askchapo keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Why do so many businesses prefer phone calls to emails?

Emails: permanent written record I can refer to later Can reply in my own time Low labour Low resource use Phone call: Times/dates mentioned will be forgotten often Active demand of time I don't pick up because that phone number looks weird but also my phone's vibrate function is weak High labour High data cost per information My shrink's office seems to want to keep billing information and past/present appointments secret. (This also seems to be worse in local industry, everything has to be a meeting instead of a two line email)

politics keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Brexit was weird because foreign policy was almost directly on the ballot

Not that it was good or there for good reasons, but it seems to happen quite rarely (say, shovelling weapons into Israel or whatever is not even tangentially on the ballot)

games keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Dune Spice Wars isn't Northgard

A reply someone sent to me a while ago that annoyed me enough to respond. The vibe I got was: “Dune Spice Wars is just a palette swap of Northgard” with the implication that the devs are lazy and greedy for developing a game that is extremely similar to their previous game (asset flipping, I guess). I hadn’t played Northgard at the time, but did watch the trailer. Northgard was on sale recently, so I gave it a shot after having played a bunch of Spice Wars. Because this has bitten me in the ass a few times on hexbear, here’s a short list of things I’m not arguing in this post: Game Publishers aren’t using DLCs or low effort new games games as low labour sources of profit. Obviously, this is the case. Artist and programmer hours down, IP rent up is endemic to the games industry. The devs are “good”. I actually have no idea, I just think this particular charge was unwarranted. Dune: Spice Wars or Northgard are good. Idk, I’ve enjoyed at least one of them These are the two most different games, nay, nouns in human history. They are not. Idk why, but in my region of the world “completely different” gets used for “actually very similar, but legally distinct”. Comes up a lot in these sort of nitpicky nerd circles Devs are always right, publishers/critics are always wrong Here is a short list of ways in which the two games are similar: Same engine Same genre (so, trad RTS, selecting units, giving them orders, building up an economy to ensure a healthy supply of units to defeat opponents in a roughly similar situation to you) Region-based mechanics (building limits, buffs, privileged starting zone etc) Diplomacy mechanics Variety of victory conditions rather than hunting down every last power plant Having now played at least some of both, these games feel substantially more different than many other pairs of games from similar devs that don’t get targeted like this. The main differences I’ve found: What players spend a lot of their time doing. Northgard heavily preferences micromanaging of the core unit (peasants), whereas Dune feels more like a trad RTS with Northgard characteristics. Northgard feels more like a village building game that also happens to be an RTS. Personally, I find the removal of peasant micromanagement a substantial improvement and one of the more annoying aspects of Northgard (especially annoying because it takes up a lot of the game) Mechanics present in Northgard are tightened and simplified substantially in Dune. This makes sense as Dune comes after Northgard and the devs have had time to hone down what worked in Northgard. For instance, scurrying around with scouts and trade relationships in Northgard is now just a single interface in Dune where you can manage your relationships etc. This does make relationships with other factions in Dune a little bit simpler, it’s not necessarily “better”. Different resources. Obviously, the relationship with these and things you actually do can change with a button, but neither are just “Money” and “population”. They both have these, but Dune Spice Wars isn’t being accused of being a palette swap of Age of Empires or Act of Aggression. No permanent Alliances: My experience with Northgard’s diplomacy was everything generally felt more permanent, whereas Dune has much more ebb and flow (as well as a limited set of hostile actions you can perform on allies). There can also only be one winner per match (two minds about this personally, I like allying with my friends and stomping on the computer, but it does change the diplomacy part of the game a lot). Less factions, greater faction differentiation. Given Northgard’s bread and butter was making lots of small DLCs with minor player factions, I feel like making a different game with both less factions but more content per faction is important. Beyond those, there are a lot of smaller changes that it would be weird to go over. There’s a couple of mechanics that are sorta tacked on (e.g. the Landsraad council/influence stuff) that are different, but I hope you get the idea. I have played a lot of different RTSes and I would say that mechanically these two games are more different than C&C and Tiberian Sun, or C&C and Red Alert (two pairs from the pre-DLC times), Age of Empires and Age of Empires 2 (an example from another developer), Medal of Honour 1 and Call of Duty 1 (a pair of games from different developers with two different engines) etc. I don’t really know why this annoyed me so much that I had to make a post. It might be touching on an extreme anti-DLC reaction that seems to want every single game to be entirely new despite most studios not having the resources to hire a network engineer every time they want to make a new game. The idea that a group of artists might commission a game engine (big, expensive, requires network engineers etc) and then write stories in that game engine (small, cheap, within reach for a group of artists) and not starve is apparently obscene.

