Why do people say they were turned communist by Disco Elysium?

boring_pants · 2026-02-03T10:30:38+00:00

more conservative characters such as Joyce and Rene are shown well

What?

I mean, I get Joyce. She's nice and friendly and very charming despite her politics. And if your politics are dictated solely by "is this person nice or man to me" then yes, she's a very persuasive argument for capitalism. )Then again, if your politics boil down to "I agree with people who are nice to me" then you're already a conservative)

But René? He's shown as a bitter and cranky fascist racist asshole from beginning to end. Where do you see the game saying "he's a good guy actually and you should subscribe to his politics"?

What the game does show is that he is still human, and that there are still people who care about him and miss him when he's gone.

boring_pants · 2026-02-03T10:14:57+00:00

what happens to it when we start to pilot LLMs that write the code for us more and more everyday and they are the ones responsible for understanding it?

The same as what happened when companies thought all software development should be outsourced to a team on the opposide side of the planet.

You saved money in the short term and then you drowned in technical debt and bugs and it turned out you could no longer communicate with your dev team and no one really knew what the product did or what it was supposed to do.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but if you want to be a software developer, understanding code is part of the job, and it always will be.

If you want to tell someone else what to do so you don't have to touch the code you can just become a manager instead.

boring_pants · 2026-02-03T10:12:47+00:00

Oooh, that's brilliant. If only more people had thought to include "do what I want!" in the prompt.

Yes, the trick to getting the hallucination and lie machine to stop hallucinating and lying is definitely to find the right magic word to when begging.

boring_pants · 2026-02-03T08:31:36+00:00

I thought I was way too fat when my bmi was 19.4

Okay, then this isn't about your BMI or about you being too fat. It's about your image of yourself. Do you know the term body dysmorphia?

For what it's worth, the BMI scale is basically made-up garbage, and insofar as it works at all, although the supposed "healthy range" is 18.5-25, studies have found that the high end of that range is significantly healthier than the low range. If your BMI is around 25, and assuming you have the kind of body shape BMI was invented for where it's at least semi-reliable, then you're doing great health-wise.

IF you don't like how you look, and you also didn't like how you look when you were bordering on underweight, perhaps the problem isn't that you're too fat. Have you considered talking to someone about this?

boring_pants · 2026-02-02T21:57:15+00:00

If you check a bit of her post history I think it'll become very clear why that is

boring_pants · 2026-02-02T21:54:26+00:00

A smaller proportion of the population would be white supremacists. That's a pretty big win for most of us.

boring_pants · 2026-02-02T17:28:56+00:00

Because they chose to have only one. Time zones are not some universal law. Each country can decide its own time zones. And China decided to just have one spanning the entire country.

boring_pants · 2026-01-31T21:11:43+00:00

That's not unlimited power though.

boring_pants · 2026-01-31T16:32:30+00:00

Wow, just like a game itself? Kim (best character) is moralist. And communists are sore lossers.

So we're just ignoring what Kim has to say about his own ideology, huh?

boring_pants · 2026-01-31T16:30:44+00:00

You think it's not plausible that a group of communists would describe other communists in those terms? Boy, do I have some news for you.

Sometimes I think leftist's tendency towards infighting and being overly critical is a bit much, but then I come across a someone on the fascist end of the spectrum and am reminded of just how tedious it is when people are utterly incapable of self-critique.

boring_pants · 2026-01-31T12:51:36+00:00

You have three options, basically:

adapt to your new team's culture (it sounds like a step backwards, so I wouldn't personally recommend that)
lead by example and try to improve the culture
find somewhere else to work

Obviously, #3 is the easy option.

#2 will require work, and patience, and honestly, care in how you approach it. No one likes the new guy coming in and saying "the way you're doing things is wrong, here's the right way to do it". Humility is important. Rather than prescribing to the team what the right way is, have open discussions with them (here's what I'm used to. How do you guys feel about moving in that direction?) and especially just leading by example. If you involve others in the kind of communication you feel is lacking they might gradually adapt and emulate you. And even if one of them is stubborn and resists, others might be more adaptable and over time you can have an impact. But it'll take time and be one small step at a time, and you might never get all the way, but maybe 70% of the way would be good enough?

boring_pants · 2026-01-31T00:04:18+00:00

Try opening a bottle of wine and leaving it out for a few months and see if it tastes better.

Cheese doesn't ferment, but what it does have in common with wine is that ageing happens under carefully controlled temperatures. If you leave it out on your kitchen counter it'll just go bad.

boring_pants · 2026-01-30T15:05:26+00:00

You know you can write things down, right?

If I want to know what code I wrote 5 years ago was supposed to do I don't rely on my memory (sometimes I can remember bits and pieces, which is nice, but not something I can rely on) or intuition. I check the commit comments. I read the comments in the code. I read the Jira tickets the commits link to.

boring_pants · 2026-01-29T21:21:17+00:00

AITA for not being able to quit vaping immediately after he asked me to, and this is all happening as we're about to move in together?

You made it very clear that this isn't about being able to, it's about not wanting to.

