31 karma · joined May 12, 2022
Fukuyama's criticism about characterization is unfair because I don't think KSR was trying and failing to make amazing characters. They were just vehicles for the larger story. Being disappointed that a main character didn't have sex at the end is really missing the point.
An aside: while reading MotF I felt the same sort of relentless sense of passing time that you get in Christopher Nolan's movie Interstellar. Interestingly both the book and movie are about climate change and time and, also, about centering the story and setting at the expense of characterization.
I'm ambivalent about the advantages of arguing for political change as a necessary part of environmental change. But as you said in an earlier comment, rapid transition (which I think is likely, as we go right to the cliff and then fall off) will itself be horribly traumatic. It will require massive government intervention to prevent total societal collapse. After hurricanes and earthquakes, you don't adjust tax rates, you send in the military.
My own major criticism of MotF is that, as the COVID crisis makes clear, people live by motivated reasoning, and as climate change gets worse that motivation will be fear, and frightened people will act badly. Most of the opposition in MotF are rich people trying to hold onto what they have or technocratic rulers too timid to act. In the actual world the real problem will be billions of terrified people whose past has been or is about to be destroyed and with no clear future. However that story told honestly would look like a Cormac McCarthy novel and maybe KSR just doesn't want to go there yet.
It looks like Smil's new book is available at my local library so I'll read it and judge for myself. Thanks again.
I don't doubt Smil is an expert. It's possible the article's framing wasn't entirely his fault. However if his books follow the approach of the article -- "Fossil fuels are necessary for plastics and plastics keep newborns alive" and then leaves readers to connect the dots for themselves -- then I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish. I'm sure he intends more than just dry scientific explanation. Maybe dishonest isn't the right word, I agree.
You might want to have a meeting with this new person, his senior peers on the team, and a manager who can oversee and referee things. Talk with him about the stuff he wants to change. If everyone agrees that his ideas are good then you should talk about how to incorporate his ideas into the code.
As a senior person he should understand that simply parachuting in new style to existing code can cause problems. On the other hand you should be willing to find places where these improvements can be added appropriately, perhaps in new code or bulk refactoring that would happen anyway. You want him to feel that you are on his side so this new style should be the team's new style, enforced by everyone where appropriate, and not just his thing. If you review a PR for new code, you'll want to make sure it conforms to the new style, and say it like "following our team's style for new code, class X should be split in two because of reason Z" and not "please split class X in two because that's what NewGuy wants, you know how he can be."
If you just say no to his ideas even if you agree they are good then he might become unhappy and, if rejecting his ideas becomes a pattern, might end up leaving.
The normal legality is that a state is governed by a national constitution that requires some supermajority to make major changes. Participating in a government formed by that constitution implies consent to it. If Ukrainian Crimea wanted to leave Ukraine then they could have looked for national support according to both regular and constitutional law. If they couldn't get the national votes then that's all there is to it. Democracy in action.
There are areas in the U.S. that heavily favor one party or the other, including rural border counties that went for Trump well over 80% in 2020. If one of these counties voted to secede after Biden won, that vote would simply have been illegal under laws they themselves had previously consented to. If prior to the secession vote some other country had sent passports and then troops to seize government buildings and "secure fair elections" or whatever, that would have been both ridiculous and hostile.
> Ideally. I'd love to see international observers in all elections. Would be great if e.g. Venezuelan election observers got to monitor US elections.
Venezuelans or most anyone else are free to come into the U.S. and observe voting stations from the outside like any other private person who isn't actively casting a vote, and conduct whatever exit polls they can convince people to take.
You wrote:
> And in a world where we're unable to continue exploiting fossil fuels, whether due to the environmental impacts of their waste, or the lack of future supplies, the present mode of operation will end.
> What that means in terms of the set of factors affecting human impacts on the planet --- per-capita wealth and total population --- one or both factors must move.
Imagine vegetarianism becomes much more popular. How does that fit into your analysis? Are you concerned about putting people out of work due to increased efficiency in the food system? I'm not sure that's worth worrying about except as a political difficulty. If all murders stopped then we'd put some police and prison guards out of work too but most people would say that's worth it.
You framed your earlier comment as being about democracy without qualifications. I'm wondering how far you'd go with that. Is every border territory only a 50.1% vote away from changing countries? How often can these votes be held? Do they require international observation?
Is anyone actually using these 1Password CLI tools in a serious way? Their CLI stuff has always seemed like a toy to me, like a fun side experiment, but I'd be interested if any organizations out there are actually putting it into their core workflows.
I recommend "Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson as a specific attempt to answer the question "what do we need to make work to prevent a catastrophic extinction event for our species." Whether what KSR describes is actually realistic is something you'll have to decide for yourself.
You make an interesting point about unrealistic depictions. In a way it's even harder for a man to write an unrealistic man that appeals to female readers than to just write accurately. I'm reminded of this comic: https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/false-equivalence. Of course male authors can learn to do it.
