That’s grotesque and you have my condolences

That’s an awful idea and you are an awful person for suggesting it.

…and I am an awful person for considering the idea

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

In this case, the law being freedom of speech, the protection being to say what they want and the binding being to prohibit others from curtailing that. Naturally, the push for inclusive language is part of a movement to curtail that freedom and needs to be reversed and pushed back against.

Thank you. Funny enough, just today I chatted with a colleague that mentioned one of the tools was technically available to us, but actually not approved for use. Ordering it wouldn’t be an issue, but getting it signed off would be quite the chore.

The fun comes when there is no actual data model. All in all, I’d say being familiar with the data model is about 60% of my job. 35% is building queries and query scripts for people who need regular exports. 5% is running after other people’s fuckups.

Strap in, because this is a ride.

There is a raw database from a decade-and-a-half old app, which I get to access through a layer of views that does some joining, but not all, with absolutely no documentation on how the original database is structured or where things are pulled from or what anything refers to. No data dictionary, no list or map of key relations, some objects are mapped in two different views, no semantic naming of columns.

If you want to want to query order part delegations by who they’re assigned to (Recipient in the app) you need to use the foreign key RefAssignmentUnit. The “Assignment” unit that did the delegation is just RefUnit. If you have orders that were created by a salesperson on behalf of a customer, OrderingPerson (also a foreign key, but not named Ref-) is the customer, while OrderingPerson2 is the salesperson that entered the order. Don’t confuse that with Creator, which for orders created through the web form is usually a technical user, unless the salesperson is one of the veterans that use the direct app in which case it’ll be the salesperson while OrderingPerson2 is null.

Also, we have many-to-many relationships that are mapped through reference tables… whose columns are named object and reference for each and every one. Have fun trying to memorize which refers to which so you don’t need to look it up every damn time.

Create my own views to clean this up? Nope, only the third party service providers for the app can do that, and they don’t wanna. Our internal app admin (singular) can use some awkward tool to generate those views, but there’s no reverse lookup to see what a given column refers to. Also, they have no concept for what actually constitutes a good model because they’re not really familiar with the database, just with the app.

Get my own serverless DB to create views that query the original DB? No can do, you’d need to order a whole server and that’s pricy.
Get a cloud DB? Sure, but it will be managed by the cloud team and if you want to have or edit custom views, you’ll get to create a project request. They’ll put it in the backlog and work it into some future sprint.

Get literally any tool that allows me to efficiently create reusable data prep so I don’t have to copy & paste the base transformations needed for a given query every fucking time and if the source DB ever changes I need to update all my query scripts? If you can somehow squeeze the time to prepare a convincing pitch - a full Power Point presentation, of course - between all your tedious and redundant query preparation and script maintenance, find a management sponsor willing to hear you out and hopefully propose your request to their superiors. Best case: It becomes a whole project - alternatives will have to be considered first, implications, security, costs, and you’ll be the one having to assemble and present that information to management only to have some responsible person point out that it would actually be the remit of a different team… that also works in sprints, has a backlog and will give you no control over your prep.

And obviously, the app provider doesn’t give us any advance notice of just what will change in the DB with the next update. We only learn that when a view breaks. The app admin can use the tool to refresh the affected views then, while I scramble to determine all the scripts that need to be updated and copy&paste the fix. If a user has been granted their own access to the database, odds are they’ll come crying to me when their modified versions of my queries break.

There is a lot I like about my job, I acknowledge the difficulties of a historically grown system and service contracts, but the rigid and antiquated corporate culture can go take a long walk off a short pier.

I imagine the answer is “what’s the real world?”

I’m being facetious. I don’t want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.

They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they’re in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.

At their heart, they’re no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can’t actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.

It’s reallly just the source of their pain that’s so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they’ve been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn’t lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question “why am I suffering?” a satisfying and concrete answer. “It’s not you. It’s not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It’s these people that you can do something about.”

Except you can’t actually do anything about “these people”, but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without “these people”, where naturally you’re doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they’re looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.

If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they’re powerful and “safe” from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It’s one thing if there’s some niche indie game made by “these people” - they’re on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It’s another thing when there’s a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.

For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You’d (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn’t born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You’ll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don’t have it bottled up already.

I say this because I’ve been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They’re victims turned abusers, and while that doesn’t excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:

Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we’re fed, the less that “someone” will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we’re exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.

The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.

Life’s still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.

Aw shite, I’ve been pedant-baited? GG

Taken literally, that implies you do care.

(To mitigate the pedantry: Given it’s a rather dispassionate response in the context of a provocation, it is probably a very weak “care” though. Just because it’s nonzero doesn’t mean it’s significant.)

To expand: I feel like it should be emphasised more that current “AI” models are, at best, hallucinating.

Their output may look real enough and for some purposes they may be perfectly suitable, but ultimately, they have no concept of the semantic objects related to the words they learn and the semantic relationships between those objects. Without that, they can’t possibly guarantee that the implied semantic connection of the combination of words they produce aligns with the actual relationships.

You can use a LLM to help translate bullet points into text of a given tone (like abstracts for theses that sound scientific), but you’ll still have to check the factuality and consistency of those texts. When using them to write texts about something you already know, that’s doable and can save you some work. But using it like in the OP to aggregate and present “new” facts without supervision is dangerous, because you can’t actually verify what you don’t already know.

