Nah that guy gives me bad vibes-- don't like him.
I like Milton Friedman, though.
First, no alternative is required for something to be unacceptable to continue
Yes there is! This system is at least feeding most people in most countries. I refuse to say that "because this system is not ideal, we must destroy the system which is feeding billions of people without an alternative in mind". Are you arguing that it should be okay for people to die?!?
Please explain-- what gymnastics?
Wikipedia definition of capitalism:
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
If slaves don't have private ownership.... then they're not living under a capitalist system. Right? What am I missing?
So the outcome from a customer's perspective is that the price fixers have dropped their prices way lower? That's good, no?
And then once the 3rd party goes out of business and they resume their high price.... they're encouraging a new 3rd party to try again. So the prices lower again.
Meaning there's pressure on prices to be lower, which is what we want. Therefore, good system.
Of course, I'm not saying it's ideal. But is there a better system?
It’s not a side effect, it’s an effect. It’s a feature. If companies could, they would externalize everything they could. Including paying workers as little as they can (or not at all, see slavery), or externalizing the health problems with the work (see radium girls), etc, etc,
Right, but they can't! That's the whole point of capitalism! Slavery is the pinnacle of anti-capitalism, because slaves don't own their own capital! It's explicitly not capitalist.
That would be the last time I moved, so about a year ago.
Also, I happen to very much like my landlord. This is because they're heavily incentivized to address my concerns because otherwise I'd leave a bad review which they care about. Examples are: they fixed a couple of times the laundry facilities were broken, they fixed broken windows a couple of times, etc. etc.
EDIT: Actually, you're making a very good point which I didn't address properly! You're saying that voting gives society more power than prices do. This is a good point, but I disagree. I think prices control production more than any government can, because it allows a much more granular decision-making. For example, every single individual can "vote" that their apartment is too expensive by leaving and finding cheaper places, driving prices down.
Capitalism is defined as a set of rules/regulations that allows people to own the capital that they produce. Regulatory capture is when an organization gains control of the regulations to subvert other people's ability to own their capital. This is why I say that the more regulatory capture that happens, the less capitalist the system.
And yes! Capitalist systems heavily incentivize caring about money and nothing else. But the system also makes it so that when people act purely selfishly for money, that it results in good outcomes for everyone. That's why I think it's a good system.
For example, if organizations price-fix, it heavily encourages a third party to undercut them. If they try to prevent the third party by legal means, then that's not capitalism.
That's an interesting perspective! Care to share some data?
Personally, I think the fact that the median person in capitalist nations has enough food to eat is a pretty big plus! I don't think that's been the case throughout most of history.
Thanks for engaging with me so politely!
“Capitalism” is a huge umbrella term so means many different things to many different people. And as an extension of this, a lot of the things that are underneath that umbrella are inarguably … extremely bad. Environmental devastation, the oppression and wage slavery of the third world, the existence of multi-million-dollar worthless baubles when people still die from lack of affordable health care… Even if you’re very pro-capitalist it would be tough to argue that all aspects of capitalism are great for humans and humanity. Capitalism optimizes for economic performance, not human happiness.
You're right! But I don't see how the bad things are the fault of capitalism. Capitalism is a tool intended to fix these very problems!
Environmental devastation is an externality because the rules haven't been defined properly-- if the rules of capital ownership around environmental concerns were clarified (through some system of carbon emission limitations and carbon credits), then I'm sure capitalism could optimize for a good environmental outcome. A bad thing, to be sure, but not the fault of capitalism.
Oppression/wage-slavery in the third world happens mostly in nations that are the least capitalist. Also, the capitalist system works for the benefit of the country that establishes it. I believe this is how it should be. Other nations can simply block all trade if they want to remain unaffected, but shouldn't be surprised if the capitalist nation simply takes advantage of their non-optimal economic choices. Again, a huge problem, but not the fault of capitalism.
Mis-allocation of resources is the very problem that capitalism is best at solving. I'd argue that systems like public healthcare are hampering the ability of capitalism to solve these problems.
Also a lot of people’s only experience with oppression is through capitalism. Here, I am talking about the alienation of workers from their labor (or, put more plainly, “shitty jobs”). It’s pretty bad for the soul to work as a wage slave in Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse #143249 earning $14/hour while bosses so removed from you they may as well be on another planet earn roughly $14,000,000/minute for doing nothing more than sitting in an office for 2 hours a day and sexually harassing their hot secretaries. Obviously there’s more to it than this for those of us who are more pro-capitalism, but I think it’s easy to see how some people get very angry about these conditions very rapidly.
