One time long ago, a guy on the train (whether tweaking or mental issues, I don’t know) sat down across from me, which was probably the most spacious spot in a fairly busy train. I didn’t register any unusual behaviour, nor was I - white male teen, at the time - particularly concerned.

He suddenly leaned in and asked me what I’d do if he killed me. Die, obviously. He then followed up telling me he could punch me in the face. He did neither of these things, eventually got off the train, and I never saw him again. The incident obviously left an impression, but I wouldn’t say I am or was traumatised by it.

I think this exemplifies that difficult grey zone. I don’t think it was motivated by hate, given I’m a fairly “safe” demographic. I also didn’t take him for the type of bully that does it for the power fantasy, or the type of macho needing to establish superiority.

Was it a threat or just a rather unhinged musing on social restraints? Was there actual intent to hurt me, kept in check by some lucky circumstances, or was it just a brief outburst of intrusive thoughts? I did feel threatened and intimidated, but is what I felt enough to judge his actions?

Regardless of the legal question, he probably needed help - medical or social - rather than punishment. I’m not qualified to assess that, but that question has bounced around my head ever since. What led to this outburst? What could be done to prevent that? What could be done to help him?

It’s not strictly relevant to the legal question - his actions are his own to account for, though his mental state may be a mitigating factor - but I figured I’d add it as context because I think it’s worth considering.

The willingness to be responsible for consequences does factor in. If you round the corner and crash into someone, you probably didn’t intend to, but whether you’ll be an ass about it and yell at the other person or whether you’ll apologise and check they’re alright makes a difference.

In a perfect-information-setting, intent equals result: If I know what my actions will cause and continue to carry them out, the difference between “primary objective” and “accepted side-effect” becomes academic. But in most cases, we don’t have perfect information.

I feel like the intent-approach better accounts for the blind spots and unknowns. I’ll try to construct two examples to illustrate my reeasoning. Consider them moral dilemmas, as in: arguing around them “out of the box” misses the point.

Ex. 1:
A person is trying to dislodge a stone from their shoe, and in doing so leans on a transformator box to shake it out. You see them leaning on a trafo and shaking and suspect that they might be under electric shock, so you try to save them by grabbing a nearby piece of wood and knocking them away from the box. They lose balance, fall over and get a concussion.
Are you to blame for their concussion, because you knocked them over without need, despite your (misplaced) intention to save them?

Ex. 2:
You try to kill someone by shooting them with a handgun. The bullet misses all critical organs, they’re rushed to a hospital and in the process of scanning for bullet fragments to remove, a cancer in the earliest stages is discovered and subsequently removed. The rest of the treatment goes without complications and they make a speedy and full recovery.
Does that make you their saviour, despite your intent to kill them?

In both cases, missing information and unpredictable variables are at play. In the first, you didn’t know they weren’t actually in danger and couldn’t predict they’d get hurt so badly. In the second, you probably didn’t know about the tumor and couldn’t predict that your shot would fail to kill them. In both cases, I’d argue that it’s your intent that matters for moral judgement, while the outcome is due to (bad) “luck” in the sense of “circumstances beyond human control coinciding”. You aren’t responsible for the concussion, nor are you to credit with saving that life.

I was responding to the “Look, they’re all nice people” defense you quoted, not contradicting you. I agree with you in principle.

I don’t consider “misguided” a valid defence.

My view of morality is largely centered on intent, so “I thought it would be a good thing” is a valid defence (though there is also a degree of responsibility to check assumptions; if you never made any effort to check if it actually is a good thing, that’s negligence)

So it’s hard to be good when your salary depends on you being bad.

…and by extension, when your livelihood depends on you being bad, yes. Not everyone’s livelihood depends on their salary, but for many people it does. If it’s hard to find a job that can pay the bills, I don’t fault people for the human reflex of justifying bad things to yourself in the name of survival.

(But if they do have a choice and choose to enrich themselves at the expense of others, they’re obviously pricks - just saying this might not apply to all the devs involved here).

You can be a great person and still write garbage software. Whether you’re just doing it because you need money or whether you’re misguided and think it’s actually good, that doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person (and remember: It’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it).

