blackstampede

joined 2 years ago
[–] blackstampede 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Puddleglum the Marshwiggle shoe shopping

[–] blackstampede 3 points 3 days ago

I support aftercare snacks. Otherwise, why exist.

[–] blackstampede 22 points 1 week ago

"you're not my brother, you're my region"

[–] blackstampede 1 points 1 week ago

Oh yeah. Fair.

[–] blackstampede 16 points 1 week ago

"It's not programming if there aren't problems"

[–] blackstampede 41 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

There is zero reason for the wizarding world to have social classes. Allow me to explain.

Although food can't be created with magic, any graduate of Hogwarts can cast the Herbivicus Charm (I think it's called) or the Greenhouse Charm to grow plants in moments. There's also a spell that produces fresh, clean water. They have spells that make the insides of things larger than the outside. Spells that clean dishes. Spells that levitate objects and automatically perform rote tasks.

Every wizard or witch is maybe a month or two of moderate work (at the absolute outside) away from having a private pocket kingdom with crops, furniture, fireplace, teleport pad, beds, clothing, swimming pool, pets, cattle, enchanted kitchen, self cleaning floors, and fucking golf course if they want it.

If they can't create, craft, grow, or summon something, they can buy it with money taken from an entire world of gullible muggles. Sure, dollars and yen are worthless in Diagon Alley, but you can still buy food and an enormous range of physical comforts with it. And if you absolutely have to spend money in a magical store- muggles still have gold. Even at the extortionate exchange rates that I assume the goblins would charge, the process of turning essentially free cash (in exchange for magic tricks or conjured trinkets) into gold and then into goblin coin is basically nothing but profit. A lot of it.

Which brings me back to social stratification. Why are the Malfoys considered a powerful family? Why do people differ to government functionaries and Dumbledore? Why do witches and wizards run businesses or work at all? Social hierarchy is a result of power imbalances, and other than direct, physical force, there are no power imbalances in the wizarding world. They can take your job, but who cares? You don't actually need one. They can take your home, but who cares? You can make another in a few weeks (and this time the hot tub will go on the balcony instead of in the backyard).

A wizard does not need anything from society or from other wizards.

[–] blackstampede 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Maybe he could even try beating and twisting the tall grass.

[–] blackstampede 1 points 2 weeks ago

That seems likely, now that I think about it. Although those barges must have been absolutely fucking massive.

[–] blackstampede 71 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (8 children)

Once upon a time I had a whole conversation with a guy about whether the pyramids were made by aliens. He had an issue with the size of the blocks, so I explained how it was likely done-

  • Local quarry chips the blocks out of the rock, wedging them to fall directly onto rollers (logs).
  • Workers move rollers from the back of the block to the front while oxen pull the block itself slowly to the pyramid.
  • Block is slowly driven up a very long, gradual ramp to the work site, where it is wedged into place.

His gotcha response - where did they get the rope? So I had to explain that ropes have existed much longer than nylon.

[–] blackstampede 3 points 3 weeks ago

I just realized that you said Musk and not Trump. But honestly, a Trump supporter would probably hear "mumble mumble said Heil Hitler mumble" and assume you were talking about Trump anyway. I'm going to leave it as-is.

[–] blackstampede 11 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

"The left just looove to call people racists and Nazis, and he gave them exactly what they were asking for and now they're losing their minds. He's the world's biggest troll! I think it was hilarious, honestly - sure, he probably shouldn't have done it, yeah, it wasn't pc, but you call people Nazis long enough, what do you expect. Everyones a Nazi, everyone's racist, meanwhile you've got liberals voting for people who sleep their way into positions of power and politicians who want to bus in votes from Mexico. It's all bullshit smoke and mirrors. Politicians are all dirty. I like Trump because he doesn't care what the mainstream thinks- he'll burn it all down if he needs to to drain the swamp, and he's doing it while thumbing his nose at the political establishment with statements like this."

[–] blackstampede 1 points 4 weeks ago

You're a dipshit.

16
How to make a company not suck (self.actual_discussion)
 

I've been thinking about enshitification recently, and I'm also working on a startup with a friend that just received funding. I've been wondering how one might arrange a business such that it won't gradually trend towards shittier products in search of higher profit margins.

Obviously, it would be nice to redesign all of society so that this isn't a thing, but barring that, does anyone have any ideas for setting up a business in such a way that motivations are aligned with producing a good product?

Currently, we're trying to retain as much control as possible, but at some point we may go public, and if we do, I'm not sure how to keep us aimed at accomplishing our goals. We're building a platform that should solve or at least improve the replication crisis in scientific research, and we could lose control to investors that want board seats, or sell to someone like Google.

If we do either, I doubt the company will do what we want it to do in the long term.

Going public is the route that seems less likely to lead to this change in direction, but it seems like it could end in the same place over a long enough timeline.

16
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by blackstampede to c/[email protected]
 

I recently acquired two used blade servers and a short rack to put them in. I'm planning to use one or the other as the replacement for a media server that died on me a bit ago. The old media server was just a little refurb dell workstation, with a single SSD in it, but the servers have 6 and 8 bays, respectively.

I would like to RAID them so that one drive dying doesn't lose any of my media, and I was leaning towards Ubuntu server as an OS. I'm not sure how to do that, and I'm kind of poking around for info and advice. Hit me with it.

 
 
 

I'm working on a parsing library for mil-std-1553 messages. It's a fun, minimal project that doesn't currently exist as far as I can tell.

11
Got a big presentation today (self.huntsvillealabama)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by blackstampede to c/[email protected]
 

Wish me luck ladies and gentlemen

Edit: it went great. Thanks for the good wishes.

view more: next ›