Agreed-- I've been in that situation, and understand that it doesn't seem fair. But were any other systems better? It was worse to be a farmer owned by your local feudal lord, no?
Personally, despite these problems, I am more pro-capitalist than not, but it is because I experience (and have experienced) a fair amount of non-capitalism-related-oppression.
Ah I see I may have been preaching to the choir here, I apologize. Your perspective is appreciated, regardless! Thanks for your input!
Quoting my reply to a similar sentiment: (link here: https://programming.dev/comment/1167202)
I’m really not trying to be a dick, but uhh… Look around? The world is literally on fire and efforts to put it out or even to stop pouring more gas on it are put down at every turn by capitalists in the never ending pursuit of more money for it’s own sake.
Well I mean it’s unclear to me that we’re much worse than previous points in history. I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one, or either of the world wars, or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.
I sympathize (and agree) with the belief that the current system isn’t serving everyone, much less serving everyone equally. But the world is a complicated thing and we’ve got >7 billion people to feed! I think we should be very careful before deciding “yeah it’s time to tear down the existing systems and hope that there are better systems out there”. It’s easier to make things worse than to make things better.
I mean... it has, hasn't it? It's worked pretty well for the last ~200 years. Even in China, the successful parts are the capitalist parts.
Yes, it's costing us in terms of environmental sustainability. This is an externality which can be (but hasn't been) addressed. A failure of government, not a failure of capitalism.
Capitalism isn’t you buying a tool and using it. It’s buying the 3D printer, paying people to design and build widgets, paying people to sell the widgets, then taking most of the money for yourself.
Yes, I agree that this should be possible. Of course, if I'm taking too much money, the capitalist system will encourage my competitors to defeat me. Meaning that there a dis-incentive in place for doing bad/selfish things. Sounds like a pretty good system!
I hate that I can work (with others) to build a company from the ground up and have nothing to show for it, because the owner is using us to fund his lifestyle. I hate that landlords can buy up all the homes, driving up the cost to the point no one can afford one, then rent them out and sit on their ass while I pay their mortgage. That’s capitalism. People profiting off of ownership. It inevitably ends with some people owning almost everything, and the majority owning nothing.
Yes I agree! I hate these things too. But capitalism doesn't prohibit every bad thing. Bad things can still happen under capitalism. I'm just saying that such things are harder to do under capitalism than any other system. For example, you mention landlords have to buy up every home before they can take advantage of you through their monopoly. That's way harder than other systems, where the government already owns all the homes, and can simply drive up the cost whenever they want :/
Yes! I'm aware of externalities, and agree that these are a side-effect of capitalism. My belief is that externalities are failures of the governing bodies to correctly define the "rules of ownership". Once that's done, the externality is resolved. This is an ongoing effort that's necessary to properly use capitalism.
In my opinion, saying "capitalism is bad because of externalities" is like saying "I used an electric saw without installing the safties and it had bad side effects".
Quoting my response (link: https://programming.dev/comment/1167093) for how I believe that environmental concerns are an externality that can be addressed here:
What is your general plan for what we should do when we can see that something we currently do and rely on will have to stop in the near future? Not that we will have to choose to stop it, but that it will stop because of something being depleted or no longer possible.
This is an interesting question! I’m parsing it to mean “how can the current problems be solved within a capitalist system?”. It’s a good question, and I don’t have a 100% guaranteed answer. But I don’t see that any capitalism alternative has a good answer either, so still I don’t see how capitalism is the “bad guy”.
In any case, my answer is this: A side effect of all of capitalist driven efficient production is that the environment is harmed. Here, I think the governing bodies have failed in their roles: their role is to define what “capital” means and rules of ownership. They haven’t done that for environmental concerns, which is why capitalism isn’t taking it into account properly. My desired solution is that the government could define a “total amount of carbon emissions” that would be allowed by the country as a whole, and then distribute transferrable carbon credits on the open market. This turns “rights to emit carbon” into a form of capital, and capitalism will do what it do and optimize for it.
In essence, I believe that governments have done a bad job of using the tool of capitalism to solve the problem of pollution.
