> Russia is not quite that ballsy over accidentally butchering civilians.
I don't know about accidental, but if anyone thinks Russia is not ballsy about butchering civilians, they need a refresher on Russia's wars during the last few decades. Last few years would be enough too. It's a principle of their military affairs.
Switch on the critical thinking part of your brain and go read about american war crimes, the reality is much dirtier than "we're Good and they're Evil". It's not a competition so I'm not going to start ranking armies but they all have their fair share of atrocities.
What makes you think I'm not thinking critically? You're the person here who seems to be thinking in terms of competition, as far as I can tell. And, who's we?
Not sure if you're being subtly apologetic, so I'll elaborate my point. Russian commanders that led campaigns in Syria got nicknames like Butcher of Aleppo and General Armageddon, for not only using scorched earth tactics, indiscriminate bombing, but actually systemically bombing schools, hospitals, field clinics, bread lines. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called it "crimes of historic proportions." Aid organizations would actually stonewall the UN, because through UN Russia would find out where the bread lines are and would bomb them. These are not accidents, or freak, isolated occurances: it's doctrine. Look at Mariupol. Or, Ukraine in general.
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram collection point ? The wikileak scandals ? 100k+ civilians dead in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that never existed. 15%+ of drone strike victims being civilian over the last 20 years
These are all accidents too I assume ? Idk what to expect from people who are currently blowing up random boats in international waters and who just declared fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction lmao
Guy, you're the only one here acting like this is a competition. Do you think what Russia does is somehow more acceptable if you can find other criminals? Yeah, just lean into it. Good luck with that.
> I was specifically talking about accidental shootdowns of civilian airliners.
Maybe you should think twice before dropping offhand comments related to mass killings. If you want to talk about what exactly I said that's "politics" as opposed to history, we can do that.
I have a bias towards not dying, and so far that has steered me away from activities that increase my likelihood of it. Bias is not intrinsically negative (that's prejudice), it just means a preference towards.
I see some lifted pickup truck, I know where to focus my attention to better perceive a potential outsize source of accidents.
If I know where a hidden driveway is, I know where to focus my attention to better perceive any cars emerging. My knowledge of the driveway biases me towards looking towards it, where another driver without that knowledge would not.
Biased perceptions of things as dangerous will absolutely make us observe them more closely in order to better perceive danger.
You're still (perhaps inadvertently) equating 'bias' with 'prejudice', but experience biases our perceptions in positive ways, like clocking a hot stovetop.
You think I think there isn't a difference between bias and prejudice, while I think you think there isn't a difference between prejudice and knowledge.
What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized, or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific. The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.
> I think you think there isn't a difference between prejudice and knowledge
I'm having trouble following this. Of course there's a difference between prejudice and knowledge.
Being aware that studies show pickup trucks are statistically more dangerous than other classes of vehicles (SUVs included, which is nuts!), and thus wanting to avoid them, is knowledge.
Thinking that pickup truck drivers are wannabe macho chuds, and thus wanting to avoid them, is prejudice.
From the outside, you have no clue whether avoidant behavior stems from knowledge-based-bias, or prejudice. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion I'd conflated the two.
> What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized
What?
> or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific
I have no clue what this has to do with our discussion.
> The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.
Ah, I see where you're going. You're wrong.
If you truly believe that you don't use lived experience to make prefactual assessments throughout life, you haven't thought about it enough:
When you walk up to a new computer, you don't assume that you have no idea how the mouse will work, just because this is a new mouse you haven't individually encountered before. You assume (and act on the assumption) that it will work the same as other mice. You don't swab it just in case it's a bomb, or covered in poison.
You just act on your expectations of how it will behave -UNTIL- you see evidence to the contrary.
The problem is you're trying to (as I said) equate bias with prejudice. The comment from pepperghost93 was about the belief in corporations' willingness to do bad things.
You and Permit1 clearly assumed they were merely prejudiced against corporations, and not basing their wariness of corporate malfeasance on factual data showing corporations being willing to, in fact, do immoral and illegal things.
tl;dr Ironically, you, in the process of decrying bias, used your own biased perception of prefactual judgements to assume they were coming from a place of prejudice rather than knowledge.
I'm sure our viewpoints are more similar than it seems, and we eventually would find a fairly spacious middle-ground, but I'd prefer not to continue: thanks for the conversation.
That bias is well earned. Maybe one day corporations will do enough good things in the world to undo the evil they've perpetuated. I'm not holding my breath.
The biggest advantage of codex variants, for me, is terseness and reduced sicophany. That, and presumably better adherence to requested output formats.
So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
> So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive.
No, not really. Many of the common game engines already support Linux out of the box. Unity, for example, already makes building for Linux basically equivalent to building for Windows or Mac. Proton has disincentivized building for Linux even in cases where doing so is already as straightforward and low-effort as could be.
> Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
Yes. Most of these games were already playable on Linux under Wine, even if it took a bit more effort on the part of the user to get things up and running. The rise in Linux usage started motivating native Linux ports for a few years, and there's a large library of native Linux games out there. But Proton has been removing the incentives to build native Linux ports by making that Windows compatibility "just work".
