r113500's comments

you want to explore, what "political" means, that's fine. we're not making a thesis here, so allow me to also ramble, but i'm cautious of your alies: another person in this thread has implicitly acused me of homophobia, sexism and racism, because that's the tactics with these kinds of people.

first of all we clearly have different relationship with video games, just by the games you've mentioned, or the fact that you've worked in the industry. i don't play call of duty, because i'm not on board with jock sniffers on political grounds. your other examples are similar, and i agree with you, a lot of video games are political, and i stand by my point. i don't like to engage with them! i find their treatment of political subjects to be juvenile, naive, reductionist, historically illiterate, and yet often moralizing and grandstanding. few games that aspire to deal with tough social subjects ever deliver. this is in my opinion.

there are two dimensions to the question of politics in video games, that make engagement with politics often an unpleasant experience. the question of familiarity that you touched on, and the question of player's choice. with low familiarity and low choice politics are not a problem. yeah i don't know anything about organized crime in japan, why would i care what the game tells me. with high choice politics are also not a problem, this is a very very very rare thing in the games treatment of politics. and i think the faux choice between "i sided with the developer's prefered political position, and got the good ending" and "i sided with developer's disliked political positions, and now i'm literally hitler" is not a real choice.

so the real problem with politics in video games is often high familiarity with low choice. the developer wants you to know that their guys are really the good guys, and they imbue them with all the political views that the developers share. you're "forced" to play out scenarios, where you are not invested in the narrative anymore, you're just doing it for the mechanics of the game. i've played shadowrun: dragonfall recently, you're part of an anarchist commune, and there's a lot of kind of talk that you hear in anarchist communes, and, man, i've been part of anarchist communes before, and all this talk is bullshit, but in the video game universe it works!

which gets me to my original criticism of "activist journalists". these people want more politics in their games not less. by virtue of their activism, and interest of the kind of audience they attract, they are also much more likely to dedicate both time to games with explicit political subjects, or often times explore games from political perspective. they are also much more likely to advocate for high familiarity, low choice games. that's my past experience with their output. there is a lot apolotical games, there's a lot of low familiarity political games, "activist journalists" pretty much gaurantee that politics is front and center of gaming experience.

this thread started with me basically saying that i'm not willing to engage, and there's a lively downvote brigading going on against the original comment (it goes from -3 to 3 over and over and over again, the grand battle of ideologies!)

i'm not signing under your strawman, because it's not true. but i know the tactics you people use, because you took them straight from the commissar books of my homeland. history books will not treat you kindly.

hello, man from the other side of the divide! i grew up in a socialist country, so i find socialist activism frightful and dangerous, so yes, i think that they are activists for something bad, in general, though not necessarily specifically. (not having grown up in america, i don't share the same divide lines as you people do)

i'm not personally willing to engage in political subjects in my escapist media, and i generally don't. this is the part where you said "you're perfectly entitled", that's good that we agree on this. the rest of my op comment is my personal analysis of the nature of this new publication, which i thought was factual, because it's a collection of facts that i extracted out of this announcement, which i then used to make my decision about the publication. i've preemptively filed it in into a "do not click" category in my brain.

op's is a valid criticism in a post gonzo journalism world. hunter thompson, an otherwise conventionally trained professional, embeds himself in the world of his subjects, and produces a masterpiece of investigative journalism. it's also sexy, and generations of journalists imitate him after. but the division remained up until quite recently, where you have the chicago manual of syle, and then you have (late 90s) vice magazine. tongue-in-cheek faux investigative article works when you're a professional humorist and that's your beat, or when you're a professional game reporter, and you want to produce some levity. in the second case the deficiencies are excused, because what otherwise carries your writing and by extension your reputation, are your serious pieces. in the post gonzo journalism world most writers act as if they have that reputation to cary them, but what they consistently produce are low effort tongue-in-cheek, insider jokes articles. there's simply not enough good will to humor them.

if you look into the names of the founders, all of them are activists, one of them has a colorful gamergate history, one mentions labour issues in their byline.

