People Trapped by Their Decisions

Posted on May 3, 2025 by David K.

This is an eye-opening take on a heartbreaking situation. The woman being interviewed in this video is fighting against the incursion of biological men in women’s spaces. She describes the people who are fighting against her have motivations they are not being honest about. While not public knowledge, they have transitioned their children, so they have to fight for “trans rights” until the day they die. She says she has become a “standing reproach” to these people, and likens them to the Japanese soldiers in WWII who would never surrender after the war was over. They are forever compelled to attack her, because to agree that she makes a good point — any point — would mean they were wrong, and lest they have to face the fact that they have done irreparable damage to the very ones they had responsibility to protect from such abuse.

I’m not here to get into any of that argument. I simply realized it has a wider application.

This was my last post to Facebook, before I deleted my account.

I can’t get into details… at least not yet… but imagine, for a second, the length, breadth, and depth of the betrayal that would lead someone to make such a post. That might be captured by the image of being stabbed in the back, face, and heart. Got it? OK.

Now imagine the “support” system that has to be in place for someone to have implemented such a betrayal, not just of a person or a family, but an entire mid-sized church. The friends and family that had to have colluded. Got it? OK.

The people who played a part in committing this betrayal are still going around telling people that they were falsely accused, that there’s “another side” to the story, lying about that “side,” and blaming the entire problem on others (including me, I’m sure), despite the fact that scores of us who know the details about what happened are crystal clear about it. We have the figurative and literal receipts proving “our” side. I helped dig them up. Over the past couple of years, I’ve often agonized over the question, “How can they be like this?”

That’s where the video comes in. When I watched it, it was an aha! moment. I finally realized that the people who worked to enable this giant betrayal, this… gargantuan rug-pull, this… 40-year-long con will never — can never — admit to any wrongdoing or their part in it. The soul-crushing disappointment of facing the reality of being such a narcissistic sociopath would be too much. So they are going to go to their grave sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling, ignoring the plain facts of the situation, and avoiding their own consciousnesses over their multiple, decades-long moral and ethical failings

They have to live in a headspace where they say things like I’m “misinformed,” because if I’m not, it has soul-crushing implications. They’ll live the rest of their lives in an ivory tower of their own imaginations, locked away from the generational spiritual and emotional harm they’ve inflicted on hundreds of people, including some of their closest, so-called friends, because to admit they’ve committed such grievous injury would be impossible to reconcile with their their supposed beliefs and ethos, and their carefully-curated public image.

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Bethesda’s Roadmap

Posted on May 3, 2025 by David K.

I found this 10-month-old interview with Todd Howard, the president of Bethesda. As usual, there’s a lot of talk, but little of substance. Look, I get it. Given his position, he can’t be very specific, or gamers will hound him until his dying day about something he said that didn’t work out the way they wanted. But if you listen between the lines, he says something that lines up with where I think this is all going.

Given my previous and salty experience of buying the advance-availability digital deluxe version of Starfield, and then refunding it because of the nightmarish inventory management, I just went and looked at the Steam chart for Starfield.

Ouch. That seems low. So I went and looked at Skyrim too, for comparison.

Like, ouch, man. The 12-year-old Skyrim has almost ten times as many players as Starfield. Maybe this is an unfair comparison, as Skyrim has twice as many players than Elder Scrolls Online and three times as many as Fallout 76, so Skyrim is sort of a juggernaut of video games. But still. Dang.

I found another video (which I won’t bother linking), lamenting the lack of updates to Starfield since launch while the player numbers languish. He complains that the potential of the game isn’t being realized. However, the “potential” of this game is being worked on, just not in the way he’s looking for it.

When Fallout 4 released, the settlement building aspect was widely criticized as not making much sense in the context of a single-player game. You could build up all the settlements in the game, and create supply routes between them, so that you could pool all your building materials together, and then… the people of those settlements would… help you fight random encounters all over the map? Really? All those hours of effort for this benefit? It was a really good subsystem, but that was the weird part. It made you question why a great, in-game building tool had such an obviously significant development effort put into it, when the in-game utilization of it was so weak. When they eventually released Fallout 76 on the same engine, it suddenly made perfect sense.

