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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • There are a lot of genuine answers to this, but the simplest one is perhaps the best: because who decides which authority is correct?

    Authoritarianism is bad because it gives justification to our bias’.

    The “good” authorities you think of when you ask this question are authorities not because they are authorities, but because they have the knowledge/training/practice/experiences that give them a greater expertise on a given subject. Authoritarianism supposes that, those things aside, there’s something inherently good about someone in a position of authority. This is factually incorrect.

    We (are supposed to) grant authority to those that earn it, and use it responsibility. Likewise we (are supposed to) strip it away from those that abuse it, or fail to maintain strong standards of ethics and practice. Authoritarianism, as a school of thought, discards that process, instead suggesting that the authority is the authority because people need that in their lives. Fuck that.






  • The mods of .ml are pro China/Russia authoritarianists, and will ban you for posting comments that disagree with them. I’ve received a ban for discussing my experiences teaching Taiwanese and Chinese students, because I described the way the Chinese students reacted in the face of evidence that Taiwan is a self-governing sovereign state as “brainwashed.”

    I was banned under rule 1, which is listed as being polite and civil. Trust me when I say I have said far more less polite and civil things directly to mods, so it’s concerning that politely expressing real lived experiences that contradicts their opinions on Chinese authoritarianism is what counts as being rude and uncivil around those parts.

    I haven’t blocked them. Many of those communities include the founders/creators of Lemmy, so to block the community feels disjointed from the app, to me. But I think twice about wasting my time on individual conversations in or from people in .ml.









  • “I’m a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I’m talking about”

    Should we call it a fallacious call to authority, meme on it for being a “how do you do, fellow gamers” moment, or simply mock the guy for whoring himself out in favor of daddy corporate? I could write an essay on the ways this is an absurd statement.

    Gamers hate Denuvo because it doesn’t “simply work”. It limits paying customers from accessing their content, bogs down mid-range machines that are already overtaxxed by poor optimization and, in admittedly uncommon cases, full on breaks some games until patches and fixes roll out. Stop pretending that “gamers” are out here rioting because they’re too cheap and immoral to pay for content. Quit your fuckin’ lying.



  • It kinda gets different when you’re talking about a series of actors intermingling in an environment designed by the seller. There are certain expectations for the experience that was sold to you, and another customer disregarding the social contract of what the expected environment is supposed to be like is problematic.

    It’s like buying a ticket to go to a theatre. You expect the people around you to also use the product and environment in a way similiar to you. Someone on their phone, screaming at the movie, throwing their feet up on your chair, etc, isn’t okay, and the people who defend their selfishness with “I paid to be here, I can do what I want” deserve to be kicked out. Cheating on an online, competitive game is no different, and I expect such players to be kicked out so the rest of us can have the experience we were promised when we made our purchase.

    Does this mean the game in question should have full control over the code you’re running on your machine? I mean absolutely not, no one is strip searching you at the entrance of the theatre, but there need to be some degree of limitations on how individuals interact with the shared environment that consumers are being offered. The theatre doesn’t allow you to take videos, and doesn’t give you access to a copy of the film to clip, or edit to your hearts content, and the notion that the consumer should have such rights seems insane. But taking an online game, editing the files, and then connecting to everyone else’s shared experience and forcing your version on others should be protected, because the code is running on your machine? To be clear, I don’t think you’re seriously suggesting that is the case, but therein lies the problem: there’s a lot of weird nuance when it comes to multiple consumers being provided a digital product like this. How they interact together is inherently a part of the sold product, so giving consumers free reign to do what they want once the product is in their hands doesn’t work the way it does with single player games, end user software, or physical products.

    The real problem is the laziness of devs not hosting their own server environments, so I hear you there. But that is, unfortunately, a problem seperate from whether hackers should be held accountable for ruining a product for others.