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If you implement any of the ends of a HTTP communication caching is still very important.

This website is chock full of site operators raging mad at web crawlers created by people that didn't bother to implement proper caching mechanisms.


It's likely that the websites need your actual government issued credentials are not your twitters and your hacker news, but government websites that actually need to link the web user to the citizen. As an example my country has a portal that you use as a citizen to book appointments to government institutions, keeps you updated about the status of your requests, allows you to securely upload scans for additional documents that your request might need, etc.

until your gov decides that websites need to age-check everyone with the equivalent of showing some ID...

Or corpos decide the time is ripe to force users to do it, so they can better optimize their surveillance targeting. Google has been nagging me with a periodic Android popup for like a decade to "add my birthday to help them comply with the law". Eventually that tack of borderline misleading will turn into an outright demand.

In the end we all are allowed to just not use a product... aren't we? Vote with your wallet is still possible.

No? A few percent of people dissenting doesn't move the needle for the company analysts, all the "competitors" tend to move in lock step since their managements are all tuned into the same memestream, and using such systems has steadily become more de facto mandatory for many previously-unrelated tasks.

I don't want to "move the needle", I just want to not support scummy companies. It sounded like you did too, but my mistake.

I don't know what you mean? My first point was just about how our individual behavior is not going to affect companies' decisions. The subsequent points were about how it's becoming increasingly harder to avoid supporting any scummy companies.

And the more this behavior is normalized, the easier it is for governments to make it illegal for any site to not demand users' government-registered identities.


From my perspective we can talk about that when it actually happens. No need to slide on that slippery slope just yet, or at least, not in my neighbourhood...

Are millennials the "older" generation now? Ooof, my bones...

Some of us turned 40 this year.

The youngest Millennials turned 30 this year; the oldest 45.

Do you decline any responsibility in the moral upbringing of your children? I think you should be the one that decides how they interact with dubious content, not your government.

Why do you think it's different with GOG?

Both GOG and Steam allow you to use local copies of games, and both would deny you access to your account to download more games once banned. Steam allows you to install games without DRM from their platform.


Unless they've changed recently, I thought GOG's platform itself does not have DRM? Steam does provide DRM and doesn't tell you if a game uses it, though as far as I know there are generic tools to bypass it.

GOG also specifically advertises games that don't have DRM, e.g. [0]. Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability.

[0] https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim_anniv...


> Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability.

Yeah, but that's a developer choice. Steam doesn't force anyone to use their API for things like that. If that's a concern for someone as a gamer, they should probably support the companies that don't do it no matter the platform, not blame Steam for it.


The original question was "how do you know these things before you buy the game?" My answer was "You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG." Whether it's a developer choice is irrelevant. GOG tells you the information you need for your purchasing decision, so if you want to know what you're buying, buy from somewhere like GOG. Also, don't assume that because it's DRM-free on GOG, it is also DRM-free elsewhere like Steam.

Buying a DRM-free copy on GOG seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do even if a company has DRM on Steam; it provides an economic signal that there's some segment of customers that requires no DRM as a condition of sale. Since marginal cost of digital "goods" is ~0 and it's likely trivial to disable DRM in your build, it would be dumb not to cater to them and take your free money.


> it provides an economic signal that there's some segment of customers that requires no DRM as a condition of sale

Do you just assume that's the reason someone uses GOG vs Steam? People could be using GOG for other reasons, and the lack of DRM is just bonus. So how does that signal really get interpreted correctly?


What other reasons?

I see, thank you. That explains it better. I would imagine that's still possible to do it for steam games also with a simple internet search. :)

Steam is its own DRM on top of whatever else a developer chooses to do. I found this out one year when I spent months without internet access. At a certain point steam would refuse to run any of the locally installed single player games I had paid for through their platform until my computer phoned home to their servers. I'd already configured everything for working offline and they did successfully for a long time until one day they just wouldn't anymore.

