Good lord. So glad my country has strict animal welfare standards for livestock. Uncomfortable that we still import and slaughter pigs from countries without those standards. (And yes, we import-and-slaughter because we don’t import pork itself. We do however, allow the import/export of live animals, so international trade buys our sheep for ‘breeding’, and sell us their pigs for ‘NZ-made pork’. I suppose it at least enforces abattoir health standards…?)

We probably don’t have enough user traffic to give people the specific help they need. Certainly not compared to something like StackOverflow, which is already what you’re describing.

The issues with generalised user-to-user programming help (esp re: StackOverflow) is that an increasing number of communities are doing this in closed-off areas like Slack and Discord, where their support is not indexed or searchable. Users running into the same problems are struggling to find each others’ answers. Creating yet another community that’s separated from the internet at large exacerbates this problem.

Man, I used to really like browsing the stuff at ThinkGeek. Even bought a few things. Now that it’s owned by… I wanna say GameStop?.. it’s ceased to be interesting to me. I liked things like the laundry basket that looked like a radioactive barrel, the shower gel that looks like a blood bag… that kind of light-hearted novelty stuff. But the new owner just gutted all the interesting content, and it’s just all IP collectables now.

It’s been long enough I forgot bout ThinkGeek. Damn. Wish something like it were still around.

• “progress on [1], fixed linting [2]”
• “[1] completed, setup for [2]”
• “[3] and [4] completed”
• “fixed formatting”
• “refactoring [1] and [2]”
• “fix variable typos”
• “update logic in [2]”
• “revert package.json and regenerate package-lock”

All my commits have comments. I generally commit after completing a ‘block’ objective, a describe what that was but in very simple terms mostly in regards to the file/section with the most significant logic changes. I don’t always specify the file if I did tiny typos/linting/annotation across a bunch of them, because the logic is unaffected I know that the differences will be visible in the commit history.

My weakness is that I don’t do it often enough. If I’m working on [2] for several hours, I’ll only commit when I consider it minimally-viable (completed 2), or when moving between machines ([further] progress on 2). And I have a bad habit of not pushing every time I commit, just at the end of the day or when moving between machines (though a messy rebase hopefully made that lesson stick), or if somebody else on the team wants to review an issue I’m having.

I think that’s a bad faith interpretation to imply that one eats animals exclusively because it being ‘animals’ is the point. Most people don’t think about it, their priority is making their daily life as simple as possible. They just eat whatever tastes good and is easy to get. And the people pushing for eating insects are thinking about it; they just have different priorities; they’re trying to make environmentally-sustainable food easier to get.

Insects are still a far better choice for protein. They don’t take remotely the amount of land or water that soy crops do, and they can be grown in areas of the world that don’t have as much freshwater. They can be fed off scraps and organic material that are waste to us. They also have a high return yield; they’re not being lost to droughts/weather/pests at the rate crops (especially organic) are. I’d posit that an insect-inclusive diet is probably more environmentally-friendly than the modern vegan diet is.

Humans are evolved omnivores. It’s both possible and noble to have an organic and herbivorous diet that meets your basic needs, but it’s difficult, often inaccessible, expensive; and it takes up huge amounts of land to grow the kind of crops needed (especially if much of them are lost to pests). Soy demands a lot of water, and avocados have been priced out of reach of the impoverished Central Americans they used to cheaply feed. Whether plant or animal, we are only alive by consuming life. There is no diet without some harm to somebody somewhere. Most vegan diets are too expensive (or unavailable), and are part of the deforestation for soy plantations overseas.

Ultimately now that principles have become a part of how we consume (and not just necessity, availability, effort etc), any philosophy requires compromise. If one’s primary concern is freshwater, the carbon cycle, deforestation for cropland, nutrition density, local food-chain, animal suffrage, animal consent, organic, local-grown, seasonal, etc… It’s not possible to follow them all, and it’s not reasonable to expect everybody choose a single specific one.