their position statement is in the fourth paragraph, it starts with "widespread labor organizing, industry-changing mergers and acquisitions, sweeping layoffs", and then reads "We need a curious, independent press to hold power to account, to cut through the marketing hype, and to elevate the voices of those affected by the gaming industry’s upheaval." they bring up the issue of labor again, "we’ll keep you up to date on the worlds of video games, board games, comics, movies and tv, nerd culture, tech, streaming, and the labor issues that surround them"

would it be safe to assume that their goal is to be a kind of jacobin for gaming? jacobin's digital only pricing model is $30/yr, which $3/mo against aftermath's $7/mo, and i'm comparing them here on selective paywalling model. jacobin doesn't have dedicate gaming section, but they do write about video games from a socialist perspective, in their culture and labor sections.

i would say it's safe to assume that aftermath is going after a niche audience, people who want an indepth coverage of the video game industry from a socialist perspective, is that an attractive enough value proposition? they might also be explicitly trying to build an activist audience to be able to put political pressure on gaming industry. this is another possible reading from "holding power accountable". i'm not sure if that's compatible with their pricing model though.

I've been meaning to look into it, so these are mostly notes, that others might find useful,

arenas are x86_64 only, not sure how involved are ports, but there's at least a VOP, that as of right now exists only on x86_64. (the build obviously fails on other systems)

I'm trying it on m1, so I can build with

    arch -arch x86_64 sh make.sh --with-system-tlabs

and then run with

    arch -arch x86_64 sh run-sbcl.sh

it's pretty raw, so for example allocating object larger than arena results in ldb. there's a lot of sample code in tests/arena.impure.lisp

and the simplest possible test code just to see what's up,

    (gc :full t)
    (room)
    ;;;    7,084,208 bytes for  36,307 simple-vector objects
    (progn (make-array 10000000) (values))
    (room)
    ;;    86,991,136 bytes for  36,080 simple-vector objects
    (gc :full t)  
    ;;     6,847,824 bytes for  35,865 simple-vector objects
    (use-package :sb-vm)
    (defvar a (new-arena 100000000))
    (with-arena (a) (make-array 10000000) (values))
    (room)
    ;;     7,050,080 bytes for  36,233 simple-vector objects

well, so at least we know the array is put somewhere. finally one calls (destroy-arena a), but you can still access the data, so presumably there's no checking involved, and being undisciplined about retaining arena pointers will create all kinds of interesting bugs.

neat!

the public's wants are always reduced to trite generalizations, so maybe it's not about thunder, maybe the upset is that one can generate lively conversation easily by exploiting trite dichotomies, and that such a behavior is distasteful. everybody has an opinion on the hoi polloi from the vantage of their phantom high horse. a chat gpt could write the rest of the thread.

"real communism has clearly never been tried" is a set expression, from the internet. it's a variation on doing the same thing, but expecting different results, with a touch of ideological stubbornness, "this time around if we let people choose, they'll choose a very different internet, from the one they chose before, i'm sure of it, because I believe in people". of course the reason I choose this particular set expression, rather than some other one is to play off your comedic choice of terminology "people's internet". they have "people's internet" in "people's republic of china". you know? I'm not saying communism bad, it's a funny phrase. jeez, you brits used to be keen on subtle humor.

jeez, krapp, you've been posting on hacker news since like forever, doing drive by hate posts in random threads all the time, and you tell me to "touch grass". I'll change the password on this bad boy, and won't interact with you fucks for at least like another half a year. /but you're here forever/

danny's meaning didn't have this romantic component. it was specifically "bad internet as experienced by non-technologically sophisticated users in the early 2000s", as opposed to the "wild internet". the example that he gives is something like spamassassin with naive bayesian filter, which meant that power users at that point in time "won" against spam, while naive users were still getting tons of spam in their inboxes. I personally always thought that it's play on "hinder net".

I'm curious about this type of response. it sort of implies that I don't know why things have changed the way they did. the causality is implicitly in the original also. we have a lot of mobile first websites, because most people use phones to access internet. and all the bad things happen on the internet have reasons behind them like that, because it's an emergent dynamic process. emails are to be collected, for they are a valuable tool in sales pipeline. things buzz and blink because it's easy to hack human attention system, which is also why casinos do it. but that's kind of, like, not what the comment is about.

thanks to the bbc brit, the subthread essentially culminated in your comment. I'd like to clarify that this dichotomy didn't exist in my original. "technology elite" like somebody hinted elsewhere in the thread, could be a dirt poor kid from underprivileged background, whose accidental access to a computer was the only means of escape from the oppressive reality. at a certain level of technological sophistication one could gain capabilities and access that make one belong to a select group, making one part of the elite. from this perspective, "the masses" are literally everyone else who wasn't on the internet in the early 2000s. yes, by weight and numbers there will be an inordinate amount of talented individuals among them. there will also be perhaps an even bigger number of complete and utter mediocrities. since the person you're responding to doesn't use the term "elites", I can only assume it's everyone you don't like, because some of them would've been technological elites, who then became financial ones, but then some of them would've been financial elites, who remained financial elites never becoming technological ones, and yet by the power of their capital they've exploited technology. they are I guess bad. most of the humanity are good, because a lot of talented ones make art. what a pointless subthread, god damn.