If you don't want lose access to every game you fully paid for on Steam you'd better pirate a copy of everything you bought because on a whim they can take it all from you at any time.


There are some games on GOG that still include DRM. The one I can remember offhand is Cult of the Lamb where the game would only run until a certain milestone at which the copy protection determined the GOG version was pirated and would gate the player from advancing. There were forum posts from the developer confirming this was intended.

I'm honestly pretty disappointed that GOG is still selling the game. If they are going to sell it at all they should have massive warnings all over the page that the game is broken. https://www.gog.com/en/game/cult_of_the_lamb

Slightly off-topic, thanks for the reminder that I wanted to try Skyrim someday, seems like a good time to get prepped for it.

When banned on steam, I believe you are still about to download and play your (offline) games.

My understanding is that your account is effectively made read-only (blocked from purchasing, community, etc) and not removed entirely. Steam's help article on restricted accounts[1] seems to agree with this, given the text description of account suspension implying that it's temporary or for legal reasons (because the account has been used for illegal activity, or to prevent the account's use until it can be restored to its owner in cases where a lock might not suffice)

Admittedly, I have no personal experience with this, nor do I even know anyone who does, but I've never heard of anyone complaining about being unable to play their existing library when banned; complaints about steam tend to be about accounts being stolen and VAC/community bans, with the occasional complaint from someone I know that lost access to an account when they lost their email address and forgot the password (this was before steam had account limitations and steamguard, and they had never bought anything).

[1]: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C...


Another issue is, how do you get your games when you're banned? Most people don't have all their games installed at any given time.

With GOG, there is at least an unofficial, supported way to get an offline installer for each of your games. With Steam, there's no officially supported way to do this, so it's likely to be a bigger PITA to archive all your games ahead of time.

In reality, though, almost nobody is thinking ahead so that they have all their games archived, and, given the size of games and collections, it's a difficult thing to do on the cheap.


How is something unofficial yet supported? Is there just no "download installer" button on the site, but can be done as long as you know how to obtain the URL?

It was supposed to be "official, supported". Oops.

With GOG you can download the games's installer, vy backing up those you can still install your games even if you get banned

For purposes of backup I don't see that large of a difference between a single installer executable and a zipped folder that you'd get after installing a non DRMed game from Steam.

GOG has allowed third party backup software like https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader to exist. I have a full offline mirror of my GOG library that I update monthly that will never happen with my Steam library.

The non-DRMed steam game will stop working after a while if you haven't logged into steam after a very long time. If steam ever went under, your locally installed single player games that work offline will stop working. Ask me how I know.

I've taken to getting a cracked copy of every steam game in my library so that steam can't screw me over again in the future.


>I've taken to getting a cracked copy of every steam game in my library so that steam can't screw me over again in the future.

you can trivially crack any steam DRM game yourself within minutes.


Yup, and you can find open source "cracks" if you don't trust using a binary for it. It's barely DRM.

Can you share why these statements are controversial?

They might be misguided or misinformed, but the underlying fact is that women are not as well represented in stem. Just because the reason it's more likely to be misogyny rather than any biological inclination, doesn't make it an outrageous statement in my opinion.


The difference in participation within STEM between men and women is not well explained by biological differences. Blow has repeatedly claimed that it is actually the primary factor and seems actively disinterested in other explanations.

This is "controversial" in that it's a position that is not well supported by evidence and he has repeatedly used his platform in the past to make unsupported claims to the contrary.


Is the opposite explained? I haven't read literature on the topic, and I'm by the way also somewhat of a sceptic of science on such topics, as a layman. But it seems super obvious that girls/women on average are not wanting to spend their teenage years in the basement programming geek stuff, like many boys/men do. In my experience, here in Germany, and you can probably extrapolate to the West in general, it's not like girls aren't encouraged to pursue programming or science. Men are, on average, just more willing to put in the hours of social neglect in order to become good at such things as programming, or also gaming, or whatever other fringe unsocial hobby. A big part of that is probably competitiveness, but also I believe there are more loners among men. Again, this is not scientific, just personal observations, also ideas I've picked up that I can agree with. I'm not even saying that it must be mostly for biological reasons (though I assume it is), just that there is a deeper reason for fewer girls to exist in tech than just "there is patriarchy and power structures and misogynist gatekeeping and shit".

