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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s not a super common occurrence.

    And even if it is, locking down the entire internet and monitoring people in an Orwellian fashion isn’t the government’s job.

    What happened back in the day when kids walked in on their parents doing the deed? What did the parents do when their child snuck a passage of Shakespeare and read all the filthy jokes he wrote?

    Oh, they spoke to the kids and guided them through a normal part of life?

    I have a son. I would like for him to not see graphic images on the Internet. But when he does, I will explain to him that human beings have sex (which is why he exists). I will tell him that sometimes people like to watch videos about it because it feels good to them. I will explain to him that it’s fake, just like the action movies and violence he sees on TV. I will tell him it’s nothing like that in reality and I will explain to him that he’s not ready to see that material yet.

    Fascists always gain control by offering “safety.” Ironically, they’re more dangerous than the thing they claim to protect you from.

    Yeah, making a government list of porn watchers with their watch history available is 100% going to be abused. It will not turn out well.


  • I think what a lot of people are missing in this thread is that not everyone has access to convenient physical stores and many people do have good reasons to want faster shipping.

    For example, young families who don’t live near a Walmart. When you realize you need a few things for the kid, it can be pretty tough to pack them up and drive however far to the store that may or may not have what you need. If they do have it, you aren’t going to get reviews or many options.

    My recent prime purchases have included bottle brushes, a crib mattress protector, a replacement remote for our sound bar (dog ate it), and a cheap car camera to check the baby since he started daycare last week and I’m completely paranoid about my ADHD brain leaving him in a hot car and killing him.

    Did any of these need to be prime purchases? I guess not but you can see how I would want them sooner rather than later.

    Walmart near me didn’t have any good car cameras in my price range.

    The sound bar remote was online only and was required for us to watch TV since our TV speaker doesn’t work.

    The bottle brushes were just convenient.

    The mattress protector could have waited but would have been a gamble on ruining our very expensive crib mattress. This could have been a a Walmart purchase for sure though.

    I’m not saying these were life or death purchases. They weren’t and people got by just fine before Amazon. But does the convenience and reliability outweigh the monthly prime cost? For us, yes. And I admit we have become pretty dependent on it.







  • I imagine your priorities become different.

    You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.

    Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.

    Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.

    Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”

    I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.

    I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.









  • You’d miss exactly nothing.

    I have tried several times over the years to pick up a game of theirs that looks interesting due to the story, setting, or due to the fact that it’s a sport game my friends are playing.

    Every single time, for well over a decade now, it’s taken me about 20 minutes to realize they haven’t changed one thing about their formula in any genre.

    All of their games feel kind of cheap, floaty, and/or just “off” somehow in terms of physics and gameplay. They have nonstop in-game purchases, and they fill their game with hundreds of thousands of copy and paste quests. Like, the most tedious thing in the recent Zelda games is getting the Koroks seeds, and even that is more varied and interesting than the vast majority of Ubisoft quests.

    If Ubi made smaller games less frequently, they’d be an amazing studio I’d bet.

    The sports games from EA are also the same exact thing every single year. Similarly, if EA released fewer sports games, instead just updating rosters and stats through free downloads, they could probably make some pretty incredible games.

    One thing I’d like to see EA do is add more fun and experimental features. First person mode in Madden where you play with a full team of guys, creative rule sets, totally off the wall fantasy settings and rule sets, career modes where you start as a high school player and get noticed, marathon games where you don’t get to call plays and instead it’s a constant stream of making it to the end zone and having to immediately punt the ball to the other team so they can start running and passing freely instantly, etc.

    They could do so much to make sports interesting to non-spors guys. And someone who likes sports more could probably tell me some of the more realistic/simulation style upgrades they’d like to see from these games. Things that have been missing way too long.


  • It’s a classroom management thing.

    I didn’t understand this until I was a teacher but unfortunately, “if I let you do it, I have to let everyone do it” ends up being pretty true. Kids will absolutely point to other kids and say, “but you let Joey put his head down and listen.”

    My response can’t be “but Joey is passing my class.” As much as I would like it to be.

    It’s also a respect thing and I don’t mean that like you might think. I don’t demand unearned respect from everyone like an asshole. But one thing that happens is, if you let kids skirt classroom expectations and let them avoid doing things you ask them to do, they learn that your rules/expectations are actually just suggestions. Everything becomes negotiable.

    Sorry dude, I would have made you take your notes too.


  • Prime example. Atomic bombs are dangerous and they seem like a bad thing. But then you realize that, counter to our intuition, nuclear weapons have created peace and security in the world.

    No country with nukes has been invaded. No world wars have happened since the invention of nukes. Countries with nukes don’t fight each other directly.

    Ukraine had nukes, gave them up, promptly invaded by Russia.

    Things that seem dangerous aren’t always dangerous. Things that seem safe aren’t always safe. More often though, technology has good sides and bad sides. AI does and will continue to have pros and cons.


  • As a recovering heroin addict, I wholeheartedly believe his story. His later stories contained some region-specific drug slang and his post-recovery updates were the perfect amount of mundane and specific for me to recognize exactly the same feelings in myself.

    Side note: if you’re watching a movie or TV show, one thing that non-junkie writers never get right is withdrawal. They often show characters skipping withdrawal entirely, or show them mildly sick but still moving through the story without any real issues. Worst case, they’ll show a character being sick and then totally fine after a short time. Huge pet peeve of mine. Really undersells the catch-22 you find yourself in when using heroin.

    What withdrawal is actually like is pure, unadulterated misery and suffering for two weeks at minimum, followed by months or even a year of exhaustion, depression, suicidal thoughts, restlessness, and feeling like everything is weird and new. It feels like you’re a reptile that just shed its skin and everything is raw including your emotions and thoughts. Those first two weeks are just nonstop puking, shaking, sweating, an uncontrollable urge to kick and jerk your body, total insomnia, scary and suicidal thoughts, full body aches and pains, and enough self-loathing to last a thousand years.

    I made it three months cold turkey once before relapsing. Fucking never again. I honestly don’t know how people quit dope before modern medications like Buprenorphine and Methadone.

    Feeling like you want to break the cycle of addiction but knowing you can’t get through the withdrawal is an incredibly scary and traumatic experience.


  • I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but I was so fortunate to find an amazing job where my coworkers treat me like a good person who has value.

    I teach middle school, and I am just surrounded by hardworking teachers who treat each other well. We all compliment everyone behind their backs and to their faces. They tell me I’m good at my job and that I’m a nice person. I used to reply jokingly, “sometimes!” because I honestly could not accept that compliment.

    This was incredibly hard for me to handle when I started teaching here. Never felt super loved at home as a kid, only person who told me I was unequivocally “good” was my grandmother, so deep down I always doubted it. I had serious imposter syndrome when people would say nice things to and about me. Still do from time to time, but overall I feel so much happier and more confident than ever before. This job is the best thing to ever happen to me. I’ll work there until I retire - found my forever job. But you could do this without the job.

    Surround yourself with people who know you’re good. Be as good as you can be. And know that multiple narratives can be true - I know I have stepped on toes and put my foot in my mouth with coworkers who love me. I have kicked myself for it. But I truly believe that it’s only a very small, very human part of the positive narrative we have all decided to focus on at my job. The positivity has bled into my home life too. I catch myself being better.

    I guess what I’m saying is that some of this is “fake it til you make it, then realize you weren’t faking it at all.”