Quoting my reply to a similar sentiment: (link here: https://programming.dev/comment/1167202)
I’m really not trying to be a dick, but uhh… Look around? The world is literally on fire and efforts to put it out or even to stop pouring more gas on it are put down at every turn by capitalists in the never ending pursuit of more money for it’s own sake.
Well I mean it’s unclear to me that we’re much worse than previous points in history. I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one, or either of the world wars, or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.
I sympathize (and agree) with the belief that the current system isn’t serving everyone, much less serving everyone equally. But the world is a complicated thing and we’ve got >7 billion people to feed! I think we should be very careful before deciding “yeah it’s time to tear down the existing systems and hope that there are better systems out there”. It’s easier to make things worse than to make things better.
Yeah, and if they serve the needs of customers better, then they'll be given encouragement (money). If they don't, they'll be given discouragement (they lose their investments). Seems like a good system, no?
Of course, corruption and regulatory capture subvert this system and are bad for everyone, but those are subversions of capitalism.
I don't see how that's obvious. Can you give me the rationale for this other system?
The rationale for capitalism is, essentially, the information problem. Basically, no one person has enough information to decide where a society's resources should be distributed. An analogy I've heard is: how should society decide whether they should build a bridge or a tunnel (one takes more wood, the other takes more steel)? The answer is extremely complicated, depending on society's capacity for producing wood and steel, people's desire for either a bridge or tunnel, and future expectations of the need for wood or steel. The answer is given by prices, which encode this information and incentivize making the right choice.
If wood is cheaper, it means there's more wood available and no one expects a huge need of wood to pop up soon. The same for steel, labor, land, and all the other resources that go into building a tunnel or bridge. Society is incentivized to build it for the lowest cost, which also happens to be the most efficient way to do it.
Is there a system which can do better? Would love to hear about it.
And also, I'm very scared when people suggest "down with capitalism!" because it's a pretty decent system and I worry about tearing society down unless we have very good reasons to believe it'll be better for it.
I’m really not trying to be a dick, but uhh… Look around? The world is literally on fire and efforts to put it out or even to stop pouring more gas on it are put down at every turn by capitalists in the never ending pursuit of more money for it’s own sake.
Well I mean it's unclear to me that we're much worse than previous points in history. I'd rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one, or either of the world wars, or live under a feudal system where I'm owned by the local lord in his castle.
I sympathize (and agree) with the belief that the current system isn't serving everyone, much less serving everyone equally. But the world is a complicated thing and we've got >7 billion people to feed! I think we should be very careful before deciding "yeah it's time to tear down the existing systems and hope that there are better systems out there". It's easier to make things worse than to make things better.
Let’s start here: are you a capitalist? Do you own any actual capital? I don’t mean your own house or car, that is personal property not private property or anything resembling the means of production.
I guess? I've wanted to start my own business a couple of times. I'm a programmer, so I've toyed with the idea and done some research into creating a few apps which I believe people would find useful, and might pay my bills. I don't own a house or a car-- I live in an apartment in a mid-size US city.
I ask because many people consider themselves capitalist when really they are just workers who happen to own a bit of personal property, and they make themselves essentially useful pawns for actual capitalists. And, if you’re not an actual capitalist, why are you so pro capitalism?
I'm guessing you'd consider me a pawn, but I don't. I fit your description of owning a bit of personal property, and being a worker. I've worked for some large companies in the past which are supposedly the "actual capitalists". But I promise they don't give two shits about social good (or social bad). They are just desperately trying to make products that people want to buy. In my view, it's a pretty good system which constrains huge organizations like Apple to making devices, when the alternative is that they could be setting up their own governments.
Because it’s objectively unsustainable?
I don't think we know that. Indeed, what we're currently doing as a species to the environment is unsustainable. But it's not clear to me how it's the capitalism that's the unsustainable part. My understanding is that capitalism is a system which allows us, as a society, to produce things very efficiently, and to distribute resources. It hasn't failed in that role, has it?
I don’t really get what it even means to be “pro capitalist” at this point.
I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to. Or if I wanted to hire some dude on fiverr to write some music to my screenplay, I should be able to. This is capitalism. Do you disagree? This is what confuses me, and why I asked the question-- on my side of the fence, I don't really understand what it means to be anti-capitalist. Hence why I asked.
We know, for a fact, that capitalism will lead to disaster if we keep doing what we’re doing. Do you disagree with that? Or do you not care?
