@nh@mastodon.gamedev.place

Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 17, 2026

Replying to @joe@f.duriansoftware.com

@joe@f.duriansoftware.com Would you like to enter the torment nexus? [ ] Yes [ ] Ask me again later

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @ShadSterling@mastodon.social

@ShadSterling@mastodon.social @minmi@sfba.social @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io I would tweak that slightly. Make those taxes fund a sovereign wealth fund that in turn pays out a universal income. The idea is to reflect the reality that a lot, and probably most, of the total wealth in our society really cannot be attributed to individuals in a desert theory sense ("desert" as in "to deserve").

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @minmi@sfba.social Think of it as a "don't feed the trolls" approach. There's a grey area where you need to engage with people in good faith and set standards for a community that way. But you also just need to *ban* the trolls because otherwise it becomes unsustainable. Same logic applies to excessive wealth accumulation. There is zero reason why we should allow it, just as there is zero reason why we should allow trolls. The only real question is how much is "excessive"?

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @minmi@sfba.social And I say we *should* claim and use that power to make that choice. My point is more that sustained resistance against the power given by excessive wealth is *hard* and is a never-ending battle. It puts too much of a burden on innocent people in the long run, and too high of a risk that something ends up slipping through a "loop hole". Better to *also* limit the extent of the problem at the source and prevent excessive accumulation of wealth in the first place.

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @minmi@sfba.social I appreciate you giving this example. I don't know anything about rap, but I'm a little skeptical of how applicable this is, for two reasons: (1) it's an example about a slice of a society, not a society as a whole; (2) it only shows resistance against one bad actor as opposed to sustained resistance against multiple bad actors over time. That said, we can agree on an underlying thesis that we as a society can choose what we tolerate.

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @minmi@sfba.social

@minmi@sfba.social @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io The Vatican, maybe? But it's not like that particular organization has been a paragon of virtue...

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @minmi@sfba.social I suppose this does assume a somewhat liberal society.

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @minmi@sfba.social Do you have any robust evidence that the difference between 1 and 2 is more than a matter of degree and *level* of wealth? The fundamental issue is that wealth *is* power, full stop, because it gives you the power to have other people do work towards your goals. And so if there are constitutional limits to the direct influence you can have, well, you fund a network of think tanks that put out "research" aligned with undermining those limits. Which should sound familiar...

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 09, 2026

Replying to @minmi@sfba.social

@minmi@sfba.social @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io Any system that allows the accumulation of excessive wealth and therefore power will at least weakly filter for genocidal maniacs. Because if you are one, you are more inclined to make the kind of exploitative decisions that make it easier to accumulate huge amounts of wealth. I don't think there is any way to reliably prevent this without putting some sort of de facto cap on wealth accumulation. And even that is probably only a necessary step but not a sufficient one.

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 06, 2026

Replying to @martinvermeer@fediscience.org

@martinvermeer @joshmillard That's what inverses are for. But don't go telling adders. They use logs to multiply!

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · May 03, 2026

The existence of pronouns implies the existence of amateur nouns.

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 26, 2026

The Hamming distance between pests and pets is suspiciously small.

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 20, 2026

Replying to @xarvos@outerheaven.club

@xarvos @gsuberland @servo @jdm_ As long as you keep multiplying the number of years by a constant, the maintenance burden decreases exponentially

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · Apr 08, 2026

Replying to @rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place

@rygorous @aeva Not sure if it helps at all, but this "don't understand at all" anecdote reminds me of all the people who ever told me that "they've always been bad at math". I suspect it's that same kind of slightly broken smalltalk reflex that a lot of people just have, and there's no need to read anything more into it.

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · Jun 08, 2025

Replying to @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @catsalad@infosec.exchange @BeamMeOut@mastodon.social And to be fair, we have multiple Jira projects (or whatever the term is) set up where I work, and some of them are more obnoxious than others. The one thing they all have in common, and why I hate it unconditionally, it's that it's soooo slow. Web apps are a blight on those of us who know that computers can actually be fast.

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · Jun 08, 2025

Replying to @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @catsalad@infosec.exchange @BeamMeOut@mastodon.social Add another point for that sentiment. I also use it on Linux (Chromium) and it works reasonably. I wonder if a lot of the Teams hate has to do with different cultures of how the tool is used. Kind of like there is always one person on these threads saying that Jira is fine if set up properly.

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Nicolai Hähnle @nh@mastodon.gamedev.place · Dec 30, 2024

Replying to @lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place

@lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place @c3awareness@chaos.social idealerweise eine synthese statt entweder oder, aber wenn es eine einfache lösung gäbe dann wäre die wahrscheinlich schon gefunden

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