askchapo keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Ableist reaction I still have

I get pretty frustrated when someone walks slower than me and keeps lurching back and forth so I can't overtake. Idk why, might miss bus maybe. I don't say or do anything, though sometimes I nip onto the road or between some tight terrain to overtake

chapotraphouse keepcarrot • Now • 97%

I find it weird that copyright gets stretched back into the past when nations become involved

It always seems to get deployed as a "The West are the only *true* innovators" and ignored if its like... The Islamic golden age or whatever. Also like some Arabian merchant couldn't have seen a steam train and gone "Oh, that's a good idea", it required colonialism to get ideas like plumbing etc. all over the world. Bleh

videos keepcarrot • Now • 96%

Prolekult Documentary about the development of capital, climate change, anthropocene, etc.

I have not vetted the creator because I do not wish to go to twitter. Marxist examination of malthusianism, "anthropocene", and the development of capital. Rebuts the argument that this is a natural outcome of humans or "overbreeding" and more a specific productive system, and discusses why fossil fuels were uniquely over-exploited by early capitalists. Should have more views. Bleak tone

askchapo keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Having a lot of trouble with food prep

I live in an area where taking public transport to get food adds between 2 and 3 hours to get to the nearest shops. I avoid shopping on the weekend. There's a bulk food order that goes out on Friday or Saturday night but I can't imagine what I'll feel like eating on the following Monday, let alone Wednesday. Sometimes I'll do bulk food prep and by the time I've finished preparing the food I'm so disgusted by the idea of food (especially that food) that I don't eat it, which is also the case if I've eaten the same meal multiple times in a row. I apparently will just wait out the clock (food goes off) instead of eating food I don't want to. I don't like pasta (again, the main thing motivating me to eat pasta is the threat of someone yelling at me, hunger alone isn't enough). Uber eats and taking ubers to go shopping is expensive. The freezer is full because there's five people living entirely separate lives in the household. idk what I'm supposed to be doing. It's hard to eat at all even if I wasn't trying to be healthy, meat reduction etc. I recently got a full time job after about a decade of no employment, so I pretty much don't have energy on weekdays either.

badposting keepcarrot • Now • 100%

People keep telling me to delete facebook, but they're missing out on banger content like this

Best comic funny :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: ::: spoiler spoiler  :::

FreeCAD keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Solidworks newbie to FreeCAD

Hey, I've just finished my diploma of mech eng and them and my new workplace use largely solidworks. Solidworks might have the most annoying subscription service integration I've ever seen, but also I've clicked with its interface. Any guides or tips for switching over?

guns keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Gun nerds, help! Solidworks practice! Supply details for technical drawings

