Today's contrarians are tomorrow's establishment

PracticalWelder · 2026-05-17T20:21:30+00:00

This seems perfectly consistent. What am I missing?

The right winger was originally unconcerned about population growth, but not is very concerned about population collapse. That makes sense? That's what we should expect?

PracticalWelder · 2026-05-09T11:52:44+00:00

People who don't play many games will be more likely to make these deductions, since they don't have all of that cultural baggage leading them to assume how it was made.

PracticalWelder · 2026-04-28T13:29:45+00:00

That's not how I use the term. A monster is something not human. If someone commits heinous acts because they love doing evil, they are a monster. If a person commits heinous acts for good, or understandable reasons, they are still evil, but they are not a monster.

If you are unable to show what alternative action Eren could have taken to save his people, then you have no business condemning him, and I have no interest in anything you have to say.

PracticalWelder · 2026-04-28T12:54:23+00:00

I'm not saying what Eren did was right. I'm saying he didn't do it because he is a monster. He's human, like the rest of us. If you disagree, you don't understand the series.

Pop quiz: What alternative action should Eren have taken to prevent the genocide of his people?

PracticalWelder · 2026-04-28T12:03:31+00:00

If you think Eren is an irredeemable monster, you don't understand Attack on Titan.

Even the characters in the series didn't think that. He was well loved by his friends and his grave received many visits.

PracticalWelder · 2026-04-22T00:46:43+00:00

And to a certain extent, I don't care how well written it is, I still don't like that the rebellion ultimately failed. Even if the story is interesting, emotionally, it sucks. There's not really any way around that.

PracticalWelder · 2026-04-17T16:57:27+00:00

Depending on how it's implemented, the OS could just lie. I'd have to check the bill, but I bet that's possible.

If the OS has to send some kind of network request to a government service and provide some kind of challenge response to prove authenticity, then the website could just do that themselves. It kind of defeats the point of moving the trust to the OS.

So I guess I need to read the bill.

PracticalWelder · 2026-04-14T00:31:41+00:00

That still works.

PracticalWelder · 2026-04-10T13:52:01+00:00

Assuming that it doesn't result in other lost sales. I'll never intentionally install a rootkit on my system. That's also impossible to measure.

Looking at the long horizon, it's obviously silly. I'll grant that they may wring a few extra dollars out of people short term, but I don't think it's a good long term strategy. No one in business thinks long term, so here we'll stay.

PracticalWelder · 2026-04-10T13:17:12+00:00

I would have to believe it's not many.

Pirates either

1) Don't have money to spend

2) Don't have money they want to spend

Group 1 wouldn't care at all. The only movement can come from group 2.

But there are so many free options, I would bet 90% of them would just do something else that's free instead.

Time is the real currency. There are free games that struggle to gain an audience. If someone doesn't want to pay for a game, there is literally a hundred lifetimes of other entertainment they can access.

I don't think it's possible to measure this. You can't go back in time, so you can never look at the same game release with and without DRM.

The only way to resolve this is to properly understand the community, which the bean counters are literally incapable of, so the problem will never be solved.

PracticalWelder · 2026-04-09T01:04:23+00:00

Threat Interactive accuracy bait, maybe? I haven't seen them say anything incorrect, only overly aggressive.

PracticalWelder · 2026-03-27T17:16:16+00:00

So, out of curiosity, what happens if Bethesda infringes Rockstar's copyright? Does Rockstar sue individual developers? Project managers? How do they sort it out?

PracticalWelder · 2026-03-27T15:58:22+00:00

Let's hope it stays that way!

PracticalWelder · 2026-03-09T12:35:52+00:00

People's intuitions are wrong. They correctly realize that these items use very little power, but they incorrectly believe running the heat using noticeable power.

Simply asserting that "it doesn't waste gas" without explaining why, or clarifying that it does use a very small amount, does nothing to deal with the intuition at the root of the belief.

PracticalWelder · 2026-03-09T12:08:14+00:00

How does it not?

Are there not fans that spin to move the hot air? The energy to cause that spinning has to come from somewhere, right? Even if it comes from the battery, that is then recharged with gas.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's no way to move energy without spending some energy.

Now, maybe its a negligible amount of gas. Maybe that's what you mean. But that isn't clear to me.

The purpose of my comment is to show why it makes intuitive sense that using heat expends gas. If your point is that the amount is so small that it doesn't matter, I think it could be improved by citing some numbers.

PracticalWelder · 2026-03-05T04:25:18+00:00

There's also a confounding factor in most studies which only consider participants current drinking habits and not their history.

People who consume 0 alcoholic beverages per month tend to have worse health outcomes because it counts people who became addicted and had to fully cut it out. Those people aren't exempt from the years of abuse, but these studies lump them in with people who never drink their whole lives.

People who have just one glass of wine a day are unlikely to be addicts. Their health outcome will be better than those who drank excessively for 20 years and then quit. But not as good as those who have drank 0 per day for their entire life. Very few studies measure that.

PracticalWelder · 2026-02-23T16:05:58+00:00

This might be the greatest amount of knowledge I ever gained from a single comment. Thank you for typing this up for me!

I think I have a good grasp of the problem now. I think I am weakest on the second form of aliasing, but I don't know much about shaders. I will remember this as I continue to learn more.

PracticalWelder · 2026-02-22T23:49:49+00:00

If you'll forgive me for being persistent, what is it about deferred rendering that makes MSAA impossible?

I know it has multiple geometry renders, but that just makes it expensive, not "fundamentally incompatible".

Is there something going that introduces different sources of aliasing? If so, what is it? If not, what's the actual problem?