It's obvious to me that if you want to depict women accurately in art, or as you pointed out create art for women, then it would be helpful to have more women involved in the process. If anyone is seriously arguing that a typical man can write women and for women as well as a typical woman can so it's okay that most game devs are men then I'm not sure what to say. Agree to disagree.
CentOS Stream is not for everyone and I don't know what OP's criteria are, but since they're considering Debian and Fedora and are willing to pay for RHEL then their criteria probably allows for CentOS Stream. Alma and Rocky seem okay if you're willing to trust relatively new distros, and Oracle Linux seems okay if you're willing to trust Oracle. They're all valid options depending on your needs.
I was referring to your Paul Hogan impression comment which I thought you meant was not a big deal to you. I can understand that a racist "yellowface/Apu" accent would be much more offensive.
> Wow, using Anita Sarkeesian - widely derided for being out of touch and over-intellectual - as a source and expecting to change minds.
I was using the series as a reference for tropes much more offensive than a Paul Hogan impression. If you don't want to listen at Anita Sarkeesian for some reason, you can find a list of tropes at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebVideo/FeministFreq... with examples linked from there.
> Seriously? Men complaining about going clothes shopping with their wives is goes back to the days of bad 1950s stand-up.
I wasn't talking about complaining but instead describing the literal process. Where to go, shopping etiquette, dressing room etiquette, cost, fit, fashion. Plus the emotional context: some women find shopping very upsetting for reasons men might struggle to understand, let alone portray accurately in fiction.
> I'm being serious here - child care, admin or even retail are much, much better jobs from the point of view of living a balanced life and providing for your family than anything in games dev.
I was thinking of home health care workers. Over 3 million in the U.S., mostly women, average age in their 40s, median wage around 30k USD per year, taking care of sick or elderly people including physically moving them and cleaning up after them, sometimes living in the patient's home. I find it hard to agree that this job would better than being a game dev, but in any case you only need a high school diploma to do it so most game devs who want to change adult diapers in the middle of the night for much less pay and for their entire working life should be able to make the jump pretty easily.
Of course a willing male game dev could research anything necessary to portraying women accurately. Or, alternately, you could hire female game devs or at least some consultants and get on with actually making the game.
OP, you can also get RHEL for free as an individual if you're just planning to use it on a handful of systems and you're willing to make a Red Hat account and log into those systems with that account. You would have to use an account for a paid version of RHEL anyway.
I'm not sure whether the fact that the director of a movie with a pedophilic subtext was himself involved in an only-slightly-less pedophilic relationship in real life makes the movie itself less ethical to make or to watch, though it certainly doesn't make it any better. Maybe I'm saying that I'm skeptical that a creator who does some immoral thing can make a creation about that same thing with the context and discretion necessary not to glorify it.
Probably the hope is that there are more nice people than not-nice people so on the whole the not-nice comments will disappear. From that one experience though it looks like it's at least as much about who's fastest to flag.
Also, the vast majority of physical music CDs have no DRM and can be ripped to whatever format you want. This is more inconvenient but can be much cheaper than buying digitally especially if you are looking for popular music.
Wrong weather and bad accents are pretty tame, I agree. Actual portrayals of women in games have been much worse. The "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" YouTube series by Feminist Frequency goes over a lot of these. Fortunately the industry has gotten better and games are now expected to include realistic female characters. That can be a tough ask for male game devs though. Most men couldn't accurately describe shopping for a pair of pants as a woman, let alone something more complex.
> Gamedev jobs are mostly terrible, with low pay, immense amounts of unpaid overtime and chronic, stressful "crunch time". I don't know why men stay in the industry, let alone women.
Nevertheless there are many women in much worse jobs who would take all of those terrible game dev jobs in a second if they could. The fact that they haven't suggests some systemic problem.
Having more female game devs is like having more Australian game devs who know when it's summer there. A big difference though is that unlike Australia which has less than 0.5% of the world's population concentrated in one area, women are over 50% of the world's population and are evenly distributed. You can have a lot of games without Australia but almost every game with people in it needs to have women or you'll be telling a strange story. Imagine a situation where most games have scenes in Australia but most game devs don't know it's summer in January there. That's a problem.
Where it can get mixed up is that a lot of "knowing the seasons" as a woman is knowing stuff that makes men uncomfortable. A female game dev making a realistic female character can introduce everyday factual experiences about things like sexual harassment, birth control, or feminine hygiene, and some male players might say she's trying to make an activist game and she can reply, no, this is just my life. It would be like getting mad at an Australian game dev for always going on about summer in January as if it's their fault the sun spends a lot of time in the sky around that time.
(This is leaving aside the economic argument that developer jobs tend to be good and therefore desirable, and it should be suspicious when any particular demographic is dramatically underrepresented in a field with mostly good jobs.)