Never forget that the social neglect is not exactly healthy, and programming isn't actually that prestigious and externally rewarding, except for maybe the compensation that you can currently earn in some places.

Adding that for example in math or other sciences, we are much closer to gender parity.


Given the success of women in sports such as ultra marathoning, medicine etc I don't think it is that conclusive that women are not willing to put the hours into difficult and isolating activities.

There are a great number of studies of the social aspects of gender differences in work but I don't have a single authoritative source for you.


> Men are, on average, just more willing to put in the hours of social neglect in order to become good at such things as programming, or also gaming, or whatever other fringe unsocial hobby.

It is much easier to put in the hours of gaming when you're not repeatedly called for your rape or have someone trying to stalk you or similar aggressive behaviors towards people perceived as female in these spaces. I pretended to be a woman in gaming spaces for some time just to see if these women had a point and the level of harassment I experienced is way more than even my most unmoderated cod xbox days. It's a simple voice modulator in chat.


Point taken. I do think that it can be challenging to be a rare female amongst males (it would probably be similar the other way around). But the biggest contributing factor for such behaviours is certainly the anonymity of online gaming.

They are encouraged in surface level, performative ways. The actual communities are incredibly off-putting.

edit: speaking industry-wide. of course there are "not all men" type spaces in local communities.


For all I know, being a male programmer myself, with a significant proportion of females in all my programmer circles so far, I can attest the exact opposite. Every one of those circles has been welcoming and inclusive.

OK, he's wrong. But is that enough to state that he "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession"?

I don't think he's said exactly that in his own words but I think on balance it's fair to say he doesn't seem welcoming about it.

He clearly has right leaning and libertarian views, and seems to be not very articulate or sensitive in how he discusses them so I can see why people might read into that more than they should maybe.


Thekla currently has 10 core permanent employees. 5 of them are women, including their studio manager, creative and art Director, a programmer, and 2 additional artists.

You can say whatever the hell you want. Or you could spend 3 minutes actually looking at public information to see if you're wrong.


I don't think these statements are contradictory.

Half his employees are women—including leadership, programming, and creative roles. If that doesn’t count as “thinking women have a role,” what would? 51%? 90%?

You’re relying on blatant social media mischaracterizations over real actions.

He actually employs women at parity. You feel like this is unwelcoming.

One of those statements is data. The other is fanfic.


I didn't say he thinks women don't have a role.

You said, "I don't think he's said exactly that in his own words but..." That's implicitly saying, "well, he hasn't admitted it outright, but yeah, he basically believes it."

Now faced with evidence contrary to your beliefs, you're claiming you didn't say that. When presented with proof, It's ok to just admit that you were wrong.


You seem very defensive of Blow. I didn't say the things you seem to think I was saying. Sorry for the confusion.

Am I supposed to be embarrassed for defending someone against a baseless smear?

Anyway, call it "defensive" all you want. It doesn't change the historical thread: You argued, at best, his views made the workplace unwelcoming; the data shows he hires women at parity. You're just backpedaling because the reality didn't match your narrative vibes.


I still don't think those are contradictory. If some women that worked with him share their opinion I'll readjust.

Low bar to accuse. High bar to retract. Classic.

I'd happily accuse quite a lot of people of not being very welcoming to women in the industry. It's a very common trait to have.

Happily accusing without evidence? Not shocking behavior. What's shocking is to just say it out loud. LMAO. Funny how "believe women" stops applying when their choices contradict your priors.

When you say, "not well support by evidence," you're either wrong, anti-science, or lying. Numerous studies absolutely show very large average differences in interests based on sex. And those carry over into occupation preferences. Just one more recent study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...

