He talks about it in one of the interviews from the remastered VHS collection. During the fight on the second death star, the script just said “Luke gets angry” and he couldn’t figure out how to flesh that out until he came up with threatening Leia.

That same logic applies to everyone else too. If Batman has some obligation to play judge, jury and executioner, so does anyone else who gets the opportunity. By that reasoning, cops who see criminals getting back on the street again and again should take matters into their own hands and just kill suspects who they believe are too dangerous to entrust to a broken system.

Batman isn’t just trying to beat up every criminal in Gotham, night after night, one by one. He’s trying to clean up the city, take down organized crime, fight corruption, and help fix the system so that it can deal with crime. Killing people prevents him from being able to work with people like Jim Gordon. And it forces the authorities to redirect resources away from fighting other criminals and instead use them to hunt down Batman because he isn’t just a vigilante trying to help, he’s a mass murderer.

And while that may prevent his victims from coming back to commit new crimes, it won’t prevent new criminals from taking their place, something that’s going to happen when he creates a power vacuum by killing a major crime boss. Plus, the calculus changes for any criminal he faces, because they have far less to lose by doing something stupid or desperate when their lives are already on the line. It destabilizes every situation, and makes dangerous people even more desperate.

Any lasting solution for Gotham has to involve fixing its failed institutions. That’s a long term goal, and one which Batman can’t do by himself. He can make a difference, he can protect people on a daily basis, and fight corruption wherever he’s able to find it. And he can inspire others to act, coordinate with them, and support those who try to create a real change.

Now, will he ever actually clean up Gotham? No, because then we wouldn’t have a story. Of course, that would be just as true if he killed people. I mean, Frank Castle has been gunning down criminals for decades, and yet, that doesn’t seem to have eliminated violent crime either.

• enough money, highly qualified personnel, and connections (both legitimate and clandestine) to bring real change to a blighted city
• does none of the sort

He does use those resources to make change through charity and programs designed to improve the community. But that doesn’t instantly solve existing crime, particularly organized crime and corruption.

Plus, it will never actually fix Gotham because Gotham being shitty is part of the premise.

• brutalizes mentally ill people (but it’s okay because he doesn’t kill)

He beats up violent criminals, generally when they are in the middle of either attacking him, or attacking someone else, or otherwise doing something that would harm or endanger innocent people. That some of these people have varying degrees of mental illness is unfortunate, but they doesn’t mean they don’t have to be stopped.

• crime lords and terrorists walk free because of notoriously terrible corrections system and no-kill policy

Everyone of those criminals who walks free could have just as easily been murdered by any number of people during their time in custody. Why is it Batman’s responsibility to decide who lives and dies, and not any given cop or prison guard? And even if the system is broken, is it really better to have a masked vigilante killing people without trials (and appeals, and evidence, and oversight by some kind of authority)?

Also, let’s be real here, the reason they get out so predictably is not because of in-universe reasons, it’s because they want to keep bringing back villains. He could kill every supervillain in Gotham and most of them would be back in six months.

• main appeal is cool gadgets made by other, more qualified people

He’s the world’s greatest detective, a ninja, a world class martial artist, a scientist, an inventor, and one of the greatest strategists who ever lived. If he’s not qualified, who the fuck is?

Just what we need, more walled gardens and exclusivity deals. And of course, another way of monetizing your data, because we don’t have enough of that already.

Search results are already fucked enough as it is. We don’t need to start carving up the internet and and dividing it among different search engines.

4x games tend to be functionally infinitely repayable, since a single game often takes an eternity and there are usually many factions to play.

I particularly like sword of the stars 1 & 2. Honestly don’t remember which I preferred but I know I got an insane amount of time sunk into both of them.

I’d vote for ToS era Pike over Trump. I’d vote for a candidate who only communicates via ouija board over Trump. I’d vote to not have a president for 4 years before I’d vote for Trump.

It’s crazy that Trump can get convicted of fraud, be found liable for sexual assault, promise to abuse presidential power to get revenge against those who cross him, actively undermine both national and global security, promise to round up millions and put them into camps, attempt to overthrow the election and refuse to not try it again, and so on, and his side is still so loyal they’ll wear solidarity diapers for him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_theseus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

I like wireless, I just fucking loathe earbuds. Unfortunately, they have completely replaced the wrap around on-ear headphones that were the best for wearing while running errands or exercising.

I don’t want something big and bulky while I’m walking around, but I also don’t like having shit jammed into my ears. And critically, those on ear headphones are just the right size to have a convenient button layout so I can easily pause or go back a few seconds in my audiobook whenever I need to.

But Apple decreed that wireless earbuds were the future and the market for everything else fucking died.

He’s firing from both ends.

Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.

I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.

What’s really clobbered Firefox has been the rise of smartphones, where Firefox has very limited uptake.

That’s fucking crazy, because Firefox has been far better than the default options for as long as I’ve had a smartphone. I only recently dumped chrome on desktop for Firefox, but I took one look at Chrome when I got an android and immediately dumped that shit.

Don’t worry, it might still bubble up to the surface in the hallucinations of an AI.

