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azertyfun

@ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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607
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3 yr. ago

  • What's a piece of Media that is so underrated you must mention it?

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  • Or it's the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

    Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children's show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it's easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

    Good for you if that's your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it's an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.

  • What's a piece of Media that is so underrated you must mention it?

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  • I tried but like most children's shows I just can't deal with (at least the early seasons') pacing. It's excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn't seem to be trying to get anywhere.

    Typically those children shows' pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn't change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.

  • Why Isn't News of Trump Building Vast Concentration Camps Being Treated as a National Emergency?

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  • Wait wait wait wait, where does this idea come from that the German people weren't to blame for Nazism? They were to blame. They were blamed. Their country was partitioned, their army was dismantled, their families were torn apart, and they endeavored to teach future generations what they did wrong. It did not even remotely make up for their nation's crimes against humanity, but they were "lambasted".

    Do not weaponize history to justify your own apathy. These lessons were paid in blood. Yet new blood is being shed, and every American who does not fight against the regime is responsible. Yes, it's an unfair ask; no-one wants to live through troubled times. But you are living in them so stop cowering behind historical wrongs to feel better about your inaction.

  • Why Isn't News of Trump Building Vast Concentration Camps Being Treated as a National Emergency?

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  • "yet"

    Just as a thought exercise, can you fathom and put into words a hypothetical breaking point that would wake people up to the madness around them?

    Because here's my prediction: the regime will commit atrocity after atrocity, each one somehow more monstrous than the last, and nothing will happen, because your first paragraph will still be true. They will start wars and nothing will happen because your first paragraph will still be true. Then suddenly WWIII will happen and the regime will be unstoppable. Then, some manner of nuclear exchange, potentially marking the end of human civilization, because all fascist regimes end up destroying themselves -- too bad this one has the power to take the entire fucking world down with it.

    If you are right that Americans won't fight for decency now (and I think you are), then all hope is lost. All historical precedent says that we are past the point of no return and you've forfeited your - and quite possibly humanity's - future.

  • Billionaire Ehud Laniado dies during penis enlargement surgery, surgeons banned

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  • Extra bonus: their vetting process doesn't involve a willingness to fuck patients over for extra cash.

    Funny when here in Belgium, the government put a couple decades ago a cap on the number of doctors who were allowed to graduate medical school (numerus clausus). The goal is to reduce the number of doctors to pay for (with the support of existing doctors who want less competition).

    The predictable result of artificial scarcity? I live a major city and if I want an appointment with any specialist it's a 6+ months delay or a 1-2 months if you can justify a daytrip to Brussels. This is having real tangible impacts on quality of care.

    Obviously I would not trade my healthcare system for the American one but let's not pretend that money and greed aren't factors.

  • Hasan Piker banned from Twitch for calling ICE supporters "rabid ultra-Zionist pigs'

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  • He's a political pundit. Part of his job is, at all times, to be entertaining and attention-grabbing. That means his appeal and success are directly tied to how abrasive he sounds at any given time. That's the unavoidable pitfall of the profession, and it's been true since long before the internet and even before television.

    Punditry content is not for me personally, but I do think it is filling a niche. Especially as very very few online American content creators have been willing to engage with politics directly.

  • protect trans kids rule

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  • I am not saying it did not sell. That's the one thing it did really well. But it's hardly a hot take to say success is not a measure of quality. Plenty of mainstream slop out there. HP is slop. It's not offensively bad, but it's certainly not good.

    Over 6+ books it's really sub-par writing to have a character who does not really grow because they already did not have any internal flaws or conflicts. The upside is that it's really hard to hate a blank slate MC and you don't risk writing yourself into a corner. I'm sure this is no small part of why there is so much HP fanfic specifically -- it's hard to write those characters badly as they lack so much depth!

    Tons of things did the HP formula better, with well developed characters, good worldbuilding, good plot, good themes, yada yada. e.g. The Magicians (only saw the show) or Misfits&Magic. And in all of those the protags face strong personal hardships and are drastically different people by the end. Yeah, it's hard, but that's what storytellers do.

  • Digital Independence: Berlin wants to introduce European payment service Wero

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  • The EPI is not a German governing body. It is a partnership of banks who decided to implement Wero. All of them had to work to support it in addition to their existing systems, though it is not exceptionally hard because it's just a frontend for SEPA. If Spanish banks want to provide Wero to their customers then they'll join the EPI and have the same say as everyone else. But again, it's just fucking QR codes that translate to "make an instant SEPA mandate to send X € to Y IBAN" so I don't understand what there is to be scared of on a technical level.

