Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]

That's a common misconception. But it's not true. Artists will keep making art whether they're paid or not. Anti-piracy rhetoric tends to come from large corporations (AAA game studios, movie studios, publishing houses, record labels) who demand ever-increasing profits, not from the artists themselves. The people who actually do the work to make games, movies, songs, books, whatever are basically never well-paid, instead their corporate overlords make all the profit and pay the people who actually make the art you enjoy as little as they can possibly get away with, just as with every other job under capitalism.

Pirating media does absolutely no harm unless you're pirating from a small indie creator. But if you just want to play the latest Ubisoft slop or watch the latest Marvel movie, go ahead and pirate. The money you'd spend on them go straight into the pockets of wealthy executives, not to the artists who do the work.

This is deeply shitty. If you're right that >80% of people on Lemmy are men (I'm not sure I buy that), then it's even worse to assume everyone is a man. What you're doing is chasing off the already extremely outnumbered non-men. If you want this place to be welcoming to people who aren't men, then you need to change your behavior.

even if there was never any official method of communicating the public will.

What do you mean by this? What kinds of methods do you find acceptable?

There isn't any discussion on political theory

There is absolutely talk of political theory on hexbear. Right now currently there's a bell hooks reading group pinned to our front page. I've learned a surprising amount from my fellow hexbear nerds. People drop reading recommendations constantly and if you make a thread with questions from something you're reading, you'll get engagement and answers. It's pretty cool.

the focus seems geared on one small part of the political spectrum while ignoring other parts entirely.

Yes, we're communists. We aren't going to pretend liberals are worth engaging with politically. That being said, we are a leftist unity instance, so anarchists, MLs, maoists, what have you are all welcome. As long as you're an actual leftist and not some "just vooooote" liberal, you'll probably enjoy hexbear.

Ok, so, first of all, people vote in China. Like, they do. They have elections there. If you're defining democracy as "a system in which people vote", then by that definition China is a democracy. (Full disclosure, I don't think that's a great definition and I don't think China is a "liberal democracy" like the US is, but at this point, we're getting hugely into the weeds of different political systems and I don't think now is exactly the time for that.)

Sure, the hexbear posts that make it to the top of the "all" feed aren't going to be the ones where we're talking theory, they're going to be the ones where we're dunking on people for shitty political opinions. Fair enough. That's true. It doesn't mean that theory posts don't exist, just that they aren't as contentious as dunking posts. That's an indictment of the internet and social media, not of hexbear specifically.

Hexbear does talk about liberals a lot, because they are the political group in power in the west. It's probably worth pointing out here that (american) republicans are, in fact, also liberals. So when we say "libs suck", we are also talking about the american republican party. Republicans are more open than the democrats about their genocidal tendencies, but fundamentally, republicans and democrats believe the same things and act in the same ways. They all think capitalism is cool and good, they just have slightly different feelings about which tactics to employ to keep capitalism as the dominant economic system. So it's not that we ignore republicans, it's just that it can sometimes look that way to people who think "liberal" means "democrat". It never has historically, but because political education in the US is so fucking garbage, a lot of people think "liberals" and "democrats" are synonyms.

And your last point is just wrong. We know that voting is never going to bring about real change, but that doesn't mean we only want to complain. The usual advice is to get organized. It's to find a local group that is on the ground helping people and get involved. Start working to build non-governmental power in your local area. Make connections, talk to people, help people, so that when world events are exploitable, we communists are ready to exploit them. It's fucking hard, especially in the US where our government has spent years and years trying (and mostly succeeding) to make "communism" a dirty word, but just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing. The idea that voting is something that will affect change is laughably incorrect. We could get into it, but let me just point out that the electoral college exists and that in my lifetime there have been not one, but two presidents who have been elected to office even though they lost the popular vote. Does that sound like a system in which the mass of voting people can bring about real change?

You did the right thing. It's a lot of bullshit about "oh, you list your pronouns? You must be fine with corporations selling your data" and then at the end there seems to be a bit of "hexbear showed up late to the fediverse party and is ruining everything", which is, of course, pretty much directly opposite of the truth.

Ok, then try your comment again. What is it that you're saying here?

Radlib isn't one I've heard yet! Would you mind saying a little more about why you think hexbears are radlibs?

I love lemmy, having been here since the very earliest hexbear days. In my view, the devs are doing the best they can. They're a tiny team surviving on grants, trying to produce software that the users, for some reason, expect to have feature parity with reddit, a large corporation with a large paid dev team. It's weird to say the least.

My understanding is that nutomic and dessalines survive solely on that 4000 euros per month, because all of their time goes to lemmy. How do you want them to survive? They need to eat and pay rent, you know. The real world exists and they're humans in it, needing food and sleep and shelter.

It seems to me you want magic. You don't want the lemmy devs to be humans, you want them to be magic coder gods who are infinitely patient, with boundless time and energy. But that's completely unrealistic, you surely must see that, right?

Nah, it's way easier than that: pirate everything, give as much money as you can afford to small creators. Intellectual property is a fuck and the vast majority of any money you pay for media goes directly into the pockets of wealthy executives, not to the people who actually make the media you enjoy.

