• Get accepted as goon for “Patrol” app
• Go to CEO location, armed with lethal weapons
• ???
• Profit

I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

But…

Belief is social. They believe what their social group does. We all do this to some extent. Some part of the brain still feels like if we reject the social group’s belief, we’ll die alone in the woods. Going with the group feels good.

You can probably change minds if they see you as in-group, but it won’t last if the rest of their in-group has contradictory ideas.

Getting people off Facebook and other hellscapes might help.

That seems fine to me.

Among other problems, people knowingly spread falsehoods because they feel truthy.

The problem is people. We’re all emotional but some people are just full on fact free gut feel almost all of the time.

Match should be broken up. But apparently some people learned nothing from history and some people don’t care as long as they make money

Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

You can do transactions.

There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.

Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.

Fans were happy to run the servers at their own expense.

In the distant past of like 2000, you didn’t have to pay for online functionality. Also, people could host their own multiplayer servers. It was nice. Consoles and capitalism did a team-up to make things shittier for the end user, though.

It’s really frustrating how many things are bad because some assholes are making money off of it. Saint Luigi, please bless up in these trying times.

This is a revelation I think more people are going to need to realize. There’s no referee coming. The rules aren’t magic. Ultimately, the only things that matter are physics and might. If enough people just decided fuck it, all the multimillonaires gotta die, no cosmic force is going to call a timeout.

The original Diablo I remember being more thoughtful and slower paced. I liked it. Diablo3 turned into just a brainless light show without much tactics. Less rewarding.

I guess it’s part of my massive privilege, but I join all my work calls in my bath robe and don’t blur out the background. I don’t give a shit, and if you do you shouldn’t.

Facial expression and other body language sends a lot of information. It’s useful.

Not counting Kickstarter projects, which I rarely back anymore, no. I’ll wait for reviews and probably a sale.

A lot of kids were taught to read badly. There’s this whole “whole word” and “cuing theory” approach to reading that doesn’t work very well. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Apparently 65% of fourth graders aren’t proficient at reading (as of the linked source from 2022)

A good Christian would let people stay in their house, though. If they were robbed, they would still have treasure in heaven.

More Christians faith is paper thin at best.

I don’t buy eggs, so not directly.

I won some stuff in a church raffle when I was a teenager. Nothing remarkable - i think a suitcase.

I also won some sex toys from a charity raffle for repro rights, but some past partner took them. Not sure who, but I don’t have them anymore.

Thinking about it for the first time now, it is funny how those are two very different contexts.

Well let me share with you the wisdom of age: often you can just ask someone what’s up.

This also works on dates: you can just ask someone out. You don’t have to go all in your head about it. If only someone had told me when I was a teen, alas.