Plus: Jon never said it's the "primary" factor, as you claim. He said it's a large factor, that doesn't apply at the individual level, but on average. Which is entirely factual and supported by copious amounts of research.

Just because people like you want to be offended by science, doesn't make it wrong, or controversial.


This study confirms that there is a gender difference but it doesn't explain why. I didn't claim that there were not differences, but that they were not well explained by biology.

Sex is the strongest single predictor of vocational interest orientation we’ve found. Nothing else comes close. If that’s not ‘explained by biology,’ you need to tell me what would be. Otherwise you’re operating on faith.

It's hard to control for social conditioning. I don't need to be able to tell you what the alternative is to be able to tell you that there are many confounding factors.

Knowing what does not explain something, doesn't tell you what does explain it.


They did try to account for social conditioning: parents' education and jobs, local labor markets, school performance, the whole bit. The gap still didn't move much. If socialization were the main driver, you'd expect the most egalitarian countries to have the smallest gaps. They don't. In a lot of cases it's the opposite. Sweden, for example, shows bigger differences in occupational preferences than places like Pakistan.

So at that point you're not pointing to a specific confounder, you're basically saying "maybe there's something else." Sure, logically you can always say that. But if the evidence keeps stacking up in one direction and the only reply is "could be something," that's just refusing to update your view.


You can't control for the social conditioning of gender. This is so fundamentally obvious I don't think you are taking the science seriously.

Congrats! You've made your position unfalsifiable.

When the data consistently shows gaps widening as social strictures loosen, and your response is to blame an invisible, unmeasurable "conditioning," you aren't doing science at all. But you are insulating your belief from any possible counter-evidence.


No I'm just clear that the current state of science makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that you are.

Note that this outcome goes both ways. We can neither confirm that biology is the main driver nor confirm that it isn't. Life is not as certain as you want it to be.


You started with “not well explained by biology.”

All of the evidence is solidly on one side, so you’ve retreated to “we can neither confirm nor deny.”

I guess that’s progress?


Again, those statements are not contradictory.

They're not contradictory in a vacuum. But in this sequence, they show you're backpedaling. You opened with a firm claim, and when confronted with actual data, you retreated to 'we can't know.' Pretending that perfect certainty is required here is just a dodge.

Well, no, you're the one that is "wrong, anti-science, or lying".

The very first sentence of the article you linked to says, "Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood."

So claiming that its for biological reasons is bullshit. You have no idea whether it is or not. And neither does Blow.


AFAIK there are differences established on many psychological axes that are more basic than "occupational choice", such as competitiveness, neuroticism, interest in things vs human relations, and others. I don't understand these deeply but you can research for yourself, so there is certainly no shortage of possible explanations based on those.

> AFAIK there are differences established

Well, you "haven't read literature on the topic"[1] so maybe leave the speculation at the door or go out and read some literature to cite rather than presenting "ideas [you]'ve picked up that [you] can agree with" as "established"?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315540


I've been very clear that I'm a layman, such as certainly most of the commenters here. I qualified using "AFAIK" and I've heard this on different occasions by people who have actual experience in the field. You can find similar claims on this page, partly backed by links. For example, I too have heard about studies evidencing that gender differences are more stark in developed countries with well functioning social systems, where people are freeer to choose their profession based on personal interest rather than for example economic aspects.

LOL. You're going to dismiss the study because of the justification for doing the study. Here, let me help you understand:

"not fully understood" -> "so we studied it" -> "here's what we found"

Besides that obvious point, the sentence you quoted says "not yet fully understood," not "we have no idea." Those aren't the same thing. We actually have substantial evidence pointing in a clear direction.

- The most egalitarian countries show the largest gaps, not the smallest. - Women exposed to elevated androgens in utero become more things-oriented despite being raised normally as girls. - Male and female monkeys show the same toy preferences we do. Nobody's socializing rhesus monkeys into gender roles. - A 1.28 standard deviation gap in every culture that emerges in infancy and grows as societies get freer is not what socialization looks like.