Ubisoft says it was trying to put an ad for Assassin’s Creed Mirage in the main menu of other Assassin’s Creed games. However, a “technical error” caused the promotion to show up on in-game menus instead. Ubisoft says the issue has since been fixed

So they fully planned to roll out full screen pop up ads, it was just supposed to be in the main menu, not in-game. Fuckers.

This is why I don't play AAA games.

Why do you think piracy is immoral?

Yup! It's what finally made me stop watching twitch (embarrassing, I know, I'm more of a gamer than I like to admit). Minutes of unskippable ads, way too often, and no adblocker could get rid of them. The best I could find was a twitch redirect that would block the ad, but it couldn't give you the content back, so when the ads happened the stream would just go dark until they were over. I decided enough was enough and I haven't gone on twitch since. I'm mentally preparing to do the same with youtube if and when they succeed in breaking adblockers. Which is going to absolutely suck, I watch a lot of youtube, but maybe it'll actually be a good thing and I'll be on the internet less.

When zathura (my beloved) isn't feature-rich enough for my needs I usually turn to okular. Sure, it's kde, so if you're on a pure gnome system you're going to have to install a bunch of dependencies, but if that's not a problem for you, okular is quite good in my experience!

This actually hasn't been true for several patches now. The slur filter is no longer hard-coded, but instead is customizable on an instance-to-instance basis. This change sure doesn't stop people from complaining about the (nonexistent) "hard-coded slur filter" though!

Yes you absolutely can. Here's an extremely trivial example: 6 is not prime, which I can prove by simply saying 6 = 2*3. Bam, I've proved a negative.

But what if we grow? What if more people pirate?

Good. Unlimited piracy on media and software corporations.

I'm a communist first and foremost. Private property is wrong in all its forms, this wrongness is just most obvious when talking about intellectual property, because intellectual property can be easily copied and isn't something physical like the tools in a factory. Of course corporations will always try to clamp down on piracy, they've been trying to do so my entire adult life. It doesn't really matter how many pirates there are, because corporations don't just want money, they want all the money. If even one person pirates, corporations will try to make piracy difficult.

I guess I fundamentally disagree with your statement that "The world can handle a stable population of pirates." I don't think that's a meaningful statement. It's not like there's some "carrying capacity" for piracy after which point the intellectual property ecosystem will tip out of equilibrium and cause pirates to become an endangered species.

I agree we probably wouldn't get any more Assassin's Creed or Deadpool and Wolverine. Very likely those kinds of media would die out in a world where no one pays for media. I have a hard time saying that's a bad thing. We'd instead have more weird little indie projects, which are so, so much better in every way. But sure, if you feel morally queasy about "stealing" (it's not stealing, it's copying) from giant corporations who make artistically bankrupt crap, I'm not going to convince you otherwise, and it would be a waste of my time to try and do so.

Maybe I should point out here that sometimes I do go out of my way to pay for media (especially games) when I don't have to. I bought Dwarf Fortress on Steam, even though the devs give it away for free and I donated to them a couple times before they released it on Steam. They are living off the money people pay for Dwarf Fortress and I'm so glad they're able to do so. I also bought my sister a copy of Pathologic 2 she has never (and probably will never) play because I bought my copy on sale and loved it and felt bad that I hadn't paid full price to a dev team that put their heart and soul into the game and had it sell abysmally for some reason. (Side note, play Pathologic 2, it's good!) I bought the Celeste soundtrack from Lena Raine's bandcamp because I love it so much, even though it's extremely easy to find and I've actually lost access to my bandcamp account.

I guess I'm saying there's nuance here and I like it when actual artists who make good art are paid. It's just that in our current society, buying a DVD or paying for Netflix or paying for Xbox gamepass or anything like that doesn't benefit the artists, the vast majority of any money you spend to acquire media goes straight to wealthy executives and I just don't see anything wrong with not giving them more money than they're already getting.

Sure, that's extremely fair! Those qt dependencies are no joke! How do you feel about Evince (apparently now called gnome document viewer)? It seems to be the standard gtk pdf viewer, but I've never used it, so I actually don't know what it's features are like. It's a heavier application than mupdf (of course), but at least you don't need to install qt to use it!

You are a disgusting human. I'm actually appalled reading the shit you're writing. It's not often that I read such concentrated evil. You don't think death and servitude cause suffering? You think domesticated animals choose to stay in factory farms? You're a fucking ghoul.

Don't pretend to have empathy for me, shithead

what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask

I don't think having my real life phone number tied to a website or game account is a trivial ask. I'd like my data to be private, especially something as real-life and tangible as a fucking phone number. Sure, there are ways around these things, you can get a fake phone number for cheap (or possibly even free), but that's rather more effort than I'm willing to put in for most things. If I need to enter a phone number to sign up for an account for something, chances are very extremely good I'll just decide I don't need the account that badly. I don't think I'm alone in this.

Sounds like you've gotten good answers about your formatting question. For the steam proton question, the answer is that yes, steam installs it automatically. You might have to mess with the proton version for specific games, so check https://www.protondb.com/ for your game if it doesn't work immediately.