I have a preference towards attainable and environmentally-sustainable eating, which means that eating crickets (and mushrooms, yum) is less harmful ecologically than eating soy (deforestation, water), and far less harmful than cattle (magnitudes worse than any other livestock). I also avoid palm oil products (deforestation). I don’t disagree with any vegetarians or vegans who chose other principles; it’s excellent that humans are becoming increasingly mindful of what we choose to eat. We just have different priorities.

They’re all derivative names. My first/middle names are gender-neutral, though I use the original spelling (which implies masc).

I won’t go into detail since it’s generally not a good idea to share full names on the internet with strangers, but when I was a kid I looked up my birthname, and the meaning of my first name was “the (opposing) version of [Name]” (eg “Francine is the feminine of Frank”).

The irony of the original name was that its meaning was ‘very gender’ (eg: if Frank were to mean “buff and hairy”), so it was confusing if the opposing version’s meaning changed in any way. I took a shine to it when I was a kid, then I used the original name and its most common spelling as my new first name as an adult.

AI can code assist; it’s quite helpful for that. Predictive text, learning a less familiar language, converting pseudo, etc.

But it couldn’t possibly replace senior developers long-term. It just looks new and exciting, especially to people who don’t truly understand how it works. We still need to have human developers capable of writing their own new code.

1. AI is entirely derivative, it’s just copying the human devs of yester-year. If AI does the majority of coding then it becomes incapable of learning, thus necessitating human coders anyway. It also is only going to generate solutions to broad-strokes problems that it already has in its dataset, or convert pseudocode into functional code (which still requires a dev know enough to write pseudo).

2. It also currently has no way of validating what it writes. It’s trying to replicate what our writing looks like contextually, it doesn’t comprehend it. If it ever starts training on itself as it ages, it will stagnate and require human review, which means needing humans that understand code. And that’s not including the poor practices it will already have because so many devs are inconsistent about things like writing comments, documentation, or unit testing. AI doesn’t have its own bias but it inevitably learns to imitate ours.

3. And what about bug-testing? When the AI writes something that breaks, who do you ask for help? The AI doesn’t comprehend the context of the code its reading if you paste it back, it doesn’t remember writing it. You need people who understand how the code works to be able to recognise why it might be breaking.

AI devs are the fast food of coding. It will never be as good quality as something from an experienced professional. But if you’re an awful cook, it still makes it fast and easy to get a sad, flat cheeseburger.

I’ve worked with devs who are the equivalent of line cooks and are also producing sad, flat cheeseburgers: code of poor quality that still sees production because the client doesn’t know any better. IMO, those are the only devs that need to be concerned, because those are the ones that are easy to replace.

If AI coding causes any problems within the job market for devs, it will be that it replaces graduate/junior developers so well that fewer devs get the mentoring or experience to become seniors, and the demand for seniors will rack up significantly. It seems more likely that developers will split into two separate specialisations, not that our single track will be replaced.

Absolutely. I hear Witcher 3 is good, and I believe that it is… but after playing it for 5 hours and feeling like I got nowhere, the next day I just genuinely didn’t feel like playing it as I’d felt very little character progress, and zero story progression.

Games are continuing to market towards younger people - especially kids - with spare time to burn. They consider their 120+ hour playtime to be a selling point, but at this point that’s the reason I avoid them. If I’m going to play for an hour or so at the end of my day, I want that game to feel like it meant something.

I prefer my games to feel dense, deliberately crafted, minimal sawdust padding. I’ve enjoyed open-world in the past but the every-increasing demand for bigger and bigger maps means that most open-world games are very empty and mostly traversal. Linear worlds aren’t bad - they can be crafted much more deliberately and with far more content because you can predict when the player will see them.

