• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Are you trying to argue that laws and treaties are worthless unless enough people abide by them and are willing to enforce them?

    Because, yes, that is the fundamental principle of society: We need to work together to survive and thrive, so we agree on rules by which we work, and enforce them on those that break them. If you disagree with something but take no steps to oppose it, your disagreement is just as worthless as a law nobody cares to enforce.

    So what point are you trying to make here? “If China enforced their claim and nobody stopped them, their claim would be effectively valid”? How is that relevant to the situation if all they’re doing is protesting, but nobody else cares to back them up and they don’t actually take measures to prevent the passage?

    “If I put pineapple on my Pizza and nobody stops or punishes me, it’s legal”? Yes. Congrats. You understood the very basics. Want a sticker?







  • A specialist in one field isn’t necessarily adept in another, and particularly coming from STEM to humanities seems a particularly treacherous transition because so much about humans is based on premises that cold, logical STEM principles just aren’t aware of. That doesn’t mean we STEMs are stupid, we just don’t know just how much there is that we don’t know and would need to know before we can understand, let alone predict human behaviour.

    I know I’ve found myself grossly misjudging human reactions in some case because humans are complex and there are so mamy premises and factors affecting individual behaviour and so many more for collective behaviour that they’re effectively non-deterministic and even predicting the probabilities requires such familiarity with the people or demographics, respectively.

    All that is to say: Yes, I think so too. She’s well-educated, but not above tripping over the same, common stone that many smart people have stumbled on.







  • On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.

    Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.

    On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?

    So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.

    The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…

    (I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)



  • That’s not even correct. I said “not all that useful” and then “next to useless”. Never “absolutely useless”.

    It’s a simplification to condense the core point:
    People say “I like this! This is useful!”
    You say “It’s not all that useful”
    I reply “It is to me”
    You double down “next to useless”
    I say “For you maybe, but for me it’s very useful”

    The essence is that it’s not very useful to you, but it is for others. Yet you steamroll over that (subjective) take to double down on how shitty it is.

    The whole point of this feature is to provide something built into Steam that works without a whole bunch of fiddling like other recording software.

    It does. It’s a built-in utility to record gameplay clips. That’s neat.

    It currently fails at that on Linux because the implementation of it is half-assed.

    It’s lacking one feature, yes, but I’d not call that a failure if plenty of people seem fine without it.

    That is my position.

    Rich, coming from “You’re wrong when you say it’s useful”.

    End of conversation.

    “I’m right, you’re wrong and I refuse to hear otherwise”

    Alright then. I figured you were genuinely confused and thought maybe seeing the other perspective could help clear things up. Guess you’d have to actually look for that to work.


  • Your opinion is posited as an absolute: “This is useless” suggests you consider it useless in general. People arguing otherwise are challenging that general claim by providing examples where it can be useful.

    They’re not invalidsting your subjective perception that it’s not particularly useful for your primary use case. In fact, I’ve seen explicit acknowledgements that your use case will require different tools. If anything, your doubling down on the assertion that it is useless invalidates those that do find it useful.

    For contrast, consider the more personal phrasing “This isn’t really useful to me, because I generally clip conversations and it doesn’t capture my mic.” This both respects that other people may find it useful and makes it clear why you don’t.


    Aside from the semantics, you might be able to work around the issue by customising your audio setup, which is something I don’t know if Windows lets you. I don’t know what exactly it captures and what audio server you use, but if it can be pointed at a specific virtual device, you might be able to loop back your audio input to that device and use a combine-stream to route your other audio both to that virtual and your actual pysical output device.


  • Are you talking about in-game voice chat, that should be available to the game to record, or a third party tool that probably shouldn’t? If the game doesn’t need your mic, it shouldn’t access it; if it doesn’t access it, it’s not part of the gameplay recording.

    That doesn’t mean it’s “not all that useful”, Linux or otherwise, just because it doesn’t cover your specific use case. I can definitely see myself using it to record brief clips - on linux - without having to run OBS in the background.