Doesn’t make the software less garbage.

But we gave him a nice little prison stay to write his manifesto in! Surely he learned his lesson and won’t attempt to overthrow democracy again, right?

…right?

That’s not even correct. I said “not all that useful” and then “next to useless”. Never “absolutely useless”.

It’s a simplification to condense the core point:
People say “I like this! This is useful!”
You say “It’s not all that useful”
I reply “It is to me”
You double down “next to useless”
I say “For you maybe, but for me it’s very useful”

The essence is that it’s not very useful to you, but it is for others. Yet you steamroll over that (subjective) take to double down on how shitty it is.

The whole point of this feature is to provide something built into Steam that works without a whole bunch of fiddling like other recording software.

It does. It’s a built-in utility to record gameplay clips. That’s neat.

It currently fails at that on Linux because the implementation of it is half-assed.

It’s lacking one feature, yes, but I’d not call that a failure if plenty of people seem fine without it.

That is my position.

Rich, coming from “You’re wrong when you say it’s useful”.

End of conversation.

“I’m right, you’re wrong and I refuse to hear otherwise”

Alright then. I figured you were genuinely confused and thought maybe seeing the other perspective could help clear things up. Guess you’d have to actually look for that to work.

Your opinion is posited as an absolute: “This is useless” suggests you consider it useless in general. People arguing otherwise are challenging that general claim by providing examples where it can be useful.

They’re not invalidsting your subjective perception that it’s not particularly useful for your primary use case. In fact, I’ve seen explicit acknowledgements that your use case will require different tools. If anything, your doubling down on the assertion that it is useless invalidates those that do find it useful.

For contrast, consider the more personal phrasing “This isn’t really useful to me, because I generally clip conversations and it doesn’t capture my mic.” This both respects that other people may find it useful and makes it clear why you don’t.

Aside from the semantics, you might be able to work around the issue by customising your audio setup, which is something I don’t know if Windows lets you. I don’t know what exactly it captures and what audio server you use, but if it can be pointed at a specific virtual device, you might be able to loop back your audio input to that device and use a combine-stream to route your other audio both to that virtual and your actual pysical output device.

Are you talking about in-game voice chat, that should be available to the game to record, or a third party tool that probably shouldn’t? If the game doesn’t need your mic, it shouldn’t access it; if it doesn’t access it, it’s not part of the gameplay recording.

That doesn’t mean it’s “not all that useful”, Linux or otherwise, just because it doesn’t cover your specific use case. I can definitely see myself using it to record brief clips - on linux - without having to run OBS in the background.

Part of the issue is the push by many left-wing voters to get actually progressive politics on the table after years of alternating between regressives and complacent centrists* that prefer making small concessions to the right over big steps to the left. They don’t want another presidency marked by lukewarm promises kept poorly. They’re tallying up all the ways in which Harris still isn’t as good as she ough to be.

For Trumpers, he is good enough. He is everything they want: A public role model enabling them to be an absolutely shameless asshat.

The complexity arises when people advocate voting for a third party instead. By and large, no third party has the traction to beat the Republicans. You’d need to get the entire Dem voterbase and then some. If that fails, you’ve split the non-Rep voterbase and the enabling asshat gets the plurality. On the other hand, there’s a risk that leaning too far left in the attempt to keep the progressive voters may lose the centrist* voters, which is a gamble whether that will end up a net positive. Harris has a tough job: walking a political tightrope, particularly if it’s consistently being tugged at by people.

And there are good reasons to tug on that rope. You’ll find some in these comments: Settling for “Good enough” doesn’t help getting actual change. For the ultra-rich, on the other hand, progressive policies are a detriment, so they’ll want to tug it the other way. The left doesn’t want to cede ground and keeps pulling. The centrists* that don’t like Trump but also fear dramatic change pull her to the other side again. The “centrists”** pull just to see her fall.

