He / They

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I think it would probably become “2X” in that case, given the “exploit” and “exterminate” parts. :P

    Against the Storm is sort of a citybuilder/ 4X hybrid, that’s all about a bunch of fantasy species (humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies) working together to reclaim the world from this (un)natural blight.

    The Bustling World is an RPG/ Citybuilder/ 4X hybrid that looks pretty interesting, but is not out yet.

    I can’t really think of a 4X that leans towards the Grand Strategy side, that isn’t pretty combat-heavy. Distant Worlds: Universe can be played without focusing on combat, but it’s definitely still there.




  • Little side-tangent, but @trslim@pawb.social if you like base-building RTSes, you should check out Earth 2150 if you have not already. It’s old, but it’s imo one of the best out there.

    • There are 3 factions, each with their own campaign, and very different styles of units, and during the campaign you have a home base that you build, and from which you can build and send out units to your in-progress missions (i.e. build a tank in your homebase, load it into a helicopter, send the helicopter to your in-mission base’s landing zone, and unload tank for use… and vice-versa for keeping units that you build in the mission zone, etc).
    • Eurasian Dynasty is very traditional tanks and helicopters, and ballistic weapons
    • United Civil States is bipedal walkers and sleek hovering aircraft, and uses energy weapons
    • Lunar Corporation is space-y hovercraft with arcing, electric weapons and AOE pulse weapons
    • There’s tunnel-building and tunnel warfare, which is so damn cool…
    • There’s unit customization, like choosing the types of weapons for the tanks, building giant bipedal walkers with 3 different weapon systems, etc
    • There are aircraft and boats, not just ground units
    • You are using the resources you farm in the mission locations to construct a giant colony ship to escape from Earth, which is a great mechanic to give you a reason to actually extract resources other than just to build more units

    Now I have to go reinstall it… xD

    There are also Earth 2140 and Earth 2160, but I never fell in love with those 2 (Earth 2160 isn’t bad, and has a cool alien faction that is basically a roaming mothership that builds units, rather than a traditional ‘base’).




  • Not to take away from the importance of voting Harris today (or hopefully, prior to today), but this:

    We can eventually have that conversation as a nation, but in the '90s, when I lived in Germany, it was still considered gauche to be proud to be German. Is that the 50 years you want going forward here?

    feels out of touch. It’s already gauche in most progressive circles to be proud to be American (What are you proud of? The settler-colonialism? The Imperialism? The choice to back genocide? The still-haven’t-abolished-slavery-ism?). Lots of us know that this supposed “eventual” conversation will never actually come. We’re never going to get the country to move to RCV or abolish the electoral college, if we forever stick to the parties who directly benefit from the status quo.

    Vote Harris today if you can, people, because it’s too late for anything else this cycle, but we have to stop this spiraling descent rightwards by adhering to a party that would rather lose Leftists than “Centrists”. As people who care about social justice and progressive politics, we should be abhorred that our platform is palatable enough to Dick The-Fucking-War-Criminal Cheney to get his endorsement.

    For every person claiming that we’ll eventually totally have the conversation about the party platform, there’s another Centrist Democrat who is saying, “No, actually, the party doesn’t need to move leftwards… It’s always been a lesser of 2 evils choice… Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good by drawing hard lines like not supporting genocide…”.

    Republicans unshackled themselves from their Centrist arm of “respectable” anti-social-justice goons to fully embrace their white supremacism in the open, and those goons have now taken up residence in the Democratic Party in response.

    If we’re just fundamentally unwilling to consider unshackling ourselves from them, we’re never going to stop the rightward-shift happening now. We didn’t move Leftwards in the 60s because our politicians led us there, people protested and rioted and made people uncomfortable until they acquiesced and got off their asses. And unless Citizen’s United gets overturned, that route isn’t going to work within the Democratic Party, because the police are now powerful enough to keep protesters from actually making politicians feel uncomfortable enough to choose their constituents over their corporate donors.

    At the risk of not be(e)ing kind, unless you can give me a timeframe for when “eventually” is, you are part of the problem, providing cover and excuses for our rightward shift as a country.

