Saying that trump is slobbering on Putin’s cock is not automatically homophobic, unless you think a dude giving another dude a blowjob is inherently degrading for the blowjob-giver? The point is that trump is pleasuring Putin, and they’re both cis men, so presumably trump isn’t going to be sucking on Putin’s clit… Would you rather people say Trump is rimming Putin’s asshole, as that is less specific to what genetals people have?

My read on Newsom is that he’s meeting the American public where (he thinks) they’re at, as well as showing how trump’s “he tells it like it is” memetics are not exclusive to trump. He’s breaking their pattern-matching so they can’t immediately shut their brain off and agree as soon as they detect this style of rhetoric, hopefully forcing them to engage more with the specifics of what is being said than just the mere tone.

Mr Trump? Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are in the line, they would like to share some advice…

Syntax highlighting for code blocks is the reason I prefer discord over slack for collaborating and just chatting with friends who know how to code. I imagine some irc clients exist that so the same, but at least with discord I know my recipient is guaranteed to see what I see.

No problem! I’ve been here almost 2 years and I still get confused from time to time.

Sounds like either federation working as intended, or some client app trying to cache info about your instance. Might be https://fedidb.com/ or https://fediverse.observer/ or some other service.

Not at all, merely sharing a parallel I just realized/remembered.

Kinda like how in early versions of D&D elf and dwarf were classes.

From my understanding of word embeddings (as used by LLMs), you could skip the LLM and directly compare the similarity of what the STT outputs to each task or phrase in a list you have prepared. You’d need to test it out a few times to see what threshold works, but even testing against dozens of phrases should be much faster than spinning up an LLM - and it should be fully deterministic.

Great follow-up piece by Mother Jones to the initial Politico article, thanks for sharing it!

Oh yeah, the graphics really insist that they are captured spawners, not converted, raised, or otherwise “friendly” spawners.

I interpret their comment slightly differently; Factorio as a game is less valuable today then, say, 4 years ago.

I still disagree with that interpretation, as the game has continued to receive updates and bugfixes, steadily increasing it’s value (or at least counteracting the depreciation). Not to mention the additional value provided by community mods has only increased over the years.

The game is also one-of-a-kind. Until a “factorio 2” equivalent comes out that is just straight-up better in every way, it’s hard to see how the value would depreciate. Heck, the Space Age DLC is basically “Factorio 2” without splitting the playerbase across 2 separate games.

The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35

… which is still receiving updates well into 2025: https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/2.0.0. Probably, in part, because they never put the game on sale and so each and every purchase of the game by players contributes equally to the studio’s capacity to continue supporting the game.

I’ve seen an online comment somewhere referring to this interview of him (it’s in Czech, but has English captions). I don’t have much interest in watching the full interview myself (though I probably should just to check what I’m talking about). According to this comment I had seen, he explains in this interview that he had that knee-jerk reaction to the pushback to recommending Bob Martin’s “Clean Code” book in the public factorio devlog in part because of the political climate he grew up in (Czechoslovakia near the end of the Soviet Union, and then following it’s dissolution) which was full of spurious accusations based on tangential links.

Myself, I distinctly remember reading the devblog post when it came out and thinking “oh boy, it’s a shame he only learned about Clean Code today and clearly is unaware of Bob Martin’s reputation on matters outside of strict software development”. His comments in the reddit thread really just made things worse. I’m still hesitant to unequivocally label him as bad as many others, but simultaneously I don’t hold much hope that he’ll ever come out and publicly denounce his former comments.

Seems like the very first, very outdated trailer from 2013 contains some of that - though in the trailer itself it seems more like bio-zombies than eco protesters. The game could only be pre-ordered at this point, though the video’s description suggests there was already a demo available. I don’t know if the game’s lore at this point was already “you play as an engineer that has crash-landed on an alien planet” – if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t surprise me that the decision to make that be the lore ended up convincing the dev team to abandon humanoid enemies.

In any case, starting from the following year’s (2014) trailer the fauna is already in the form of biters, spawners, and worms.

tagging @causepix@lemmy.ml in case they’re interested in this tidbit of history.

The game has long eschewed “good” and “bad”; thematically I’d say it’s more of a “water & oil” situation where you, the crash-landed engineer, don’t really have a way to both get off the planet and not pollute – you are of a fundamentally incompatible nature compared to the bugs. I imagine it could be possible to do a play-through that deliberately avoids automation and attempts to launch a rocket with the minimum of pollution emitted, though that’s more of a self-imposed challenge to try out when you already “master” the game (it will be long and dull, for the most part). As this analysis puts it, “Factorio is a game about building factories, and only uses environmental devastation as a minor background mechanic.” Another analysis comes to more-or-less the same conclusion.

It’s worth noting that, as of the Space Age DLC that released almost exactly 1 year ago, things get pushed even further away from morality. On the one hand, the dlc introduces a way to replant trees, including automatically, finally allowing players to get to a point where no blurb of pollution ever extends into the rest of the world/map. On the other hand, to complete the dlc you will need to farm the fauna by literally capturing the spawners and harvesting biter eggs from it. It’s a very fun automation and logistics challenge (harvested eggs hatch into aggresive biters if not used in a recipe quick enough, and nutrients for the spawners must be produced off-world and imported via rockets else the spawner reverts back to a “wild” state). Things are even less clearly moralized by the end of the dlc, where you obtain the capability to craft new spawners and plop them down wherever you want. This means you can add to the native fauna, not just take from it. In a sense, you get more agency in how your relationship to the native fauna ends up. The road to that agency, however, remains that of the base game. Neither planting trees nor creating new spawners is available without launching a rocket off-world (in fact, it takes many many rockets to get to this point). As the first analysis I linked so succinctly puts it, “[i]t is manifest destiny that a rocket be launched, so exploitation of the environment is unavoidable and the efforts of the bug race stand in the way of fate.” Cynically speaking, the DLC basically just lets you green-wash your dominion of the planet/solar system, after-the-fact.