I'm not hn, and primarily it's because I don't believe that pseudonymous conversation generates interesting dialog. I mean user a says something, user b misunderstand, user c attacks user b's misunderstanding. in aggregate it's fun to read, if you don't have a goal, but mostly it's just an opportunity to read your own clever writing.

dearest Kenneth, I did not mean to single out apple or iPads. it's just that in my circle nobody uses androids (and my circle is predominantly non-tech!). I've not even seen an android in a very long time. I've spent some time trying to "libre-ify" chrome books, and discovered, like you said, that the devices are heavily locked down, with multiple tiers of mystery chips (for your protection!) ensuring that you can never really de-google them. but when I think "locked down consumer device for checking your mortgage account" I think "iPad", because that's all and exclusively what I ever see.

it's quite cyberpunk, in a dystopian sense, I don't think most people realize. it can of course be framed as benign and I'm sure there are protective policies in place. but you know, if you take a sweeping look from a distance, the fact that the login system for government website, which every single citizen might at any point be forced to interact with, has a profile option (enabled by default) to "receive emails featuring ID.me offers and discounts" seems quite insane to me.

think of it from a subjective experience of somebody who was "from the internet" in the early 2000s (because that's when Danny coined the term):

mIRC made irc easy, jabber was already a thing, you're have a bunch of bookmarks (in non-monetized, non-ad supported online services) to high quality content, you're posting on forums, you get your news from blogs of intelligent people, etc. etc. the internet you're interacting with is great!

alas you have technologically unsophisticated users joining in and what they are experiencing is "hinternet": banners everywhere (we had adblockers), spam all the time (we had spamassassin, and our host Paul graham just invented naive bayesian spam filtering, which at least early on worked spectacularly), phishing and trickery (the computer told me to put my credit card, or similar). it's a miserable broken experience, that potentially results in your information or money being stolen, and all kinds of other indignities.

I'm saying that modern internet is more like a hinternet of old than it is anything else, but we are all forced do t use it.

you misunderstood the concept, brought in your own windmills, and then successfully attacked them. I guess it generated an interesting subthread, even if it did derail my point into the tired "internet ain't what it used to be!" direction. god, I was hoping what I said was more subtle than that. other people in the thread have done better, even managed to use google to search the original posts on oblomovka so that they can reflect on the point, instead of just typing things.

but to your "people's internet" point, the real communism has clearly never been tried! it's not the people that want TikTok, it's the power structure. left to their own devices they built cathedrals!

Danny o'brien, he runs one of the oldest surviving blogs, oblomovka, coined a term "hinternet" sometime in 2007, that was when the internet was still being run by the technological elite, for themselves, but normal people have also joined. The idea of hinternet was that there was essentially two internets. One is the sophisticated technology and a value add, and the other one is the internet of the viagra pills and popup banners. We, the technology elite, would rarely venture into the hinternet, like going into a bad neighborhood, where's normal people had no such mechanism for discernment, so their experience of the internet was distinctly different and inferior.

Now most of the internet is hinternet, and we're all forced more and more to rely on it. Banking systems, mortgage platforms, car payments, utilities payments are generally designed mobile first, desktop later, they employ various dark techniques for "verifying real user", which break on open platforms, forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all. If hinternet used to be the dark shady streets where hucksters were peddling you knockoff watches, then now hinternet is the dystopian landscape of vertical information integration, ran, behind the scenes, by para-governmental institutions. You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things.

There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication, but they are of mixed success. On a personal level there's a strong disincentive to participate in the hinternet beyond the mandatory, carefully navigating poorly designed and conceived systems just long enough to achieve an objective. One has to login into irs, but one doesn't really need to read that popup and upsell blocked, mobile centric news article.

From this perspective "mobile-first web design" is a symptom removed from its greater context.