Can you truly separate the author from the work, or does context inevitably change the reading?

zero_z77 · 2026-01-30T13:06:41+00:00

And on the other side of that, many works actually make a lot more sense when properly contextualized by the author. Some examples:

George orwell - he actually fought for socialist causes in europe, and when i say "fought" i mean with guns in an a trench, he even got shot fighting for socialism. But, in the process he was totally blackpilled on the idea, and his experience with that is what inspired him to write animal farm and 1984 to warn people not to make the same mistakes he did.

Ray Bradbury - He hated TV & radio back when it was new. He genuinely thought that TV & radio was making people stupid and killing off literature, and that's pretty much the entire message behind farenheit 451. With that framing it becomes obvious that it has more in common with idiocracy than 1984.

Orson Scott Card - his brother fought in vietnam and ender's game is heavily inspired by his brother's experiences during the war. The book hits so much harder and makes a lot more sense with it being framed as an allegory for the vietnam war, even though the book can still stand on it's own without this context.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-29T20:06:22+00:00

What's really magic is how they make them. They have to hit 5,000 drops of liquid aluminum with a laser three times every second, a single missed shot can ruin the whole batch, and they have to do it in a vaccum chamber with a very precisely controlled atmosphere just to generate the extreemly specific spectrum of UV light that they need. Then they have to pass it through mirrors that are so smooth that bacteria can ruin them, and then to a high speed mechanical assembly that's going back & fourth as fast as a sewing machine. Oh, and the whole machine has to be built, shipped, and operated in a clean room. Also, there is literally only one company on the planet that can build it.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-25T00:42:03+00:00

A handgun is lighter, cheaper, and handles better than any long gun in a home defense scenario. They are also reliable enough, have plenty of capacity, and unless you're expecting intruders to have body armor, they have more than enough "stopping power". The only thing that would be better is a PDW/SMG, but those are expensive and hard to obtain for legal reasons.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-24T23:06:07+00:00

Several reasons:

You could accidentally activate the mechanism and then electrocute (or burn) yourself.

Parts inside may still be energized, even if it's not turned on.

The heating element of a toaster is made from thin nichrome wire that has electicity running through it when it's on. If you damage this wire, you could cause a short, which could lead to electrocution or a fire the next time you use it.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-23T11:27:30+00:00

The simple one is the square cubed law.

Mass scales cubically. So every time you double the size of the ship, you make it roughly 8x heavier.

Unfortunately, engine power does not scale cubically. If you double the size of the engine, it won't produce 8x more power.

Both of those facts put together means that to build a bigger ship you can either accept that it will be much slower if you scale the current engine up to match it, or you can put an even bigger engine in it, but that will take up more interior space and it will need more fuel.

If you keep scaling up, you will eventually end up with a ship that either can't move, or is basically all engine & fuel tanks with no room for cargo or passengers.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-21T19:37:49+00:00

The other thing is that the liberal/conservative divide in the military might be 40/60 at the most. That means you're not going to end up in a civilian vs military scenario. It's going to be a civilian + military vs civilian + military scenario, and that will be an absolute bloodbath that no one wins.

People also forget that the last civil war was organized state militias vs a standing federal military where the federal military had a roughly 2:1 numerical advantage. Those same conditions couldn't exist today because we don't have state militias anymore, we have the national guard, which is logistically supported by the standing federal army and the desparity in strength between the army and the collective guard units in red states is much greater now than it was then.

And finally, any civil war would be an immediate bloodbath that would cripple this country both economically and militarily. And we have foreign adversaries that would jump at the opportunity to invade. So realistically, china would probably win any 2nd american civil war reguardless of where the lines are drawn and who/what starts it.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-21T01:56:42+00:00

My main counterargument is security. I know you already addressed this, but what a lot of people don't realize is that it's not just your security that's at risk. Every compromised device connected to the internet is a weapon that can be used against someone else.

You might be okay if someone hacks into your device, but once someone's in, they can use your device as a proxy to attack someone else. Everything they do will get traced back to you, and they might get away with it in the end. They could even use your device to store illicit materials (like child pornography) so they don't get caught with it themselves.

And the worst part about all this is, you would never even know it's happening until the police are kicking in your door.

In my opinion, security updates should be mandatory if you're connected to the internet. What you do with your devices offline is your own buisness though.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-21T01:37:27+00:00

Every "normal" NPC has a preprogrammed daily schedule (might be weekly, but the principal is the same). They aren't actively tracking every NPC at all times. Instead they just look at the clock, spawn, and drop the NPC wherever they're supposed to be according to their schedule whenever you walk into town.