    I don't understand the point of fragmenting the Eurozone for the sake of fragmenting the Eurozone. Integration is in the long run more complex, expensive, and less user-friendly than standardization. What is so good about competing solutions that they should not eventually be replaced by a common digital payment system?

  • Digital Independence: Berlin wants to introduce European payment service Wero

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  • Wero is not "something the banks don't control". It's a SEPA-based standard, implemented by the participating banks. It originated with Dutch/Belgian technology and banking markets and Germany and France joined because their sorry asses didn't have anything better so it's a pure upgrade for them.

    EuroPA is trying to work with fragmented markets, Wero is trying to establish a new standard. I fail to see EuroPA as anything other than a stepping stone to an eventually unified standard. Having a single currency but noeasy and practical way of spending it in a Austrian or Spanish online shop without going through American banks is an absolutely bonkers situation.

  • Digital Independence: Berlin wants to introduce European payment service Wero

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  • I already used it in Belgium though...? "Pushed by Germany" is a bold statement when the technology comes from iDeal/Bancontact which are Dutch and Belgian respectively and France is also a very large economy in the mix. Don't forget about Luxembourg as well. Benelux+FR+DE is hardly an ignorable market. France is already abandoning its existing solution for Wero. That's always been the plan.

    Do you care to source your claims? My understanding both the EuroPA and EPI are a private agreement between banks, but only the latter has received explicit backing from the European Commission. The EuroPA does not seem nearly as ambitious and only seeks to streamline existing national SEPA-based online payments (unclear to me what that means exactly in practice), which is a nice short-term vision for sovereignty but probably not where the EU will want to be 5 or 10 years from now. The big selling point of Wero is that you can be shown a QR code and use it to pay easily and instantly with extremely low fees, regardless of your bank.

  • protect trans kids rule

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  • Harry Potter has no true self to discover. From the first to the last page of this pile of rags he is a wizarding Mary Sue with near-infinite privilege and the personality of an oyster. The story opens with "yer a wizard" in the first 50 pages and that's the end of his character arc. From then on he's a mere vessel for the reader to experience the world and the author to move the plot along.

    .... As a matter of fact, what even is the biggest character arc in that story? I don't remember much, but Neville and Hermione have a glowup and Harry's uncle dies or something? And the weasleys open a shop? I certainly don't recall anything that lends credence to the idea that Rowling even believes that either individual people or societies are capable of profound change. The story begins and ends basically in the exact same place except the characters are 10ish years older.

  • Alzheimer's Fully Reversed in Mice, Scientists Say

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  • There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com's whole schtick. There's so much happening in science that doesn't get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer's gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

  • Kristi Noem Blames Her Actions on Trump and Stephen Miller

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  • Except the Trials where that precedent was supposedly established actually allowed a great many people to escape conviction using that exact defense, then the prosecution subsequently gave up on the trials altogether. The Nuremberg trials were a travesty of justice, not because the Allies set up kangaroo courts, but because in an attempt to avoid such accusations and through unbelievable prosecutorial incompetence they let almost every Nazi who was still alive run free.

    What I'm getting at is, don't expect justice to magically administer itself.

  • How come residential power lines aren't buried underground still?

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  • Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it's very rarely relevant to any discussion.

    The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn't the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.

  • Cycling without a helmet and high-visibility jacket may be made criminal offences in Ireland

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  • What you're saying is true, and when riding in those conditions I choose to wear a high-vis and helmet.

    Nonetheless it is victim-blaming to make it mandatory (nevermind doing that in broad daylight). There's always more that could be done ; clown hat, flashing lights, police escort, machine guns, F-35s. We have to draw the line somewhere, and if headlights are good enough for cars, they're good enough for cyclists. Cars would also see fewer accidents if they were covered in high-vis paint, yet curiously no-one is arguing for mandating it.

  • Which Countries Are In The World Health Organization

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  • Not ever. Even when every male under the age of 50 is conscripted into one of Trump's pointless wars against former allies, Democrats won't do shit because resistance is illegal and they have an unshakably legalist worldview. Calexit was already a complete joke before their government started executing their own citizens in broad daylight with no repercussion - legal or otherwise.

    Americans: stop with the escapist fantasies and start finding actual ways to fight back because your elected representatives aren't going to do it for you.

  • Minnesota US Attorney’s Office is bracing for a new wave of resignations

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  • Can't easily prove a negative but here's an example.

