Notices by sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Nov-2025 17:02:10 JST 
sj_zero
daggerfall remaster when, todd? WHEN, TODD? -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Nov-2025 17:02:07 JST
sj_zero
The effects of not making game devs build their own engine and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Nov-2025 23:12:58 JST
sj_zero
BUY! BUY! BUY! -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Nov-2025 05:09:28 JST
sj_zero
Just me and the boys, eating 2.5 million dollars worth of fish (wasn't that good tbh) -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 31-Oct-2025 07:04:01 JST
sj_zero
You can also think of it as casting off a marketing expense. When people were getting rich working for these big tech companies, it's also a giant sign going "Wow they must be a really cool up and coming company, look at how great the wages and working conditions are!"
Thing is, most big tech companies are getting out of that phase. Now they're as big as they're gonna get, if they want to keep drawing investor dollars they need to start optimizing their capital, and to do that they need to ditch operating costs to drive up margins. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 26-Oct-2025 05:07:59 JST
sj_zero
Consider the irony: "I have to buy a brand new computer because the people who make my operating system arbitrarily require a new microchip? Well forget that I'm buying a Mac"
4th architecture now? -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 25-Oct-2025 21:53:02 JST
sj_zero
I kind of feel like even if you win this one on the yes side, you might have lost big...
"Wait, you gambled on this?" "Yes, and I bet on you!" "But you gambled on it?" -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 25-Oct-2025 02:04:46 JST
sj_zero
I saw someone saying "Half the Internet went down when AWS failed. This is proof you need to have money in crypto"
At some point, people are going to have to realize that crypto only makes sense in the context of a world with an open Internet. If STTF, the open Internet is about the first thing to go away, meaning your crypto isn't going to be available along with your global DNS and your connection to root miners. Shiny rocks might seem like a sillier form of value storage, but shiny rocks don't depend on a global communications internetwork to operate. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Thursday, 23-Oct-2025 07:39:44 JST
sj_zero
Right at the beginning of the pandemic, I was like "Oh shit we won't be able to get haircuts, they're gonna mess us up" so I quietly grabbed a hair clipper on Amazon.
And it turned out to be like the last flight out of Saigon for the next 2 years. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Thursday, 23-Oct-2025 05:56:44 JST
sj_zero
"Can we agree that having to pay for a human necessity is a major a-hole design?"
You've got two options: Go have a chat with God and his pesky laws of thermodynamics, or slavery.
We could bring it back, then we wouldn't need to worry about paying for human necessities! -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Oct-2025 20:20:41 JST
sj_zero
I find it very hard to wrap my head around the fact that 99% of cases don't have drive bays anymore. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Oct-2025 02:43:04 JST
sj_zero
I remember when my great-great-great-grandfather Ezekiel was working on his automobile.
He said "yo Gretchen! Get me the odb2 reader! I think the mass airflow sensor is fouled! We also need to update the flash with the updated air/fuel mixture!" -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Oct-2025 20:11:27 JST
sj_zero
I hope it's glitchless. Throwing a pizza at the corner of the room as hard as you can and the cooked pizza showing up on your table just doesn't feel satisfying to watch. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Oct-2025 01:36:33 JST
sj_zero
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15208111/Snapchat-Roblox-Duolingo-Fortnite-outage.html
I always love it when half the internet goes down and my crappy little websites hosted off parts scavenged from roadside signs keep chugging away. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Oct-2025 07:07:40 JST
sj_zero
I don't disagree with you. But it is also true that in being more realistic they completely upend Roddenberrys original vision of space utopia and replace it with a more complex space realism. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Oct-2025 07:04:22 JST
sj_zero
DS9 is a paradox. It is some of the best storytelling in Trek, but it also fundamentally broke Trek. What it did was fundamentally break Trek by proving Roddenberry wrong; it turned out there is no utopia in the future, it just looked that way until an enemy came along that forced Starfleet to fight back for real. Shortly after DS9, that happened to the western neoliberal world order.
Nothing else has ever come out since then that's really the same as what came before. Kirk and Picard, even early Janeway, they were no longer possible in Trek and that's one reason it's never truly recovered since. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 12-Oct-2025 22:07:23 JST
sj_zero
I saw Jeff Cliff on here this morning.
Hard to believe he's still going on about COVID in late 2025.
Especially after we're years in and many of the predictions made about the lockdowns turned out to be entirely true. A generation of young kids have had their reading severely crippled. Another generation of young adults have had their social foundations severely crippled. The Wall Street economy exploded but the Main Street economy was crippled and never really returned to normal. Homeless encampments that started during COVID never truly went away. Normal people are still visiting food banks at unprecedented levels, and a lot of food banks are having to turn away people because their use rates are so much higher than ever before and the cost of food has skyrocketed.
One thing I do tend to want to correct people about is they blame COVID for things like the lower literacy in classrooms, but it is in fact the lockdowns that caused that, not COVID itself. In fact, for a good chunk of the lockdowns, most places didn't have COVID (by design -- that was the purpose of the lockdowns), and the harm of lockdowns was occurring independently of any harm from COVID.
In medicine, often we need to modulate the immune response in a person because the immune response is what kills us, not the illness itself. We take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce fevers because the fever is worse for us. We also take Tylenol and Aspirin to reduce inflammation responses because inflammation is often more damaging to the local tissue than the infection itself, and we can let the more sophisticated parts of our immune system deal with infections instead. Through this metaphor, we can see the fever and inflammation response of lockdowns, masking, and presenting our papers like every restaurant is a soviet checkpoint may have been more harmful than the infection we were trying to resolve. Chronic fever can cause brain damage and organ damage that can take far longer to recover from than the infection itself, and arguably that's exactly what we're seeing from our civilizational fever.
