Again. IF we decide that “paddy wagon” is a slur toward the Irish, it is specifically a slur toward Irish cops. And fuck the police.
Simple as that.
Like I said, I’ll try to avoid it in the future because even though there is very little evidence that it is even a slur toward Irish cops, it sounds enough like one that I would rather avoid it. But I am not gonna lose ANY sleep over oppressors getting their fee fees hurt because people don’t like them.
Yes, the Irish were (and kind of still are) looked down upon by “Whites”.
They historically chose to address that by becoming cops. Oppressors. The idea being that if they were useful they would at least be better than the brown and yellow people. And irish cops have caused untold horrors amongst labor and minorities.
So while I disagree that “paddy wagon” is an Irish slur so much as MAYBE it is a cop slur, it is close enough that I’ll refrain from using it. But it is still the same issue as with “cracker” where… you are gonna have to try a whole hell of a lot harder for me to care if people’s feelings are hurt that folk don’t appreciate how many skulls they cracked in the name of impressing the crackers.
Every sourcing I have seen comes more from the UK as a way to shorten patrol and the argument that it is an ethnic slur against predominantly Irish police forces is similar to “cracker” in that… can you REALLY be that racist against the oppressors?
But tweaked anyway. Thanks.
Its a balancing act. You shouldn’t be recording tiktoks and doing the carlton.
But there is a lot of value in organizers being able to communicate. If you see a fat white kid with an assault rifle, you let people know. Same with when the patrol wagons roll in.
And there is a LOT of value in being able to make it clear to the cops that you are recording before they decide to “teach some people a lesson”.
I chat about this with my activist buddies a lot. And one thing we are increasingly realizing is that there is a LOT of value in convincing even a mid-tier IRL streamer to come out. Yeah, they are fucking obnoxious when they are trying to yell to chat. But it is someone who is high enough profile that they won’t immediately have their gear destroyed AND privileged enough that they won’t even realize that is an option until it is too late. At which point the decision as to how to handle the escalation is already happening.
There is a massive push right now for energy efficient alternatives to nvidia GPUs for AI/ML. PLENTY of companies are dumping massive amounts of money on macs and rapidly learning the lesson the rest of us learned decades ago in terms of power and performance.
The reality is that this is going to be marketed for AI because it has an APU which, keeping it simple, is a CPU+GPU. And plenty of companies are going to rush to buy them for that and a very limited subset will have a good experience because they don’t have time sensitive operations.
But yeah, this is very much geared for light-moderate gaming, video rendering, and HTPCs. That is what APUs are actually good for. They make amazing workstations. I could also see this potentially being very useful for a small business/household local LLM for stuff like code generation and the like but… those small scale models don’t need anywhere near these resources.
As for framework being involved: Someone has kindly explained to me that even though you have to replace the entire mobo to increase the amount of memory, you can still customize your side panels at any moment so I guess that is fitting the mission statement.
And your phone isn’t repairable because it needs to be water proof. Your earbuds because of power efficiency. Etc.
Also, I suggest watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3zB9EFntmA.
But, to be clear: I am actually not as opposed to the idea of soldered ram when you have “an excuse”. Same with phones. But framework is a brand that tries to build itself on minimizing e-waste and maximizing repairability and… hey, at least we can still swap out the side panel on their prebuilt!
Oh. Okay. As long as I can replace the side panel.
Everything except the APU/RAM/Mobo combo is upgradable, and you don’t have to replace the whole machine if the board fails.
So… storage, case, and USB C dongles?
So… now Framework Corp is selling non-upgradable hardware?
I dunno. Conceptually I want to like Framework. But their pricing means it is basically never worth buying and upgrading versus just buying a new laptop (seriously, run the numbers. You basically save 10 bucks over two generations of shopping at Best Buy). But they also have a system that heavily encourages people to horde spare parts rather than just take it to an e-waste disposal facility/bin.
One is the ownership of a digital copy on the same terms as a physical copy. That allows you to resell your copy, lend it to a friend, move it to a different device, retain the use of it even if the seller no longer exists . . . stuff that falls under the first-sale doctrine and other actions that are generally accepted as “okay” and reasonable. That’s what’s being called out here as not existing for most digital copies.
And you still aren’t authorized to do that with a “DRM Free” copy (which gets into a mess since those aren’t actually DRM Free but…). In large part because there is no mechanism to transfer authorization for updates and so forth. GoG made a cheeky “take that” to Valve when they said they would allow you to transfer a dead relative’s account… but even that is a huge mess and had a LOT of fine print at the end. Again, there are exceptions but they are few and far between.
Same with buying Ghostbusters on VHS. There is no DRM to speak of involved. But any teacher who threw it on because they were hungover was technically in violation of the terms of purchase and there were a few medium profile cases where people learned about public performance rights when they were showing “their” copy of a movie or album.
You can make as many arguments as you want. Until those go to a court of law they mean nothing.
However, that isn’t what most people expect to get when they’re purchasing a copy of a media work, regardless of whether it’s digital or physical.
We are specifically talking about expectations versus reality. Which gets back to the reality that even when you bought that CD you were engaging in what was a hell of a lot closer to a “lease” than not.