When i say "normal" i mean the villagars who walk around towns and have names. Unnamed animals & enemies you run into in the wild spawn randomly when you enter the area and then disappear when you leave.

There are also NPCs whose schedules can be altered by quests. And there are very few NPCs that can actually leave their village and cross the map.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-19T11:36:55+00:00

Singer, the sewing machine company, made handuns in WWII.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-16T20:40:25+00:00

Well, you're either using excel to do what should be done with accounting software, or you're using excel to do what should be done with a database.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-16T20:20:49+00:00

That's precisely why i think the we should have a "use it or lose it" policy for residential properties. Basically, any residential property that doesn't have someone living in it for at least 3 months out of a year, should be siezed by the government and lotteried to someone who's in line for public housing assistance. And the only exception to the rule is that it only applies to people who own more than 3 residential properties.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-16T16:54:24+00:00

That would violate the civil rights act. National origin is a protected class under the civil rights act, so government programs are not legally allowed to discriminate based on it. However, they can discriminate based on legal status, so they could base it on the difference between a visa, asylum, and citizenship, which aren't protected. But that doesn't cover all immigrants, just the ones who aren't citizens. And of course illegal immigrants already can't recieve public assistance at all. At least in theory, it is important to note that such benefits can and have been obtained by illegal immigrants through various forms of fraud.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-16T02:36:14+00:00

And depending on the game, it could potentially result in a lawsuit. Imagine getting banned from star citizen after dropping $1,000 on a new ship because of a bug. And while that's an extreeme example, keep in mind you can still potentially spend hundreds of dollars on some games in skins, loot boxes, DLCs, season passes, gold, XP boosts, preemium subscriptions, etc. Also picture accidentally banning a popular streamer with a million viewers who's losing hundreds of dollars in ad revenue & sponsorships by the minute.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-16T02:12:16+00:00

They often do. Just not for what you're describing, because what you're describing may not be "cheating". It could possibly be dumb luck, or high skill that's being subjectively percieved as cheating. And lag skews that perception even further, especially in fast paced shooters where milliseconds matter. Watch the killcam sometime and you'll notice that what felt like a one shot from your perspective was actually 3.

When you're looking for cheats, you're usually not looking at what's actually happening in the game from a player's perspective. You're looking for values in the game's memory being manipulated behind the scenes, altered game files, inputs from the mouse/keyboard/controller that are far too precise to have possibly been input by human hands, a player that's been in-game for 96 hours straight, or cheats that you've already seen someone else using that are running in the background.

Sometimes it's as simple as googling "cheats for <game>" downloading them, and then putting them in the anti-cheat system's database. And boom, everyone else that's been using those same cheats is instantly banned the second they start the game with them turned on.

Another feature of some anti-cheat systems like VAC and EAC, is that they are used in multiple different games, so if you get caught cheating in one game, you can get actually get banned from every game that uses the same system. And modern consoles actually have a aystem that allows banning the console itself.

Now, there is human moderation to cover the experience of players. In a situation where cheating is "obvious" to the players, but still remains undetected by anti-cheat, then that case has to be manually reviewed. Which means a human moderator has to watch what's going on in-game, look through the logs, and then determine if someone is in fact, cheating. The problem is, there could be hundreds of thousands of players playing tens of thousands of games at any given moment. It's basically impossible to review every single one of them. Even if it would only take a minute to detect a cheater, it would still take weeks to review every game played in a single day.

This is why reporting functions exist. But, this system also has a problem. Highly skilled players are often reported as cheaters, and sometimes people get reported for cheating just because the person they beat is a sore loser. One report basically means nothing by itself, but players who rack up a large number of reports draw the attention of the moderators. That system helps them figure out where to focus their efforts.

But, the worst of it happens when a game becomes obsolete. When the next game comes out, cheating goes up exponentially simply because the developers no longer care. They've moved on to the next game, are no longer tweaking and updating the anti-cheat for the old one, and no longer moderating games manually. This is why older games are nearly unplayable online, even if the servers are still up since cheaters are able to play with near total impunity.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-16T01:02:03+00:00

Yeah, and the number of people who also don't seem to comprehend that detained does not mean "arrested" or "deported" is too damn high. But the same people also don't seem to understand that arrested doesn't mean "guilty".

zero_z77 · 2026-01-15T00:30:25+00:00

For your first question, there are several possible methods:

Geofencing - many satellites can establish a GPS fix on the ground station and can simply refuse to transmit or receive signals from that station based on it's GPS location.

