EnglishMobster

I am very pro-union. I was a Teamster for years (Local 495).

I now work in the game industry. A good chunk of the gamedevs I know are pro-union, but there's enough of those opposed where there's effectively a question mark.

Generally, the holdouts tend to think:

• Union leadership is corrupt/greedy, and they don't want to give union leaders money for "nothing" (as they see it)

• Being in a union means everyone would need to be bound to strict regulations - keeping exact track of time worked, having exact lunch breaks, documenting everything. As-is in the game industry, the "standard" at most places is hands-off, take lunch whenever, stay at lunch however long you want, clock in/out whenever, nobody questions you as long as your work is getting done. People like this and don't want to risk losing it

• Being in a union threatens close relationships with management. I can say that when I was a Teamster, management was outright adversarial and conversations with them weren't fun. In the game industry, management is quite literally my friends and people I chill out with. There's a very, very blurry line between "friends" and "bosses" - some bosses are horrible, to be sure, but the general vibe is casual

• There's a lot of benefits in the office like free snacks, free swag, a place to chill out and play games at work, etc. People are afraid that this would count as "compensation" and thus being unionized would mean that you'd have to pay for snacks or swag or whatever - or that it could be taken away as retaliation from management

• Retaliation is a thing. It's illegal. US government doesn't care. Corpos get a slap on the wrist because of plausible deniability. EA has been downsizing recently and they "coincidentally" cut the contract with a QA team that just unionized. Hmm.

Again, I myself am very pro-union. However, to some extent I can see the logic in each of these bullet points - I disliked the guy running my Teamster local way back when because I felt he was too soft and captured by management. I can understand needing to clock in/out (fairest way to ensure nobody is being overworked), ruining relationships (can't have accusations of bias from being friendly), and losing benefits (although this can be put into a contract). And nobody can deny illegal retaliation is a real thing.

So I can understand where the holdouts at least are coming from. It would take a shitty workplace for unionization to happen, shitty enough that all those bullet points above aren't enough to keep the union holdouts in line. I hear Blizzard is really bad from people who have worked there, and my money is still on them being the first "big" dev to unionize - assuming Microsoft doesn't come in and clean up.

There's still a lot of people who will always stick to Reddit as well (as evidenced by a good amount of hostility in the comment section of the Reddit discussion on /r/rust).

I said what I said.

It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn't have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.

I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day...

I've heard if you leave out treats and shiny toys you can make friends with your local crows!

Counter-counterpoint: I've been using it since 2019. I think you're exaggerating.

• It aggressively tries to center itself, always. If you're in a lane and it merges with a second lane, the car will swerve sharply to the right as it attempts to go back to the middle of the lane.

• It doesn't allow space for cars to merge until the cars are already merging. It doesn't work with traffic; it does its own thing and is discourteous to other drivers. It doesn't read turn signals; it only reacts to drivers getting over.

• If a motorcycle is lane-splitting, it doesn't move out of the way for the motorcycle. In fact, it assumes anything between lanes isn't an issue. If something is partially blocking a lane but the system doesn't recognize it as fully "your lane", the default is to ignore it. The number of times I've had to disengage to dodge a wide load or a camper straddling two lanes is crazy.

• With the removal of radar, phantom braking has become far, far worse. Any kind of weather condition causes issues. Even if you drive at sunset, the sun can dazzle the cameras and they don't detect things that they should be able to - or worse, they detect problems which aren't there.

• It doesn't understand road hazards. It will happily hit a pothole at 70 MPH. It will ignore road flares and traffic cones. When the lanes aren't clearly marked (because the paint has worn away or because of construction), it can have dramatic behavior.

• It waits so long to brake, and when it brakes it brakes hard. It accelerates just as suddenly, leading to a very jerky ride that makes my passengers carsick.

The only time I trust FSD is when it's stop-and-go traffic. Beyond that I have to pay so much attention to the thing that I might as well just drive myself. The "worst thing it can do" isn't just detour; it's "smash into the thing that it thought wasn't an issue".

Yet another reason why I prefer Kbin.

The developers of Lemmy have been questionable for some time. See their post announcing Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. This was their first post announcing Lemmy as a real thing you could go use. (It's also why a good chunk of the Threadiverse is absolutely infested with tankies.)

I never agitated for a fork because generally the Lemmy devs do an okay job at keeping their politics separate from their software. But the more I look at their attitudes and (frankly) the hazing they do towards contributors, the more I'm thinking that it may be better to push for an outright fork of Lemmy, give it a better name, a saner dev team, and excise the original devs entirely. Even if we ignore their politics (which is hard to do, but can be done), they've simply not been the best stewards of the project - it's succeeded in spite of them, not because of them.

That said, I think Lemmy as a piece of software is generally okay. Kbin has more long-term promise, I feel, but Kbin has its own issues and is much rougher around the edges. A lot of the issues Kbin has have already been sorted out by Lemmy, so I think it might be best to make a Lemmy fork and bring in features from Kbin into it (alongside performance fixes and whatnot that the Lemmy devs refuse to action on).

If you follow a Kbin community on Mastodon, the top-level post is the only thing shared to the community's "profile". If you click on the post, then the comments section is the Kbin comments section.

Here's an example of a Kbin post I made displaying on Mastodon. I replied to this post, and my reply shows up as a reply to the top-level post.

Kbin's federation with Mastodon works as you'd expect it to work.

I don't know why Lemmy insists on such bad integration with Mastodon. Last I checked, the Lemmy devs were insisting on not having smooth integration with Mastodon.

Doesnt make much sense when you can create a second account on Mastodon or one of many other platforms which already implement user following much better.

It's one reason why I jumped to Kbin and have been using it for the past few months. Kbin does indeed support user following much better -and it supports threads showing up in Mastodon much better too.

...And out comes the r-slur!

Look at that! Who would know that a conservative is hateful and uses slurs???

It's almost like nobody likes them and they have to be assholes about it!

Fuck tankies.

Keep the banner.

To be fair, you don't get to be an expert at something by just reading about it. You become an expert by immersing yourself in it and knowing all the nuanced details of what you specialize in.

For example, I'm a AAA gamedev programmer. My specialty is the Unreal Engine. I know tons of little quirks about the engine that many of my coworkers don't - but that's because I've been using the engine for over a decade at this point.

I don't devote every waking moment to learning about Unreal - I used to spend a lot of free time researching it before I got hired, but now I leave gaming stuff at work to avoid burnout.

You don't need to like hyperfixate on something to become good at it. You just need to work on it for long enough - and if it's literally your job, you'll spend 40+ hours/week engrossed in it, for years.