Possessive is normally done with an apostrophe. The dog’s toy. The apartment’s lobby.

But when possessive goes on the pronoun “it”? No apostrophe.

Look out for the monster. Its fangs are sharp.

If you put an apostrophe, that’s for “it is”.

This bothers me slightly. There’s history illinonating why it happened, but I don’t like it.

I’ve been saying for years that focusing on self driving cars is solving the wrong problem. The problem is so many people need their own personal car at all.

Larger orgs probably have their own website, and could put it there and/or make an RSS feed. That’s old tech, and probably not as popular because it can’t be monetized like twitter/facebook/etc.

There’s also email, which is typically free. It’s less fancy, but it’s also very open. You don’t get good discoverability, though. Some bands I like send out newsletters and that’s how I keep up with them.

Lastly, the fediverse exists. It has some of the problems of social media, but at least it’s not owned by a handful of rich assholes.

I don’t use reddit aside from reading search results. I never post and never explicitly seek it out.

I deleted Twitter years ago. I never used Facebook or Instagram or tiktok. That shit’s bad for you.

It’s annoying that some places will make announcements only on shitty platforms. None of my friends are this “hardcore” , so sometimes I find out about stuff like a concert or protest or whatever because one of them sees it on Instagram

CrossCode has such charm. The puzzles are good, but I find myself tired after playing it in a way other games don’t give me. I should finish it.

Shadowrun for Genesis was amazing! Ahead of its time. The way it semi randomly generated jobs for you to do was pretty unique. Like Bethesda radiant quests, but decades earlier and better. I really enjoyed rising up from the weakest street runner to someone with enough reputation to skip the line at the expensive club.

The leveling system was also pretty advanced for Genesis.

Also the cyberspace hacking was wacky and fun.

I haven’t thought through all the scenarios and edge cases, but generally spying on the public seems dicey and ripe for abuse. Especially if it’s just like “the public, all the time, whenever we feel like it,” instead of “ok we got a warrant signed by a judge to investigate Joe Bombguy”.

I don’t think the current government is capable or interested in making sound decisions. I don’t think the public is capable of electing a better government. For profit orgs don’t have the public’s best interest as a priority. So this is bad

I haven’t! Seems similar to Falling Down

A friend and I were talking about what’s wrong with the world, and one of the things we discussed was there aren’t any consequences for minor infractions. We’re all too polite. Someone does something shitty, like this person in their car, or someone taking up 4 seats on the bus, or throwing their trash on the street, and no one does anything. No one wants to start a fight or make a scene.

Many people operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning: avoid punishment. Some people, some of the time, achieve higher levels of reasoning like “I should follow the rules” or even “I should do what’s good for society.” But many people chill out at the toddler level of “I don’t want to be punished.” So it follows that when these oversized toddlers never get punished, they think they’re doing just fine.

But concurrently, the institution we have to enforce laws and norms, the police, sucks dog shit. Racist, corrupt, no accountability, and lazy. If I see a guy littering, I’m not going to call the cops. They wouldn’t even come, for one thing, but I also don’t want to bring a bunch of armed assholes into the scene.

I don’t know what the best way forward is. My friend suggested local “guardian angel” volunteers that patrol and “Deal with” people who are shitty, but that feels like it could just turn into the police-but-worse. But I really want people who shit up the world to stop, and it feels like they don’t have enough empathy to understand anything more complex than “you took up four seats on the bus and were blasting youtube out of your phone, so we threw you out. Enjoy walking home, asshole.”

Ownership will abuse labor as much as it can. Sometimes to make more profit. Sometimes for murkier reasons. I think some management are just stupid and they’d hurt the company to follow their unfounded feelings.

Labor should organize.

Yeah it bothers me when the community for a game is like “{skill} is TRASH never use it” and when you do some digging you find it’s like 2% less damage per second. Or it doesn’t work well in NG+7. Some people are really obsessive about this stuff.

One of the reasons I prefer playing on PC over other platforms is there’s usually fan made mods / cheats. Like, yeah, I could do something really tedious for four hours, or I could get a mod to skip it. This is my leisure activity, not an exam.

I try to be mindful that too much cheating can water down the experience. Like, if I was playing BG3 and just set everyone to max level from the start, I would probably have less fun, personally. But if someone just wants to do the story and have fun with exploding barrels? Not for me to judge.

(I do draw the line at multiplayer. Cheating against other people is rude as heck. )

Yeah. Often when I talk to people who say they “don’t have time” I wonder where their time is going. Often to watching TV. Sometimes podcasts. Social media is a big time suck.

But like if you have time to watch all of the office again this year, you had time to play video games.

A friend of mine realized they were just losing hours a day to Instagram. Delete that, and you have time for better hobbies. Play a game. Read a book.

Having children seems like a bigger factor. The only couple I know that has kids still has time. One spends it on DND, and other on TV and simple phone games.

Right, humans are bad about that kind of thing. I think it has to do with Dunbar’s number? The monkeysphere? It’s hard for us to model a lot of people as full people in our head, especially as they’re more removed from us.

Like you probably don’t really think about the garbage man as a fully fleshed out guy with hopes, dreams, a favorite band, a love that got away, and all that. When you have some absolutely rancid trash, you probably just throw it in the can and forget about it. But if it was your mother or best friend that was going to have to deal with it, maybe you’d be more careful. Wouldn’t want the bag to rip and spray maggots all over Mom.

That’s fine. That’s all of us.

But I think there’s degrees. Shades. Like you mentioned cell phones. Most of us accept the out of sight horrors that go with them. But, like, some people are absolute assholes to wait staff. Just treat the waiter like shit, are rude to the coffee shop people, whatever. I think most of us recognize that as bad.

Somewhere between those two points I think is “I’m going to build software to spy on people”. Personally, I think that should be ok the far side of the line. The not okay side. Why? A bit of self preservation, a bit of ethics, and a helping of “I don’t want to contribute to bad things happening to people, even ones I don’t know”.

This post is getting long. I think you’re right that it’s not as simple as “doesn’t care about other people” but I think that’s a factor.

You know how scam emails intentionally include mistakes because they want to filter out smart people? Same idea.

Reasonably smart people will see this and go “this is garbage”. The idiots will go deeper, and become loyal gop voters.

Single use plastic should he illegal for most things. Yes, it might be inconvenient to have to carry your own thermos or whatever, but filling the ocean with plastic is worse than inconvenient

He was a pretty smart guy, so I’m pretty sure he understood the ramifications. This isn’t like a plumber working in a building that happens to house an evil company. This was directly working as a high ranking software developer at a shitty software company.

Palantir is pretty awful. I knew a guy who took a job there, a bunch of years ago. When he said where he was going, I asked “But what if they work on something really shitty? Like spying on people?”. He was like, “Meh”, with a big shrug.

He was friendly and kind to the people around him, but I guess he just didn’t care about anyone he didn’t know personally right now.

I’ve already posted this a few times, but Ed Zitron wrote a long article about what he calls “Business Idiots”. Basically, people in decision making positions who are out of touch with their users and their products. They make bad decisions, and that’s a big factor in why everything kind of sucks now.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/ (it’s long)

I think a lot of us have this illusion that higher ranking people are smarter, more visionary, or whatever. But I think no. I think a lot of people are just kind of stupid, surrounded by other stupid people, cushioned from real, personal, consequences. On top of that, for many enterprises, the incentives don’t line up with the users. At least wikipedia isn’t profit driven, but you can probably think of some things you’ve used that got more annoying with updates. Like google putting more ads up top, or any website that does a redesign that yields more ad space, worse navigation.