Well no need to be rude! Of course I care! And yes, we're headed towards disaster in terms of the environment. But I don't understand, like I said above, how capitalism is causing it and how not-capitalism would solve it. We have 7 billion people on the planet and they all need to be fed. Capitalism is the most efficient system we know of to create and allocate resources. Should we... move to a less efficient system? Wouldn't that be worse for the environment? How does that solve anything? This is my confusion.
What is your general plan for what we should do when we can see that something we currently do and rely on will have to stop in the near future? Not that we will have to choose to stop it, but that it will stop because of something being depleted or no longer possible.
This is an interesting question! I'm parsing it to mean "how can the current problems be solved within a capitalist system?". It's a good question, and I don't have a 100% guaranteed answer. But I don't see that any capitalism alternative has a good answer either, so still I don't see how capitalism is the "bad guy".
In any case, my answer is this: A side effect of all of capitalist driven efficient production is that the environment is harmed. Here, I think the governing bodies have failed in their roles: their role is to define what "capital" means and rules of ownership. They haven't done that for environmental concerns, which is why capitalism isn't taking it into account properly. My desired solution is that the government could define a "total amount of carbon emissions" that would be allowed by the country as a whole, and then distribute transferrable carbon credits on the open market. This turns "rights to emit carbon" into a form of capital, and capitalism will do what it do and optimize for it.
In essence, I believe that governments have done a bad job of using the tool of capitalism to solve the problem of pollution.
If you imagine that we’re trying to find the best long-term system for humanity, and that the possible solutions exist on a curve on an X/Y plane, and we want to find the lowest point on the function, capitalism is very clearly a local minima
Great analogy! But.... have we seen a lower minimum? What's the rationale behind that system? That's my question
Hi all,
I'm seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I'm wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I'm pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.
If this isn't the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I'm happy to take this somewhere else.
Cheers!
My point is that any meaningful capital is directly tied to resource usage. Our ability to produce energy directly depends on our ability to mine resources to build power plants and maintain them. Saying that we can increase energy production infinitely is reductive beyond any meaning, it’s like a physics problem about a perfectly spherical cow.
Not at all! To use real examples to avoid spherical cows:
Used to be that you needed wood to generate energy. Then coal (which is an order of magnitude better). Then oil (another order of magnitude). Then solar. Then fission. Then (hopefully) fusion. Then who knows what. At each step, we've taken something which previously wasn't considered a resource at all and used it to generate exponentially more and more energy. There's no limit to how often we can do this-- things which were previously not resources become resources once we know how to use them.
Another example is food production. I saw a graph recently-- if I find it I'll edit this message to include it, but it showed how it used to be that we needed 100% of our population dedicated to food production. Now it's less than 1%. Meaning that 1 person is producing enough food for 100 people. Incredible.
These examples (and many more) show that our ability to produce things are not subject to limitations of natural resources, because natural resources aren't limited. There's enough energy coming out of the sun to be infinite, for all intents and purposes.
Hey folks, was just thinking that one of the major benefits of forums is that it stores and indexes knowledge for the rest of time. I still regularly look up stackoverflow questions written years ago.
Are lemmy instances (such as https://programming.dev) going to be similarly indexed?
If there's been no thought on how to implement this, I was thinking that meta tags could be used to indicate to search engines that homegrown content (i.e. content that belongs to your own instance) should be indexed while federated content (i.e. content on your instance that was federated from other instances) should remain non-indexed.
That way, searching the title of this post on Google will only lead to a single result on the single instance that owns it.
Thoughts?
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/223663
> Hey folks!
>
> I've noticed that it's often difficult for newcomers to git to understand what the heck is happening and how the commands work.
>
> Here's a flowchart that has helped me explain things in the past, and (more than once) folks have asked me for a copy of it to use as a cheat sheet. Hope it's helpful!
I’ve crossposted this in multiple places where I think it’s relevant. Hope y’all get some use out of it too! (Mods, please let me know if I should take it down)
EDIT: added non-transparent image, hopefully more visible for dark mode users.
