TechTakes

If you want decentralized systems you have to take the good with the bad. It’s part of the game

I wonder if these people are at all familiar with the stages of grief

technical aspect seems to be for now that israeli secret services intercepted and sabotaged thousands of pagers to be distributed for hezbollah operatives, then blew them up all at once. it does look like small, reportedly less than 20g each explosive charge, but orange site accepted truth is that it was haxxorz blowing up lithium batteries. israelis already did exactly this thing but with phone in targeted assassination, and actual volume of such bomb would be tiny (about 10ml)

“best at”, they say? I shall have to update my priors

Also means we're likely to have a better jumping on point to explain these people to those who aren't already here. Hope he does one on Yud and friends in the not too distant future.

Also John McCarthy and Ray fucking Blanchard

I look forward to the 'but we often disagreed' non-apologies. With absolute lack of self reflection on how this helped push Sailer/Unz into the positions they are now. If we even get that.

Who could have predicted that liberalism would lead into scientific racism and then everything else that follows (mostly fascism)???

The only invidious instance that works this week is nadeko:

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=3jhTnk3TCtc

his delivery regarding the content is absolute perfection

How would you audit a computer? Would they add USB-C ports to the cans?

Doesn't have his body tethans so would be a different person or something.

the only worthwhile use of LLMs: endlessly prompting the L Ron Hubbard chatbot with Battlefield Earth reviews as a form of acausal torture

is this what gaslighting is?

We know $10 USD may not seem like enough to reclaim the internet with the browser we barely maintain and take on irresponsible tech companies that pay us vast sums of money. But the truth is that as you read this email, hundreds of Mozilla supporters worldwide haven't realized we're a charity racket dressed up as a browser who will spend all your money on AI and questionable browser plugins. And when each one of us contributes what we can, we can waste the money all the faster!

With the rise of AI (you're welcome, by the way, for the MDN AI assistant) and continued threats to online privacy like question like integrating a Mr. Robot Ad into firefox without proper code review, the stakes of our movement have never been higher. And ~~marks~~ supporters like you are the reason why Mozilla is in such a strong position to take on these challenges and transform the future of the internet in any way we know how -- except by improving our browser of course that would be silly.

(I'm feeling extra cynical today)

upside of this: they’ll get told why they’re not getting many of those $10 donations

downside of that (rejection): that could be exactly what one of the ghouls-in-chief there need to push some or other bullshit

it's even funnier than that (albeit also super depressing, in some ways)

primer: hilmar (the head honcho at ccp) has been "crypto = bae" for going on 5~6y now (that I'm aware of, maybe longer), to the point that there are pictures of the guy at chain confs from around then, and mentions of people talking with him in The Private Backrooms at said chain confs. it's been his darling and he has wanted very, very hard to put it into tq (the main game server). see this for example (and fwiw, warning: eve reddit)

in-fill: there also appears to be quite a bit of cart before the horse element in how the company operates - they will frequently first work on something, then when it starts getting near release they'll send out some surveys that almost without fail have some extremely loaded questions in them. an example would be that instead of asking players what they generally think of xyz feature/intended mechanic/etc, the survey will instead garden path answers along, attempting to manufacture consent/compliance.

and, last little detail: keep in mind this is a game where people will min-max the everloving shit out of something, and where a fair number of people out there are willing to trade actual time to making in-game money with which to fund their gametime ("plexing"). people who would be willing to engage with some really ridiculous abstract/effortful shit for whatever gains they could, just because they could.

so with that said, during 2021/2022 (in the middle of the NFT tsunami of shit) the first big round of "we want to add NFTs to tq" came about. and there were a fair amount of indications that ccp had already sunk quite a bunch of devtime on it, and were getting ready to roll it out. the pitch was, uh, "not well received" would be putting it extremely lightly. it was panned so fucking extremely, they had to put out this newsblog which included the remarkably tortured phrase "Not For Tranquility"

which is the early strand of what leads us to this particular little "gem". it's hard to get specific details because they're fairly tight-lipped about internal processes and shit, so the following is definitely heavily conjecture. hilmar didn't want to break up with his bae, and kept pushing trying to keep this alive, somehow. whether the drive for this is also tied up with the Pearl Abyss acquisition some years prior is unclear (but Black Desert Online players all cried wolf when PA bought CCP, and said to expect increasing financial fuckery). what does appear to be the case is that a number of developers (possibly the pro-NFT among them) got sequestered off to the Special Project that became this thing, along with the a16z money a while back. the general feeling in the eve:o community is still largely "get fucked", and this project is likely to be double-stillborn (on account of dead kriptoes and an unwanted game/product)

I look forward in earnest to see just how dead it is on arrival

[0] - it took less than 2mo from the "would you like to play a fps in the eve universe? what would you want in it? what do you normally do in eve? what would you do in an eve-universe fps? why would you want your eve ...." survey going out to the announcement "hey surprise! we have an fps!"[1]

[1] - again. they've failed a few times, with multiples out. ccp product leadership real bad.

I admit, in my haste, I read that link as Marc Andreessen openly announcing they're investing in the Chinese Communist Party, which is slightly funnier than the reality of yet another crypto game.

In 3 years they will release their NFT game.

Borked link. Possibly unthrottled invidious version

I prefer less pop and bop in my industrial, but I am glad to see anybody else still enjoying this with the word industrial in it.

I still need to listen to this (I got way too into making backups of various systems, as one does) but severed heads has been such a big part of my FLAC rotation ever since you first mentioned them

I almost made it but couldn't be arsed to replicate the explanation text