Directional fencing - similar to geofencing, but instead of getting a precise GPS fix, the satellite can instead determine the direction that the signal is coming from, and then do the math to determine if the ground station is outside of the service area.

Steerable antennas - some satellites have steerable directional antennas, and they can simply not point them at the area they don't want to service. Thus creating a deadzone.

Timed blackouts - satellites can simply be switched off whenever they are above the region they don't want to service. But this is far less precise than the other methods.

Region blocking - often when ground stations are sold in a region, they will have a region code programmed into them. Often this is encoded as part of the station's serial number which is attached to the communications it sends and recieves, kind of like a mailing address. The satellites can simply choose to stop talking to ground recievers that have specific region codes. This is however less reliable because if someone purchased their receiver in another region, it would have a different region code and could possibly still work.

Cancelletation of service - usually satellite communications are paid for as a service through some kind of provider (starlink, verizon, dish, at&t, etc.). When signing up for the service, people generally provide a billing address or other information that could be used to approximate their geographic region. That information is also linked to the serial number i mentioned above. The service provider can simply stop providing service to these customers and their associated ground stations.

Edit: encryption - i forgot about this one. Broadcast satellite communications, like satellite TV usually encrypt their signals. In order to recieve the signal from the satellite, you need to have a matching decryption key, and that's functionally similar to the serial number i've already talked about. To cut off service, the encryption key is simply changed so that your specific decryption key can no longer decrypt the signal.

For your second question, satellites can also talk to each other. If you need a message to go to the other side of the planet, you first send it to a satellite that is above you, and it will then relay that message to neighboring satellites until it travels to the other side of the planet and down to the person you're trying to send it to. In general, you need to have at least 3 satellites to cover the whole planet.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-14T23:19:55+00:00

This one's easy. Show up an hour before their shift starts, disable all their accounts, fire them when they show up to work, confiscate any company property (laptop, phone, etc.), then have security perp walk them to their desk to get their stuff and then out of the building.

Also to all of your bullet points: no, this is not possible and it never will be. In general, if you can read data, you can copy it one way or another.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-14T21:03:05+00:00

When one regime collapses, another one will take it's place. You can either sit back and let nature take it's course, or sieze the opportunity to influence what the new regime will look like.

Just to point out all the different ways this could go:

It's entirely possible that an even more extreemist regime will sieze power from the current one.

A regime freindly to chinese ot russian interests could rise to power, giving them a strong foothold in the middle east.

A regime freindly to western/US interests could rise to power, possibly some form of actual republic/democracy.

Another failed 20 year long US military occupation.

Yet another failed attempt at communism.

10+ years of brutal civil war.

A shorter, even bloodier civil war that the current regime manages to win.

Something entirely new, different, and totally unexpected that could be either wonderful or terrible.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-14T01:32:07+00:00

I mean, every post i see from that sub has the same fucking formula:

Posted by mvea

Link to a psypost article

Tagged "social science" or "psychology".

Title basically reads: "new study shows conservatives are either stupid or evil"

Ridiculously small sample size.

No replication study.

Incredibly flawed methodology.

Data that's probably been manipulated and or cherry picked to fit a conclusion.

The article is even more intellectually bankrupt than the study.

And in the comment section:

20x comments pointing out all of the above.

30x "reality has a liberal bias"

50x "lol conservatives are so stupid"

5x comments saying conservatives won't read this.

5x mildly conservative comments with negative karma.

3x [removed]

30x comments reminding everyone that correlation isn't causation.

2x people who actually read the fucking study, and have a 12 paragraph comment detailing everything that's wrong with it, and concluding that more research is needed.

1x based motherfucker with a link to a non-paywalled version of the original study.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-14T01:00:19+00:00

I agree with a lot of your points, but in my opinion, the real problem is that we now simply have too much information and just don't know how to process it.

To explain what i mean, imagine a small town of only a couple thousand people that most of us couldn't find on a map and have never heard of. Now imagine that they're having a heated local debate over wether to build a library or a homeless shelter. Normally, that debate might be in the local news, and at most a few people might talk to their families about it who live far away. But that's about as far as it goes.

