as much as double the bills of industrial consumers and led to “global adjustment days” where industrial plants totally shut down for a day to avoid the charge.

An example of green energy that could win in the free market running up against government would be hydroelectric. Some of the least expensive electricity in the first world such as Manitoba and Quebec Canada and Norway in Europe, comes from hydroelectric, and unlike solar or wind it can be created at a scale large enough to power an entire region. Moreover, it can be used as a base load which neither wind nor solar can. In many regions where it’s practical, lobbyists have ensured that spots that could have good hydroelectric are not allowed to be used for that purpose. There isn’t much money in successfully providing cheap power to millions of people.

I think I’ve played NFS1 the most, the original one for MS-DOS. The non-circular tracks felt like they were set up for the love of driving, and I really enjoyed driving those tracks without even worrying so much about winning the races.

You know, everyone’s getting pissed off at seeing these numbers but it is over many years.

They’ve already lost 20% of their buying power just in the last 4 years, and that’s if you go by the fake CP lie. Reality is you need food and shelter and transportation a lot more than you need a new smart phone (my phone is from before covid), so cost of living has gone up a lot more than it says for actual people.

It isn’t really the company’s fault that inflation went so high, but as a defense contractor they are one of the beneficiaries of The extreme government spending that led to the inflation. The fact that they’ve mismanaged themselves into Oblivion isn’t really material here, that’s entirely self-inflicted. Every time one of the Frontline workers tries to speak out they get assassinated…

It’s similar to hydroelectric – if it works and it’s cost effective, people will use it and consider it a privilege… Some green energy works really really well.

More coal for China to burn manufacturing disposable junk for us to buy!

The same paypal that thought they can fine you for TOS violations?

Deleted my account, nothing of value was lost.