Open worlds that craft everything in it deliberately are very rare, and still rely on constraints to limit the player into somewhat-linear paths. Green Hell needs a grappling hook to leave the first basin, Fallout: New Vegas fills the map north of Tutorial Town with extreme enemies to funnel new players south-east.

And what really gets me is that with microtransactions, the number of games that make themselves so big and so slow that they’re boring on purpose, so that they can charge you to skip them! Imagine making a game so fucking awful that anybody buying a game will then buy the ability to not play it because 80% of the game is sawdust: timers, resource farming, daily rotations, exp grinding. Fucking nightmare, honestly.

Maybe - certainly generations always assume anything that younger people do is somehow worse than what they did, and the digital landscape is a part of that. When writing slates became accessible, the old guard complained it was ‘lazy’ because they didn’t have to remember it anymore. Any music popular among teenagers (especially teenage girls) is mocked as foolish, cringe, etc.

But I suspect like most hobbies, it’s mostly the following that determine our assumptions:

• history of the media and its primary audience (digital mediums are mostly embraced by youth; video games initially marketed to young children)
• accessibility; scarcity associated with prestige (eg: vital labour jobs are not considered ‘real jobs’ if they don’t require a degree)
• the kind of people we visibly see enjoying it (we mostly see children, teenagers, and directionless adults as gaming hobbyists)

You’re right, reading is not somehow more or less moral than video games. Many modern games have powerful narrative structure that is more impactful for being an interactive medium. Spec Ops: The Line embraces the players actions as the fundamentals of its message. Gamers are hugely diverse; more than half the US population actually plays games at this point, and platforms are rapidly approaching an almost even gender split. (Women may choose to play less or different games, and hide their identity online, but they still own ~40% of consoles.)

Games as a medium is also extremely broad. I don’t think you could compare games to ‘watching anime’ for example, so much as ‘the concept of watching moving pictures’, because they can range from puzzles on your phone, to narrative epics, to grand strategies, to interactive narratives.

So a better comparison for video games isn’t ‘reading books’ so much as reading in general, and are you reading Reddit, the news, fiction, or classic lit? What does your choice of reading mean?

So for your suggested hobby of ‘reading books’, one might assume any (or all) of the following:

• they are intelligent and introspective (or pretentious),
• they are educated (or think they’re better than you),
• they are patient and deliberate (or boring),
• they’d be interesting to discuss ideas with (or irrelevant blatherers).

Assuming everybody who reads is ‘smart’ is as much an assumption as assuming everybody who games is ‘lazy’, and the assumptions you make about the hobby are really assumptions you make about the typical person who chooses it. It may not be a guarantee, but its a common enough pattern.

TLDR: Ultimately? I think books have inflated status because it’s seen as a hobby for thinkers; people picture you reading Agatha Christie (but you could be reading Chuck Tingle, or comic books). Games have deflated status because it’s seen as a hobby for people who consume mindlessly - the people who know what games are capable of are the ones playing them, too.

Be 80 and play FIFA, it’s fine. There’s no age where you are obliged to put down your controller for the last time. But it shouldn’t be your first answer while you’re dating, and definitely not your only one.

Being a gamer, as an identity, has a lot of baggage.

Having gaming be your only interest or hobby is associated with being an unambitious self-interested person who intends to do as a little as possible, as long as possible. The recognisable games are marketed towards kids/teens with time to burn.

Imagine your date’s interest was “moderating Reddit”, “watching TikTok”, or “reading Instagram”. That’s what ‘gaming’ sounds like: your hobby is media consumption.

There’s no age where you aren’t allowed to consume media; but it’s worrying if that consumption is your identity, if consumption makes up your routine.

So it’s not actually about age - it’s about maturity and goal-setting.

When we’re younger, most of us live moment-by-moment. Media consumption offers no future, but it has a pleasurable present.

But as people age, people develop goals and interests that require more investment and focus, and they’re looking for people that are doing the same. A cutthroat economy demands people develop goals for financial stability, even if they still otherwise like games.