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/240893
> The crowd went silent when the human entered the bar. You didn’t see many of their kind here. He grumbled, uncomfortable for the attention, walked up to the counter and signaled for a mug. > > That’s when the whispers started. Mayfly. Young one. The walking dead. He was happy to down his ale. > > You see, this wasn’t your average bar. This was a speakeasy, one of the few scattered across the world where the elves and the dwarves shared a drink. Where the seraphim flirted with yokai, while fae fluttered from table to table. Where the orcs played chess at their own table, practically drowning themselves in ale. Where seldom a human showed his face. > > They aren’t rare, of course, humans. No, quite the opposite. They simply didn’t live long enough. Speakeasies are illegal, you see – no self respecting elf could be seen drinking with a dwarf, or dare I say, an orc – so they’re not exactly advertised. The humans who helped found these establishments had long since died. They’re mayflies, alive just barely long enough to be young, and dead practically as they learned to walk. The new humans since simply hadn’t heard of the place. > > “There you are, Arthur! It’s been a long time since I saw you last!” > > The bar quieted once again as she walked in. Drea, high elf, and uncontested beauty. Many pairs of eyes tracked her as she comfortably made her way to the counter, where the human was nursing his second drink. > > “Has it been that long? Seems like only yesterday,” he said. > > A second passed before he cracked a smile. > > “But it is nice to see you again, Drea, after all these years. I was beginning to get bored.” > She laughed, embraced him, and for a while they simply enjoyed each other, rocking slightly as they hugged. > > The chatter in the bar changed as the pair caught up. The beautiful, stately high elf laughing as the human told some story, snorting as the ale went up her nose. She was clearly smitten, and many of the larger orcs and stronger dwarves, now more than a little intoxicated, took exception to such a lady falling for a human. > > “No!” she was saying between laughing spurts, “Surely Matt told you it was a bad idea!” > > “Was it, though? I’m telling you, my arms are pretty long, and the River doesn’t have any– Ah, can I help you gentlemen?” > > A dwarf had approached the counter in the company of a rather large orc, both wearing faces that shouted “I’m stricken by her beauty, but I don’t want her to know it.” > “Nae, nae youngster,” said the dwarf. “I’d more like if ye lady friend here’d care for another drink! So’thing stronger, maybe, with some flavor!” > > “Aye,” the orc boomed, “something stronger!” > > Arthur quietly admitted to himself, he was impressed with the orc’s bulging muscles as he flexed. Drea, apparently, wasn’t. > > “Oh quiet yourselves, my friends. I’m afraid you’ll have to drink with each other. I am quite taken.” > > A fist slammed hard on the counter, “By the human?! What can this young thing do that I can’t! I can lift a mountain!” > > Arthur believed him. He tapped the orc on the shoulder to get his attention, and felt the rock of his muscle. > > “Aye, my friend,” he said, “taken by me. I’m sure there are others here that would be more receptive of your charm?” > > “Nae,” said the dwarf, “I wan' te know what makes ye better than us who been buildin' when ye gran’father still be suckling milk!” > > “Ah but we can so easily tell you,” said Drea. > > Arthur wasn’t so sure. “We can?” > > “Sure, sure! Please continue your story.” > > He still wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but no one ever had to prompt him twice to tell a story! He swigged his ale and cleared his throat, warming back up to the tale. > > “Aye, so there I was, at the top of the cliff by the bank of the Gaiden’s Blood River with my friend Matt. We were looking at the River down below. I’ve been swimming in it, and it’s gorgeous. It’s exactly the perfect temperature and it’s so deep and wide you can swim for hours. I really did feel like a swim– it was getting rather boring up top.” > > Eyes started widening as Redbeard and Grukk began to realize where this was going. Gaiden’s Blood River, as you probably know, is the largest river in the world. As the story goes, when the blood rushed out from the god Gaiden’s wound, the force of it cut such a deep swathe in the earth that its banks are huge cliffs. How the River changed from blood to water is a story for another time, but the cliffs are so high that a dive would surely kill even the most sturdy dwarf. > > Surely he didn’t. > > “Surely ye didn’t” > > “Jump? Of course not! I’ve no wish for death. See, we have these things called parachutes – large cuts of fabric, as large as the largest dining table in the largest hall, that catch the air and slow your fall. But I didn’t have a parachute.” > > Eyes widened again. Such an invention didn’t exist among the dwarves or the orcs, and neither Redbeard nor Grukk could think of a