You're treating "not fully understood" as "both hypotheses are equally supported."

They aren't.

The evidence overwhelmingly favors a substantial biological component. Just because you don't like the implications of that, doesn't make it false.

Seethe harder.


> Male and female monkeys show the same toy preferences we do. Nobody's socializing rhesus monkeys into gender roles.

You may believe that, but: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9898904/


Little bro read the paper title and no further.

That study found that when you test 14 monkeys alone in cages where they can’t actually move the toys, you don’t see the same sex differences as when 135 monkeys are tested in social groups with freely movable toys.

The authors themselves say the social context may be necessary for expression. That’s not evidence against biological contribution, but evidence that behavior requires context to manifest.

You don’t disprove hunger by noting that people don’t eat when there’s no food available.


I didn't dismiss the study; I agree with it. Not fully understood.

Think harder kid.


Gravity isn’t fully understood either. Guess we can’t say things fall down.

Because as a statement is functions to excuse the representation in the field.

It completely neglects the actual history of the field of computing, even just the 20th century, where the field was filled with women.

It’s only once it became a prestigious field that women suddenly developed a “biological” inclination against it.


I… super hesitate to wade into this, but:

1) It was way before it became prestigious.

And

2) An explanation of this needs to account for a great and rapid shift in favor of women, as far as proportion-of-practitioners, that was happening at exactly the same time as the opposite shift in programming, in both law and medicine.

I don’t know what the actual reason is but “it got prestigious so women got pushed out” makes no sense to me, based on the timeline of events in full context. It was very much not prestigious in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, certainly far less so than law and medicine at that time (still isn’t as prestigious as those, outside tech circles—you can see it in people’s faces. It’s high-paid but lower-“class” than those, to this day)


As others have pointed out, prestigious is too strong of a word, what I actually meant was "a job a man could be seen as doing".

The traditional way I heard it wasn’t that it was about prestige, but rather that programming became engineering-coded rather than humanities-coded. And misogyny did play a role there, one of the Turing movies had a great story line about it, although I can’t remember the name off hand.

Related, I think math went through a similar transition.


It completely neglects the actual history of the field of computing, even just the 20th century, where the field was filled with women.

Something interesting that I think a lot of younger people don't appreciate: back in the day, unless your name was Hemingway, it was considered unmanly to touch a keyboard. Anything that involved a typewriter or anything else with a keyboard was distaff by definition, just so much secretarial work. Maybe a journalist's job, if you were feeling generous.

Sounds stupid as hell, and it was, but that's a big reason why women played an outsized part in the growth of computing. First as the 'calculators' in WWII, then as Baudot terminals started to take over, as keyboard operators.

Don't make the mistake of assuming they were all Grace Hoppers or Margaret Hamiltons or Adele Goldbergs, because that simply wasn't the case. Many of them might have been, though, in a less stereotype-driven world.


When Lance passed, it was one of the only times when I heard Blow be actually effusive about a person and their accomplishments.

He seemed very affected by his passing. You could tell how deeply he felt the loss of such talent from the world.

When you support political leaders that push fascist discourse where regular people that happen to have more empathy for their fellow man are presented as the enemy - in Hegseth's book the call to arms against them is literally in the first paragraph - I think it stops being about not far enough left, but about being way too far right.

Yeah, when you call half the US fascist and nazi there is not much we can talk about.

I said nothing about "half the US", and nazi is just your projection I think. But I'd like to know, are you disagreeing with me that the "us vs. them", where them is minorities, women, liberals is *not* in fact one of the upmost fascist tenets?

You are calling the majority of the US "far right". You're calling people fascist for voting republican. You are the extremist.

Calling a dog a dog is not extreme. VOting for a fascist makes one a fascist.

With the risk of being a pedant, I think that even at the time that Trump got elected, the validity of saying he was supported by a majority of Americans would have been questionable. Today, I'm positive that it's wrong.

