PeriodicallyPedantic

Vehicle combat games. Which I guess is more like a genre than a mechanic.

Right now it's basically Mariokart or nothing.

Grip came out in 2018, but the physics were really unforgiving (clipping a corner could cost you like 10 seconds as you tumble) and there weren't enough players online.
Which is a real shame because it's gorgeous, fast paced, with effective power ups, and amazing tracks. And a hell of a sound track.

The thing new games don't have that I miss from old games is friends to play the game with 😭

In an open world game that isn't about racing*

Games like wreckfest have pretty great damage modeling. BeamNG too.

I really want to see a god game with gestures, like black&white, make the jump to VR

Like in the finals, kinda?

Outside of VPS firewalls settings and fail2ban, is there anything else you'd recommend to harden the VPS?

Idk about audio but they rate limit video pretty quickly. Audio might be low enough bandwidth for them to not care, but be cautious

Is there a reason not to use pangolin for the public stuff too?

I'm just about to make the switch from CloudFlare to pangolin on VPS, and I wanna make sure I'm not missing anything

They do basically what I'm describing, just not as well because they don't have as much of an incentive. Are end users willing to pay for these more advanced models?

Well there you go. It could be authoritarian, except an authoritarian govt isn't subsidizing it. Exactly like I described.

Governments, however, are willing to pay that amount. Why?

You keep walking straight into the points I'm making.

That, in itself, isn't authoritarian

Wrong. Setting up a super invasive surveillance system is inherently authoritarian, even if they initially happen to use it for reasons that don't typify authoritarianism. You have to bend over backwards so hard to keep it from becoming authoritarian, that it will just naturally corrupt any entity that deploys it, even making the monumental assumption that an entity that deploys this didn't have the intention to use it for nefarious purposes from the start.

it's only authoritarian of there's some enforcement arm to enforce obedience or punish disobedience.

Is a rather clumsy piece of mental gymnastics. Not only have you said it before. You can use this argument, coupled with your earlier "it's constituent parts aren't authoritarian" to argue that nothing is authoritarian.

Again, I disagree. Something is only political when used for political ends.

And again this is just the pro-gun argument. Fine on paper, useless in reality.

I'm making the argument that it is possible for software to be political even if it wasn't created as such. I only need to show that a single case is possible.
You are making the argument that it is impossible, and you keep trying to prove it by example.

Again, in theory in a vacuum, I agree. But I disagree that anything you describe could actually be both commercially viable and deployable without authoritarian involvement

In your example do you not see all the gymnastics and bending over backwards you need to do to avoid the inherent nature of the system? I'd go so far as to say that the people in your theoretical HOA are analogous to supporters of a authoritarian regime.

You're making a pro-gun argument here, and it's not convincing for similar reasons: products are more than the sum of their parts, and the actual application of a product matters more than the theoretical use. If it is nearly impossible to meaningfully use apolitically, then it is not apolitical.

Surveillance has a lot of use cases outside of government. Palantir could have sold its services to non-profits like the ACLU as a check on local, state, and law enforcement agencies.

In theory, yes. In practice no.

ALCU could not roll a system like that out; never mind securing the resources needed to deploy this meaningfully; using it would go against their ethos, because using it would make them authoritarian, or adjacent.
Similarly, even if HOAs could deploy a system like that, that'd make them authoritarian.

Mass surveillance products like these don't have a lot of non-authoritarian uses. Even if you could find such a use (of which I'm skeptical), it'd almost certainly need to be subsidized by an authoritarian customer. We're not talking about security cameras around you personal property, here.

I mostly agree with you, so we're probably not really doing much in this discussion. I'm trying not to be pedantic, but as my name will tell you, I find that to be a challenge lol.

I agree wrt how to regulate.
If disallow the govt from broad indiscriminate surveillance and disallow the govt from circumventing that rule by subcontracting it to private entities, then these companies and products that perform the mass surveillance would naturally become unprofitable and collapse. I would argue that such a product would be by its nature political, because it's only practical use case was the furtherance of a political goal.

Cameras aren't political, but the use of cameras for mass govt-level surveillance is political. So a system that does so (like the ones sold to the govt) is a political software product.

To me where it gets tricky is when private entities grow to government-sized proportions, and begin to use these same tools for similar purposes. I think that is also a problem, but it becomes harder to frame it.