eupraxia

This is why you shouldn’t kill rattlesnakes. If we kill the rattlesnakes that make themselves known, over time they adapt to not rattle before striking.

I’m standing outside the LL Bean

…tryna get some free woman sweaters, know what I mean?

This tracks for how a lot of people use the app, but depending on where you are you can also have some fairly normal (for a dating site) conversations with people as well. I spent a couple months on Grindr despite not being interested in hookups, since it’s a decent way to meet other trans folk in my area. My inbox was mostly dick pics but I also met some amazing people I’m still with several years later!

Yeah, 100%. This kind of advice can maybe make sense if you’re starting a startup, but everyone employed at that stage needs to be on equal ground and well-protected. If they’re not, then that can still be fine, but they can’t be expected to put as much of their lives into your product. They’re contractors you’re hiring for some shit-shoveling and maybe it’s best to be honest about that.

The unfortunate thing in tech is that, due to pushing “learning to code” as a universal employment option, there’s always a pool of idealistic fresh blood that is willing to crunch for you if you make vague mention of being in it together, when a few people stand to gain the vast majority of the profit if the company’s product is successful. By the time the new recruits are old and bitter and burnt out, you can lay em off for poor performance (or cannibalize the company at large) and hire some more doe-eyed interns.

If you’re expecting your employees to consistently work long hours for you, they need to have the same stake as you do. They need flexibility to take care of their mental and physical health as needed. You should encourage them to unionize and collectively bargain for their needs once they come in conflict with yours, because they absolutely will. You can’t afford to lose these people, because it’s rare to find people that won’t get ground into dust doing this because they want it as bad as you. so make it sustainable and more than worth their while. if you can’t find these people? maybe your app sucks.

these types view themselves as above the labor they’re hiring because they got there first / had the means to form a company and I fucking hate it.

This was one of the more baffling experiences in coming out - seeing some of the most scientifically minded, media literate people I know suddenly shut off all of those instincts when they encountered “the trans debate.” Like someone with a healthy amount of skepticism around statistics linking me bullshit “average number of sexual partners” figures from a conversion therapy lobbying group. Or someone with an active dislike of sports suddenly deciding that the sanctity of women’s sports is more important than their relationship with their daughter.

The best explanation I’ve been able to come up with is that gender is regimented by complex trauma, often when we are children, and these are the types of cognitive distortions that occur when we’re in fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses. Flashbacks are often thought of as vivid sensory experiences i.e. re-experiencing the traumatic event, but it’s a spectrum of responses. Many are more subtle and feel extremely normal in the moment, while our ability to reason is actually overtaken by our need to feel safe in the face of a perceived threat.

I think this kind of statistics vomit can sometimes be a “flight” response to a perceived threat of someone being trans in proximity to them. Flight responses are characterized as attempting to avoid a threat by throwing oneself into action not to overcome, but escape the threat. Perhaps a wall of text with nuanced-and-reasoned set dressing and lots of links and numbers feels like a wall between them and “the problem.”

definitely seconding this - I used it the most when I was using Unreal Engine at work and was struggling to use their very incomplete artist/designer-focused documentation. I’d give it a problem I was having, it’d spit out some symbol that seems related, I’d search it in source to find out what it actually does and how to use it. Sometimes I’d get a hilariously convenient hallucinated answer like “oh yeah just call SolveMyProblem()!” but most of the time it’d give me a good place to start looking. it wouldn’t be necessary if UE had proper internal documentation, but I’m sure Epic would just get GPT to write it anyway.

“I love dogs! I’ve always loved dogs!” has to be one of the funniest movie lines I’ve heard. but for my money it was probably the bees choosing their space queen because they “respect royalty”

do actually recommend getting some friends and drinks to see this one, we laughed our asses off at space-twilight and had a good time

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and for anyone who’s played the base game - make sure to check out the DLC, it’s essentially a sequel! and I found it even more fascinating and affecting. an improvement on all fronts to an already very special game.

I’m of the opinion both violent and nonviolent means are probably necessary and there’s plenty of nonviolent means of engagement. no war has been fought without support from somewhere, whether that’s a national war machine or the supporting element of an insurgency. there’s always logistics, resources, and well organization that has to occur.

I’m in no condition to fight myself, but over the coming decades I’m gonna have to be thinking about how much violence I’m comfortable being around and how much we can support people in the thick of it. violence is definitely present already in day to day life, but it’s more of an orphan-crushing-machine kind of violence that feels more normal.

Hi, this sentiment from non-americans pisses me off and it’s okay, but I feel it’s important to explain why so I’m copying another comment I made today.

Goodness knows some of us are trying our best. I mean keep in mind our country is a democracy in name but systemically props up white supremacists in excess of the real popular opinion. And a media disinformation machine keeps the working class divided against itself, with open support from the wealthiest and owners of the most popular social media platforms. Social media platforms that, let’s be honest, are super recent inventions we are not yet capable of engaging with safely. It makes it an uphill battle to try to reach out to people whose necks aren’t on the line. And the responsibility to do so falls upon the disenfranchised themselves, who are increasingly saddled with economic and health burdens that might just kill us someday.

