Underrated pun

I’ve always thought of competence porn as something more like Suits or House M.D, where the entire point is to see cool smart people doing call smart things and vicariously feel cool and smart yourself by watching them do it. In Star Trek, the crew’s competence seems incidental, but at least to me it doesn’t feel like the point of the episodes is to show off how competent people are - it usually seems like either some sort of philosophical enquiry, a straightforward action/suspense, interpersonal drama, or some combination of them. So while competence does feature in the stories, I feel like it’s handled with a lot more depth and realism than straight up pornography of competence. Star Trek is like competence erotica~

I really wish this just said life before the internet.

Zooming in on tiny drops and saying XYZ PLUMMETS is my #1 pet peeve of all stock analysis

Absolutely there is, but unfortunately the solution to CP is having moderators who can delete content, and that alone is enough to cause all the problems with moderators. It seems largely intractable to me. The only thing I could see maybe working is some system where moderators can be removed by community vote, but then you rely on systems preventing fake accounts from being created or account age to stop those votes from being botted, etc… I just don’t see how to technically solve the problem of moderators having power to delete things. It’s the classic issue of who watches the watchmen. Humanity has never had a great solution to this.

The problem is that if you actually have no or insufficient moderation then people just start using the site to post child pornography. And then you visiting what used to be a site you like becomes basically illegal and dangerous, not to mention potentially traumatizing. I’m not exaggerating, there was a small game fan forum site I used to love along with many others, but someone caught on to the fact it was run by just one guy and kept signing up with fake accounts and posting child porn or links to it. Luckily I had already fallen off using the site by then, but one of my Internet friends who still visited it kept me updated on the drama. First everyone normal stopped visiting. Then it eventually got so bad the owner had to shut down the site.

People lack imagination when it comes to what will happen with no moderation. It quickly becomes horrible.

Big insult chains like that only hit home for me if each one adds a new dimension or sense to the insult. This is just saying stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again. Reminds me of le epic reddit insults like “fuckwaffle” or whatever the hell it was. I hate conservatives and fascism as much as anyone, but it’s tiring to see such circlejerky posts that basically just say “conservatives dumb, upvote below”. I don’t need my opinion circlejerked, I’m already convinced of it without some random man telling me it’s true. And there’s nothing cathartic about reading this either because of how try-hard the insult sounds. Bleh.

I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I’d rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word “Allah”, etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don’t want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I’m not going to take that into consideration, because that’s not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

Lastly, all other things equal, I’d rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let’s be honest, especially developers) won’t want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that’s reasonable or not, it’s hard to deny. It’s certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

Yeah same. I respect the huge amount of work it takes to make a suite like that, but… I’m lucky I’ve worked with Blender a lot to give me a good impression of open source software. If Libre was my first thing I experimented with in the open source world (and I think for many, many people it probably is), I would probably think “wow open source software is a joke, I guess you get what you pay for after all”. It really makes a horrible impression. I wonder why LibreOffice has so many usability pains vs Blender, despite the fact that both applications have very high demand. Maybe it’s just that LibreOffice seems really dull to contribute to?