Mossy Feathers (They/Them)

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • The other significant grouping I’ve run into are the ones that only cheat on PTW games, where they’ll say that if you can pay your way to winning, the game is already a cheat. I actually agree with them, but I just refuse to play those games, even if they’re otherwise very good. In theory, I would maybe cheat in those games if I knew for a fact everyone playing was cheating too.

    I used to cheat in Need for Speed World. Almost everything worth getting was locked behind an extremely steep paywall ($15 for a car kinda paywall). I don’t know why I played that game, but I loved it. I didn’t cheat to win though. See, need for speed world was very poorly programmed. Badly enough that you couldn’t tell when people were cheating because they would lag-port around due to shitty netcode and/or shitty servers (knowing the devs, probably both). There was a lot of car customization in the game, which is where my cheating came in. A number of body kits for the cars were normally sold in packs with a fancy spoiler for premium currency. However, iirc the kits themselves (minus the spoiler) were hidden but available for purchase with in-game cash if you knew the right memory values to edit/freeze (tricking the game into letting you buy one of the hidden body kits). As such, you could get most of the premium body kits for free and the devs didn’t give a fuck.

    Need For Speed World basically had whales, “cheaters” and cheaters.






  • Furthermore, “RUNK” was originally made in the 1980s to take over from a program written on punch cards in the 1960s. Finally, it’s missing some important functions that the original 60s program had because "RUNK"s developer doesn’t see the purpose of those functions and refuses to add them; and no one has publically released a fork of “RUNK” that adds those functions back in, so you have to do it yourself. Thank God it’s open source.

    Edit: oh yeah, and back in 2005 there was an effort to make a GUI for it, but “RUNK’s” sole developer got mad because “back in the 80s we didn’t need GUIs; command line is infinitely faster” and kept intentionally breaking support for the GUI with each bug fix, leading to the project eventually being abandoned.





  • I’m… honestly kinda okay with it crashing. It’d suck because AI has a lot of potential outside of generative tasks; like science and medicine. However, we don’t really have the corporate ethics or morals for it, nor do we have the economic structure for it.

    AI at our current stage is guaranteed to cause problems even when used responsibly, because its entire goal is to do human tasks better than a human can. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, even if you do your best to think carefully and hire humans whenever possible, AI will end up replacing human jobs. What’s the point in hiring a bunch of people with a hyper-specialized understanding of a specific scientific field if an AI can do their work faster and better? If I’m not mistaken, normally having some form of hyper-specialization would be advantageous for the scientist because it means they can demand more for their expertise (so long as it’s paired with a general understanding of other fields).

    However, if you have to choose between 5 hyper-specialized and potentially expensive human scientists, or an AI designed to do the hyper-specialized task with 2~3 human generalists to design the input and interpret the output, which do you go with?

    So long as the output is the same or similar, the no-brainer would be to go with the 2~3 generalists and AI; it would require less funding and possibly less equipment - and that’s ignoring that, from what I’ve seen, AI tends to be better than human scientists in hyper-specialized tasks (though you still need scientists to design the input and parse the output). As such, you’re basically guaranteed to replace humans with AI.

    We just don’t have the society for that. We should be moving in that direction, but we’re not even close to being there yet. So, again, as much potential as AI has, I’m kinda okay if it crashes. There aren’t enough people who possess a brain capable of handling an AI-dominated world yet. There are too many people who see things like money, government, economics, etc as some kind of magical force of nature and not as human-made systems which only exist because we let them.



  • What, you think Trump is going to be different? Hell, you think there’ll be another election if he gets elected? I hate Biden. He’s done some good things, but he’s been a complete piece of shit regarding Gaza, and putting tariffs on Chinese EVs and solar panels because they’re “too cheap” is the icing on the cake. There are no good options, and not voting does literally nothing. If not voting actually changed anything, then we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with (a significant amount of the US doesn’t vote).

    The reason why voting “neither” in the primaries got Biden’s attention was because it sent a message that said, “I want to vote for you (the Democrats), but I don’t like any of the candidates”. That message didn’t come from the people who didn’t vote, it came from the people who did vote, but chose to vote “neither”.

    Not voting during the general election doesn’t send a message. They can’t glean how many people would have voted for Democrats if they’d had a better candidate from the number of people who didn’t vote. Those people could be Republicans who don’t like the Republican options, they could be Democrats who don’t like the Democrat options, they could be libertarians, communists, socialists, fascists, happy with either option or just straight-up lazy. They’re not mind-readers, and again, if not voting actually did anything, then the US wouldn’t be where we are now because a significant portion of the US does not vote.

    Biden being elected may lead to more death in Gaza, and I don’t like that. However, the alternative is Trump, which will result in more death in Gaza (likely the eradication of Gaza’s remaining population), cutting aid to Ukraine, environmental destruction (paraphrasing: “we’re gonna start drilling day one”), the complete destruction of civil rights, attacks against anyone opposing him, attempts to seize unconditional power (again, paraphrasing because I can’t remember the exact quote: “I’m going to be a dictator on day one”), and more.

    Biden sucks, but Trump is so unimaginably awful and destructive that I just can’t see anyone arguing against Biden as arguing in good faith. Either you’re an accelerationist who thinks Trump’s destruction of America will lead to a new and better world, you’re a Trump FUDdy, you’re a Russian/Chinese bot, or you’ve drunk the accelerationist’s koolaid without realizing what you’re supporting. The fact that, after everything that has been said, you think that we’d still have a chance to vote again if Trump gets elected is… mind-boggling.

    I’m envious of your privilege. The implication that you can unironically support non-voting is that you’re privileged enough that you can weather the storm if Trump gets elected. I envy you. Not everyone has that kind of privilege.

    Edit because I want to reiterate this to drive the point home: if not voting sent a message then we wouldn’t be in this mess because a significant portion of the US does not vote.