Ultimately, we’re discussing two different styles of communication that I don’t see as any better or worse than each other - everyone finds what works for them in their circumstances and environment and your style probably works great for yours!

There’s a fair bit of hostility and harassment I encounter in public for various reasons, and I also have some inherent difficulty processing speech and verbalizing. As a result, I take a pretty blunt approach to communication - one in which I do not mind showing that I’m angry, because that is a necessary thing to be sometimes.

I practice mindfulness a lot and do not generally feel required to say the first thing that comes to mind. But if a drunk asshole is following me home, I’m not looking to outwit em. I’m looking to stay focused on my safety while letting em know that I see em and I’m probably more trouble than they’re looking for.

In serious conversation with people I care about, I do swear, but it’s because phrases like “I’m so fucking sorry that happened to you” come naturally to me and are effective. The emphasis that a little bit of swearing can add in moments like that is pretty useful.

This all doesn’t have to be your thing, like I said this is all down to personal preference - but it would be a mistake to assume that people who swear aren’t communicating as meaningfully. It’s just another tool that we have at our disposal.

My answer too.

And also for the benefit of anyone who’s just played the base game: the DLC is basically a sequel, and I found it even more impactful than the base game!

1. why is letting off steam indicative of a weak character? I think that when under stress, it’s actually indicative of someone being emotionally intelligent to recognize they need to let some stress out and find an avenue for it. I can’t explain exactly why, but swearing has always been a pretty effective way for me to let out some stress mid conversation while staying focused on a problem.

2. some contexts call for aggression. i.e. If someone’s making me or someone I care about uncomfortable in public, it can be pretty useful to bare my teeth back. A simple “fuck off” doesn’t require me to engage with any of their bullshit at all, gets the point across, and carries it with a mild aggression that actually does make people fuck off much of the time.

3. it is imprecise, but in many contexts it’s precise enough to convey displeasure and dismay enough to get the point across. In fact the power of “fuck you” is in how concise yet universally applicable and understandable in so many situations.

Much of the time communication isn’t about being creative or coming off smart. It’s about effectively conveying meaning with the tools you have. Sometimes that means simple, crude language is more effective at conveying something than all the wit in the world.

So when I’m in a situation that calls for its use, I don’t care that “fuck off” is a dime-a-dozen phrase that doesn’t make sense. It’s never misunderstood, it’s cathartic to say, and I don’t need to think on the spot to figure out something more eloquent - my mind is on, y’know, who or what needs to fuck off instead.

Especially considering a lot of the creative talent behind Valve’s acclaimed single player catalog are no longer at the company. Valve is a different company now and so their games will be different too.

yeah I heard this album, it’s ok but personally I just think CD Laser Lens Cleaner has elevated the genre further

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/cd-laser-lens-cleaner/cd-laser-lens-cleaner/

young men have been told that white men are the worst thing to be.

Ok, but try not being a man and see if people think that’s any better…

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]

ooh I fell in love with Taking Water by Billy Strings a day or two ago and it’s been in my head since

As much as I pretend to be one, I’m not really a fighter. I think this war may not need me to be one. The time to respond has already begun, and while front-line protests aren’t my strong suit, supporting protestors in my community is the place for me right now. If a greater conflict escalates, I’m probably not like doing the active fighting, but I can sure as shit help with supply lines as well as helping people who need to recover in the backlines. If I ever need to be in a fight I intend to be prepared, but there’s a lot more to do in a war than fight. And by the time anything like that would happen, I hope to have a resilient community around me who can support each other through hell. The fight’s already begun to an extent, and it’s important to remember that our best place may be “back-of-house” so to speak.

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.

I used Copilot for a while (in a Rust codebase fwiw) and it was… both useful and not for me? Its best suggestions came with some of the short-but-tedious completions like path().unwrap().to_str().into() etc. Those in and of themselves could be hit-or-miss, but useful often enough that I might as well take the suggestion and then see if it compiles.

Anything longer than that was OK sometimes, but often it’d be suggesting code for an older version of a particular API, or just trying to write a little algorithm for something I didn’t want to do in the first place. It was still correct often enough when filling out particular structures to be technically useful, but leaning on it more I noticed that my code was starting to bloat with things I really should have pulled off into another function instead of autocompleting a particular structure every time. And that’s on me, but I stopped using copilot because it just got too easy for me to write repetitive code but with like a 25% chance of needing to correct something in the suggestion, which is an interrupt my ADHD ass doesn’t need.

So whether it’s helpful for you is probably down to how you work/think/write code. I’m interested to see how it improves, but right now it’s too much of a nuisance for me to justify.

bark-to-text, of course!

I’ve attempted to do public-facing technical support for a game and dear Christ you’re spot on. I love people for wanting to engage with something I’ve spent a substantial part of my life putting together and trying to make it run okay, and am sympathetic to people feeling frustrated when technical issues prevent them from fully enjoying an early access game. Early on when the community was small I had a great time shitposting with the players, but once we hit release the environment turned toxic pretty much overnight as the community suddenly grew.

But like, none of them know how hard we crunched to get even a playable version of the game out, nevermind one that’s playable on the lowest of netbook specs. None of em know how complicated the system is that’s breaking preventing them from logging in, that that’s not actually my area of expertise and that I’m just feeding them information from the matchmaking team who are all freaking the fuck out because this is the first time we’ve tested this shit at scale. None of them know that we were getting squeezed by our publisher, who wanted us to do a progression wipe that we didn’t want ourselves, but like they control if the game gets shipped at all so… not really a choice there. And we can’t admit any of this because accusations of incompetence come out pretty early, tend to stick around, and leave devs very little room to make bad decisions (which happens a lot!)

And like, being trans now on top of that? Hell no, I’m never touching a public server again if I can help it. Slurs and mistrust were already flying before, I can’t throw myself in front of that bus again. I’m gonna miss it because I cared a lot about connecting with people playing the game and for a while found a lot of joy in responding to bugs and fixing individual system issues and integrating into the community. And there were some amazing people who were great to talk to that I really missed when I left. But the inherent abuse that comes with that gets so overwhelming and it drained my desire to even work on games at all for quite a while.

To be fair, Bluesky does have “blocklists” maintained by other users that you can opt into, and quite a few popular ones exist with active maintainers who take and act on reports pretty quickly. So you still can delegate moderation responsibilities. One advantage to this is that you can opt into a few blocklists based on what you personally want to block - separate lists exist for hateful bigots, crypto pushers, and so on. I gave it a shot out of curiosity and haven’t run into any issues yet, but that’s just me.

I still prefer Mastodon for broader AP integration, and I think blocklists aren’t discoverable enough outside of word of mouth, but I am curious to see how that turns out for Bluesky. Certainly an improvement over Xitter imo.

I forgor 💀

that an offer, or…?

wait wait wait, but I’m on the internet! :o

It always depends but tbh I hope you feel free to use whatever terminology you find useful to describe yourself! and I think there’s no valor that can be stolen, identity is what you make for yourself. It’s always a joy to learn someone I know is queer in any form. Lots of us have had times where we’ve doubted how we describe ourselves too and gatekeeping labels doesn’t tend to help anyone. You will come across people who do here and there, I did myself, but in my super objective opinion they’re annoying, smell bad, and stifle people just trying to figure themselves out. Labels are just tools for further conversation and more people using queer labels is a good thing.