But “Copilot can scrape your data to give you some pointers and spare some of the tedium of finding it yourself, but you shouldn’t take it for gospel truth” doesn’t quite sell as nicely as “Microsoft Copilot leverages the power of AI to boost productivity, unlock creativity, and helps you understand information better”.

Tinfoil Hat Time:

Linux Gaming, while increasingly viable, isn’t currently a threat to MS. There are enough reasons people will stick with Windows. But Valve are doing a good job of showing that it’s possible, that Microsoft’s hold on PC gaming isn’t absolute and that an increasing number of games are playable on Linux too (with the right tools). Wine and co. have been around for a while, but they never enjoyed the spotlight of a major videogame platform investing time and manpower into developing a dedicated gaming compatibility engine.

I don’t think MS would intentionally run it into the ground. They’d probably try to squeeze it for money, which might end up doing so anyway.

I also don’t think they’re really worried about Linux gaming. But I also doubt they’d leave Proton untouched entirely. Whether they’d kneecap it, whether they’d enshittify it, whether they’d work on interfacing it with their proprietary stuff in an attempt to put it ahead of any competition and tip potential Linux Gaming developments in favour of using their engine to more easily target both platforms at once, I doubt they could resist doing something to squeeze money from it.

Maybe the very idea that they’re challenging Microsoft’s supremacy is unpleasant to them. Maybe their analytics show enough of a trend to concern them. Maybe they just want to make sure they have a piece of the pie if it ever becomes worth something.

Or maybe the whole thing is baseless bullshit made up for attention and site traffic.

I’ll die on the hill that DS2 was misunderstood, and rather than being a poor game it just caters to a specific taste in Souls games, which turned out to be the minority.

It’s rather unforgiving with Stamina and requires more in terms of positioning and timing to handle multiple enemies, such as lining them up to hit multiple in one swing or singling out a target to stunlock thanks to weaker poise. Healing also requires more consideration to pick the right window. I like that. It feels more like a harsh and dangerous world where you have to watch out for your own survival.

The Small White Soapstone often works for a quick trip to another world, earning souls, lifegems and regaining humanity with less commitment than a full summon, which encourages jolly cooperation by lowering the stakes and raising the reward. I like that.

I also like the changes to the weapon upgrades and the magic system. Pyromancy becomes an actual magic discipline, that can still be worked in alongside miracles, sorceries and particularly hexes, like having more attunement gives you more casts, consumables can restore spell uses and you can use materials to lower spell requirements, all of which affects character builds. Being able to respec means you can change or fix your build later on.

I’ll concede that the learning curve is bad. There’s more mechanical complexity to learn and less explanation than in DS1, and particularly the differences between the games aren’t obvious if you go at it with the expectations set by the original.

In a way, that makes it a bad “Dark Souls” 2, since you’re obviously expecting more of the same because it has the same name. Trying new stuff may be good, but changing existing systems is always a gamble whether the people trying and liking it outweigh those that didn’t like it or never even tried.

That many people ended up not liking them was unfortunate. Particularly with DS3 going so hard in the other direction, the approval of DS2 has diminished even further. Its playstyle just isn’t to everyone’s taste, and many people conflate “I didn’t like it” with “It’s shit”, which is a shame.

In summary, I think it’s a good game, even a good Dark Souls that innovates on the original, but it’s probably a bad entry point for the genre due to the steep learning curve, and a rough transition from more faster paced titles. I acknowledge it’s not for everyone, but I liked it.

Doesn’t linking users work differently here? I thought @ampersandrew@lemmy.world would be the canonical way to mention users, given that it includes their instance. I’m still fairly new to Lemmy, so maybe that’s app/instance-specific

I’d be surprised if opponents of genocide would vote Republican instead, given how some GOP reps seem to be opposing even the half-measure of delaying arms shipments.

A two party state where you choose between “fucked up” and “less fucked up, but constantly ceding ground” just does a poor job of accurately representing the opinions of people favouring actual progress, so they’re doing what they can to pull the Overton Window their way.

Thank you for putting the meme in text too. I wish it was more commonplace, not just for screenreaders but also for people like me whose internet loads pictures slowly. Saves me a click and is just as funny.

Also, yeah, fuck their hypocrisy. They’d gladly push both buttons and see no issue.

I mean, I got upset like everyone else at the news that they wouldn’t be making more BG, but the longer I think about it, the longer I feel like it’s the healthier choice. Like you said, Hasbro might have pressured them to rush out the next game, instead of giving them the creative space to make that game live up to the expectations.

I’m sold, where do I sign up?

A boomerang is a clip that plays and rewinds in a loop, like it’s flying to the end of the clip and returning like a boomerang.

I don’t even use Instagram myself, why do I know this

I think the issue is that it’s not also millenial-universal. If only some millenials know it, the rest of us is left out.

I can still operate the iPod though, so I don’t need to know who it is to look for and select.

Das ist der ekligste Brenn den ich über einen Dialekt gelesen habe.

Hast du auch einen zu Schwäbisch?

If you’re looking for good code, you missed the point of my comment 😄

If I was looking for an enumeration of valid inputs, I’d make it a selection box rather than a text field that’s supposed to contain a number and give the selections reasonable names. If I want an integral quantity, I’d use a number input field.

If I have no control over the frontend, that means I’m writing a backend in JS for a bullshit frontend, and no amount of good coding practice is going to salvage this mess.

I’m also blessedly far away from WebDev now. I work in Data Analytics and if I ever have to do any of this for a living, something has gone very wrong.

Converting texts into numbers or dates still haunts me though - fuck text inputs for numbers and dates.