    On 19 April 1943, the twentieth transport left Mechelen transit camp carrying 1,631 Jewish men, women, and children

    Three young students and members of the Belgian resistance including a Jewish doctor, Youra Livchitz and his two non-Jewish friends Robert Maistriau[a] and Jean Franklemon [fr], armed with one pistol, a lantern, and red paper to create a makeshift red lantern (to use as a danger signal), were able to stop the train on the track Mechelen-Leuven, between the municipalities of Boortmeerbeek and Haacht.[1] The twentieth convoy was guarded by one officer and fifteen men from the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo-SD), who came from Germany. Despite these security measures, Maistriau was able to open one wagon and liberate 17 people.[1]

    Other prisoners escaped from the convoy without any connection with the attack. The train driver, Albert Dumon, did all he could to keep the slowest pace between Tienen and Tongeren, stopping whenever it was possible and justifiable, and so allow that more people could jump without killing themselves. In all, 233 people succeeded in escaping from the train.[1] 89 were eventually recaptured and put on later convoys.[1] 26 others were killed, either by shooting or by the fall, and 118 who succeeded in escaping.[1] The youngest, Simon Gronowski, was only 11 years old.[1] Régine Krochmal [fr], an eighteen-year-old nurse with the resistance, also escaped after she cut the wooden bars put in front of the train air inlet with a bread knife and jumped from the train near Haacht. Both survived the war.

    Emphasis mine. Albert Dumon "did his job" (the French version of the article goes a bit more in-depth). He didn't overtly defy the orders given to him under the threat of immediate execution (!). He didn't quit his job knowing that if he didn't drive the trains a German train driver would take his place. He followed the regulations to the letter of the law, as incompetently as he could afford. And his malicious compliance saved 118 lives.

  • Disastrous poll shows Trump’s White House return is a ‘failure’: Americans say he’s ‘gone too far’

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  • Well obviously a thermonuclear war is not good for business. However do not make the grievous mistake of thinking that Trump is a mere pawn in the oligarch's game who can be relied on to act rationally in their self-interest. He's done their bidding aplenty, but he's also doing a lot of stuff that weakens him, his buddies, and his country, just because he's so fucking dumb and vain. Like invading Greenland, a country he already had full access to for military purposes and that US companies were always welcome to exploit for minerals. His generals are literally using every trick in the book to try to redirect his attention away from Greenland because the US has literally no interest – military, financial, or geopolitical – in it. Literally the only explanation for this fixation of his is that Greenland looks big on a Mercator projection and that makes his tiny dick hard.

    M.A.D. only works when all actors:

    1. Have reliable information (certainly not always true, see Stanislav Petrov)
    2. Can be assumed to be acting in their own self-interest

    Number 1 is in doubt with Trump because he and his cult spend a lot of time in a made-up reality. I can totally see some war hawks explaining to him that the UK and France don't have the nuclear capacity to glass the entire continental US outright, and Trump interpreting it as "we're untouchable" because he's not into concepts such as "nuance". To a degree the same is true of a dictator like Putin or Xi Xinping who are also surrounded by yes men who purposefully feed an enabling narrative (see also: Putin's decision to invade Ukraine because he thought he could get away with it).

    Number 2 is simply completely incorrect. Trump is so unpredictable even his own administration can't guess his next move – they're constantly acting on his latest rant and doing a poor job of pretending it was part of the plan all along. I'd love to believe that he can be deterred by the thread of M.A.D, but I'm unfortunately too acutely aware of the news to lie to myself like that. That's the main difference between him and Putin – I can actually believe that Putin will only act in what he believes to be his self-interest, and he knows a nuclear exchange ain't it.

  • Scrum

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  • Well, yeah, that's what Scrum is. From the guide which takes maybe 10 minutes to read

    Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.

    That's not a throwaway sentence - it is fundamental to how scrum works and that is reinforced throughout the scrum guide.

    Every conversation about Agile and/or Scrum being "the worst", after some prodding it turns out that their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles, often without even being aware that was an essential requirement. You're baking a cake and you decided to not use any butter, that's on you champ, don't blame the fucking recipe.

    The biggest valid criticism of scrum is that the thing that makes it so great - its structural empowerment of individual teams - is also what makes it structurally incompatible with any traditional top-down management style. The company must fundamentally be (re-)organized to have a flat corporate structure within its R&D department - most are simply incapable of mustering the necessary changes, if only because too many middle managers' jobs are at stake. So they call their middle managers "POs" or "Scrum Masters" and wonder why their version of Scrum sucks.

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    azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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