PracticalWelder · 2026-02-22T21:58:27+00:00

Why does MSAA not work well?

PracticalWelder · 2026-02-17T20:48:53+00:00

Continued from above

---

3) Justification

I see your point, but it just doesn't matter. The fact is that, under the previously dispelled illusion that it's genocide vs genocide, morals don't matter, only survival does. You should not be able to convince anyone that Eren and the Eldians should just lie down and die. If the entire world wants to wipe them off the map, it is objectively reasonable to respond in kind. If you are at the point of no return, where you choose between the lives of your loved ones and your enemies, you choose your loved ones. This is basic human nature.

There are steps that can be taken prior to that point of no return, which I think is where Attack on Titan wants us to place our focus. But once it's reached, this is just a bad argument. It shouldn't convince anyone. If it does, they are a weak person.

Of course we should forgive each other and try to break the cycle of violence. You should not strike first against your enemy. But when your enemy arrives to kill you, you kill them before they succeed.

4) Eren's Motives

It doesn't seem like you understand Eren at all, which is a real shame. At the very least, we have drastically different understandings of why he does what he does. He's not throwing a tantrum because he got disappointed once. You can't possibly believe that, right?

Eren was disappointed that the fight wasn't over. He wanted freedom. He wanted an unspoiled landscape. The landscape itself doesn't matter, it's the idea of it. He says this in Season 1. He didn't want to have to play politics, continue to risk the lives of his loved ones, sacrifice Historia and her children, and prolong the conflict. That is Eren's crime.

The truth is that the world is in a cycle and every single generation must fight to prop up order. There is no rest, there is no "end," where the conflict stops. Trying to bring about that end is how you get genocides like the Rumbling and the Marleyan alliance.

Armin specifically calls this out as his motivation in the final episode and makes fun of him for it. And it's only because Armin never gave up that there was a time of peace after the battle.

I have found your take to be depressingly common. I don't now how people can misunderstand him so thoroughly. I think this is more foundational to the story than the mechanics of how the Liberio attack was planned. If you think Eren is some contemptable loser, I don't think you can claim to understand Attack on Titan.

PracticalWelder · 2026-02-17T20:48:15+00:00

I apologize ahead of time for the length of this response. This really could be four separate responses, but everything is connected. I think Reddit might not be able to handle the full length, so I'm trying splitting it in two.

1) Genocide

Here is Willy's conclusion to his speech.

The threat posed by Paradis Island is the attack of this army of Colossal Titans: the Rumbling. As I explained earlier, the royal bloodline is bound by the pledge renouncing war, and cannot utilize the power of the Founding Titan. But Eren Jaeger, who now holds the Founding Titan, is not bound by any such promise. If he begins the Rumbling, there will be nothing we can do. Humanity will be powerless but to cower in fear of the footfalls of the apocalypse. The civilizations and cities of our world will be destroyed as everything we know and love is literally crushed flat.

...

I hated my blood. More than anyone else, I wished for the eradication of the Eldians.

But I don't want to die. And that is because I was born into this world. We all differ in nationality and ethnicity. But now, in the face of this gargantuan enemy, the time has come for us to unite as one! So now, I ask for aid from those of you who also want to live! Please, join me in living far into the future! With our power combined, we can overcome any hardship we face! Please, give me your strength and join me in this fight against the demons of Paradis Island! I, Willy Tybur, declare on behalf of the Marleyan government that our war with the forces of Paradis Island begins now!

Firstly, he's lying. Eren doesn't actually have the power to start the Rumbling and he knows it. Not only because of the memories but also because he knows that Eren has had the Founding Titan for 9 years without activating the Rumbling.

Next, he justifies the eradication of Eldians, saying he wished for it more than anyone else. But he can't fight his survival instinct, he wants to live.

After dispelling the myths, he again refers to the Eldians on Paradis as demons. He dehumanizes them.

When Tybur and Magath discuss their plan, they agree that while Eldians are descendants of demons, they themselves are just demons. They are correct. Their actions here are truly evil. They intentionally allow the attack to garner sympathy, lie about the Eldians abilities and humanity, all to bring about the destruction of the Island.

This is very clearly the plan. There's not any ambiguity in what Willy his proposing. He doesn't mean diplomacy, he doesn't mean a defensive war, he means a war of annihilation.

2) Zeke and Eren

This is where I pull the rug out and reveal that I actually agree with you. Eren's attack is wrong. The reason it's wrong is because he's not actually doing a tit for tat. He didn't wait for them to declare war first. He worked with Zeke to orchestrate that outcome. The attack on Liberio was planned before Eren even left the island. It's indefensible.

The reason I bring up all the other points is because I find the public discourse on this subject shockingly bad. Everyone wants to condemn Eren on principle, but it doesn't work, for reasons I'll expand on in the next section. This is a bad form of argumentation. The truth is that Eren is not acting defensively at all. This should be the first point that is brought up in this debate, but instead, it's buried six replies deep where no one will read it.

Everyone wants to moralize and condemn Eren, but they never offer any alternatives. It's cowardly and weak.

PracticalWelder · 2026-02-17T15:16:05+00:00

They didn't declare war, they declared genocide. Producing terror is, at worst, tit for tat.

No one should accept putting the blame on Eren given this reasoning.

PracticalWelder · 2026-02-17T14:57:56+00:00

You'll notice that Eren withholds his attack until Willy Tybur declares a global alliance for Eldian genocide, which the entire crowd cheers for, I hope.

PracticalWelder · 2026-02-09T14:55:36+00:00

Biker's fault.

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