WTF happened to Sinfest anyway?

an unwritten rule of the brony fandom is that you don’t hide it.

This explains so much.

I don't know of any "consolidated" alternative.

For the text portion, IRC ain't bad.

What is it about easter eggs (and such) in software that makes them such a canary for this sort of thing?

I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread.

The idea is to get into a self-perpetuating scheme where everyone hears everyone else saying X, so they think that they themselves must be mistaken. And then over time you get everyone thinking X too.

In practice this relies on way-overly-naive Bayesian analysis, and isn't what happens at all.

More like they expect everyone to drink the kool-aid.

By which I mean, a lot of people seem to expect that if you always force everyone to signal X, people with dissenting opinions will sooner or later go "everyone else is signaling X so X must be correct".

It's way over-naive naive Bayesian analysis taken to an extreme. i.e. "I think X is 10% likely, this person thinks X is definitely true, so I'll adjust to 11%, this person thinks X is definitely true so I'll adjust to 12%, etc, etc, X is definitely likely".

In practice, what happens is instead "I think X is 10% likely, but am being pushed to say X. This person says X is definitely true, but I think there's an 80% chance that everyone is being pushed to say X not just me. Adjust to 11% likely. This other person says X is also definitely true, but I think there's an 80% chance that everyone is being pushed to say X not just me and I'm not going to double-count. I still think X is 11% likely, and now think there's an 81% chance that everyone is being pushed to say X. Repeat.".

(This is also overly naive, but gets the idea across hopefully.)

SSC is/was golden.

It was one of the (very) few places where you could actually hold discourse, and could actually disagree with one another.

One interesting measure of a site is how far of an outlier your views can visibly be while still being welcomed and discussed, and SSC was the winner on that metric. By far.

I'm suffering from SSC withdrawal already.

Personally, I'm one of those weird Linux-only PCMR peoples.

I finally had enough takehome income to start affording consoles and such right about the time that consoles lost all advantages to me.

Consoles used to be about a couple of things, for me:

1. More powerful for the money, partly because people could write to the specific hardware, partly because of more esoteric (but effective) architectures, partly because they were often sold at a loss.
2. You could buy something and play it and come back to it, and the company can't just decide "nope, time to remotely remove it so people get the new shiny instead"
3. You can buy something and play it and the company can't 1984-retcon things out from under you.

And now...

1. Consoles are essentially just the same PC architecture as everything else (Exception of Nintendo, though they have other issues.). With more lockdown and higher-level SDKs required, making it difficult-to-impossible to write to the hardware, so you lose that advantage too. And the scales are such that you don't even really have the advantage of economies of scale, as they are just using, well, pc parts.
2. Everything is internet-required now. Good luck playing Driver: San Francisco, for instance. Meanwhile, I still play Stars! sometimes via wine.
3. See 2.

So, consoles lost me. I don't bother. I'm purely PCMR now.

(That all being said: this is all me-centric. And I have no issues with discussions of xbox / etc / etc.)

You guys have your own language! It’s cool.

Jargon is the term :-)

And you do have mental health covered as part of your healthcare plan, correct?

plummets in value and is sold to some company or another for a minuscule percentage of its capped value.

Something something tumblr.

as much as a Digg-esque dive into irrelevancy.

Yep, exactly. Reddit will probably also hang there like that.

Hmm. Archive sites are important; can we please use one that's a little less "No. You bad. Go away." to tor users?

Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. For more details visit our help page

Just like SMR being submarined into existing product SKUs.

Put the good stuff in long enough for people to write rave reviews, then exploit the reputation for as long as possible. Rinse. Repeat.

bad faith claims of discrimination

Ah yes. The DWIM of policies.

I hereby declare that all speech complying with this policy is in bad faith.

To be clear: is this a ban from kia.win? Or from all .win?

we're not worried about .win bowing to the whims of the rapidly-sliding Overton window and tightening up those rules?

If the past decade has taught people anything, it's that one should always be prepared for seemingly-obvious things to take a 180.

Always have a backup plan, in other words

.win looks promising, but so did the old site once upon a time.

communities.win has an official list in the sidebar.

Really, this place just "needs" a link there. u/HandofBane?

Though now that I look there isn't a sidebar to put it on. Huh.

As a stopgap could you perhaps put text to the effect of "this may take a few minutes to take effect, please be patient :-)" when you add a post or delete a comment/post?

I haven't tried to add a post or delete a post/comment yet. It is entirely possible this is already the case.

See, in general with hosting: I couldn't really care less about where something is hosted and who it is "associated" with, until or unless they start forcing policies onto you.

Yes, even if Kotaku offered hosting for KiA. If anything, that would make me revisit my opinion of them (slightly).

They key is: always have a backup, always. And don't count anything 'flaky' as a backup. Applies to IT in general, and applies here too.

And no time is more critical to get a backup then right after you had to switch to the backup, as right now you're operating without a backup.

Many people did, even with there not really being anyplace to go.

Now that there is a seed crystal, such people - you and I included - will likely nucleate around it given time.

KiA and a bunch of small niche subs for me.

I think one of my top comments back at the old place was a ramble at someone with a checklist of things to watch out for power delivery for mixed analog/digital circuitry.

Really, that sort of thing has long stopped being appreciated at the old place. So I moved on. And now I am here.

It's alive!

And in a fora that I'll actually participate in!

Now if only I can overcome my distaste of JS long enough to find/build a RES clone for this place. So many missing QOL features. So many.