You’re welcome!

I’m just glad the length of my response didn’t intimidate you. Factorio is really one of my favorite games of all time, top personal contender for “if you were stuck on a desert island and could only bring 1 video game with you”, so it’s easy to ramble far too long about.

In a very real sense, the game is only intended to be played in the manner that makes it actually fun for you.

The fauna is an integral part of the game only in the sense that the pollution produced by your machines makes them angry and makes them evolve, and a lot of work has gone into balancing the pollution/evolution rates to provide a sort of tension and pressure that adapts to how fast you are progressing. If you care a lot about experiencing things “as the devs intended them” then I understand not wanting to cut off an entire system and set of mechanics. In that sense, dealing with the attacking fauna without completely stalling or falling apart is one of the first hurdles you are “meant” to struggle with.

There are intermediates between keeping the attacking fauna and removing them: you can disable their expansion, you can make them only attack when damaged, and you can tweak the numbers that determine how your factory’s pollution affects them. You can also change the amount of “safe space” the game forces the map to give you around where you spawn - this alone can be the difference between the early game being anxiety-inducing or quite relaxed. These can only be done at map generation (unless you don’t mind using console commands to change things on an existing save/map).

Without changing any map settings, it’s not immediately obvious how many options you have to address the problem in-game, but here are some pointers if you ever do give it another try:

• trees will absorb pollution, preventing it from reaching biter nests. They can absorb a decent amount but will eventually die and stop absorbing. Starting in a forest can be a bit more cramped than in a desert but at least you don’t have to fend off as many attacks early on.
• avoid overproducing just to fill up buffers - you probably don’t need to have 2k green circuits sitting in a chest as soon as you can make them. avoid emitting all of that pollution until you actively need those items.
• try to set up defences before they are needed. You can build a new production line first to know what space it requires, but set up walls and turrets before you turn it on. This should help prevent you being interrupted by attacks on undefended machines.
• researching damage upgrades gives you more damage output per unit of pollution produced, helping keep the balance in your favor
• only a nest that is exposed to pollution will send attack parties. You can toggle displaying pollution in the world map (now called “Remote View”) and proactively clear out nests before the pollution his them. You’re essentially choosing between proactive defensive efforts vs reactive efforts.
• reloading a previous save to change your approach without restarting an entire game is totally legit and nothing to be ashamed of.

At the end of what I would call the early game, you unlock even more options.

• efficiency modules reduce the pollution a machine emits. They also reduce the amount of electricity the machine consumes, which will indirectly lower your pollution by making you burn less coal
• solar power is a great way to lower the amount your factory is polluting once your panels and accumulators are already made. Making enough to power your whole base, however, takes a lot of steel and other ressources, whose refinement emits pollution. So don’t expect solar power to automatically fix your fauna problems - it’ll take a little bit of thought
• laser turrets do away with the need to produce ammo and get it to the front lines, though the spikes in power consumption they cause keeps them from being a total, immediate fix. Similar to solar power, you’ll need to plan a bit.
• flamethrower turrets are much easier to supply than gun turrets, and can be waaaaaaaay cheaper depending on how much crude oil you have available to you

Finally, you could also first play the game through once without the fauna to get familiarized, and then do a second run with them activated. in my experience, it’s a lot more fun to deal with them once you know your way around the other mechanics.

On it’s own, nothing really? As long as you don’t let that nihilism justify making life worse for others.

Combined with racism and the rest of the bigotry on display in these leaked exchanges, I think it’s useful to distinguish between someone whose ignorance has allowed them to be co-opted by bigotry against their own interests, and someone who justifies their bigotry because “nothing really matters”. I also think it’s useful to accuse them of not actually believing in anything when they’re running a political movement. Especially if the target audience for that movement does have a belief that some things intrinsically matter (be it democracy or, more likely here, the christian faith).

I’ll readily admit I was mainly trying to go for more than just “racist pieces of shit”, while having a clear impression from the tone and content of the leaked exchanges that there is an undercurrent of nihilism that is, if not fueling them, then at least lubricating them. If you have a better suggestion I would love to hear it.

“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr,” he wrote.

Get cooked, fuckface. nihilist racist pieces of shit

Great job on Politico’s part, though.

plus my passwords are partials (I salt them)

I’m curious how you make that work - do you just remember the salts, store them separately, or what? I have like 50-70 passwords in my store currently, there’s no way I’m remembering a (true random) salt for each one.

I use pass for my passwords, and it has an otp extension that I’ve been using more and more. I used to use aegis but I have needed to switch phones one too many times without having access to the previous phone to be comfortable with phones for 2fa.

Of course, this isn’t as secure as a truly separate OTP solution, but it’s still better than no OTP/2FA. And I can easily enough back up and restore my 2fa access over the internet, even on a new computer (albeit I need to also backup a PGP key that can decrypt the password store to truly be portable).