But please, answer my question: do you disagree that the discourse of Trump's administration, where immigrants and minorities are "the enemy" and every measure is allowed against them, is not fascism?

To quote one of their golden boys Pete Hegseth's book *first* chapter:

> The other side—the Left—is not our friend. We are not “esteemed colleagues,” nor mere political opponents. We are foes. Either we win, or they win—we agree on nothing else.

> The United States has the top economy and military in the world, but our cultural and educational institutions—America’s soul—have succumbed to leftist rot.


> our cultural and educational institutions—America’s soul—have succumbed to leftist rot

Sure, let's examine this. Do you disagree that most organisations are extremely dominated by the left? Something like 90% of people in academia, media, schools, (until recently) corporate leadership, various government institutions etc vote democrat. Do you disagree that in the past 20 years or so, the right has been heavily censored online and in the work place by the left? These are all facts, he is not wrong here. When one side has spent 20 years pushing out the other, taking over institutions, censoring them and calling them fascist/nazi, don't be surprised when they are viewed as the enemy.

I also know exactly what you're thinking, the reasoning you use to justify this:

1. It's not censorship, it's preventing disinformation and "hate". This argument doesn't hold when "disinformation" is political opinions of roughly 50% of the country

2. Academia and institutions lean left because Republicans are simply less intelligent than Democrats. "Truth has a liberal bias". You think kind of arrogance from the left is conductive to a good dialogue and friendly relations?


Even if Trump were quite literally a Nazi, he is the elected President. Democracy is important. I don't know how one can simultaneously believe in democracy and believe that everyone who voted for the winning candidate is objectively incorrect. If most voters want to gas the Jews, that is just the will of the people, and that's terrible, but you need to pick in that scenario between a democracy and some other form of government that surpresses the will of the people.

I am of the opinion that Trump is nowhere near bad enough to choose the latter option; we should preserve democracy I think and allow that the majority of voters are not wrong or "too far" right. Yet a whole lot of people seem to be of the opposite opinion.


Tell me what happened to democracy when Hitler took power? And how democratic was the overall process? So was the decision to commit mass murder of millions of people really the democratic will of the people?

It’s like people haven’t even touched a history book sometimes.

You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on.

If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends.

Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism.


> Tell me what happened to democracy when Hitler took power? And how democratic was the overall process? So was the decision to commit mass murder of millions of people really the democratic will of the people?

It wasn't, but as I said, if the majority of voters do wish to commit mass murder, that is actually not trivially ignorable.

> You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on.

Congress is our representatives. They are philosophically us. The majority of them do not want to impeach Trump for these things. Also the majority of voters reelected Trump knowing how he is. The way things are going is how the people want it (if you believe in democracy and the philosophy of representatives).

> If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends.

There has been absolutely nothing to suggest that democracy, as in the literal sense of voting to determine representation, is at risk from inside the political apparatus. I don't consider Jan6 anything of that sort btw.

> Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism

Sure, but the crux of the issue is that the left is going beyond criticism. The vocal left continuously claims that the elected government, and crucially those people who voted for it, are in some outgroup (nazis, fascists, bigots et al) that does not deserve to have democratic power in the country by their very nature. They weild the 'paradox of tolerance' as a bludgeon to disenfranchise half the country. It's unhealthy for democracy, both in itself and because when a group feels under (politically) existential attack they will do heinous things to survive.


You’re mixing the principle of democracy up with the process which is necessary to uphold the principle. It’s quite clear that the issue with the democratic process in the US is not with the language used by Democrat voters. What’s unhealthy for democracy is the continued flouting of the process by Trump and the enablement of that by Republicans. I can definitely understand it feels bad when people compare you to fascists though but y’know stop enabling fascist things. The idea that it’s actually the language causing it is very silly.

I've been watching Blow work on his compiler and game for many years. He has gone the deep end in his sympathies for Trump and Trump adjacents, but misogyny I've never witnessed from him.

