thinkercharmercoderfarmer

The buyers are way beyond that point

Electronic Arts confirmed it was entering an agreement to be acquired by a group of investors comprised Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners at the end of September. The PIF is run by Saudi Arabia's Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, and the investment firm Affinity Partners was formed by Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Considering the new owners are famed journalist murderer and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman and Presidential nepo-in-law Jared Kushner, I'm doubtful that respect for the creative process is high on the list of priorities. And yeah, EA already sucks but I imagine they'll find lots of innovative ways to drive EA to new heights of terribleness.

I don't remember season 3 being better or worse, though I did roll my eyes pretty hard when they decided to go to the Land of Space Nonsense where Mysteries Abound, which I think was season 3.

Hard to say which series had the rougher start, IMO. I can get onboard with the TOS-ish cornball nature of ENT, and I like it for what it is, but TNG found its footing and matured, and I don't feel like ENT ever pulled that off so it just kinda... stayed the same.

Ah makes sense. Thanks!

Very cool, thanks. I migrated from top to htop a while ago and never looked back, but I occasionally have to use machines that don't have htop so it might be time to get familiar with the default tooling.

Why do they say that SIGKILL bad practice? I use it as the second tap if a SIGTERM doesn't knock something out. The link in the article is 404ing.

I think that's broadly true, but just because you work somewhere as oppressive as IBM doesn't mean you don't long to breathe the free air. I like to imagine some of the contributors to the IBM songbook felt trapped in their day job and grabbed at that as the only available creative outlet, and they had their own magnum opus that they were going to publish just as soon as they felt safe enough to take the leap. I can't find any credits for the songs so maybe they did.

I believe all pyramid schemes have earnings. The problem is that the bag has so far been shown to be pretty empty and somebody is going to be left holding it.

This is as good an excuse as any to break out the ol' IBM corporate songbook

Tech has always been suits at the top, hippies at best an annoying necessity because they know how to actually operate the machine.

I think it has to do with the kinds of stories these characters are used to tell. Batman is a tortured billionaire who tries to use his vast resources to solve the problem of crime single-handedly, and he keeps people at arm's length because he's afraid that personal ties will endanger the mission he's given himself (or something like that, Batman scholars feel free to chime in if I got it wrong.). Spiderman is a story about a broke kid trying to make a difference in the world with the limited resources he has. Similar goals for both characters, but different preconditions make the stories meaningfully different.

I think these flaws are what endear fans to a particular character because they struggle with the same problems (overly self-reliant, broke as hell) and if you have a character grow past them, you're now telling a meaningfully different story. Might still be an interesting story, but I get why people who love these characters would consider some changes to be dealbreakers.

This is kind of a foundational feature of serialized character stories: if you want to keep telling stories about the same characters over and over again, they can't fundamentally learn or grow or change meaningfully, not permanently anyway, because then the appeal of the character fundamentally changes, so you get characters like Batman who are stuck in this sitcom-y eternal purgatory of constantly slamming their heads against their own limitations, and still failing to grasp the root issue. And really I think, it's not for them to figure out. Their stories are there so that we can see our own flaws in them, and learn from them. And once we have, Batman will still be out there, being a lonely nerd for other lonely nerds to identify with.

I think comparison can be accompanied by misery but I don't think it's inevitable. I don't know if it's possible to go your whole life and not compare yourself to anyone, ever, on any metric. Some people are better than I am at some things, and I learn by comparing myself to them. I think the trick is to not condense it all down into a single spectrum. I mean that for broad moral judgements (e.g. "I am a better person than my boss") as well as in particular domains ("My co-worker is a worse coder than I am"). I think that type of quick judgement can always be peeled apart and analyzed, and learned from, and I think that resolves a lot of the tension that typically comes from comparison.

four pane terminal: top left running htop, top right showing the commit history for a gnarly repo, bottom right just running cat /dev/urandom, bottom left is a cowsay script reciting the dialogue of "Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace"