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Ben Cates

@bencates.bsky.social

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Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 36m

So the trick to being a Linux person is wanting a computer to satisfy the same niche in your life that other people fill with lovably neurotic pets.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2h

The value of democracy is not, in any meaningful sense, that it selects better leaders than other systems. The chief virtue is that the metaphorical torches and pitchforks remain metaphorical noticeably more often.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2h

It's literally the "some of you may die" Shrek meme.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 17h

Why would we suggest vim? It's borderline obsolete at this point. Neovim is a much cleaner and better maintained implementation of the objectively correct editing UI.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

Damage multipliers go a long way. There's a big difference between having to be in the flow for long enough to get 50 clean hits on a boss vs 100, even if each of those hits is just as difficult.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

Lots of the boss fights end up feeling fairly tedious to me once I've learned the patterns. I don't want to be able to faceroll through but I also don't want it to feel like I'm save scumming through an endurance challenge. It'd be nice to be able to individually dial in that sweet spot.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

There's a lot of "the first third that I'm not skill gated out of being unable to experience seems really good". I know that difficulty settings are A Thing in this microgenre, but IMHO Nine Sols proves you can do it without breaking the game.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

It probably is a tiny bit gentler on your immune system to split them up. The root problem is doing a cost/benefit calculation without accepting that the low probability high cost outcomes are real.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

Must... not... post... spoilers.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

It's an interesting mix, moreso than a lot of Metroidvanias, of doling out a few mechanical power upgrades paired with giving you challenges that force you to learn to use the tools you already had in more creative feeling ways.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

It's honestly fairly rational on its own terms to not want to be vaccinated against a disease you have no chance of being exposed to. It's just that that's a much shorter list than most people's anecdotal experience would suggest.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

The general problem with trusting experts is that you have to actually trust them. Knowing how to solve your problem is a package deal with knowing whether solving your problem is feasible and if so how much doing so will cost.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

It's extraordinarily good at solving the parts of your problem that are also part of everyone else's problems.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

While we're listing possibilities it's worth including "accurate summary of what his advisors are reporting".

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

Just because evolution can't figure out how to spin a wheel doesn't mean we can't.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

I understand why they ultimately made the changes they did but I suspect the early version where River got most of Takemura's early scenes would've played a lot better.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 1d

Does track with how neuroplasticity seems to indicate that nearly any 10% is expendable provided the rest is in good working order.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2d

I'm a guy with a glider PFP. I've installed Gentoo. On multiple occasions. For fun. I have a recreational soldering kit in my office. I get it.

I'm not the median end user and any vision premised on making me the median end user is a fools errand. We have to engineer for how people really engage.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2d

Labor and, to a lesser degree, quality. I could, say, spin up an email server pretty easily but even if I poured as much time and energy into it as could reasonably be expected it wouldn't be as clean of an experience as what I get from ${faangCo}. They have inherent economies of scale that I don't.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2d

That probably means we should be self hosting a hell of a lot more services than we do currently, but on a technical level there's usually not much preventing us from doing that now aside from it being a ton of extra work. It's a consumer demand problem as much as anything else.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2d

Autonomy is a weird framework when so much of modern compute is situations where you're a guest on my damn server and I have the autonomy to tell you what the rules you're gonna follow are. Self-hosting and API usage are very different, even if a lot of modern UX insists on blurring the lines.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2d

More to the point, the world is chockablock with people who aren't really paying much attention.

I don't think the built environment should be entirely cleared of sharp objects. I do think it's humane to put the sharp objects behind barriers that force you to be fully present before removing them.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2d

Childproofing my physical home for a literal toddler has, admittedly, changed some of the ways I think about security tradeoffs.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2d

In some sense the ideal is a sort of generalized sudo model where you explicitly can opt out of the safety guardrails, but it's a mild pain in the ass that breaks your flow every single time.

Ben Cates @bencates.bsky.social · 2d

Y'know, I've kind of come around a bit on security/safety theatre. Most people most of the time work within the UX constraints placed in front of them, even when they understand that circumventing them would be possible. That's not the only threat model, but it is a lot of low hanging fruit.