The result is now that there are more games where Linux compatibility still running on top of an emulation layer -- but one that's a bit less straightforward for users to configure directly as they would with Wine -- and a bit less performant than they might otherwise be.
It also means that Linux compatibility for these games is more closely coupled to the Steam ecosystem. Whereas a game with a native Linux build might distribute that build through Steam, GOG, Humble, itch.io, etc., now the non-Steam platforms have only Windows builds. Sure, these can usually still be played under Wine in the traditional fashion, but that represents a regression away from native Linux support.
A lot of Linux ports have serious issues, it's quite common to get better performance/fewer bugs by forcing a Linux native steam game to run the windows version through Proton instead.
Realistically a lot of devs aren't going to make Linux versions at all (or be able to spend time actually fixing issues with them) unless Linux users make up a bigger market share. Valve's efforts are helping to grow Linux market share, which is a necessary step before we can ever hope for most devs to focus on Linux compatibility.
My thoughts exactly, linux gaming really doesn't tell me much, beyond that I might be able to use it if I was using Linux. Could be some controller or a Proton-something for all I can tell reading the phrase.
And same goes for less technical disciplines too. Adobe, Autodesk, Archicad, etc. It's pretty bad software: expensive, very buggy, poor extensibility, poorly maintained, closed-source, rapid tech debt accumulation requires upgrading your pc every few years. If only a minor percentage of organizations licensing it would instead spend that budget financing an open source project, that would have a very positive effect for everyone. I can somewhat understand private businesses not thinking long-term, but public institutions paying licensing fees instead of financing open-source seems like plain incompetence. Then again, maybe there's a lack of open-source initiatives willing to spearhead this.
But if students learn some open-source software that doesn’t get used in private industry, will they be able to land a job that’s asking Autodesk et al. knowledge as a requirement?
As a former medical and scientific illustrator, learning a software package (Photoshop or GIMP) really isn't as crucial as learning principles and practices of art, design, and graphics. Color theory, negative space, composition, etc., are critical to production and apply to any media one chooses to work in: oil on canvas, pen and ink, or computers.
The other issue is access. Again, from an art/graphics/design perspective, costs associated with proprietary software can limit some students from even participating in art/graphics/design programs. Adobe Creative Suite is US$69.99/mo or US$840/yr.
It's not the job of a university to prepare you for the workplace. That's the job of the workplace. I'm sick of industry outsourcing their jobs to public institutions.
It's the job of a university to teach cutting edge research
Sure, you can say that. But a good chunk of people will disagree with you. I went to one of the top schools, and it was fairly 30/70 between teaching “cutting edge research” and teaching “what’s being used in practice”. I think that was fair. During bachelors, hardly you’ll get cutting edge research cause you don’t have prerequisite knowledge.
Agree with this 100%. At some point the private sector decided that it will accept no responsibilities of any kind (except for what was fought and defended tooth and nail by the civil society and a few slightly more responsible governments), and all the costs that can be avoided will be avoided, shifting the burden on the public sector.
It's not a big jump to go from open-source equivalents of the close source products. The concept and what one wants to accomplish is the same. Many of these companies have certification programs, if the point is to be specific and narrow, for a particular job.
Good points. Funding the open-source equivalents, even at a fraction of what they are spending on close-source, would have circumvented the problem of being "trapped" in the first place. Even more, the universities would be able to contribute code to the projects, if they wanted to.
It was always pretty obvious what Microsoft wanted and was trying to do. Now trying to escape, will be painful, but that's the price they will have to endure if they want freedom and data sovereignty.
I don't think it's a stretch. I've numerous close friends that work with it daily and I've helped troubleshoot some of the issues. After Effects is quite hated among them, but has to be used, because there aren't viable alternatives. Illustrator crashes randomly. Photoshop has multi-decade bugs in color handling. But, the fact that their resource use baloons yearly and thus forces the industry to waste on constant hardware upgrades would be enough to discredit Adobe software, imo.
I'd be surprised if the people I worked with would think twice before working with someone that's been in psychiatric care, though I can't be sure, because I don't know that any of them did. I know that I wouldn't care. I have friends that stayed in hospitals for psychiatric reasons: they'd be great to work with, I think.
Yeah, I have a number of coworkers that have shared with me that they are on psychiatric medications, and have discussed mental health with. It's becoming normalized, and that's a good thing.
It’s still definitely a big deal. Note that the CIA and the NSA routinely declare ex-employees that whistleblow or leak as “mentally ill.”
It depends on the company. I worked for fairly “stolid” companies, for most of my career, and I suspect that they would treat mentally-ill people badly.
Mental illness is something that, unfortunately, I have a lot of experience with. I have severe mental illness in my family (I deal with it every day), and I spend a significant part of my life, interacting with folks at various stages of recovery from it.
I have been seeing therapists for much of my life. When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with autism, but was never told, so I spent decades, trying to “fix” myself, before finding out. Once I found out that I was “on the spectrum,” I realized that it can’t be “fixed”; only mitigated, and things started improving quickly, at that point.
