I’m a software engineer who makes games as a hobby. I love making tools for creatives, and I love incremental games. I’m the creator of Profectus. He/him
thepaperpilot.org

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 14th, 2024

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  • I don’t hate apple. Especially from a privacy record, they actually have a far superior history than essentially every other hardware manufacturer out there.

    I think they’re overpriced and I don’t agree with some of their design decisions, and in general feel like they could give the consumer more control over things, which is why I don’t personally have an iPhone or iPad etc., I use them at work and have nothing against them in general)




  • I agree with this take, and recently I actually read this article that criticizes how server centric fedi is as a whole. If it’s hard and expensive for a layperson to self host, but you need to have an account associated with a specific server, then you’re going to end up with a system where you’re under the whims of a instance owner still. Not to mention the whole pick a server step severely hurts our adoption rates.

    I like the idea of having an account just being a public and private key pair. Theoretically you could make one client side, use it to sign your messages, and servers could verify the signature and distribute your post without needing to have an explicit account for you. You could send every message to a random instance and it’d still work. You wouldn’t have to worry about links to the “wrong instance” and you wouldn’t have to attach your identity to a instance that might shut down or be bought by a bad person. The server would be essentially irrelevant.







  • Funkwhale seems really interesting and I’d love to be able to listen to music without relying on a company’s servers and getting tracked, and not being locked into that corporation’s apps, but music specifically is just so hard to justify switching. I use YT music and it has access to soooo much music, and the recommendation algorithms are useful in letting me discover new music. There’s just now way I’d be able to transition from something with effectively access to all music in existence to something with none. I kinda wish there was some service that could discover all videos tagged as music on YT, add them to funkwhale without downloading them, and then allow them to be in search and radios and stuff and just download the song with youtube-dl or something the first time they’re requested. Ideally with some way to trim outros and such manually. I know even the first step of this (discovering “all videos” on YT) makes this completely infeasible though.


  • This comic reminds me of a classic argument used for leftist policies, unrelated to ayn rand though. Under capitalism, technological advancements are harmful to the working class because companies are likely to keep pay and hours the same, and just scale up production and/or lay off surplus labor force.

    Under a system where the workers own the means of production, those same advancements could go towards lowering the hours of the employees without lowering their pay, or if they decide to scale up production then it would mean more profit that the company could decide democratically what to do with, making it likely to result in pay increases for the workers. Point is it wouldn’t just go into the hands of the capitalist class, but rather stay under control of those who labored for it.


  • I don’t think what the democratic party does counts as just compromising. They often expand the awful systems they inherit, or at best just fail to revert the bad policies of their predecessors. There’s a reason for the ratchet theory to exist, or the saying that democratic policy is just Republican policy on a 1 election cycle delay. Just look at our foreign policy - Obama massively increased drone strikes under his term, to say nothing of the atrocities Biden has been funding and providing arms for in Gaza. Why did Obama promise to codify roe v wade on the campaign trail, only to make no efforts when in office? Why did Biden do the same? Why are they now calling for voters to vote blue in November so roe v wade can be reinstated when we already did vote blue, and the guy we’d presumably be voting for is already in office? If Biden as president is all it takes to reinstate roe v wade, why the fuck hasn’t he done so yet?

    Honestly for all the infighting, I think plenty of leftists would agree over common ground and change tons of things so long as they’re going in the correct overall direction, despite the specific details being so contested. But they attack the DNC because the DNC is not progressive in any way shape or form, it’s neo liberal.


  • I’m big on urbanism and walkable cities and absolutely don’t mind people who don’t want to live in cities. We don’t tend to argue rural areas shouldn’t exist, but rather point out that suburban areas have a lot of problems and are way more common than they should be, when looking at demand for mixed use development, walkable cities, etc.

    For what it’s worth, for most of human existence rural towns existed without need for cars, so there’s still some truth to the idea that America has been rebuilt for the car, even in rural areas. There’s a variety of explanations out there for why and how they worked, but one I’m a fan of is how many rural towns would organize around a central “main street”, and keep the houses near it while the rest of their land spread outward. That way food, entertainment, and neighbors were all still easily accessible despite the large average amount of land.

    And tbh, even setting that aside, I don’t think many urbanists actually have an issue with rural areas. The movement really focuses on suburbia. A lot of the problems stem from suburbs being spread out like rural areas, but with city level amenities, without paying the amount of taxes to get those amenities that far out. Most notably, paved roads are extremely expensive to maintain and gas taxes are not high enough to pay for it. But to some extent most services suburbs get are going to be subsidized by those living in a nearby city, because it’s just so much cheaper to provide those services when everyone lives closer together. And besides the subsidization, suburbs (unlike both cities and rural towns) just have a lot of qualities to them that make them bad for the environment and unpleasant and dangerous to live in - I understand not wanting to live in a city, but no one thinks hour long commutes through rush hour traffic is a positive.