Well, they’re doing the same thing with Starfield. It’s well understood through some online leaks of recruiting posts that the studio is working on another “untitled” MMORPG, but it seems patently obvious (at least to me, given previous history) that this will be based on Starfield. So the lack of updates with Starfield has to be understood in this context.

They are surely coordinating the direction of the inevitable single player game expansions with the work going on with the MMO version of the game. In the same way that they timed the big Fallout 76 Ghoulification update to land with the TV show, I believe they’re holding things back waiting on other teams. Don’t forget that they promised to port it to Playstation, and now people are noting that this is being hinted in the Creation store, so that’s coming, and what better way to hype that re-launch on a new platform than with the forthcoming Shattered Worlds update? And after that, the next big update will probably land with the reveal of their new MMO based on the property.

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That’s Just… Too Many Buttons

Posted on May 3, 2025 by David K.

Reminds me of the joke where the guy says he went in to work early, and switched the N and M keys on half the keyboards, claiming, “Some people will call me a monster, but others will call me a ‘nomster’.”

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The Inevitable Monetization of Subclassing

Posted on April 29, 2025 by David K.

The well-known Elder Scrolls Online streamer, Alcast, has a writeup about the forthcoming ESO subclassing feature here: https://alcasthq.com/eso-how-to-prepare-for-subclassing/. He points out that you have to level a skill line to 50 on a class in order to unlock it for use in subclassing, then you have to re-level it to 50 as a subclass line, at half the normal rate of advancement. However, at least that subclass skill line is shared among your other characters.

When they announced this feature was going to be free for base game, I was surprised. Given previous history, I expected this to cost 1500 or 2000 Crowns per character. Now the monetization angle becomes clear. I think they’ll offer instant subclass skill leveling in the Crown store, and the only question becomes will it be 1500 or 2000 Crowns, and will that be for all 3 skill lines as a class, or per individual skill line? My first guess was going to be 1500 per skill line, but on further reflection, I think it will probably be 3000.

Now we wait to see…

UPDATE: The new patch landed, and they did not offer a way to insta-level subclass skill lines. So I was wrong, and it’s too bad. I think they would have gotten a lot of money out of me. I spent several hours grinding the hard way, realized that I was having zero fun, and quit for good.

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No Comment

Posted on April 29, 2025 by David K.

I have laughed until my stomach hurts. I needed this very, very badly.

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Everything in Every App

Posted on April 28, 2025 by David K.
Poly Lens

This is a real screenshot of an app that starts automatically on my work laptop at login. It’s part of a driver for Polycom headsets. I don’t have a headset plugged in, because my kid’s pet rabbit chewed through the cord too close to the ear cup, and I couldn’t fix it. Regardless, this is still running, popping up like it’s important, and has such necessary and tightly-coupled-with-headset activities as showing me “insights” on my computer’s “connectivity,” reminding me to hydrate and rest, and teaching me about ergonomics. Thank goodness my (former) headset manufacturer is looking out for me like this. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. I might have gone all day without drinking a glass of water or something.

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Neuro-Atypicalness

Posted on April 28, 2025 by David K.

I follow Dave Plummer on YouTube. He’s one of the OG Windows programmers. A true hacker in the best traditions of the ethos. Turns out, he’s on the spectrum. He wrote about book about being out on “far end,” so to speak.

Can you be a “little bit” autistic?

He’s written enough about his neuro-atypicalness on Twitter to resonate with me, so I bought the book. The whole first part is explaining how things “work” for him, and I got tired of going, “Well, yeah,” and set it down.

I just picked it up again, and skipped ahead to the next part, and he hit me with this:

“Much of my life was spent presuming that, as an intelligent individual, my version of the world was the right one and that all I had to do was sufficiently educate, convince, and cajole the other person until they “got” my version.

Which is exactly what I was referring to in this post, where I was trying to convey how futile trying to persuade people has been for me over my lifetime. I’ll give an example.