Congrats on trying out Linux! I hope you enjoy it! I've never used Mint myself (I don't like ubuntu-type package management), nor the Cinnamon desktop (although I've heard good things), but that's part of the beauty of linux, there's so much to try! Mint is definitely a good starter distro, but if you find you enjoy messing around with it, you might consider a bit of distro-hopping.

For years I used vanilla vim before finally switching to spacemacs like 4 years ago. I've never used neovim, because it just didn't seem stable and mature enough before I switched to spacemacs and at this point I'm happy with spacemacs and will probably stick with it for the foreseeable future.

My issue with vim, and the reason I switched, is that vimscript was an absolute nightmare. I was doing easy stuff, writing LaTeX, but getting vim to compile LaTeX and talk to my pdf reader (as you need if you're going to be working with LaTeX in any kind of serious way) took way too much configuration and my setup would break fairly often as well. Spacemacs is significantly easier. I was shocked when I went from "I've never used spacemacs before" to "I'm comfortably writing LaTeX here" in about half an hour. My setup still breaks occasionally and sometimes it's a bit difficult to figure out why and how to fix it, but it's much easier than vim was, that's for sure.

I also just like the emacs workflow. I like helm, I like being able to change how the editor works on the fly just by writing some elisp anywhere, I like how easy it is to access the documentation on functions, variables, keybindings, whatever else you might need. I like org-mode. I like that emacs has been around for decades and will be around for decades more.

I'd never heard of doomemacs. I'm pretty happy with spacemacs so I probably won't switch, but I'll at least read about it some more.

Oh my, I literally read the comment you're replying to backwards! I thought they said that carnists hate vegans. I'm glad you're here to read properly and give a great response!

I can think of a couple of uses. Well, basically just one use. You could hide posts that cause distress for whatever reason. For example, I hate snakes and if someone posted a neat picture of a snake I'd probably hide it, just so I don't have to keep seeing the same post and jump scaring myself with a picture of a snake while scrolling. Another example might be a thread in which people are arguing and you don't want to get dragged into the argument. I actually literally did this earlier today with a thread where people were yet again arguing about the upcoming US election and whether voting Biden is a reasonable choice. I've read this argument so many times and it's so tempting to jump in and be an asshole to someone who is wrong and I just don't want to do that today, so better to hide the post so I don't keep seeing it while scrolling.

So yeah, you can hide posts you don't want to keep running across while scrolling for whatever reason. Seems like a pretty useful feature to me, I'm glad we have it now.

They probably thought I was going to make fun of them if they elaborated I wasn't though, I just wanted to see what they'd say!

This is such a shitty "joke". Fucking hell. I hope you experience even half of the suffering a dairy cow experiences during their life. You won't, because the world isn't fair, but if I could imprison you and exploit your reproductive system until you're too old and worn out to be worthwhile and then kill you, I would do so.

You could try spacemacs (what I use) or doom emacs. Both have vi-like keybindings as a default and are slightly easier to get going with than vanilla emacs. On the other hand, especially with spacemacs, there's more to learn than vanilla emacs and more that can go wrong.

Yeah, good point! In a world without intellectual property rights, of course there would still be large projects, they'd just be, well, actually good and not shitty focus-grouped sequels.

Pathologic 2! It's so good! And the next one is coming out next year so it's a great time to become obsessed with Pathologic!

Demonstrating absences anything beyond math's clarity and definiteness can be challenging if not impossible to say the least.

ftfy

Anyway, just a tip for future comments on the internet: I'd suggest not being an asshole in your very first reply to someone you disagree with unless there's a good reason to be, because it makes you look extremely silly if your shitty comment is actually just wrong. I wouldn't have commented in this thread at all if you hadn't been an immediate asshole to frightful_hobgoblin, but here we are.

Sometimes the 3 second emacs startup time is annoying so I use vim then.

The way I get around this is by using emacs in daemon mode. So it only has a long startup if I've just rebooted my computer or if I needed to change my config and manually restart emacs. You probably already know emacs can run as a daemon, but I thought I'd mention it anyway!

Wait, you think hexbear "gives little regard to class consciousness or worker solidarity"? You think we're only claiming to be socialist? You think we have a "pathological obsession with identity politics"? I would disagree about all of the above, honestly. I will grant you that I'm not a big fan of patriotism, because I live in the imperial core, and there is nothing good about america. Also, could you give me an example of what "lumpen behavior" you think we're defending?

I just realized, I have no desire to get in Yet Another Internet Argument. Please do not answer the above questions unless you really, really want to for some reason. Thanks for explaining your thinking, I very much disagree with you, but that's ok! This is a 2 day old thread at this point and I'm trying to be less of an argumentative butthole online, so I'll just say, I hope you have a great day!

Oh my, I literally read the comment you're replying to backwards! I thought they said that carnists hate vegans. I'm glad you're here to read properly and give a great response!

There's a pinned post at the top of this very comm talking about exactly this issue: https://hexbear.net/post/403920?scrollToComments=false

Long story short, yes, it's a racist term with a racist history and should not be used. Please change it