And that’s exciting! That’s an actual conflict of ideologies! That’s her having to work for her voters’ approval! You’ll see the complaints flying left and right, see her try to keep an ever-shifting balance, see drama and tension! People love drama and tension. Corporate media loves drama and tension because it gets attention, clicks, revenue, all that. “Assholes still support Asshole” just isn’t as interesting as “<prominent person> criticises Kamala for <policy>, calls her <incomplete quote>”.

Also, splitting the Dem voterbase serves the corporate executives and shareholders that want the right-wing tax breaks and erosion of worker protections because it makes them even richer. That’s probably not a coincidence.

*Centrist as in “I don’t want things to radically change”, not as in “I think both parties are equally bad, so I’ll sow dissent in the Dem voterbase, pretend that I’m not helping Trump with that and get to feel superior to both”.

** The latter group of the above footnote. It doesn’t really matter whether they’re intentional agents of disunity or idealists that care more about voting with their heart than the actual outcome. The result is the same: At best, they’ve achieved nothing. At worst, they’ve contributed to Trump’s victory.

500 Kelvin is a hot oven that severely burns you if you touch the tray directly. 1000 K is a nice campfire. 1500 K is the upper end of Magma. 2500 K is beyond normal blast furnace temperatures.

5000 Kelvin is ridiculously hot.

To save you a click: Crashes on connecting with servers may be related to the default vm.max_map_count being too low. You can increase it temporarily with sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=1048576 or permanently set that value in your “/etc/sysctl.conf” file or “/etc/sysctl.d” depending on your distribution.

The difference between a million and a billioj is about one billion. Millionaires aren’t the biggest bloodsuckers by a long shot, so the focus right now is on damage control by opposing the parasites.

My high-school class on philosophy concerned itself with formal logic (syllogisms, really) and a little ontology, though I have forgotten most of the ontological stuff again. I don’t know just how much there is to know, so I don’t know just how ignorant I am. But where other Internet philosophers pretend to know what they’re talking about, I at least know that I don’t.

I once tried Red Bull Cola.

I am very flexible when it comes to Cola. I have my strong preference, but I’ll drink other brands to when offered, with one notable exception: You’d have to pay me to drink Red Bull Cola again. They should’ve stuck to Energy Drinks. All their pretty flavours are nice, but that one product is an crime against my tastebuds.

For future readers looking to set separate default pulseaudio or pipewire sinks for individual apps, this his how I accomplished it.
If you’re using pipewire config, sink_name will be called node.name in the capture.props of the module.

For flatpak apps, I used this per-user override only for my current user:
flatpak override --user --env=PULSE_SINK=(sink_name) (full application name)
For example:
flatpak override --user --env=PULSE_SINK=live_sink com.spotify.Client

For steam games, insert the respective environment variable into the launch options if you already have some, or otherwise put PULSE_SINK=(sink_name) %command% in there.

Steam Tinker Launch maintains a gamecfgs/customvars/(Game ID).conf config file for each game to set custom environment variables in, which you can most conveniently find through from the launcher’s Main Menu > Editor > find the customvars entry. In there, just put the line PULSE_SINK=(sink_name) and you’ll be good to go.

Aesthetically pleasing like a blank canvas, a bare concrete wall, a block of clay, an empty manuscript: Brimming with potential to become something.

Install the Musixmatch app, get the lyrics for free from the original service instead of Spotify’s embedded player.

I pay for premium, personally, but that shit is just scummy.

I mean, it seems like that’s the cultural push-and-pull depicted here: Some people don’t like it and make that known. If their opinion ends up prevailing and papers containing silliness end up being rejected by the major journals of their field, doctoral comittees etc., eventually the silliness may be driven out and gatekept.

We fans of harmless humour would lament as much as the guy in the OP laments now. We would presumably attempt to encourage silliness, as the guy in the OP does now.

Consensus swinging one way naturally doesn’t magically mean we now have to change our opinions to fit the consensus. Right now, language evolves in our favour, and we will attempt to support and leverage that evolution because it suits us.

How would that invalidate their findings?

I’m not a native speaker, but somehow have a bigger vocabulary than my phone. Granted, I read a lot, but you’d expect my dictionary to, well, contain the entire dictionary. Some words, it recognises one form, but not others.