As we age, we stop looking for somebody to hang out with, but to build a life with.

So once the people you’re talking to have interests for the future, “I enjoy my present doing my own thing” doesn’t offer them anything. If they don’t play games, they don’t even know what games are capable of. Maybe one day they’d enjoy playing Ultimate Chicken Horse with you.

But right now, they just see the recognisable titles that want to monopolise children’s time, and assume you’re doing that. They picture you spending 20+ hours a week playing Fortnite. And there is an age cut-off where it’s no longer socially-acceptable to be a child.

It’s not that video games are bad, but they’re a non-answer. They want to know what you do that’s good, and a non-answer implies you don’t have a good answer at all, and that makes video games ‘bad’.

This… is dumb. Reddit gets traffic from people using it as a secondary search engine to get relevant answers.

Most people on the Internet view it from mobile. Reddit already makes their mobile experience genuinely awful despite this. Blocking it entirely?

The herding to their mobile app is so transparent (and DEFINITELY through stick, not carrot) I’m morbidly curious to see what horrible things they planning to put in their app that they know users will loathe, that requires their alternatives to be zero.

Either it doesn’t get engaged with, or the people who engage with it have the reading comprehension of a carrot.

I noticed you didn’t explicitly say in your post that you don’t kick puppies, so let me assume that you believe that is acceptable and then vividly describe what a horrible person you are. Also,

Time to start over

…now that I’ve pulled a tiny portion of comment out of context to make it easier to attack, how dare you.

Go out of the house and go… where?

In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home (“first place”) and the workplace (“second place”). [x]

There aren’t places to go anymore. There just aren’t. Libraries, but they’re underfunded and aren’t well-suited for socialisation. Parks, if you live in an area that has a planned/maintained one. There aren’t any nice pedestrian-focused city centres for people to visit just for the sake of visiting, to sit outside drinking tea while listening to the birds - just miles of thoroughfare and parking spaces, covered in smog and traffic noise. Who would ever?

Many countries (especially US and Canada) are so car-centric that they might not even have sidewalks at all in huge areas. Housing is sprawled in low-density suburbia. It’s hard to go over to a friend’s house and play a board game with them or host a party if it’s an hour and half driving commute to get there, so we’re not even visiting each other’s homes.

The only thing that exists anymore is the place you earn money, the soulless big box stores you spend money (if you have any), and home.

So, yeah. We’re all fucking home, because home is free, comfortable, and has a short commute.

Sounds like an interesting read; thanks for putting it on my radar.

One of many examples of how profit-driven platforms care about engagement quantity over product quality. A lack of stopping points feeds FOMO and keeps people trapped longer, but I doubt many people actively enjoy it.

I disable it on any platform that lets me - besides, pagination can be cached to return to later. Doomscrolling can be binged but not suspended.

That’s a great point; the echo chambers. Supported by the lack of the downvote button, it’s one of the most impactful things Beehaw can do in fostering its goal of community.

Any platform that measures success by engagement (eg: for ad traffic) tends to evolve into either of two extremes: content that makes you feel good, or contact that makes you feel afraid/angry. Usually both: something to get angry about and degrade each other, and then share to your echo chamber to yes-man each other. Very little constructive discussion takes place.

Echo chambers deny people the growth opportunity that being exposed to diversity of experience and opinion brings. It entrenches people into ideas, including [self-]harming ones. Even good/benign ideas at their core can rapidly become steeped in tribalism, supremacy and animosity, particularly in conjunction with content that is engaging because it sparks anger or fear.

The most powerful things humans create are the things they create together. The most progressive decisions we make are the ones we make for the collective other. The easier it is for humans to form into competing cliques (especially as encouraged by algorithms), the more divided we become. People with similarities will draw arbitrary lines over their differences, enforced by algorithms and divisive moderator principles.

A community doesn’t require that we all agree to thrive - only that whenever we disagree, we know we all still belong.