How IP in general and copyright in particular is handled does really need an overhaul, but that isn’t a problem specific to the digital world—it’s equally applicable to print books, oil paintings, and vinyl records.
Which gets back to the original point that most of those purchases were always “leases” because of how the legal system is set up…
I buy the correct way and it’s been working okay so far. The moment something is taken away, I’ll get it back another way.
Have you ever heard of “lost media”? Countless books and movies and songs were never actually backed up for one reason or another. And this is especially concerning as Amazon are pioneering the way to increasingly lock down kindle ebooks when they already have a history of editing books on their servers with no notice to the customer. It basically results in the GoG problem where even if you CAN back up everything yourself, you never will because of the updates and won’t know if it is important to keep 1.01567 of a game because that was the last version where they were able to distribute a specific version of an art file.
Speaking of video games: There are hundreds of games over the years that just never got cracked. It was usually a case where the DRM model was such that only one or two groups knew how to handle it and they were busy the week that game came out. And since there is no “prestige” in going back to crack a five month old game… they didn’t. Starforce was particularly notorious for this and my understanding is that denuvo is even worse. Let alone all the indie releases and patreon games where people just don’t bother at all.
Because… people also need a reason to bother backing stuff up. For example, I recently got it in my head that I should re-read the 100% free and available online webcomic Chimneyspeak. Color me surprised when it sounds like nobody bothered to back it up when it was still available, the author took it down because it cost too much money (hard to run ads on porny sites), the author has been “missing” from the internet since before covid, and the wayback machine was missing large swathes of it. There wasn’t even any DRM or licensing to worry about. People just didn’t think to back it up and by the time they did, it was too late.
No. Outside of VERY rare occurrences, you are still licensing that media. If you owned it you would be able to distribute it yourself and so forth.
And if you actually checked through the fine print for the old big box games you would see very similar verbiage. Presumably the same with music
I do think it would be good to make people more aware of what they are actually paying for. But once EVERYTHING says “lease” it will just kill the meaning of the word.
Like I said in this and the branch below it, many games, balatro included, include game and visual design that evoke psychological experiments and concepts that are basically the foundation of slot machines and the like.
And these are the same concepts people deride when we call them loot boxes (but not gacha for some reason).
Honestly… yeah.
How many millennial/genx gamers have stories about staying up all night playing Diablo 2 or WoW? Hell, it was almost a requirement for any games media person to have an “I almost flunked out of college because of WoW” story.
It was hard to care TOO much with D2 because any additional monetization was mostly illegal gold farmers (and let’s ignore the various former devs who have acknowledged they were involved in those…). But starting with WoW? That was a subscription model. That “I need to run this raid 500 times to get the drop I want” equated to increased subscriptions which was profit. Again, there were limits-ish in that very few people ran multiple accounts so it was a fixed cost per year. But it was still there.
Fast forward again and we have the same concepts going into loot boxes and, eventually, gacha games where it is 100% predatory and basically what the majority of successful live service games are built around.
Like anything, it is about understanding what you are and aren’t susceptible to. But it is also important to actually think critically and wonder if you REALLY like the gameplay of that game or if you just like the flashing lights and sparkles of a good drop?
To make it clear (to the people who have read beyond just getting pissy and smacking the go away button): I love Balatro and Vampire Survivors and play the ever loving hell out of them. But any time “Oh god… they have a mobile port. This will be the end of me” is even jokingly uttered… that is when you take a look at what you are doing and add some restrictions.
Because, at the end of the day ,time is not just money: it is life. Yeah, there is the aspect of “I stayed up all night and performed worse at work/school and got fired/expelled”. But there is also just “I spent all night locked in a room and didn’t interact with a single human being or spend any time improving myself” to worry about.
I can’t speak to factorio since every time that dev has ever opened his mouth it has just been horrific hateful bullshit.
But Civ is more just “addictive” because the gameplay is fun. That is not to downplay that but it is generally closer to “escapism” than not when you get into that “one more turn” cycle and realize it is 3 am.
ARPGs were very much designed around skinner boxes/operant conditioning chambers which are one of the core tenets of how things like slot machines are designed. We can see similar (and it was outright acknowledged by many reviewers/influencers) with games like Vampire Survivors.
At the end of the day, the reality is that the “This is fine if you are 13” system is idiotic and what we actually need is fine grain warnings… which will go down great in an era of “Eww, trigger warnings are woke”. But, like, I have a cousin who is well aware that he is incredibly prone to addiction when it comes to gambling and on many occasions he has texted family and friends to ask if it is “safe” for him to play a new game. And… it is kind of concerning how often the answer is “no”.
Good.
I very much think games like Balatro DO need to be assessed and probably have an increased rating because they are unabashedly designed to be as addictive as possible. Same as ARPGs that have been built around skinner boxes basically since Diablo.
But this was never that. It was just “oh, cards and poker theming? GAMBLING!!!”
Facebook got FBI_README.txt at the root of their DC++ share.
Cops who know they are being recorded MIGHT behave slightly better. It is why they are so hellbent on never wearing bodycams ever again.
An SD card on the person of someone being thrown in the back of a van to have an “accident” on the way to booking? Not so useful.