more reckless, irresponsible, unsafe thing to do than to fall freely from the sky with nothing but fabric to stop you. Didn’t this human have better things to do? > > “I didn’t have a parachute–” > > The pair sighed in relief. > > “–but our tents were made of the same fabric, so I told Matt to hold my beer, and I cut the damn things into wings from my wrists to my ankles. See, I’ve got pretty long arms, and I figure my wingspan would be enough to catch enough air that I could glide down to the River.” > > At this point, both sets of eyes were as wide as dinner plates, and Drea was quite amused by the rapt attention with which they were absorbed. She could hardly blame them. > > “An' it worked?” ventured Redbeard the dwarf. Drea, too, was curious. > > “Worked?! My friend, it was amazing! It felt like flying! I didn’t even bother swimming! Soon as I landed, I climbed the two-day path back up the cliff and I jumped again!” > Drea was the first to break the silence. > > “You really are something, aren’t you, Arthur.” > > “Human,” said the orc, “you are lucky to be alive. What drove you to such madness? Why threaten your life?” > > “Aye. Ar' ye mad, ye dumb bastard?” > > “No, not mad. Just bored.” > > “Bored?” > > Neither man had ever heard of the term. It must have been some sort of madness to drive a human – already with so short a life – to commit to such a danger so readily. They glanced blankly at each other, clearly confused. > > “What’s bored?” they said in unison. > > “If I may,” said Drea. “I can explain.” > > Arthur gestured for her to go ahead, as he drank his ale. > > “You see, humans, and especially Arthur here, occasionally enter a state of mind that drives them to do ridiculous things. I daresay it’s a kind of madness, but we’ve been arguing about that for ages. There is a very interesting cause to this madness to which all humans succumb.” > > She waited a beat, and watched as both men were swallowing nervously. > “It’s caused by a lack of threats in their immediate environment. Humans crave threats, you see. Threats to overcome. And that is why, gentlemen, I stand by his side over yours.” > > Thus leaving both men impressed, Drea grabbed Arthur by the arm, and they walked out of the bar together. > > “You are extraordinary, you know,” she said, “I’m very glad I met you. You must’ve been mad to approach one such as me, a high elf, so many years ago.” > > He kissed her then, smiled, and said “No, not mad, my dear. Just bored.” >
The crowd went silent when the human entered the bar. You didn’t see many of their kind here. He grumbled, uncomfortable for the attention, walked up to the counter and signaled for a mug.
That’s when the whispers started. Mayfly. Young one. The walking dead. He was happy to down his ale.
You see, this wasn’t your average bar. This was a speakeasy, one of the few scattered across the world where the elves and the dwarves shared a drink. Where the seraphim flirted with yokai, while fae fluttered from table to table. Where the orcs played chess at their own table, practically drowning themselves in ale. Where seldom a human showed his face.
They aren’t rare, of course, humans. No, quite the opposite. They simply didn’t live long enough. Speakeasies are illegal, you see – no self respecting elf could be seen drinking with a dwarf, or dare I say, an orc – so they’re not exactly advertised. The humans who helped found these establishments had long since died. They’re mayflies, alive just barely long enough to be young, and dead practically as they learned to walk. The new humans since simply hadn’t heard of the place.
“There you are, Arthur! It’s been a long time since I saw you last!”
The bar quieted once again as she walked in. Drea, high elf, and uncontested beauty. Many pairs of eyes tracked her as she comfortably made her way to the counter, where the human was nursing his second drink.
“Has it been that long? Seems like only yesterday,” he said.
A second passed before he cracked a smile.
“But it is nice to see you again, Drea, after all these years. I was beginning to get bored.” She laughed, embraced him, and for a while they simply enjoyed each other, rocking slightly as they hugged.
The chatter in the bar changed as the pair caught up. The beautiful, stately high elf laughing as the human told some story, snorting as the ale went up her nose. She was clearly smitten, and many of the larger orcs and stronger dwarves, now more than a little intoxicated, took exception to such a lady falling for a human.
“No!” she was saying between laughing spurts, “Surely Matt told you it was a bad idea!”
“Was it, though? I’m telling you, my arms are pretty long, and the River doesn’t have any– Ah, can I help you gentlemen?”
A dwarf had approached the counter in the company of a rather large orc, both wearing faces that shouted “I’m stricken by her beauty, but I don’t want her to know it.” “Nae, nae youngster,” said the dwarf. “I’d more like if ye lady friend here’d care for another drink! So’thing stronger, maybe, with some flavor!”