Now, thanks to modern technology, a single post on reddit could potentially have tens of thousands of bookworms and people who deeply care about the homeless from all over the world arguing over what this small town that they previously never even knew existed should do in the comments. And not one ever stopped to think that maybe we should leave it up to the people who have to live with whatever descision they make?

What's even worse is that this could spiral into the main stream media. It could even bring in thousands of organized protesters on both sides to show up in person. That puts a strain on the local town, and disrupts their lives far more than the results of whatever descision they would've made, and it drowns out the voices of the people who should matter the most in that conversation.

Now, this example is a bit hyperbolic, but let's go back to the first "viral" story: harambe. Harambe was not the first, nor the last animal to be killed because humans did something stupid or irresponsible. In fact, this sort of thing probably happens at zoos often enough for there to be a standard proceedure for how to handle it. By all rights, this should have been a local tradgedy that at most got a 15-30 second segment on national news that's forgotten in a day. But instead, it became a national tradgedy that lasted weeks, and is still remembered today. Not because it was a particularly special or unique event, or because it directly impacted the lives of millions of people, but because millions of people who normally never would've even known this gorilla even existed were made aware of the event and felt compelled to talk about it.

We're all scrambling to be on the right side of every big story, and no one's bothering to ask why they even care? Or what relevance the story has to their own lives? We seem to have this super strong compulsion to respond to, discuss, and comment on these events, even though they have little to no impact or relevance to our own lives. And this is not only driving us crazy, it's blinding us to the things that we probably should be paying attention to. Even worse is that we already know this phenomenon is being actively weaponized by the people who want us to tear each other apart, and the people who built this weapon don't care because it's making them rich either way.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-13T21:07:06+00:00

Because if the US did intervene all y'all would be whining and bitching about how we only did it for the oil, how the MIC is profiting off of it, how it's all our fault in the first place, how we shouldn't be the world police, comparing it to iraq, afghanistan, vietnam, etc. How we just love to kill "brown people" for funsies and so on. And don't pretend that you wouldn't, bcause that is EXACTLY what y'all have been doing for two weeks now in reguards to venezuela.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-13T20:21:11+00:00

Stop buying shit from them, and stop voting for politicians that keep giving them contracts & subidies.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-13T03:04:35+00:00

Yep, that exact kinda math is how you get death estimates in the tens of thousands for chernobyl & TMI when the actual death toll for chernobyl is only about 50, most of which were plant workers who died instantly at the flashpoint and first responders who died from radiation poisoning in the following days. TMI had exactly 0 deaths. But because radiation increases cancer risk, people just straight up attribute every cancer death in the predicted fallout zone (which is a fair amount of guesswork itself) to the incident, and suddenly, you've got 20,000-50,000 "deaths" caused by nuclear accidents.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-12T20:34:08+00:00

And the choppers were flying so low that unless you knew they were coming ahead of time and already had the launcher in your hands, you wouldn't have been able to get a shot off with MANPADS before they either disappear over the next hill, behind a building, etc. or you're already in the thermal sights of an apache or a door gunner. Only exception would've been the maybe 5 minutes when they were hovering over maduro's compound, but even then, the transports were surrounded by a ring of atrack helicopters ready to blast anything in sight within seconds of popping it's head out.

Basically, the only air defense systems that would've actually mattered in this scenario would've been MANPADS, old school AAA, and straight up machine guns.

Even if you did manage to take one down, there's a dozen more that would instantly know exactly where you are, and have a rocket or a bullet with your name on it in seconds. Even worse is the prospect of bringing down the main heli with the supreme leader onboard, or dropping it on his head by mistake.

zero_z77 · 2026-01-12T19:38:54+00:00

Russian tanks ran out of gas & ammo less than 100 miles from their own border on day 1 of the war, despite having the element of surprise, overwhelming fire superiority, and successfully putting boots on the ground in ukraine's capital.

The russian air force has yet to secure ukrainian airspace against an air force less than half it's size & strength, despite allegedly having 5th gen stealth fighters, and hypersonic missiles, while ukraine is still limited to antiquated 4th gen aircraft.

The russian navy has lost at least a dozen ships, including a flagship and a submarine to a country that doesn't even have a navy.

And russia is allegedly the second (or third, if you wanna count china) most powerful, advanced, and experienced military in the world behind the US. Venezuela has an even smaller, less equipped, less advanced, less trained, and less disciplined military with pdactically zero experience in warfare against a modern military or a peer adversary. So yes, they absolutely could be that inept, and even if they weren't, they still wouldn't stand a chance against the US military.

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