I’ve found “You work all day and get a small salary. The business owner sits around, and gets a huge payout. Does that seem fair?” is moderately effective.

The other core is “I’d rather die of preventable diseases so long as black people suffer more”

That’s a good point.

Though sometimes people are just sandbagging. Like I know one guy is just watching Netflix instead of working. I’m downstream from his work, so it’s a little annoying that I have to wait a couple days to get started.

I wouldn’t rat him out because my labor solidarity beats out my annoyance, but the annoyance is real.

I’m not (intentionally) being rude while knowing that it’s ineffective.

I’m saying the people that believe a flashy YouTube video instead of something uncomfortable are being stupid.

The solution will never be to get them to fall on their face and worship logic. Nor will it be to call them idiots to their face. (Even though some people are so fucking stupid and full of worm paste that I want to scream at them, that’s not appropriate so it stays inside). The solution, unfortunately, needs to be wrapping facts up in ways that make them feel good. We have to cater to this behavior.

Here’s a more concrete example. We do code reviews at work. I could leave a comment that says “Don’t sort this list in place. That’s going to cause a bug at XYZ”. Straight. To the point. I could also leave a comment that says like “hey great work here. And a good call to sort the list! I think you might want to make a copy and sort that so it won’t be weird at XYZ. Thanks so much.”

The latter is a lot fluffier and a little dishonest (it’s clearly not great work), but I have to write more like that. Otherwise people feel bad and whine about it.

I think this is a factor in why people love LLMs so much. They’re always getting fluffed.

Right. But that’s a stupid strategy that leads people to believing what the flashy YouTube video says about eating horse medicine to cure cancer instead of the grumpy scientist who makes you feel bad.

You’re not wrong in describing how people behave. I’m saying that behavior is foolish.

Right. I think winning moves might have to play into people’s emotions. Don’t tell conservatives that greenhouse gases cause more heat to be trapped. Tell them like ONLY AMERICA CAN DEFEAT PHYSICS AND MOVE INTO THE FUTURE or whatever.

That doesn’t change the square root of 9, and it’s stupid to discard facts because the speaker is rude.

Another facet of what I said above: facts don’t matter. Emotions matter. Which is a stupid way to live, but that’s humans.

The average person, if you told them like “the square root of 9 is 3, you fucking idiot” isn’t going to believe you. Which, amusingly, shows they are kind of a fucking idiot.

Facts don’t change people’s minds. The main thing that matters is “is the source in my in-group?”

This is kind of a stupid way to live, but that’s the human baseline. So that’s how all the conservatives live, and why they won’t come around on things like climate change. They’re not listening to facts. They’re listening to their in-group.

One time we spent like more than an hour in a horrible meeting to plan out how long the next step of a project would take. 4 weeks, we said. Management came back and said to do it in 2. Well, why did we fucking have the meeting if they had a deadline in mind already?

On the other hand, at my current job I have seen a lot of “oh that’s going to take a couple days” protests for things that are 20 minutes of work.

Seems like the solution is to get rid of out of touch management.

I deeply dislike sarcasm. It’s neither funny nor helpful.

There was a guy I worked with that was pretty much always sarcastic.[1]. I’d ask him if he’d written the run book yet and he’d say like “Yes, it’s written in the style of a sonnet with hand drawn illustrations”, and I’d be like “I don’t know if that means you wrote it or not”. Everything with him took extra steps because his communication was such a swamp of insincerity.

[1] well, when I asked him to stop being sarcastic he said it wasn’t sarcasm. He was merely being ironic. Nonsense.

Oh man I completely forgot diablo4 existed. Diablo1 was one of my favorite games. Shame where they ended up.

Good on valve for maintaining proton.

It does feel like the average person has the self control of a toddler.

He shouldn’t be allowed to keep going.

The megacorp I work for is frothing at the mouth to replace people with AI. Most of leadership doesn’t know anything about programming, but still feel confident to talk about it.

Arpgs do have a big random factor, but many have some element of crafting to offset it. Sometimes as small as slotting upgrade stuff (ie: gems) into armor, sometimes more involved. I’m pretty sure path of exile 1 had some depth to it, but I never went super hard. It’s one of the only free to play games that isn’t abusive, so it’s pretty low risk to try. I like the second game more, but it’s early access and has less stuff.

Monster Hunter

Any diablo-like. Path of exile, grim dawn, last epoch, etc.

Disgaea goes a little crazy with items and modifying them.

Teams is the worst. Microsoft keeps finding new lows.

Not excited for this to be used to squash union efforts (legally or not)

I decided not to get one. If I had a lot more money, maybe. I got a steam deck a couple years ago when I had a nice job, but even that I don’t use all that much.

Usually if I’m not home, I don’t want to be playing video games.

Valve makes drm easy but I’m pretty sure the developer can choose to not include it. It’d be on you to back up the files in that case, though.