A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that “once you start playing, suddenly it’s 3 hours later” factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.

Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. (“Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4”) Can’t really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. (“Man, I’ve got to get back to Mirror’s Edge”) Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. (“Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it”)

When things go wrong in Windows at an app or third party software, stuff is often fixable. At worst you might need to reinstall the damn thing. But if the OS itself starts doing weird stuff, things often go to the headache territory really fast. Get a weird error, log says some OS component is going boom, no idea how to fix it, official instructions are along the lines of “Well if DISM and SFC are not going to fix it, looks like you need to reinstall the entire damn OS.” Which usually wouldn’t be a cause for anxiety, but blergh, muh preschus licence key, hope I won’t screw that up.

Meanwhile, I ran one Debian install for over 20 years once. Stuff is usually very fixable indeed. There are good logs. It’s rarely a complete mystery why some program is doing what it doing. At absolute worst you might need to look at the source code, which is actually rare.

I have a sports watch and the corresponding fitness app. I can confirm. “Sitting on one’s ass at the restaurant” is not a fitness activity. HOWEVER. Some of my activities (e.g. walks) do terminate near fast food jonts. …I dread what that kind of data analysis would yield on a major political figure.

Some of the things that helped me:

• Regularity. I also have ADHD so actually getting me to catalog daily/weekly things that I need to do was hard enough. But now that I have like 5 todo lists things are looking up.
• Cataloging things. I love photography and writing down interesting ideas. Someone looking through my photo collection might wonder why I take photos of random shit. Simple reason: Something managed to brighten my day and I just had to put it in on the record. I feel happier when I know that those moments won’t ever disappear if I can at all manage it. Similarly, if I have cool ideas that made me happy for some reason, I write them down.
• Crap social media is the worst. Be on the social media to fearlessly shout your cool ideas to the void if you have to. Don’t be there to passively and silently afraid to speak up and stick around with people you barely know and watch them slowly turn nazi yes-men. (Yes. It has happened. Before Elon bought Twitter. Can’t even imagine how shit things are nowdays over there.)

Most recent time I was awestruck by a thunderstorm in a game? Forza Horizon 5. One of the early missions involved heading out in the jungle during a massive thunderstorm and it was just legendary. Visuals, audio, everything.

Reddit’s backend is absolute junk and not designed for efficiency from the ground up, they just keep throwing more servers in and solve the efficiency bottlenecks with a shitload of caching. A site whose meat and potatoes is text comments and links just shouldn’t be this crap at it.

Lemmy has the benefit of hindsight in design and the fact that each server is only really responsible for a subset of all Lemmy users.

When I was a kid, on a trip to Paris, I went to the zoo, and the highlight of the whole trip was seeing an Aldabra giant tortoise (listed as vulnerable by IUCN). Now, even when this was 1990, I was still like “ooooooo cool turt”. I didn’t expect the buddy to jump around and munch pizza. Just a tortoise doing tortoise things slowly.

(The other highlight of the trip was seeing a public Minitel terminal. Holy shit guys, we were only mildly approaching that level in Finland.)

I’m actually fine if the subtitles have to be truncated to communicate the same meaning in less space.

I actually find it harder to comprehend the subtitles when someone tries to be as accurate as possible, especially if the subs transcribe every little stuttering. I’m here to learn the stuff they people on screen are trying to say, I’m not interested in the subtitler’s scholarly digression into the finer points of what they’re hearing.

Some person in reddit once did a hilarious thing where they whipped out a full blown IPA transcript and started analysing the finer dialectual points of a viral video, trying to pinpoint the origin of the speaker. It was hilarious. Probably even more hilarious to linguists. But the point is, that whole thing was not what we were there for, we were just discussing a viral video.

It’s a tale as old as the game industry itself: The company releases an okay game, everyone goes “hell yeah, a solid 7/10”. …except by now everyone expects the company to make nothing but absolute masterpieces.