One of my earliest memories of this type of conflict happened in the late 90’s. I was working for a bluechip Fortune 250 which no longer exists. It was a special place, and it was destroyed in a textbook corporate raid, but at the time, I had established myself as someone who knew what they were doing with computer systems, and — at least I like to believe — had the respect of the leaders of the various IT subsystems of the company.

The company was pretty big, but the IT staff was relatively small. By comparison, the company that bought and pillaged us was about the same size, but had an IT staff four or five times as large. We were having a big meeting with most the IT people, and the subject of DNS came up. I was frustrated that I couldn’t spin up hostnames in our DNS system, and had to ask and wait for someone to do it for me. Now, the person in charge of the network had had enough foresight to make various sub-domains based on sites. For instance, our technical center was ctc.arvin.com. So hosts could be given names like pdm.ctc.arvin.com.

I made the point that the local site IT admins could be given permissions to be able to create new names in their local subdomains. I was trying to get them to allow my own site’s admin to be able to do this for me, without needing to involve corporate, and wait. I remember pointing out that the system was designed to work this way, implying that it would be easier to let them do this themselves.

One of the big 3 IT bosses said that the local site admins wouldn’t be able to do that. I thought that was silly. After all, the DNS admin tool in Windows NT was really easy to use. My prototype and testing facility’s admin was one of the most talented IT guys I’ve ever met. Still. Thirty years later. So I was imagining that the rest of the site admins were at least competent “computer people,” which wasn’t the case. Like, at all. The other sites — the manufacturing sites — were having their IT needs met by someone who just got picked because they had an inkling of what was going on, and had the bandwidth to setup the box. A couple years later, I would be meeting some of them, and they turned out to be HR people and shipping clerks. I was confused by the disconnect in the moment, but I dropped it. But after I met some of these other people, I finally got it, and was able to fill in the gaps in that story. It was an honest clash of multiple levels of high-flying expectations dashed on the rocks of reality.

It took me a long time to see that my whole approach lead people to think that I thought they were stupid. In this particular case, I’m sure I made the managers in the room feel like I was calling the site admins incompetent. No, I just made bad assumptions, and gave people the benefit of the doubt. This is a very different thing, but people can’t see it that way when they feel they’re being indirectly accused of not being unqualified. If I had understood the proper context of the other sites, instead of extrapolating from the one I was familiar with, I wouldn’t have suggested it in the first place. But despite being a trained mechanical engineer — where every single problem I ever solved started with identifying my assumptions — I still sometimes can’t see that my assumptions are bad. It’s probably because I’m just rushing to get to the place I want to be.

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Typical IT

Posted on April 16, 2025 by David K.

From here.

It’s not “insane.” And, in fact, 100 days seems like a short request.

In my Fortune 250, I recently spent 4 months asking for a change that took literally 30 seconds to do. I wasn’t confused. They eventually did exactly what I asked to be done. But the email chain eventually included 52 people, and required a meeting to finally get the people responsible for doing the thing to actually DO the thing.

This is a perfectly-predictable result of the 40-years-out-of-date “best practice” of how to do “IT,” driven by the accumulation of selfish motivations present in any large collection of people.

Internal “product managers” with zero technical ability make requests to outsourced “product managers” with zero technical ability, who relay the request to internal teams which take a month to figure out who has the very specific knowledge of how to, say, move login buttons around on web pages — and ONLY that specific knowledge — and then middle managers with no technical ability have to schedule that activity with the activities of all the other people who have one, very-specific thing they know how to do. And after it’s finally changed in dev, then it has to be pushed through QA, staging, and finally prod.

This is how Fortune 500 companies do “IT,” all day, every day, and the very same incentives that have led to this climate are present in government, just writ larger.

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Elder Scrolls Online Subclassing

Posted on April 15, 2025 by David K.

Well this is actually exciting. Over and over, I see suggestions of how to fix “pain points” in ESO and Fallout 76 go unheeded for years and years, and then something gets announced that is better than any of the things people have suggested. I can’t think of an example off the top, but it’s happened several times. I think we’ve just seen another.

For years and years, people have complained that they wanted to be able to change a character’s class, like you can their race. Being a full-stack developer for decades, their reaction always felt like the class was a high-order property of the character, which was tied into too many things to ever change.