I get the potshots at Americans, but frankly I don’t plan on taking the blame if this goes tits up - many of us did a hell of a lot more than vote to resist fascism. Nothing happened here that isn’t happening elsewhere. And I’ll fight the notion that citizens at large are the problem. It’s a cynical outlook that serves to individualize the responsibility for a systematic disaster. Our country was built to make this possible after all. And I sure as hell know I don’t plan on giving up. Kind of morbidly curious about how much of an incompetent clusterfuck Project 2025’s implementation will be.

Victory or no, fascists are paper tigers and I plan on sticking around to remind them of that fact however I can.

omg I just wrote a comment about a student project with this mechanic, wishing to see it in a full production and then scrolled down and here you are telling me that game actually exists! Thank you 😁

I played a student project game a long time ago that based itself around this kind of mechanic. It was a horror game set entirely in the dark, and the only way of seeing was by echolocation - you’d click to send out a pulse, and you’d get brief ghostly glimmers of your environment. Importantly, you couldn’t directly see anything moving - you’d have to send out another ping if you wanted to see something in motion.

Given that monsters could hear your pings too, it was a wonderful little game of cat-and-mouse deduction trying to figure out where monsters were with as few pings as possible, remembering their patrol paths in the dark, and so on. Really cool and I’d love to see that mechanic in a full game production.

(edit: apparently that full game exists, it’s called Perception, and I’m absolutely giving it a shot!)

The thing is some games make the line really fuzzy and it’s hard to draw an exact line where it no longer is a game.

Pyre does have a whole RPG wizard basketball thing going on that I enjoyed, but wasn’t the reason I recommend the game. The more engaging part of the game was the visual novel stapled to it, which was affected by wizard basketball in cool and interesting ways, but inside each scene it’s largely non-interactive.

Disco Elysium also has some RPG mechanics going on, and there’s a city block for you to wander around, but the vast majority of the game is dialogue. It could largely be written as a more complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s so much stronger as a game.

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is almost entirely dialogue and telling people’s fortunes, with only brief moments of creating new tarot cards to break up the dialogue. Despite this, the fortune-telling aspect of the game has made it one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a bit.

There’s any number of “walking simulators” that this debate comes up around and I counter that with the fact that Outer Wilds built off the back of that formula to create something unquestionably a game, but built off of gameplay loops largely based around traversal and finding new bits of lore to unlock progression.

These were all successfully marketed to gamers as video games. My hot take is that they’re all games, but with a form of gameplay that some may find too simple for their liking and that’s ok. And the semantic debate over what’s a game and what isn’t is just feels vibes based sometimes.

IIIIT’S LIKE RAAAAIIIIIIIIIN ON YA WEDDING DAYYYY

It’s funny cause to me it’s always meant a third entirely different thing! To me small talk is just starting from a basic place to feel each other out a bit, bringing up mundane things and simple questions to find topics we could drill further into.

“How was your day” to a partner would be small talk, even though I care about what they’re saying - I’m just asking so they can bring up something to talk about. “Weather’s been shit lately” to a stranger is small talk, but the ensuing story about how they had to rush to work late in the rain would not be.

Given it means three different things to three random people, it’s almost like “small talk” actually covers a broad set of social purposes and people who “aren’t into it” might actually be missing a lot 😝

Best description of this I’ve read, thank you. It’s not a question about men directly, it’s a question about how women have to navigate a world with a small percentage of men that will hurt them given the opportunity.

That’s been my experience with GPT - every answer Is a hallucination to some extent, so nearly every answer I receive is inaccurate in some ways. However, the same applies if I was asking a human colleague unfamiliar with a particular system to help me debug something - their answers will be quite inaccurate too, but I’m not expecting them to be accurate, just to have helpful suggestions of things to try.

I still prefer the human colleague in most situations, but if that’s not possible or convenient GPT sometimes at least gets me on the right path.

[Outer Wilds cycle end music intensifies]

While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply. On the one hand, yes you can tell people their ideas do not gel with the vision of the project, and sometimes that’s the right call. And sometimes doing this a lot is best for the project.

On the other hand, even if a majority of the work is coming from one person, not only does your community learn your project, they also spend time contributing to it, fixing bugs, and helping other people. I feel it’s only to a project’s benefit to honor them and take difficult suggestions seriously, and get to the root of why those suggestions are coming up. Otherwise you risk pissing off your contributors, who I feel have the right to be annoyed at you and maybe post evangelion themed vent blog posts if you consistently shut down contributors’ needs and fail to adapt to what your users actually want out of your software. And forking, while freeing and playing to the idea of freedom of choice, also splits your userbase and contributors and makes both parties worse off. It really depends on the project, but it pays to maintain buy-in and trust from people who care enough to meaningfully contribute to your project.