It’s an okay game with lots of little janky bits I don’t like (surprising in sense that I of course expected there to be some jank, this is Bethesda we’re talking about). The game seems to be amusing enough that I enjoy my time while playing it, but it doesn’t have the magic sauce that would make me eagerly get back to the game the next day.

Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.

But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?

…In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don’t do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely

I always liked “not the sharpest bulb in the tree”.

(Because it kinda makes sense. Some Christmas lights have pointy bulbs. But nobody picks them for sharpness.)

Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆

Digg’s biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That’s why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said “go right ahead”.

So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.

Now, to Reddit’s credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.

Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It’s all allowed unless it’s blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it’s just organic random users.

Now, you don’t see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I’m not sure they’re interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They’re this close to saying “fuck it, it’s a free-for-all” and going full Digg publicly.

Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?

I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.

Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn’t like got buried really fast.

Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn’t care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.

Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I’ll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)

So that’s what killed Digg. …that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (…insert comparison to modern Reddit here)

I’m, like, yeah, some of the stuff Mozilla has done has been worrying, but I’ve seen far worse happen to some other open source projects and their corporate branches.

I’m not worried about Mozilla projects’ future. If LibreOffice survived corporate calcification, I see no reason why Mozilla projects wouldn’t, if the push comes to a shove. But the thing is, in my opinion, push hasn’t come to a shove yet. There’s red flags at best, which is a cause for concern, but that’s it.

Have any regular users actually looked at the prices of the “AI services” and what they actually cost?

I’m a writer. I’ve looked at a few of the AI services aimed at writers. These companies literally think they can get away with “Just Another Streaming Service” pricing, in an era where people are getting really really sceptical about subscribing to yet another streaming service and cancelling the ones they don’t care about that much. As a broke ass writer, I was glad that, with NaNoWriMo discount, I could buy Scrivener for €20 instead of regular price of €40. [note: regular price of Scrivener is apparently €70 now, and this is pretty aggravating.] So why are NaNoWriMo pushing ProWritingAid, a service that runs €10-€12 per month? This is definitely out of the reach of broke ass writers.

Someone should tell the AI companies that regular people don’t want to subscribe to random subscription services any more.

To me this doesn’t sound like a massive amount of work went into this, it’s just a sidebar that displays a web page.

Pretty much the same thing happened with Pocket. “Why is Pocket integrated to Firefox?” “Well it’s a project wholly owned by Mozilla. If you don’t like it, you can just remove the button.” “Well I still don’t like it at all - can I remove it entirely to reclaim some of the bloat?” “What bloat? It’s just a button and a few web API calls, disk/memory saving would be negligible.”

Most of my photography gear falls under “well, that money could have been spent more wisely”. But photography has been one of my major ways of dealing with depression, so I absolutely don’t regret it. I can’t really put into words how good it felt to finally get a Camera That Didn’t Suck.

Did someone say… cookies?

I can just tell that whenever Twitter’s user interface has weak attempts at humour, it was put there during the previous ownership, and that just makes me sad.

Like when you delete your account the final message says “#Goodbye”, I was tearing up, thinking, like, shit, Musk really fucked everything up, did he?

Maybe! Or maybe this whole new concept of dogness actually is something that needs rational consideration. Given no forthright consideration at all, it could be rejected at face value in every possible scenario! It is not at all unreasonable for the Homemade Dog to point out that additional time should be spent to consider their merits.

And that their rejection is still a sad fact, because they were a homemade dog and as such they were made with love. Nothing really changes that fact.

(Adapted from XKCD)

There are 5 zillion hotkeys.

“5 zillion hotkeys? Ridiculous! We should add dedicated buttons for common operations.”

There are now 5 zillion hotkeys and “media buttons” nobody uses.

…

Seriously though, a lot of old keyboards in ye olde computers had dedicated buttons for a lot of things, but then people figured out software defined, remappable key commands are actually pretty neat. You don’t need a dedicated “Help” key if it’s usually mapped to F1. Moving back to dedicated keys is, ummm, sometimes unwarranted?