I think he is the latest victim of the Notch-Rowling slide into rightism. It happens when a relatively benign conservatives have opinions that get the internet mob riled up, bullies them, cancels them and thus makes them dig deeper into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It's a bit sad really. I hope he'll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong.


I think your general idea is right, it sounds reasonable that the insane cancelation mania can bring some conservatives to dig into deeper holes. It is probably what enabled the recent right shift in politics. As to Blow specifically, I've watched his streams quite a bit. I've always had sympathy for him and have been able to relate to his opinions a lot (about software in particular). But I can see how some other people could take offense from the way he's presented his stances.

I say that as someone who once made him angry myself when I live-commented in one of his streams because I had a rare disagreement. I was maybe not in shock but at least startled by his reaction. I had presented my disagreement relatively casually.

Now, my impression is that he's tuned down his considerably and developed a more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".


I'm not talking about his words on technical stuff, I'm talking about him being so pleased with the state of US today. Somehow in Blow's mind what Trump and his handlers do to the country is the best thing ever.

I'm not a US citizen, but being enthusiastic about other people losing their freedom and freedoms is obscene.


There's also just a lot of "No, no, no, I kill the bus driver". A sort of "Greater Fool theory" but for genocide, everybody else is a useful idiot who, having supported your rise, is then next in line to be sacrificed, never for a moment remembering that even if you are the only person to have thought of this - which is unlikely - everybody who understands how this actually works will have been together against you from the outset.

Misogyny is a subset of supporting trump. If you've seen him go off the deep end on supporting trump then you are witnessing his misogyny, even if you ignore his other comments.

> he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong

Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum? It can be very difficult for that kind of personality to re-evaluate something, once they think they have reached a "logical conclusion".

I'm not making excuses, just agreeing that the chances of him changing seem low.


> Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum?

I don't know, but I doubt it. He's too well adjusted at being social (his hobbies have him interact with people on the regular, and he's streaming on twitch, and doing public speaking at conferences) for me to think that.


>a relatively benign conservative

Can it really be considered “relatively benign” when an extremely famous public figure is calling for people who disagree with them to be shot?


You are missing their point. They are saying they start with relatively benign views, and the intense overreaction to those views drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.

I can't speak for Blow, but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.


> but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.

What a bizarre time we are living in when "men aren't women" and "women should have single-sex spaces and rape crisis centres" are considered extreme views.


I don’t think those are the extreme views, those are the views being overreacted to.

Which views of hers do you consider to be extreme?

Women who insist that they specifically get to decide who is or isn't a woman and what women believe aren't new. Phyllis Schlafly managed to ensure the Equal Rights Amendment didn't pass on this same basis. Phyllis would fly from city to city, addressing crowds of women to tell them that women should be at home looking after their kids, not um, flying from city to city making political addresses like she did...

Beware anyone who claims to represent "all" of some large diverse group, such as "Women" or "Floridians".

"Women should have single sex spaces" turns out to be used to justify, "It's OK to be hateful and even violent against women in these spaces so long as your excuse is that you believe they're not actually women" which is bullshit.

Years ago, when I wasn't too tired to spend all day and half the night dancing, I went to Bang Face Weekender - basically imagine a huge multi-room club night except for days and days. I keep the socials for it available because hey, it's a nice memory. This sort of "Single sex spaces" bullshit caused a problem for the last-but-one Bang Face because a new-to-this Security outfit somehow decided it's their job to go remove people who in their view weren't women from a toilet for women. These women weren't causing any problems for anybody else, but because they presumably had the wrong genitals or for some other reason were "suspect" to that Security team, Security dragged them out of a toilet cubicle and threw them out of the site. Other clubbers were of course horrified, and the event runners had to apologise to everybody - because regardless of how many X chromosomes you have, or whether you do or don't have a womb, dragging people out of the toilets because you've got weird ideas about what is or isn't a woman is batshit.