“Aye,” the orc boomed, “something stronger!”
Arthur quietly admitted to himself, he was impressed with the orc’s bulging muscles as he flexed. Drea, apparently, wasn’t.
“Oh quiet yourselves, my friends. I’m afraid you’ll have to drink with each other. I am quite taken.”
A fist slammed hard on the counter, “By the human?! What can this young thing do that I can’t! I can lift a mountain!”
Arthur believed him. He tapped the orc on the shoulder to get his attention, and felt the rock of his muscle.
“Aye, my friend,” he said, “taken by me. I’m sure there are others here that would be more receptive of your charm?”
“Nae,” said the dwarf, “I wan' te know what makes ye better than us who been buildin' when ye gran’father still be suckling milk!”
“Ah but we can so easily tell you,” said Drea.
Arthur wasn’t so sure. “We can?”
“Sure, sure! Please continue your story.”
He still wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but no one ever had to prompt him twice to tell a story! He swigged his ale and cleared his throat, warming back up to the tale.
“Aye, so there I was, at the top of the cliff by the bank of the Gaiden’s Blood River with my friend Matt. We were looking at the River down below. I’ve been swimming in it, and it’s gorgeous. It’s exactly the perfect temperature and it’s so deep and wide you can swim for hours. I really did feel like a swim– it was getting rather boring up top.”
Eyes started widening as Redbeard and Grukk began to realize where this was going. Gaiden’s Blood River, as you probably know, is the largest river in the world. As the story goes, when the blood rushed out from the god Gaiden’s wound, the force of it cut such a deep swathe in the earth that its banks are huge cliffs. How the River changed from blood to water is a story for another time, but the cliffs are so high that a dive would surely kill even the most sturdy dwarf.
Surely he didn’t.
“Surely ye didn’t”
“Jump? Of course not! I’ve no wish for death. See, we have these things called parachutes – large cuts of fabric, as large as the largest dining table in the largest hall, that catch the air and slow your fall. But I didn’t have a parachute.”
Eyes widened again. Such an invention didn’t exist among the dwarves or the orcs, and neither Redbeard nor Grukk could think of a more reckless, irresponsible, unsafe thing to do than to fall freely from the sky with nothing but fabric to stop you. Didn’t this human have better things to do?
“I didn’t have a parachute–”
The pair sighed in relief.
“–but our tents were made of the same fabric, so I told Matt to hold my beer, and I cut the damn things into wings from my wrists to my ankles. See, I’ve got pretty long arms, and I figure my wingspan would be enough to catch enough air that I could glide down to the River.”
At this point, both sets of eyes were as wide as dinner plates, and Drea was quite amused by the rapt attention with which they were absorbed. She could hardly blame them.
“An' it worked?” ventured Redbeard the dwarf. Drea, too, was curious.
“Worked?! My friend, it was amazing! It felt like flying! I didn’t even bother swimming! Soon as I landed, I climbed the two-day path back up the cliff and I jumped again!” Drea was the first to break the silence.
“You really are something, aren’t you, Arthur.”
“Human,” said the orc, “you are lucky to be alive. What drove you to such madness? Why threaten your life?”
“Aye. Ar' ye mad, ye dumb bastard?”
“No, not mad. Just bored.”
“Bored?”
Neither man had ever heard of the term. It must have been some sort of madness to drive a human – already with so short a life – to commit to such a danger so readily. They glanced blankly at each other, clearly confused.
“What’s bored?” they said in unison.
“If I may,” said Drea. “I can explain.”
Arthur gestured for her to go ahead, as he drank his ale.
“You see, humans, and especially Arthur here, occasionally enter a state of mind that drives them to do ridiculous things. I daresay it’s a kind of madness, but we’ve been arguing about that for ages. There is a very interesting cause to this madness to which all humans succumb.”
She waited a beat, and watched as both men were swallowing nervously. “It’s caused by a lack of threats in their immediate environment. Humans crave threats, you see. Threats to overcome. And that is why, gentlemen, I stand by his side over yours.”
Thus leaving both men impressed, Drea grabbed Arthur by the arm, and they walked out of the bar together.
“You are extraordinary, you know,” she said, “I’m very glad I met you. You must’ve been mad to approach one such as me, a high elf, so many years ago.”
He kissed her then, smiled, and said “No, not mad, my dear. Just bored.”