    We got Bush instead of Gore because of 700 votes for Nader in Florida.

    No, Gore likely had more votes (if they had performed a statewide recount). We had Bush (and Cheney the now-Democrat) because SCOTUS stepped in to stop the recounts, and the Democratic Party chose to “keep the peace” instead of fighting it. Just like they will every time.


  • Not friendly enough when talking to customers? Bad employee.

    Too friendly when talking to customers? Bad employee.

    This is just about 1) creating an algorithmic justification for the racial profiling that managers already do, and 2) keeping employees in fear of termination so they put up with bullshit.

    Side story about how shitty retail management is:

    When I was working retail years ago (big box electronics store), our management employed a system of getting every new employee to 3 write-ups as fast as they could (I’m talking, within a month of starting), using literally any excuse they could, so they could hold the “one more write-up and you’re fired” over their head.

    “AI” is definitely going to become a new tool for employee suppression.



  • t3rmit3@beehaw.orgtoChat@beehaw.orghow's your week going, Beehaw
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    17 days ago

    We’re a security engineering group (other 2 teams are Compliance and SOC), so we do security automation, vuln mgmt, binary/ malware analysis, web app testing, SIEM management, level 2+ IR, etc. Basically anything that requires using a shell, or scripting. Right now I’m doing prep for a FedRAMP ATO attempt, so lots of image build pipeline work, prepping for ConMon reporting, etc.

    Definitely interested in hearing what y’all are about (and I am in the US).





  • There is no such thing as a form of media that is only applicable to a specific scale of use. Long form and short form media is useful to large and small groups.

    For example, my partner coaches high school policy debate, which has long form video training content, short form content (30 seconds - 5 minutes) like clips from tournament rounds or practices, for recruitment, and very short form (1 - 30 second) clips that are mostly memes.

    Their shorter form content is explicitly meant not to be viral, it’s purely for their school, and other kids in their debate league. Most of it’s not even parsable by non-debaters. It’s only useful to their small community, but that’s what they want.


  • I actually kind of love the idea of a per diem Unknown User Limit. Like the first 5000 unregistered users can view the site, but after that they get dropped at ingress. Also, limit user signups per day (this ain’t about growing user base, it’s about preventing virality)!

    Sure, you could still need an ingress server that can handle a high load to avoid the accidental ddos if word-of-mouth gets out about it, but that’s a million times lower of a requirement than a server that can handle serving a web page or app to the same number of users.


  • Now that the week is behind me, I have assessed that it’s time to start looking for a new job. My team lost our CISO in February, and mgmt placed us under the Operations director, and they do not know what they’re doing, and don’t have our backs. The whole team is burning out rapidly, and I don’t think it’s long before most of us start moving on.

    That aside 🫠 I had a nice Saturday taking a long walk and getting hot pot with my partner!



  • you’re failing to see the biases inherent to the content you’re consuming

    You are underestimating people, I think. People choose their echo chambers because they understand that their positions are being challenged elsewhere. It’s not an inability to see the bias in what they consume, it’s a dislike of the alternative.

    Every Trumper I talk to knows very well that Trump is unpopular, that Christian Nationalism is unpopular, that abortion rights are popular, etc, but they don’t care, and they don’t want to constantly be (rightfully) told and shown how dumb they are, so they wall themselves off in their gardens. “I’m just tired of hearing how bad Trump is all the time.”


  • Media literacy was never the problem, because it wasn’t actual confusion about what was real or not that was drawing people to the extreme alt-right sphere, it was confirmation bias that allowed people to choose not to critically assess the content for veracity.

    But I don’t think you can solve this through “media ecology” either. Curating this volume of content is impossible, and there are legitimate dangers in giving the government too much ability to shut down free speech (see Germany condemning any form of pro-Palestinian rhetoric as antisemitic) in order to guard “truth”.

    I think that this is similar to the issue of biased GenAI; you can’t fix bias at the human-output side, you have to build a society that doesn’t want to engage with bigotry, and explore and question its own assumptions (and that’s not ever a fixed state, it’s an ongoing process).