Well they’ve just announced “subclassing.” A character is defined by 3 skill class lines, but subclassing will allow you to swap out 2 of those lines for lines from any of the other 6 classes (but not both from the same one). To me, this is even better. This is much more interesting than just changing classes.

The best part is that it’s free for all players as a base-game feature. It won’t cost $15 per toon in the monetization shop, which, given prior history, is what I would have guessed if no one had told me otherwise. (That’s what the “race change token” costs.)

At this point, people are worried about 2 things with this change: that class identity will be wiped out, and that there will be significant power creep. First, yes. Class identity is basically going to be a thing of the past. No one is really going to care what class a toon is. It will only matter as far as there are a very limited number of class-specific sets which will still be class locked, but no one uses them anyway.

Second, oh, my, yes! There is going to be power creep. The subclassing feature is already live in the PTS server, and people are already posting dummy parses.

155K Beam

They’ve already pointed out that some of the hoped-for things won’t come true, like how the sorcerer’s Daedric Prey — which boosts all pet damage by 45% — will only apply to sorcerer pets, so it’s not going to boost the warden bear or the necro blast bones. However, that being said, it looks like we’ll be able to make builds capable of more than current god-tier level (~130K) with this system, without needing to be a sweaty try-hard at light attack weaving and animation cancelling. (Which the purists say are different things, but I can’t figure out the difference. Maybe this is why I suck at it.) This isn’t some perfect weaving build that requires 10-millisecond timing for 200 button presses in a row without missing. More than half of this guy’s damage on the parse came from the arcanist’s beam, which is an easy thing to manage.

131K Heavy Attack

Oh, dang. Hyperioxes is one of the current prominent ESO streamers. He’s getting 131K with a heavy attack build, which is nothing but holding down the attack button and occasionally pressing a skill button. I can get 93K with this kind of build currently, but it absolutely maxes out around 98K if you manage to land a lot of crits. So this is a big upgrade. I mean… that’s almost 50% more, for the sake of replacing one skill line, and using one of the new mythics. This is veteran trial hard mode DPS numbers in the easiest build configuration possible. (OK, to be fair, the new mythic he’s using will require light attack weaving in order to restore resources, but the exact timing won’t be an issue for the build, and that’s the hard part.)

The oakensoul ring and the arcanist class opened up the vet trial scene to a lot more people in the game, including me. I think this move is intended to give people a shot at running hard modes and trifectas who wouldn’t have stood a chance before. There was a 4-man prog group in my main guild of people who were all awesome at the game, and they got stuck in their runthrough of the dungeon trifectas. When that happened, I knew then that I was never going to get on in that scene because I’m not even as good as them. If ZOS doesn’t nerf this too much — and the studio lead has been clear that they’re happy with how these DPS numbers are testing internally — this is going to open the end-game content to another strata of people. Maybe I’ll finally be able to manage a perfect Veteshran Hollows run; who knows!

Of course, everyone who was really good at weaving is hating all of this, and I love that part too. I’m bitter that I can’t do it well, even after all these years, and those that gatekeep the game over it can suck it. I’ll take the achievements anyway, thank you very much.

I retired from ESO back in December. I’m thinking I may un-retire when all of this lands. It seems like it’s going to be a blast.

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Capabilities of Current-Gen “AI”

Posted on April 10, 2025 by David K.

There are 2 schools of people on Twitter on using AI in programming. One states emphatically that they are producing fully-realized projects through nothing but “vibe coding,” and the other states, well, what DHH says here.

John Carmack had this summary, and he should know.

This put into words my feeling that LLM’s are just another tool — an advanced tool, to be sure — but “just” another tool, like source code managers, diff-er’s, IDE’s, debuggers, and linters. In fact, writing code is the least interesting or important part of creating software to do something non-trivial and useful. It’s the understanding and translating that need into an application that’s the magical part, and it’s my contention that LLM’s will never be able to fill that role. If you can also make the program work well and be fast and look nice, that’s the fun part. Maybe a future version of AI built on a different technology will be able to do these things, but not this version.

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