Ukraine is a major global food supplier. The war has directly impacted food prices. And if Russia succeeds, it will only encourage more conflict of this kind. And that’s ignoring the possibility that this will escalate into an even larger conflict because Putin decides that NATO’s resolve is weak enough that article 5 is no longer a plausible threat.

Also, that stupid argument applies just as much to funding schools, cancer research, fighting climate change and basically all other functions of government that serve the public good. We should do more to address economic issues, but that doesn’t mean we should stop doing everything else.

My dad used to tell me “It’s a lot harder to carpet the world than it is to wear shoes.”

Ambitious redesigns of existing infrastructure are neat, but they are rarely more efficient or practical. Especially when you are overengineering to solve an issue that’s already been dealt with. A self cleaning room requires a lot of additional hardware, all of which has to be designed, built and installed, and has to be powered and run by software that needs to be programmed. It also needs to be maintained, and depending on how it’s cleaning things, it may also be dangerous, or at least capable of damaging property (ever have a motion activated light turnoff while in a bathroom stall? now imagine it triggers steam jets). Not to mention the potential hazards of water damage on a room if anything goes wrong.

Or, you can buy a mop for 0.1% of the price.

Humanoid robots can escape this problem because versatility adds value. The upfront cost may be tens of thousands of dollars, but for that price you’re getting something that solves many, many problems. They can potentially go from task to task, filling a multitude of roles, and ideally with minimal down time.

It also helps that we can use existing processes to train them. They can observe human workers performing a task, attempt to replicate that task, and use feedback to improve. And that’s critical because the hardware is the easier part, it’s software that’s the real challenge.

It’s easier to build a specialized robot for one task than to create a general purpose robot to handle that task. However, as the technology matures, I think it becomes much more practical to create a general purpose robot that’s capable of performing millions of tasks than to create millions of different specialized robots. Not only is that far less to design, source parts for, build and maintain, but it also makes it much easier to repurpose them as needs change. The same basic design can potentially be used for factory work, household chores, new construction, search and rescue operations, food service, vehicle maintenance, mining, caring for kids/elderly/pets, building and maintaining other robots, etc. We’re not there yet, but that’s where this kind of technology could potentially take us.

The advantage of a mostly humanoid robot is that it’s versatile and can use existing solutions built for people. Yes, you could replace the legs with wheels or treads, and you’d probably be just fine for most functions with a Johnny 5 type design, but there will still be exceptions. Being able to climb up or down a ladder for example means that you don’t have to engineer a solution to deal with getting onto a roof or down into a tunnel system. We’ve already spent thousands of years solving those problems for humans.

Ultraviolet. It makes other colors look cool. And it kills stuff.

Competition usually isn’t bad. Unfortunately, Apple has a tendency to not only be terribly anti-consumer, but also tends to be a trendsetter. They do shitty things, and other companies learn from their example. Thus, the competition becomes a race to the bottom.

Lying about testing a product in order to get people to buy it so you can get your affiliate revenue sounds like fraud to me. Seems like the kind of thing that should lead to lawsuits and potentially criminal charges. Not that anyone would actually try to do something about this or most other problems facing consumers.

You’re friend might be afraid of “gay” touching, I wouldn’t know. But I do think that can also be an easy way to explain away someone’s boundaries without understanding the complexity of the behaviors involved.

I have fairly strong boundaries, and as a general rule I don’t want people hugging me. This isn’t because there is something sexual about the hug, but because I don’t want the unwelcome close physical contact. A lot of people get to the point of welcoming that kind of contact faster than I do, and that’s fine, good for them. But that doesn’t make my comfort level less valid. And critically, one thing that makes it so hard is the social expectation, the idea that there is something wrong with saying no, and the implication that you should let people do these things that make you uncomfortable. In fact some people will ignore those boundaries and act like it’s doing you a favor, as though willfully inflicting themselves on others is supposed to make people less defensive.

And yet, if someone is having a hard time and needs an arm around their shoulder, I’m there. I will absolutely hug someone who is hurting and needs to be comforted. I’m a very caring person, and I don’t have a problem with that kind of physical contact when it’s for someone else’s benefit, as long as it’s my choice to offer it.

Sexuality only really enters into it in that a bit of sexual attraction can also quickly overcome those boundaries. It’s easy to welcome intimate contact with someone when a primitive part of your brain is trying to nudge you into doing whatever it takes to get this person naked and pressed against you. It’s a specific desire overriding the general preference for boundaries, not the context for all physical contact.

Prime was a reasonable value for me a decade ago. The streaming side was never the main draw but it was a nice added bonus, especially when Netflix started to lose a lot of the content I actually wanted to watch.

Unfortunately, Amazon’s been flooded with worthless trash, and they made the conscious decision to make searching and filtering as useless as possible. It’s actually impressive that they’ve so degraded their service that it’s usually more convenient for me to go shopping locally than to try to navigate the unending mine field on Amazon.

So of course they try to ruin the last thing keeping me subscribed. I’m done, they can fuck off. I’ve got a jellyfin server, I don’t need these assholes.

Unfortunately, I’m sure they’ll make an obscene amount of money with this move, because apparently the world is full of people who will pay good money to bend over and take it.