I've just finished my mech eng diploma and to keep up solidworks and drawing practice thought I'd dust off my silly "Bullpuppest Bullpup" idea. It's not really for ever actually making, but just exploring weird ideas based on some workshop experience and watching a lot of Forgotten Weapons and other gun disassembly. It's loosely based on the TBK-022PM, the F-2000, and some of those weapons that turn the bullet from the magazine to chambering. Awful complicated mechanics all around. Anyway, I was going to make it in 5.56x45 NATO as I'm in a NATO country and assumed that would be the easiest ammunition to get (as well as pre-cut M16 or AR-15 barrels or whatever, and I didn't want to fiddle with ballistics really). However, I've had a heck of a time finding the technical drawings for the round ([STANAG 4178](https://web.archive.org/web/20201112201249/https://s3-mittlag-prod.cmd.as/production/uploads/attachment/file/16294/556x45NATO.pdf))/chamber/magazine well dimensions to design around. (Yes, apparently it's not actually an accepted standard, but it would be nice to have *something* to work around) I've also noticed that a lot of the supplied technical drawings are very old scans of very old drawings, with almost unreadable dimensions (and are often incomplete). Every AK-47M drawing that I seem to find, something that I feel must have an abundance of drawings, seems to be a tiny grainy picture maybe with cursive Cyrillic written all over it or something. M16A1 etc seems to also. Also, a lot of drawings have one or two dimensions missing that would be trivial to measure and include in a 3D model. So I thought it would be a good practice project for me to take some of these old drawings and after much examination, interpretation, and discussion (and potentially measuring actual objects), reproduce the drawings in a very clear and readable format. The actual making of 3D models (especially if they are traditionally machined parts) does not take very long once dimensioned, and I can upload them here or where-ever. Solidworks is actually pretty intrusive with what details about your computer it includes in drawings/parts, so probably PDFs until I can work out how to scrub everything with the Admin tool SW has (if possible, hexeditors maybe). I'm also pretty open to just changing the ammunition/magazine standard etc. to whatever, even a made up one. Can't do any physical testing, but would work fine for a "fantasy" gun for like... idk, an imaginary modern soviet Industrial Concern. The US Army seems to want its funny high powered 277 Fury with the stainless case base (is that really the best way of doing things). It's also fine to roleplay as an engineer or end user with complaints and stuff around the design, but don't get too heated about it. This is mostly just a project to whet teeth on and get brain juices flowing. What do I want from gun nerds? Interpretation of technical drawings Measurements for real parts (e.g. I could not find the STANAG magazine feed lip dimensions or how far the catch is from the lips etc, some parts could be reverse engineered based on the size of the round). Access to lots of parts is impractical, so we'd basically guess and decide what the tolerances were based on other parts. Design suggestions/comments (mostly for fun, this is a very silly design) What does everyone get? Up to date, modern technical drawings with cut lists, welds, BOM, 3D modelled parts, tolerances (where possible) without having to squint at tiny pictures of scans and cursive cyrillic. I'm happy to do extra models/drawings for whatever "base gun" we're building off; models/drawings are pretty easy once details are finalised. Current Decisions: Ammo/magazine standard. Probably based on ease of getting drawings, dimensioning, or models, but if there's an interesting set of old drawings we can use that as a standard we can go with that. Can hypothetically invent dimensions (and primers are standardised and interference fit, so that part is already "designed"). Odd features I'm including because I'm a weirdo (the absurd design is partly the point): - Pulls ammunition from traditional AR sickle mag that runs almost parallel to the main length, turns the bullet 90°-ish, and shoves it into the chamber, thus maybe reducing the distance between the rear of the gun and the chamber. - Funny membrane that pushes air out of the barrel when cycling - Different funny membrane that has a filter (for dust) that allows air in but not out, and no water in - Forward ejector for spent rounds (but like... yet another way of doing it) - Different bullpup trigger/action By the end, I hope to have something of an absurd rube goldberg machine wrapped up in a modern (or whatever aesthetic) shell. But that might be a couple of years down the line. Notes: - Could crib measurements from video game models for some looser fits maybe. - I'm not above stealing other people's ideas, patented or not. But this is partly practice for me.

askchapo keepcarrot • Now • 100%

What is the ideological goal of ancient aliens/ancient technology theories?

It does often seem to be correlated to reactionary conspiracy sentiments. There is the "non-white people could not have possibly stacked rocks this big!" thing I guess also flat earth?

askchapo keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Help me find: edit of a comic arguing that butts are the proletarian choice

My partner has a big butt and has asked to see it. I cannot find it. Several others have asked to see it also. It is manga, full of text, and the main character gets more unhinged and full of energy as the comic goes on. Random notes: boobs are hereditary or bought Butts are the product of labour.

chat keepcarrot • Now • 100%

A type of guy I want to complain about

Was around a guy who literally never said anything that wasn't making fun of someone, complaining about someone, or direct work stuff (we were pulling up star pickets). Just kinda toxic to be around. He seemed to enjoy himself though.