Phyllis Schlafly is an odd comparison to make. She argued that women should stay in traditional roles and out of public life (while as you mention, not following her own advice), whereas JKR and other feminists take the exact opposite view. Not sure I see the relevance of your analogy here.

As for Bang Face last year, what happened is that security staff kicked a group of males out from the women's toilets. I agree that this isn't an ideal outcome, much better would have been if these men had respected that women's spaces are not for them, and stayed out in the first place. The fact that their removal was treated as some sort of scandal shows how far we've lost sight of the rights of women and girls to have single-sex provisions.


So, you absolutely agree with Phyllis, that one woman somehow gets to decide who is or isn't a woman and what all women believe.

And yet this fact about your belief makes you so uncomfortable that you find yourself trying to pretend that somehow it's the opposite of what you believe.


>that they otherwise might not have.

I think this is letting people off the hook. We're talking about adults in their 40s and 50s here. When people like that 'suddenly' endorse extreme views it's because they had held them back and feel enabled to say them now, an adult isn't going to become an extremist because someone was mean to them online.

I'm 20 years younger than Blow and even at my age I can tell I'm settled enough psychologically that adopting radically different views would require a lot of internal effort. Views don't exist in a vacuum, to believe radical things you have to radically alter all the other things you belief. I really don't think we should people like this like children without agency.


Thank you for saying this. In particular people are often already on a journey of self radicalisation so blaming people reacting to their views for radicalising them further is seeking to soft soap that. On top of which the people reacting are often framed as “going too far” and thus becoming more radical is the only natural reaction. It removes all agency and generally I think is mostly deployed by people that agree already with the radical views but are too scared to say so.

Not recognizing societal causal effects on radicalization is letting even more people off the hook.

I am not missing their point at all, you are missing mine.

>drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.

The view I mentioned was the one that got Notch (one of the public figures mentioned by GP) the reaction from the internet in the first place. A bit disingenuous to say this was a moderate conservative talking point before he got sent spiraling into a far right abyss by an angry progressive mob.


I am not an expert on Notch's slide into craziness, but I'd argue that the episode you mention it might not be the start. His start was as a "anti-SJW" game developer which got him hated and vilified by his former fans.

I'm not saying these people were rays of sunshine before, I'm saying they could be talked to without them foaming at the mouth and you face palming at how unhinged they were. I was using the meaning of benign attached to tumors.


>an expert on Notch's slide into craziness

I am not an expert either, if that episode occurred later than I remember, it could have been as you say.


What are we going to do about those hate mobs in our societies in Western high culture who are so intolerant, intransigent and violent that they radicalise the moderates? I fear for the future. Any good ideas?

I think you identify the cycle of radicalization correctly but only on a specific side.

There are people in this thread comparing Trump to Hitler. I don't think Trump is the US finest president but those of my family who weren't slaves for the Germans were slaughtered.

The fact that people throw comparisons that are false on some massive scale around and it's completely normalized is an example why losing touch with reality is not only a problem of the right


I'm not sure what you're claiming in here. Is it that deporting immigrants, and taking rights from women is as bad as trying to get billionaires to pay more taxes and reducing systemic societal biases?

That's an extremely biased presentation of things on both sides.

I tried to summarise what I understand from the two ideologies. Would you share in what way that's biased?

It's _obviously_ reductionist and biased, not losing any more words on that.

I'm trying to offer a good faith argumentation. Why aren't you giving me the same courtesy?

My apologies, not trying to fight here, and I acknowledge you've been more balanced and nuanced in other comments.

If you want something that doesn't require a docker container to run but still supports multiple targets, I'm maintaining a small linux daemon for that: https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler

for my use case I think the docker container is better solution. I listen on several different devices so having plexamp send everything to last.fm and use that as the "source of truth" and then the docker container monitors last.fm and resends that info to other targets makes a bit more sense - this way I never have to make sure I have something running on my listening device.

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