… basic institutional competence?

What’s happening here is not normal or sane.

Strong disagree. Voting is preliminary moderation. It’s the wisdom of crowds. The fact Lemmy does nothing to hide comments at +1 -48 is fucking horrifying… especially when mods don’t just delete that shit, despite demanding all responses to it be “civil.” As if gentle and polite replies are appropriate in the face of plainly intolerable horseshit.

They really were the best possible group to deal with such a loss. See John Cleese’s Eulogy:

I guess that we’re all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, such capability and kindness, of such intelligence should now be so suddenly spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he’d achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he’d had enough fun.

Well, I feel that I should say, "Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard! I hope he fries. "

And the reason I think I should say this is, he would never forgive me if I didn’t, if I threw away this opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste. I could hear him whispering in my ear last night as I was writing this: “Alright, Cleese, you’re very proud of being the first person to ever say ‘shit’ on television. If this service is really for me, just for starters, I want you to be the first person ever at a British memorial service to say ‘fuck!’”

Reddit’s short list of good decisions definitely includes “disable replies.”

Is anyone compartmentalizing a browser? There’s enough moving parts that keeping them monolithic is an obstacle. Nobody really needs the option to swap in their own CSS parser or JS transpiler or whatever, but competing implementations could allow independence without each requiring a whole separate version of the complete stack.

Other approaches would be similarly clamped-down. We’d quickly run out of ways to make things happen on a screen in response to pushing buttons.

The very concept of a video game console might still be owned by Fairchild.

Length alone makes them obscene. The classic example in games is minigames during a load screen - which happened in exactly one game, and then belonged to Namco until after we stopped caring about load screens. They strangled an entire subgenre. The feature was not allowed to exist, in an industry built from collective incremental experimentation.

Twenty years is an eternity in computing.

Twenty years ago, shaders weren’t a thing.

Twenty years earlier, video cards weren’t a thing.

Twenty years earlier, home computers weren’t a thing.

The entire RPG genre emerged from dork-ass teenagers wasting time on mainframes between 1973 and 1976. If the concepts involved had been patented and locked away, there would not be games with first-person perspective, overhead maps, generated dungeons, turn-based combat, or inventory, until the Nintendo 64.

Fuck software patents.

Once you pop, you shall not be able to stop.

I don’t think an edit was necessary, but if you’re gonna edit it, he committed sexual assault against multiple probably-legal-at-the-time fans.

Occasionally broken by Arin being a music dork instead of a gaming dork, leading to magic like introducing him to Gen1 Pokemon designs.

… oh god that was nine years ago.

Crash Course was some good shit.

That one hurt.

I’ve forgotten who but I know one of their content creators was accused of either grooming or at least having inappropriate conversations with a or potentially multiple minors.

James Ryan Haywood did some penis crimes at Rooster Teeth conventions. Basically a dozen variations on “not technically rape.” With fans, of questionable age, on the company dime. As soon as credible accusations arose, his ass was gone, and the rest of Achievement Hunter had exactly one emotional-and-drunk livestream to say they were never going to acknowledge him for the rest of their lives.

His whole personality on-camera and in-game turns out to be really close to how he sincerely acts and thinks. He was not playing a heel.

Some people get addicted to being right all the time.

The general difference is that these bookmarks go away when re-opened. They’re an alternative to leaving a buttload of tabs open.

Not that guy. But: what people were promised was smartphone guts in a set-top box, for all the novel PSP-grade mobile titles that were limited by touchscreen controls and battery life. What was delivered was Not That. They turned the Kickstarter into a custom microconsole, which is a vulgar word in any context, because it means there’s no goddamn software. The central fucking point was to take advantage of everything on Google Play… or whatever the hell it was called that month. Instead you got a tiny selection of games which were forced to provide free demos. And you could play them with an abysmal controller, which was the one thing these geniuses were supposed to get right for free.

Currently budgeting a mission to resupply the magenta toner.

You won’t unfuck that chicken.

The most anticipated feature of 2015.