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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • They all started killing each other because plasmid use makes you psychotic, unless you can afford to keep taking more and more.

    They all started taking plasmids because they needed to compete in the workplace (then later, in the war) or end up homeless / dead.

    Plasmids were legal in the first place because Randism, being based 100% on individual responsibility, doesn’t believe that things like feedback loops or cumulative effects can happen at a societal level, and so doesn’t believe in regulations.

    Plasmids are a pretty clear metaphor for dehumanizing yourself to serve the market, especially because the Randian superman is a psychopath that is only self interested.

    But even without plasmids the fact that the worlds elite were brought down to Rapture, yet (to quote an audio log) “we couldn’t all be captains of industry, someone had to scrub the toilets” bred a huge amount of resentment from people who felt scammed and now trapped down there. Just like in the real world the markets in BioShock rely completely on low level workers to be able to function, and yet punish them for being in that position.



  • If your motivation is to see old html pages, with minimal style, well it’s impossible to do them reliably.

    Not only should your site be legible without JS, it should be legible without CSS, and infact without rendering the effects of the HTML tags (plain text after striping the tags).

    At one point in time this was the standard, that each layer was an enhancement on top of the one below it. Its seems that web devs now cannot even imagine writing a news article or a blog post like, something that has the entirety of its content contained within its text. A plain .txt file renders “reliably” on anything. You are the one adding extra complexity in there and then complaining that you’re forced to add even more to deal with the consequences of your actions.





  • Since you have expertise in this maybe you can answer this question for me.

    Do brick or stone roads last longer than asphalt or concrete roads?

    It seems to me like they should, given the higher hardness of the material and the presumably greater resistance to freeze/thaw cycles. I have also seen a few brick roads near me that I can only imagine have gone a very long time with no maintaince (as I think the government here would rather cover it in asphalt than try to work with the bricks). The ground underneath the bricks has shifted over time forming depressions in the path that car tires take, but it is still fine to drive over at low speeds, as the slopes are smooth unlike the holes that form in asphalt.

    I’ve tried googling this before but haven’t been able to find a straightforward answer as to how long a road like that can go between rounds of maintenance.


  • This is an idea from the 1960s back when they thought solar panels would be like computer chips and remain super expensive in terms of area but become exponentially better at the amount of sunlight they could convert into electricity.

    It makes absolutely zero sense to spend billions of dollars putting solar panels in space and beaming the power back to earth now that they are so cheap per unit area. The one thing you could argue a space based solar array could do would be to stretch out the day length so you need less storage, but that’s easier to accomplish using long electrical cables.


  • FOSS doesn’t mean “we think people that make software should work for free because we like free shit”. It means:

    1. When you want to modify something someone else made to your benefit you should recognize the work they did for you and pay it back in the form of contributing those changes back to the project. Beyond that, it also benefits you directly because someone else might build on your improvements (well, that, but also its easier to stop your changes from breaking in new versions of the software if other people are aware of them). Like the other commenter said, its communal development, sure lots of people do it at least partly because they want to make the world a better place, but the primary reason it works is because the various parties mutually benefit from mutual cooperation.

    2. The belief that you should have complete control over your own computer, which you can’t do in practice without being able to view the source code of the software you run.








  • Companies and individuals play by different rules.

    When a big company purchases software a team of people from both parties (whose entire job and career are based on doing this) negotiate with each other to decide exactly who is liable for what and to what degree.

    When you purchase software you agree to let the company fuck you over at their leisure because you literally do not have enough hours in the day to even read everything you agree to, let alone understand it, let alone argue with it. And even if you did you don’t have enough bargaining power to make a large company care.