That said, I think “mentally-ill” means “diagnosed and professionally-treated,” to most folks. It’s my opinion, that there’s a lot of undiagnosed/untreated mental illness out there. Just looking at the threads of interaction, on any Internet community, makes that clear. One “tell,” that I have encountered, is when someone has extremely strong opinions on psychiatry. It’s not something most folks even think about, so it’s unusual, when it’s a big deal to someone.
Mental illness also tends to get worse, as we get older, if untreated. An “eccentric” young man, may become an old hermit, flying around, keeping his piss in canopic jars.
Much of what we call “mental illness,” is actually self-developed coping mechanisms, in response to trauma, or brain-chemistry imbalance. That’s why getting medication doesn’t just “fix” us. We need to seek help in defusing the habits and rituals that were developed to help deal with the problem.
I think the problem with "mental illness" is that I think in many cases it's the environment that is not suitable. In modern times we've created this environment that just doesn't fit all archetypes of people and those who it doesn't fit well with, we declare "mentally ill". There are obviously actual serious issues, but I believe a lot of it has to do with environment. It's not a clear illness like diabetes, etc. For instance I couldn't handle going to school, people can label it ADHD or Autism, but does it make sense in the first place to force me to study specific things that I don't care about as opposed to playing into my interests and strengths. I'm glad I'm grown up now, and can decide to learn what I'm actually interested in and do it 100x more effective per unit of time, as opposed to in school.
One of the issues I face, with my family member, is that they can’t handle stress, well.
I have found that we only advance, when we are outside our “comfort zone.” As long as everything is copacetic, there’s no need to improve.
But a “comfort zone” is a “fuzzy” quality. Too far out, is “trauma.” Different folks handle discomfort and trauma, in a variety of ways. I do think our families and support systems, can make a huge difference.
For myself, being “on the spectrum” has really been an asset, in many ways. I have always learned technology quickly, but I’m a high school dropout with a GED, and almost all my education has been self-directed. Most of my life has been spent “outside my comfort zone.”
Yeah, that's complicated. I guess from my own experience related to stress and going out of comfort zone what I can speak to is that I have trouble going out of comfort zone when I'm doing something I'm not interested in and when I feel like I have to pretend that I'm someone I'm not. E.g. normal social situations where I have to pretend that I have favourite food, favourite place to go, or I even know places. I zone out on 90%+ topics, and I can't understand why on earth people are talking about these things.
But if I'm passionate about something, I will be excited to present to a large audience, to go through things that you might consider going out of comfort zone, be competitive etc.
Now in school I had so many situations where I had to "be out of comfort zone" in things I wasn't interested in. Social situations I didn't enjoy. I left things to last minute, then stressed, lost confidence, massively. Eventually dropped out of high school.
Luckily managed to get a successful career going where I've been passionately moving forward, and this has massively boosted my confidence too. Now I'm a successful member of society, make quite a bit, pay taxes, etc, and can build the exact life that I want and works out best for me.
Thanks for sharing. To be clear, I don't doubt that there are people that would make a problem out of a history of mental illness. But, it's definitely not everyone and someone with such a history shouldn't be discouraged to get out there and be open about it. Or, at least I'd like to see this stuff talked about without stigma.
I have a nephew with bipolar. He has chosen to “go public” about it, on LinkedIn. His reasoning, is that it helps remove the stigma. He seems to be doing fine, but he also has a very good background, and a lot of advantages, not available to others (I come from a fairly Ivy League family, and my sister has a lot of resources).
For myself, I have been in Recovery from drug addiction, for over 45 years. I was once a Very Bad Boi. I quit at 18, so never got a[n adult] record.
It’s not something that I have chosen to reveal, while I was working. I know, damn well, that it would not have worked in my favor (even though the Recovery process has conferred significant advantages). I never explicitly told my employees or my employers. My last employer was a Japanese company, and drug addiction suffers a great stigma, in most Asian nations. It would not have gone well. As it was, they kept me for decades, and I enjoyed an “inner circle” level of trust (a significant part of my path of Recovery is rigorous Honesty, Personal Integrity, and self-Discipline. I’m a very trustworthy and hard-working person). They never knew it, but they got a great deal of benefit from my addiction and subsequent Recovery.
In fact, I guarantee that some folks, after reading that, now suddenly hate me (in addition to the ones that already do, because they think I’m a stuck-up boomer). There’s a great deal of emotion, in mental illness and Recovery, and there’s a very good reason that folks don’t reveal it. I’ve watched it happen, for a long time. It’s a real thing.
As it is, I still don’t mention it often, though it’s a primary fact of life, for me. It’s not relevant to most of my interactions, and most people have no understanding of Recovery (and shouldn’t be required to, either). It’s very much a “If I have to explain, you wouldn’t understand” thing. It’s my problem, and my responsibility to manage. I have to understand others; they don’t need to understand me.
I think in many places there's now enough of critical mass where people are understanding enough and call out anyone who uses that information negatively towards the person.
I think that the general concensus is as long as a name doesn't start with a V, and is not taken, it's a good brand name. You can substitute W for V though, as in Waginium.
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