psycotica0

joined 2 years ago
[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

Right, yeah... It was definitely reminiscent of Magicka. Maybe even a little too reminiscent, since I feel Magicka was a much stronger game.

OK, interesting! It's nice to know the game wasn't objectively bad, and was only just "not for me", since I like the devs!

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Huh. My siblings and I love the Trine games, and wanted to like Nine Parchments, but found it to be one of the worst games we've ever played. I don't think we could find a single redeeming quality, and it just seemed like a total misstep.

So seeing it here on this list makes me think maybe there's something that was okay about it? I'm curious what people liked...

(all the rest of these seem like good games, though, which honestly makes me even more confused about Nine Parchments' inclusion...)

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

100% you can do it with some good instructional content and a smidge of patience!

A standard lock is disturbingly easy to pick... We used to run a booth at a maker event where we taught members of the public passing by including, like, 5 year olds to pick padlocks.

Unrelated, but BTW there are some jurisdictions if I'm not mistaken where having lock picking tools found on you is considered "criminal intent" or something, but on the other hand if you're already at the point where your bag is being searched you may already be boned...

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 24 points 2 years ago

I've never been a Twitter/microblog user, but here's how I gather it worked, presented in the order in which it was developed.

Do you ever think "oh, that's a funny/interesting thought I had", but there's no one around to tell? Or not enough people and you think it had more potential than that? Microblog. Unlike a forum, you just dump in out into the void as-is. It's a broadcast. Like if every account was a personal /r/showerthoughts.

From there we make it so I can subscribe to my friends. Now when they post their funny thoughts, or even just being like "I feel like tacos tonight, anyone in SF down?" I'll get their post. Now it's kinda like open group texting. Except I don't choose who sees my random thoughts, they self-select. I just broadcast things out there and whoever might be interested might be interested.

That was basically all that microblogs were, at the beginning. A stream of non-topic'd stuff I said, and you can follow me if you want to hear more like it.

But sometimes I'm surrounded by strangers, like at a conference. At these points I want to know what random people I don't follow are all saying about FooCamp. Search already exists so I can see all tweets with the word "cat" in it, but I can't find a way to fit FooCamp organically into every post, so hashtags get invented as a social convention to say "that was my message, but here are some other keywords for search purposes". Later they got linkified and so people started putting them inline, but originally they were just at the end and just for extra categorization.

So now the tool does two things. I can just broadcast out any thought I have without having to care about where to put it, etc. It all goes on my feed and anyone who has chosen to care about me will see it. And I choose who I care to receive broadcasts from because they're cool, and it doesn't matter what they're talking about. But also I can tag a particular message with some categories, and that will allow strangers to see my messages if they happen to be looking for messages in that category, but obviously a single message can be in multiple categories.

Then later famous people and governments showed up, and people followed them because they love go hear what famous people talk about. But if you don't follow them, then you don't hear from them.

That's basically it! So it's kinda like the opposite of a reddit/lemmy/forum/usenet model. Rather than topics that have content posted by people, it's people who post content that sometimes has a topic. Like a large group-chat (among friends or colleagues) where you're not really sure who is in the chat, but you don't have to care. You can prefer one over the other (I know I do), but fundamentally they're not trying to solve the same problem as lemmy, they're just a totally different model for communication. More like a friend group than a discussion group.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 years ago

This isn't surefire, but sometimes I'll double tap to zoom way too far in, but it'll put me in zooming mode and then I can zoom back out from there.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago

Yes, I do have a soft spot for Netscape Navigator. It will always be my first...

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 29 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I used to use Firefox before Chrome came out, because it was better than IE. When Chrome came out it was a breath of fresh air. A real third option! (konqueror didn't really count). And it was faster, cleaner, lighter than Firefox. Just better at everything. So I installed it on all of my family's computers, which they allowed me to do because IE by then was so bad it was an obvious improvement even for the layman.

Then in the intervening years Firefox dwindled to basically no market share and IE died, so now Chrome isn't a third option, it's the only option. And so I switched back to Firefox basically as a political sacrifice, but there's no way I'm going to be able to convince any of my family to switch because Firefox isn't better for them in any perceivable way. It's just different and they don't care. If Firefox had 30% market share I'd almost definitely be using Chromium still myself.

So probably that, but a million times. There was a period where every nerd moved all their associated people to Chrome because it was new, great, and non-dominant. It was hip and indie. And now they're still there and there's no reason for them to move that they care about.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 24 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Ok, let me rephrase your rephrase to be what question I think you're trying to ask.