history keepcarrot • Now • 100%

It is amazing how much people forget minority targets

I saw a conversation here where someone thought homophobia wasn't that bad in the 90s. I had someone else say they didn't remember any anti-Japanese racism in Australia in the 90s. I being on the receiving end of it would remember it pretty strongly, but to forget it entirely? Just really poor memory (History? I guess this is history subbear. Given how much people seem to misinterpret events happening now, what does that say about writing of events at the tim?)

badposting keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Drunk Thoughts from keepcarrot: Nationalism

idk where to put this. Want to type. So periodically there comes a discussion about whether nationalism is good or bad or a tool that can be used, and certainly we can see a difference between, say, the white nationalism present in the USA or Germany, or the nationalism present in, um, Palestine, as a means of thought and motivating people to political action. I think part of the problem is Nationalism isn't clearly defined. Partly deliberately so; many national myths refer to their past as an eternal metaphysical history. Germany (well, Deutsch Volkishness) has always existed, at least to prior to when anything relevant mattered. But also Nationalism evolved from forced categorisation of what were very fluid social relations between rural communities and cities. And really, that's what I want to focus on. Nationalism evolved from these relations, but then spread outside of that context (to where rural feudal relations to cities wasn't the defining factor of power). And compared to aristocratic relations, nations have a lot more power. Just to head out some definitions: Aristocracy: The aristocracy is a class that derives its power from personal martial prowess. The root of the word comes from "chariot rider", but things like feudal and fief come from the "grain lord". If you were able to have enough personal strength (with your friends) and elite weapons etc. you can control the inflows and outflows of food to the granary. This is largely derived from agrarian relations, but you can see this in pastoral peoples too. There is an upper class, through access to food and leisure time, are more powerful warriors than the lower class, and thus can limit the horizons of the lower class's actualisation. In jest, I call this the politics of "Large Adult Sons", which stretches from prior to agrarian sedentary societies to very recently (liberalism, gunpowder, capitalist etc). Nationalism: Do not ask a nationalist this. They will have a shitty definition unless they are brutally and indifferently honest. The UN offers a shared culture, language, and territorial history definition that works ok but doesn't really explain any "why"s. It also doesn't explain why Bavarian nationalism is less valid than German nationalism (and many other such cases), even though it purports to mediate conflicts between nations. My own exploration of nationalism involves a bunch of different sources. First is where it comes from; the enriching of cities and the Merchant/Guild class during the enclosure of the commons. Second is Europe's diverse (as in... Not allied) polity allowing different cities to have different allegiances without too hard to enforce borders (rivers and mountains) while still having numerous wars, this is explored by Caspar Hirschi and Jared Diamond among others (to varying degrees of plausibility). Lastly is Europe's colonial period, which roughly coincides with the first "current" enclosure movement which has resulted in our current property pedigree (i.e. land owned in the UK in 1500 is valid now, compared to land owned in the same time period in Africa, the Americas, Asia, or Eastern Europe, and hypothetically could be sold for modern dollars). These combine as a part of property and labour relations that have been handed to us over 600 or so years. **Nationalism as a result of the Enclosure Movement and the Great Migration to Cities** So I've commented here before that prior to nationalism, there must have been great variation in rural areas. Not only this, but the population proportions between rural areas and urban areas was more in favour of rural (let's say rural areas are areas where agriculture is the primary industry and are largely self-sustaining were urban areas to collapse, not a great definition but good enough for now). If we look at the variation in accents in rural areas in the UK, it is massive. I hypothesise that this is the last relic of what was otherwise massive cultural variation in rural