squaresinger

Better north of antarctica than north of arctica.

The problem is that people just accept a continuous drop in quality.

I once had a conversation with an old woman who told me that it would be unheard off for someone with some level of status or self respect to wear ill-fitting off-the-shelf clothing back in the 50s, and nowadays even TV news anchors are wearing cheap off-the-shelf suits.

The same thing applies for everything. When I was a kid, the transition from small, independently owned shops with qualified stuff who'd give you proper consultation to chain stores in malls was just under way. Old people would complain all day that the staff in chain stores had no clue about the stuff they were selling. And yet everyone went to the chain stores in the mall because they had a bigger selection and were cheaper.

And now there's the same thing happening with the chain stores in malls getting replaced by online shopping, and now not only is there no one to consult you on your purchase, you can't even trust the product listings because they are riddled with errors.

For a while you could trust reviews, but that time is long gone, but still everyone just happily shops and consumes away, because online shopping is cheaper, there's a bigger selection and it's more convenient.

The same process is happening all the time everywhere. Stuff just gets gradually shittier, but we just accept it, because we get used to it.

Yeah, especially in peace time. When war heats up and resources get scarce, you use the cheapest thing that does the job. But in peace time you feed your military contractors to keep them happy and to keep them researching and developing so you don't lose out on modern technology development.

(For clarification, with "war time" I mean "being in a war that actually threatens the country". The US hasn't been in a war like that for a very long time. They've essentially being in "peace time" while having military training and testing facilities in the middle east.

I don't think so. We've all been happily having discussions with bots online for a long time now. People just don't notice that the person they are writing to isn't a human.

We went from talking in person to talking via computer and no talking with a computer. It's not getting better.

This.

The old forums are often still up, and there are still actual humans there, sometimes. But nobody goes there, because nothing's happening there.

There was this programming forum (blitzforum.de) that I loved when I was a teenager. I spent so much time there and learned so much. I actually attribute a lot of my career to getting an early start there. But the forum is mostly dead nowadays. People still open the page every once in a while, but nobody posts there.

Trolls actually saw themselves as an art from. Everyone else saw them as annoying cretins.

I agree with your comment.

You can not change history for any published changes - like I said, doing so makes your repository incompatible with any other clone.

That's the same on Git.

10 years ago I got into RC planes for a summer, and me and the guy were talking about how ridiculous it is that the milirary is spending so much money on simple drones, when they could just strap some explosives on a cheap hobbyist RC plane/drone for a fraction of the price, and just create swarms of them.

The technology had been widely available for some time already back then. Turns out, it was just lacking a war to do so.

(Just to be clear, we were all anti-war in general, this was just idle speculatiok back then. But if our country was attacked at that time, I'm sure some of us would have ended in a newly created drone force like what happened in the Ukraine.)

Looks like Mercurial can change the history just fine using the hg command. You just need to enable it first.

https://book.mercurial-scm.org/read/changing-history.html

Git can also be configured to disable history rewrites.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2085871/strategy-for-preventing-or-catching-git-history-rewrite

So the difference between git and hg really just comes down to the defaults.

I got weirdly invested in this, and by the end I was kinda happy that it was "just" a bug in the tooling and not anything actually malicious.

At least not coke and buthane. That would have been worse.

I understand what you are saying and I can see why that could be interesting to some.

I myself prefer to go the exact opposite route. I like Mini6 a lot. It's 2 pages of actual rules and a few more with example scenarios, spells, items, skills and enemies. The whole thing is like 30 pages IIRC.

And even better: Dread. You can explain the rules in 2 minutes.