Yet he's still talking as if there's only one truth and that truth is that COVID is the worst thing ever and we never should have ended anti-COVID measures. I recall him also arguing that the downsides I discuss above would never come to pass, and perhaps today would argue they didn't come to pass.
It almost looks like a modernist idea of COVIDism. That isn't to say it's a cult of COVID, but rather a totalizing worldview where one and only one thing matters at the top of the grand narrative hierarchy, and that's COVID.
Part of the risk of the original COVID-19 is that it was a novel coronavirus -- something our immune systems had no defense against. One major argument for the lockdowns is that people didn't have any chance of not getting COVID, so if everyone got sick at once there'd be big implications to that. The problem is, it's been 5 years, and most people have had COVID. In fact, it's a sick joke regarding the vaccines -- where I work, definitionally 100% of the people working there were vaccinated, yet tons of people got COVID anyway.
Honestly, at first I wasn't against the lockdowns, since the argument seemed sound -- we didn't know how lethal it was, there were videos out of China of people dropping dead in the streets (almost certainly fake we now understand), and there was a risk of virtually everyone getting really sick with a bad illness right away. Later we learned that many of the fatalities we saw were a result of bad treatment options such as intubation rather than the inherent lethality of covid. The thing is, by the end of 2020 we already had achieved the goals of the initial lockdowns, but then to totalizing narrative hold to "defeat COVID" had taken hold. People felt like it was possible to totally eliminate a virus that had travelled across the entire world, and wouldn't accept anything but total eradictation. This meant that 14 days became a month became 6 months became 2 years before things finally started to go back to normal.
Ironically, although the vaccine didn't prevent covid, it seems that natural immunity did ultimately do its job. I don't see people getting routinely sick with COVID anymore. A few unusual people got it multiple times, but most people seem to have gotten it once and after that been OK.
I don't know what Jeff's story is. Maybe he lost some important family members early on and never really psychologically recovered. If that's the case, I can sympathize with him, but empirically we can say it's time to let go -- Continuing to fight this fight isn't going to bring your loved ones back, but if you ever got what you wanted a lot more people would suffer because of it.
Maybe he's just keeping up a joke. If it's a joke on his part, he needs to find a new joke because it really isn't funny anymore.
Unrelated to Jeff, some people think 2020 was an exercise in societal compliance. They wanted to see if they could push people to do act insane and they succeeded. That may be the case, but I'd argue because human relationships aren't digital, it's a measurement that changes when you take it -- A lot of society changed as a direct result of 2020, and I know a lot of people are quite sensitive to any similar event occurring again. To enact what they did took massive capital: social capital, political capital, and monetary capital. The scale of what it took to enact the lockdowns was similar to how in order to measure an electron you have to bounce another electron off of it, changing the state of that electron you're measuring -- it doesn't matter what result you get back, the system is fundamentally changed afterwards. You only proved it could be done back then, not that it could be done again. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 12-Oct-2025 07:37:04 JST
sj_zero
Unless you're requesting asylum from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, or Spain, I don't see why you'd have a claim to asylum in the UK.
Now, I can understand why you'd request asylum from France, but for the most part people from those countries are happy to sleep in the beds they've made. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 11-Oct-2025 06:44:54 JST
sj_zero
Should people take life seriously or just be happy?
I would say it's a false dichotomy. To be truly happy, you have to take life seriously.
Taking life seriously doesn't mean taking every single thing you can't control seriously, of course. The wisdom of the stoics is important, but not focusing on things you can't control isn't the same as not taking life itself seriously and taking the things you can control seriously.
I became a father in 2021 after a lifetime of thinking that was impossible. I released my first book about a month before he was born. Most fathers wouldn't publish a novel length book to their son, but I felt like it was important to get started.
Being a father is one of only a few things in my life that have ever made me truly happy, one of the other things being my marriage. These two things are a big part of my life, and I take them both deadly seriously. That totally changes the calculus of things. Going outside, going for a walk, going to the park, they stop just being something you do for your own happiness, and start being something you do because you're serious about your life and that makes it important. By doing the things that aren't fun in the moment, by taking life seriously and treating it like something that matters, you do these things and fundamentally become happier because the things you care about succeed.
Meanwhile, while I got to the park with my son 7 times a week some weeks, I see we're living in ghost world. The sidewalks are empty. The parks are empty. Everywhere is empty. Where are the kids? Obviously there's a lot fewer kids now that we aren't in a baby boom, but the truth is there's still plenty of kids but nobody takes live very seriously so they're just at home playing on their electronics and watching slop videos.
In fact, I think taking life seriously and acting like it matters is how you make sure you're doing the right things and ensuring your happiness continues. Doing the right thing when nobody's watching is serious. Deferring gratification when it can pay off is serious. Raising your kids is serious. Staying connected to your wife or husband is serious. You ultimately end up with what Aristotle called eudaimonia, human flourishing. It's a deeper happiness than just being able to say you enjoyed doing something transient briefly.
I finished my second book and first novel this year. I took writing it very seriously, and spent a lot of time thinking about what sort of world could make people happy. It wasn't a world of fleeting joy and lackadaisical attitudes. It's a world rich with meaning, where people take their lives, their communities, their responsibilities seriously. It's a world where people make commitments to the people around them, and that's where they find joy and meaning. We are free, so we are free to do the right thing that makes the world a better place to live in. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 06-Oct-2025 20:47:59 JST
sj_zero
I really hate minetests new name.
Luanti sounds like a hedge fund or boner pills.
"Ask your doctor if Luanti is right for you. In some cases luanti may cause irritable bowel syndrome, heart attacks, stroke."
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