areas. These areas were illiterate so not much evidence exists. Some French author discussed this in the context of France and Paris. I will also say these areas weren't some shangri la of Queer identities or whatever, they were likely still very patriarchal, largely a combination of Christian and European Animist... As agricultural technology develops, the rural labouring class (peasantry) has much more idle time. They had more idle time than we do now to begin with, though there were some hard months of planting, weeding etc. Idle time is obviously not great for the Aristocracy, though I don't know if this is what motivated the first enclosures. What did happen with enclosures is that the peasantry slowly lost their ability to directly support themselves (especially after taxes). Thus, a portion of the peasantry began to migrate to the cities to find work, both to sustain themselves and to pay for their family's taxes and food. The city classes (Merchants, Artisans, other odds and ends) had a massive opportunity. This migration is the first forms of nationalism that we see in Europe, at least that we'd recognise. While some peasants were able to afford proper housing as they became the proletariat, most were stored in filthy barracks-like conditions, and were constantly bombarded with the dictates of the nascent Capitalist class. Obviously, you had to pay rent and buy bread, and getting money for that required working in factories. But you'd likely be renting from those same capitalists, buying bread from those same capitalists etc. The new partially formed class of Capitalists employed this new partially formed class of Proletarians (urban workers), and thus had immense power to dictate the culture of Proletarians. The Proletarians, even as their connection to their peasant families, sent their culture outwards to their families that they sent money to and brought in new labour from. Thus, nationalism gets seeded as the culture of the connection between major trading cities and the rural communities that they drew cheap labour from. Specifically, the local business class that is empowered by such a migration. Now, you might think to yourself, my country of Australia or the USA doesn't feel like that, historically. Or, perhaps, India (to take a non-settler colonial example). However, once Nationalism is formed, with its attendant demographics and agricultural/communication technologies, it is very powerful, and migrates itself to other communities. Certainly, once nationalism had established itself in the 18th and 19th century, every great power (whatever their organisation structure) would have noted that nations states could muster armies of hundreds of thousands while each Aristocratic lord would be lucky to have a few thousand peasants under his arms during a levy. This migration and development of Nationalism occured well before "nationalism" was codified. The word itself is a late 18th century invention, but the culture it developed happened for centuries before that. I'd also like to point out that sometimes this process was explicit, but a lot of the time it would be the natural consequence of the migration, power, and the relationship between urban and rural communities. After Nationalism is codified and understood to be a "thing", even though no one person necessarily knew where it came from or what it was, it's easy to model other societies off of it. It is also easy (relatively speaking) to control; the British used nationalist ideas to divide and conquer territories. It wasn't that there weren't conflicts between communities, up to the point of slavery and genocide depending on the century, but that the British could draw a line between Hootoos and Tootsies and instill the powerful members of their society with a certain vigour to defend their interests (those powerful members being what we'd today call "small business owners" generally) This also explains the divide between national and international capital. National capital, however much it wants to secure its position internationally, at the moment is tied to the local trading centers (aka cities). It is also a lot more numerous than international capital. While in a material sense, international capital holds more cards and can knee-cap national capital, culturally for a nation national capital ranges from a local fish and chips store owner to a farming conglomerate, and has much more capacity to define the culture of a nation. This rears its ugly head in fascism as capital as a whole gets threatened, but is constantly present in Capitalism. (probably hitting the character limit here)

