• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 16th, 2024

help-circle
  • I’m curious why you would be interested in public groups on Simplex? Its great for direct messages and small friend/invite only groups. But what would you gain in terms of privacy with public groups? If the challenge to entry is “click this public invite link”, you should assume bots are joining and scraping anything with triple digit member counts. If your threat model is focused on corporate surveillance, public group chats aren’t that much different than community forums that lack a bot friendly API for scraping. Which is to say, very easy to scrape still if anyone actually cares to.

    As others have mentioned, the moderation tools are basically nonexistent and bigotry runs rampant. Even if you try to organize alternative groups to the Nazi bars, you will not have any tools to stop organized harassment.


  • An alternative view point : https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n13/jon-day/the-beautiful-ones

    The accuracy of Calhoun’s observations about rat sociology, still less their relevance to human society, remains a matter of debate. Even at the time he was criticised for the methodologies of his experiments (one colleague at NIMH told him that ‘there are so many variables in your research that you can’t possibly draw any conclusions about anything’).

    Many of the behaviours he considered ‘aberrant’ – cannibalism, aggression, homosexual mating – are not uncommon in rodent society. As both books acknowledge, his experiments have never been successfully replicated by other researchers, and wild colonies of rats don’t seem to display any of the personality types he so vividly described. He rarely published in mainstream scientific journals, saying that his concerns were so pressing that he didn’t have time to wait for peer review.

    It seems plausible that Calhoun was responsible for creating the conditions for population collapse. He only cleaned out Universe 25 every six to eight weeks; disease and parasitism could account for many of the phenomena he thought were due to mere proximity. It can’t have helped that, other than the ladders and ramps, the Universes didn’t provide much in the way of stimulation. Calhoun thought of his rat cities as utopias, but they seem more like well-stocked prisons. No wonder they didn’t bring out the best in the inmates.

    I generally raise eye brows any time the dangers of overpopulation come up, as it always a concern of eugenicists. These sorts of research studies are constantly looking for data that confirms beliefs they already held, and they never want to look any further in what the root causes are. The foregone conclusion is always demanding population control, followed with the healthy dose of “I’m just asking questions!”.



  • I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one. The developer mentions the idea of having “expected time to complete” featured on the Steam Store page, and using that as an exception for 2 hour refund periods. But he also says he intended this Paddle game to be between 3-4 hours long. He was already aware of the problem of short games on Steam, made efforts to avoid it, and still missed the mark. By his own admission, his game would not meet his own recommended refund exception.

    He also blames speed runners as a general player type that is causing this abuse, but the way he speaks of them sounds like he is implying that it is a concentrated community effort. Now, I haven’t checked speed running community discussions or watched any YouTuber’s talk about this game. I could imagine some not so well thought out “influencer” talking about this games short run time, and their audience turning it into a novel blind speed run challenge. That would hypothetically be some real shit head behavior, and the best course of action would be for speed running communities to take some moderation action against people who post their times but refund/remove the game from their libraries.

    But I don’t think Valve should change their refund policy over this. There are games with much shorter completion run times that don’t get refunded. Including linear, narrative focused games comparable to Paddle Paddle Paddle. The developer even mentions that despite the large amount of refunds, this game got a much larger reception and net profit than other titles. Its an easy assumption to make that the social advertising of being a gimmicky speed run caused its financial success. 1/4th of the sales are refunded, but the total sales dwarf many of the countless indie titles that drown at launch.

    Idk. I can think of 10 games in my library off the top of my head, that I completed in less than 2 hours but didn’t feel like refunding. “They beat my game and still refunded it” isn’t a valid problem to the no questions asked refund policy. People get refunds for things besides games for much less time and more money spent. Hell, it doesn’t even seem like he has any negative consequences to these refunds! The game is at positive reviews, its not algorithmicly being suppressed over the refunds, he’s making the same “ratio” of profit as he would without the refunds; what is the actual problem here???


  • I feel like this meme being originally from an autism community, posted outside of it without that context, has lead to some egregiously bad takes in the comments. Unfortunately ironic. People coming in here having no idea what the autistic experience of people giving vague instructions and then just assuming you will figure stuff out is like. And then the reverse; trying your best to explain a process in hopes that there will be no ambiguity, only to be accused of being condescending.

    And of course we have a plethora of “well in this edge case, its actually necessary to not question instructions!” takes, as if we are talking about last minute bomb defusals, instead of everyday office procedure or insensitive social situations. People on the spectrum are a great showcase of how unwilling the average person is to question the status quo.







  • Have you noticed any change in battery performance on BasicSync? I’ve been thinking about switching over; aside from the poor dev transition/communication, the new version by ResearchXXL started chewing through my battery life. Used an older version of the app and confirmed that it used less energy, but was too concerned about possible security exploits in what is a very popular p2p application with extensive file permissions…