Sunsofold

I ignore the question and go to the IT and maintenance teams to put a series of blocks, physical and communication-system-based, between the maths and philosophy departments. Attempts to breach containment will be met with deadly force.

'...wait til the users see this!' said client.

'Fuck you and the server you run on. We want the old system back. This shit is useless, pointless, and moved the thing I click on most often one line farther down so I keep clicking on this new shit I don't want.' - said the users.

'Look, it's our most popular feature!' - said client

Just tossing on: 'If I have to go blind I want to make your naked body the vision I take with me into the darkness' sounds like a hell of a compliment, and maybe the basis for a gothic love song/novella.

Ah yes, you've never been murdered before, therefore there's no reason to assume someone might kill you if it suited their goals, and certainly no reason to assume someone who has killed other people would think of you as a target. The null hypothesis is that no one wants to kill anyone, so I guess murder just never happens at all.

Idiot or troll, I gave you a chance but I'm done with you. I hope you learn some epistemic humility before someone teaches you in a way you don't like.

Ah, okay then. Hadn't seen it in that phrasing before. Pretty stupid as an idea though. The issue is not that someone wants to follow diagetic character motivations, or even that someone else wants to play with a focus on successful combat encounters regardless of diagetic knowledge. It's that they both ended up at the same table. The DM fucked up by not setting expectations regarding the kind of table they were running. It is our duty as organizers of play to prevent these kinds of people from playing different games at the same table.

My guy syndrome?

That's not how the null hypothesis works. You are presupposing the negative and then ignoring the possible, and even the probable, to maintain it. Treating corporate malfeasance as unlikely as the existence of gods is skepticism ad absurdum. Corporations acting in ways that are harmful to their employees, customers, and neighbors isn't the nebulous 'must have been the spirits' activity of religion. It's the history of corporations.

Google management is perfectly willing to engage in suspicious practices. It's basically their business model. Since you need examples because apparently you haven't been paying attention in your day to day life: Google tracks as much as they can of what their users and adjacent people do. This occurs even after they 'opt out' of the tracking. This is well known but here is an AP article talking about it if you've somehow made it to 2025 not knowing about it. Google makes deals to obtain data on people from other sources as well, including personal medical data (e.g. Project Nightingale), again without consent. The idea that the people at google, or any large corporation, would ignore the incentives of their business and not apply any pressure to align Mozilla with their interests when they spend millions of dollars per financial quarter on lobbying, and many times that on PR, is absurd. Expecting them not to seek profit is akin to expecting a living organism not to seek food. Trying to hold the null hypothesis of 'We must first assume nothing wants food' and then ignoring common experience until a peer reviewed double blind study can show you the patently obvious is just not feasible.

I do, because it broadly displays a bad approach. If a thing should be in the game, it should just be in the game. There is no reason the developer has to gate things behind a payment. Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew, and so many others, all managed to keep adding content without pretending that DLC was anything more than a way to pay out for shareholders. The invasion of microtransactions into gaming has been nothing but harmful, deceptive, and malignant, and I refuse to participate.

Little bit of each. It's a bit of a catch 22 situation. The tipping system enables low wages. The traditional response to a bad system is to try to not participate. But then the underpaid waitstaff are paid worse until the system is changed, and unless a critical mass is reached, no change will happen anyway, so refusing to pay a tip in order to help the staff long-term hurts the staff short-term, and can only be said to be enough to make a change if it's really hurting them. It sucks as a whole situation.

1. It's a standard discussion point, not my argument in particular. It's the same one as for why it's a problem to have so much corporate money behind news media, political campaigns, and just about anything else.
   But
2. It's all speculation, both the idea of priority manipulation happening and your idea it does not. The general population doesn't know anyone at these projects, so everything has to be discussed in vague generalities. You can say 'I trust X never to take a bribe, because I know X.' but you can't say 'I trust all members of the profession X is in, because they are in that profession.'
   Saying you don't trust Google is just sensible. Saying you don't trust management at something like Mozilla because they are faceless management, (not that all the things said about choices made inside Mozilla are likely to encourage trust) though a bit generalizing, is also fairly understandable. As such, it's not at all unusual that people are going to hold some distrust for the combination of the two, especially when one of the big drivers of Firefox usage is specifically that it's supposed to be more respecting of privacy than chrome or edge. The user base is already primed to be distrustful of tech companies, and not through paranoia but experience.

I'm not saying manipulation of Mozilla by Google is guaranteed to happen but it's honestly less speculative to expect creepy activity from google, a company for which the business model is 'do sneaky shit on the internet,' than to assume absolutely everything going on is totally trustworthy.

That's kind of cool, I guess. Good luck to them. I didn't bother getting that far because I haven't burned out my attention span badly enough to desire anything approaching that level of pointless visual noise.

Someone I know wanted a recommendation for a multiplayer game recently. One of the games I remembered existing was Payday 2. DLC and subscriptions involved? Never-fuckin-mind.