technology keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Downloading Solidworks stuff and


guns keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Over-engineering: keepcarrot's thoughts on what people mean when they say over-engineering

(based on my further thoughts from someone's comment a while ago) Things get described as over-engineered, which definitely means _something_ but there doesn't seem to be good consensus on what. I think there are multiple definitions and context tends to be used to work it out. I think this comes up in military engineering a lot because: - the end-users of any product (say, the soldiers shooting the guns and driving the humvees) have much less say about the products they are using to the people procuring them, and are quite distant from said people. Often, it is cheaper to train soldiers to attempt to handle the weirdness of a product instead of replacing the product. - the production runs are a lot smaller - the iterative process for military equipment has a much longer cycle - the ability of a segment of the military to go with a different product (e.g. if you command a tank platoon, you can't decide that you're going to go with the Challenger 2 instead of the Abrams, let alone a T-90), which means there is less incentive to compete directly with rivals offering similar products. I realise that we're socialists here, but there is at least some motivation for Ford to offer a similar product to Toyota and that helps iteratively improve both products to some extent. Hence this post going in "guns". All these tanks, AA missiles, guns etc. don't have their designs pared down in the same way the Toyota Hilux has been (though one can see such long term iterative designs have some over-engineerings creep in) However, I've seen it used to describe bridges, small plastic gadgets, all sorts of things. So what are the different over-engineerings? Note that none of these really describe an overallocation of engineering time, or effort directly. There is such a thing as a bad engineer. **Over-engineering 1**: This product has very complex systems in it which are either unnecessarily hard to manufacture, hard to use, or hard to maintain. So, this definition is the one we think of when we think of German (or Swiss) Engineering. With military equipment, this is definitely true during the Nazi era, but things like the HK G11 or the Swiss PE-57's ejector. The late war Nazi tanks had some of these for specific components but also had other problems. I could imagine something like the F-35 also suffering from this. This can actually happen for a number of reasons. One can imagine management, without true understanding of the systems, makes a request (or demand) for a mechanical solution to a problem that has appeared in testing, usage, or even imagined. The problem may be simple to define, but quite complex to solve. The engineers may have been given enough time to solve a problem, but not enough time to iteratively pare down to make it easier to manufacture, use, or make it more reliable (this can happen with either new features or initial features). Engineers can do this to themselves if they get particularly excited about solving a particular problem and not much interest in iteratively testing and updating their solution, but historically a lot of these have come from management (up to and including literally Hitler). The design is feature complete but has had insufficient time allocated to testing a design (from production to actually hooning around in a park). **Over-engineering 2**: Feature Creep and related things So this one causes the first one a lot, but I think the nature of design in large organisations tends towards this. Features tend to be added but rarely taken away. Thus, you might wind up with a hatch that requires not much strength to open, easy to operate, thickly armoured, pretty cheap, and traps the crew if it's under 20 degrees and a little bit dusty. The energy to say "maybe we could just have a spring loaded hatch with a lock on the inside instead of this thing" has to maintain itself through multiple layers of bureaucracy, people without the authority to make the change and so on. And each person responsible for that communication has to maintain that energy until it gets to someone who does have that authority. And the connecting links may actually be pretty attached to a particular design. This results in products having lots of little clever mechanisms on it that may be better replaced with training or simpler devices that take a huge amount money to produce, are unreliable, have low endurance, and so on. I'm sure we could all think of a thousand examples. **Over-engineering 3**: Arbitrarily high safety factor. Again, this is likely the result of not enough engineering time allocated, so crude shorthands wind up being used. You don't know the minimum thickness of steel for a bridge to support a 10 tonne truck going over this particular ravine, but you do know that this ridiculously large amount thickness of steel with supporting trusses will hold up a 10 tonne truck and you kinda want to go home tonight. This can also result from using standardised parts; the gap between a part that will fail and the next part up might be quite large, so you wind up with an absurd amount of material holding what might otherwise be a light cheap thing together. In military tech, we often see up-armouring without any corresponding improvements to the chassis, suspension etc. even though it could hypothetically be done for pretty cheap (but not as cheap as not addressing it, up front), or even weight reductions in other parts of the vehicle. Anyway, those were the ones I have been mulling over.

games keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Community DLC Games Idea, want opinion

So, a while ago I was in a community theater and we put on plays that would break even largely. Our biggest costs were theater rent, followed by specialist hires (a worker with safety training that did our ropes and high powered electrical stuff). We charged pretty cheap tickets in the context of theater, which given the majority of our actors, costuming and props labour etc. was volunteer. It got me thinking about games. I realise there is an intense dislike of DLC, particularly AAA companies doing day 1 DLC, but even longer term DLC that could not have been made on the budget of the original game and released like a year later or whatever. The idea was having a platform for, say, RPG systems that's well coded, slick, bla bla bla, and comes with a few base stories, but after that the majority of development after that is done by something similar to the theater group but indie artists, writers etc. and you buy into a long form RPG (or, idk, subscribe on patreon or whatever). Every month (or whatever), some sub-team releases a new part of their adventure or a new system with a new adventure, and you can keep playing with what characters you had before (if that's what's happening). Things like the Adventurer's Guild (or whatever the D&D one is, where you register and play each adventure bit once alongside thousands of other players) are a thing, this would wind up be something similar but system agnostic and more tech oriented. IRL, every time a community theater wants to do a show, they don't rebuild the theater and stuff. It's not "wholly original". I'd also want the writers/artists to be more connected to their community, hypothetically. The system would have to have very non-coder friendly tools for writers to pull together systems and make maps and stuff. Dialogue trees may be a bridge too far.

chapotraphouse keepcarrot • Now • 100%

Is this the new effective altruism?

Just got this email from one of the event ticketing place some of my friends use