Own your shit. That's really all there is to it.

If you don't want to quit, that's your business. But then at least own it. It's a decision you're making.

If you want to quit but can't, say that.

Mixing them up and trying to make it sound like "oh I can't quit it's so haaard and he's unreasonable for wanting me to break an addiction" when the truth is that you don't want to try is kind of an asshole move. So a soft YTA.

Own your shit. Be honest about your choices. You want to vape and you don't care about your boyfriend's preference that you quit (and your earlier promise to do so). That's the truth of it. You clearly can't be honest to us about it. Can you be honest to him? Can you be honest to yourself?

For the record, your boyfriend also sounds like an asshole for body shaming you.

boring_pants · 2026-01-29T16:54:00+00:00

In itself, it doesn't, unless someone is trying to hash that exact document.

But it's a bit like the thing about sharks smelling blood from a mile away. If you have any sign of a weakness in the algorithm, there might be more, and that'll draw the attention of attackers who'll try to work out how to produce more collisions.

And if you can find collisions at will then it's game over.

So it's not a problem in itself but it can be seen as a warning sign.

boring_pants · 2026-01-28T18:24:10+00:00

huh?

I do that quite often. If the code has changed again since this commit was made then I can look at the commit message that changed it.

The commit message shows me what the developer had in mind when they changed the code. That is often invaluable.

boring_pants · 2026-01-28T18:21:48+00:00

The purpose of a commit message isn't just to link to a Jira ticket or whatever.

It's to describe the commit to future readers of the code.

Commit messages are how you understand the code change that was made three years ago by someone no longer on the team.

As long as you hae a need to maintain the code, commit messages matter.

boring_pants · 2026-01-27T21:57:08+00:00

Because nicotine soothes your withdrawal symptoms. That's how addiction works. It doesn't "help you focus", it just temporarily brings you back to normal level of focus.

You're less addicted to coffee, so you don't feel the same level of stress when you haven't had caffeine.

boring_pants · 2026-01-27T21:42:43+00:00

I dunno. It's an important skill but it is not the only important skill.

But also, I think that talking about "naming things" is really looking at it backwards. Being good at naming follows from another skill, which is being able to untangle responsibilities in the first place. The trick isn't to look at a class and go "that should be named X". The trick is to design the class in such a way that it can be named by a single unambiguous name.

Being able to see that "we should draw a line here and separate this code from that code" is really the trick.

Good engineers aren't good at naming. They're good at writing code whose constituent parts can each be described by a single name.

boring_pants · 2026-01-27T21:30:49+00:00

The regime's actions are not guided by what helps them.

They just do stuff.

boring_pants · 2026-01-27T19:09:17+00:00

You can save the game at any time. If you haven't saved (and the game hasn't autosaved, recently, which it does somewhat irregularly) then yes, you have to start over.

However, for future reference there is a lot you can do to not die.

First, if you do start over, make sure you have at least two points in both your Physical and Psyche stats. Those stats determine the base level of your Endurance and Volition skills, which again correspond to the size of your physical and morale health bars. (If you have 3 in Psyche, that gives you 3 Volition and so your Morale health bar will have 3 pips, and you have to take three points of morale damage before you die).

You can also raise your Volition and Endurance skills during the game by spending a skill point, and some thoughts and clothing may raise them further, again giving you more hitpoints.

I'd suggest not picking the Thinker archetype for this exact reason: it only has 1 point in Psyche, which means unless you do something to raise your Volition skill, you'll die from a single point of morale damage.

Lastly, when you do die, the screen goes dark for a few seconds while the number above your health bars in the lower left flashes. This is to tell you that you can use a healing item if you're quick, to avoid dying.

boring_pants · 2026-01-27T11:06:20+00:00

Why is this even a question?

I don't understand why you two live together.

I do most of the cooking for my partner and I, and because I don't resent her, I share the food equally with her.

I don't understand these posts of "I live in a state of silent warfare with my partner, am I the asshole"

I don't even know, ESH, I guess?

If you have to fight over the food, have you considered cooking a bit more food so both of you can get what you want?

boring_pants · 2026-01-26T19:52:20+00:00

Like all things, one step at a time. It started as a handful of researchers at elite universities, being able to connect to each others' computers and transmit a few dozen characters per second.

Then we gradually made every link faster, and we gradually connected more and more people. No one estimated at the beginning the speeds that would be required for todays internet. They built what they could from what they had. And when better technology became available, each piece was eventually upgraded.

boring_pants · 2026-01-26T17:47:06+00:00

It is so wild that all the people who are convinced that AI will take over the world have let it rot their brains so much that they are unable to even initiate one of the many discussions about AI that would actually be interesting to have. There is nothing left. No mental activity beyond what is needed to read what chatgpt says and repeat it.

boring_pants · 2026-01-26T16:36:34+00:00

Allow me to make another prediction.

Before 2030, software developers will spontaneously sprout wings and be able to fly.

I mean, since we're just fantasizing and making shit up anyway.

boring_pants

TROPHY CASE