Thought this might interest the general programming community as well! If you've ever been interested in the different types of ways websites can render themselves....
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/223726
> Here’s a quick summary of the different ways you can load a website. > > SSR (Server Side Rendering): The classic way. Browser makes request to server, server creates an HTML/CSS/JS bundle, sends it to browser. > > CSR (Client Side Rendering): The vanilla React way. Browser makes a request to server, server sends back JS code which runs on browser, creating the HTML/CSS and triggering browser to further make requests to load all assets. > > SSG (Static Site Generation): The “gotta go fast” way. Server creates an HTML/CSS/JS bundle for web pages at build time. When browser requests a page, the server just sends this pre-built bundle back. > > ISG (Incremental Static Generation): The “imma cache stuff” way. Server may create some HTML/CSS/JS bundles for web pages at build time. When the browser requests a page, the server sends this pre-built bundle back. If a pre-built bundle doesn’t exist, it falls back to CSR while it builds the bundle for future requests. The server may auto-rebuild bundles after certain time intervals to support changing content. > > ESR (Edge Slice Re-rendering): The “cutting edge, let's get latency down so low it's practically in hell” way. Server does SSG and tells the CDN to cache the bundles. Then, it instructs the CDN to update the bundle in the event that page content needs to change. > > In order of performance, usually: > (SSG = ISG = ESR) > CSR > SSR > > In order of SEO: > (SSR = SSG = ISG = ESR) > CSR > > In order of correctness (will users be shown “stale” information?): > (SSR = CSR) > ESR > ISG > SSG >
Here’s a quick summary of the different ways you can load a website.
SSR (Server Side Rendering): The classic way. Browser makes request to server, server creates an HTML/CSS/JS bundle, sends it to browser.
CSR (Client Side Rendering): The vanilla React way. Browser makes a request to server, server sends back JS code which runs on browser, creating the HTML/CSS and triggering browser to further make requests to load all assets.
SSG (Static Site Generation): The “gotta go fast” way. Server creates an HTML/CSS/JS bundle for web pages at build time. When browser requests a page, the server just sends this pre-built bundle back.
ISG (Incremental Static Generation): The “imma cache stuff” way. Server may create some HTML/CSS/JS bundles for web pages at build time. When the browser requests a page, the server sends this pre-built bundle back. If a pre-built bundle doesn’t exist, it falls back to CSR while it builds the bundle for future requests. The server may auto-rebuild bundles after certain time intervals to support changing content.
ESR (Edge Slice Re-rendering): The “cutting edge, let's get latency down so low it's practically in hell” way. Server does SSG and tells the CDN to cache the bundles. Then, it instructs the CDN to update the bundle in the event that page content needs to change.
In order of performance, usually: (SSG = ISG = ESR) > CSR > SSR
In order of SEO: (SSR = SSG = ISG = ESR) > CSR
In order of correctness (will users be shown “stale” information?): (SSR = CSR) > ESR > ISG > SSG
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/223663
> Hey folks!
>
> I've noticed that it's often difficult for newcomers to git to understand what the heck is happening and how the commands work.
>
> Here's a flowchart that has helped me explain things in the past, and (more than once) folks have asked me for a copy of it to use as a cheat sheet. Hope it's helpful!
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/223663
> Hey folks!
>
> I've noticed that it's often difficult for newcomers to git to understand what the heck is happening and how the commands work.
>
> Here's a flowchart that has helped me explain things in the past, and (more than once) folks have asked me for a copy of it to use as a cheat sheet. Hope it's helpful!
Hey folks!
I've noticed that it's often difficult for newcomers to git to understand what the heck is happening and how the commands work.
Here's a flowchart that has helped me explain things in the past, and (more than once) folks have asked me for a copy of it to use as a cheat sheet. Hope it's helpful!
Instances, of course, have some bot-mitigation tools which they can use to prevent signups, etc.
However, what’s stopping bots from pretending to be their own brand new instance, and publishing their votes/spam to other instances?
Couldn’t I just spin up a python script to barrage this post, for example, with upvotes?
EDIT: Thanks to @Sibbo@sopuli.xyz ‘s answer, I am convinced that federation is NOT inherently susceptible, and effective mitigations can exist. Whether or not they’re implemented is a separate question, but I’m satisfied that it’s achievable. See my comment here: https://programming.dev/comment/313716
Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.
Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?