At some point we had decided on a seven day week with week names. That's fine. But we must also have decided at some point that today was Wednesday in this system.

So I think you're asking "what is the first day we all agree was definitely a Sunday, such that all Sundays after were based on that". Or put another way, at what point did the days of the week get locked to the days of our year.

I don't have that answer, but your question confused me, so I've reworded it.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 years ago

I don't know the answer to the title, so I'll answer the body. The answer is "it depends".

If you're talking to someone in a technical setting, then servers are the physical machines. The computers themselves, sitting in a room somewhere. Or maybe a virtual server that pretends to be a physical machine, but runs on a real server that sits in a room somewhere. Whereas a website is some location you can put into a web browser and get content that "feels" like it's all one thing.

The reason this distinction matters is because you can host multiple small websites on a single server. For example there's no reason a particular machine couldn't host 10 different lemmy instances, if it's got enough processing power.

But on the other hand a popular website may have its work spread across multiple servers. Maybe I've got a database server, which is a machine that only runs the database. And then maybe I have a few different web servers that actually serve "the webpage", but I've also got a cache server that stores part of the webpage and serves that when it can, etc. Websites like Facebook or Twitter are considered one website but have thousands and thousands of servers.

But if you're talking to someone in a non-technical setting, yeah they're basically the same.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I have two criticisms of this view.

The first is the distinction between "replacing humans" and "making humans more productive". I feel like there's a misunderstanding on why companies hire people. I don't hire 15 people to do one job because 15 is a magic number of people I have to hit. I hire 15 people because 14 people weren't keeping up and it was worth more to my business to hire another expensive human to get more work done. So if suddenly 5 people could do the work of 15, because people became 3x more efficient, I'd probably fire 10 people. I no longer need them, because these 5 get the job done. I made the humans more effective, but given that humans are a replacement for humans, I now don't need as many of those because I've replaced them with superhumans instead.

If I'm lucky as a company I could possibly keep the same number of people and do 3x as much business overall, but this assumes all parts of my business, or at least the core part, increases at the same time. If my accounting department becomes 3x as efficient but I still have the same amount of work for them to do because accounting isn't the purpose of my business, then I'm probably going to let go some accountants because they're all sitting around idle most of the time.

It used to be that a gang of 20 people would dig up a hold in the road, but now it's one dude with an excavator.

The second thing is the assumption that AI art is being evaluated as art. We have this notion in our culture that artists all produce only the best novels and screenplays, and all art hangs in a gallery and people look at it and think about what the artist could have meant by this expression, etc. But that's virtually no one in the grand scheme of things. The fact that most people know the names of a handful of "the most famous artists of all time", and it's like 30 people on the whole earth and some of them are dead should mean something.

Most writers write stuff like the text on an ad in a fishing magazine. Or fully internal corporate documents that are only seen by employees of that one company. Most visual artists draw icons for apps that never launch. Or the swoopy background for an article. Or did the book jacket for a book that sells 8 copies at a local tradeshow. If there's a commercial for chips, someone had to write it, someone had to direct it, someone had to storyboard it. And no one put it in a museum and pondered its expression of the human experience. Some people make their whole living on those terrible stock photographs of a diverse set of people all laughing and putting their hands into the middle to show they're a team.

Even if every artist with a name that anyone knows is unaffected by this, that can still represent a massive loss of work for basically all creative professionals.

You touched on some of these things but I think glossed over them too much. AI art may not replace "Art", but virtually no one makes money from "Art", and so it doesn't have to replace it for people to have no job left.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 years ago

If you're talking about a community instance that strangers can join, it's mostly about volunteering and feeling like you're contributing to something.

If you're talking about running one for you alone, or you and friends or family, then it's mostly about controlling your experience. You control when there are updates, you control what version you run, you know who has your data, it's you. You know no one's doing anything bad with it, because it's you. If there's something bugging you and someone else wrote a patch to fix it, you can deploy that. Or if there's some setting to enable or disable a feature for the whole instance, you can set it to your preference.

The cons are that it's you. If it goes down because something broke or got corrupted, it doesn't come back later on its own. You do it. If your database poops the bed and eats all your data, then did you have backups? Were they kept on a different disk than the corrupted one? Because if not then your data is now gone. A new version came out! When does the upgrade happen? When you make time to do it. Maybe there's manual migration steps you need to do, maybe you need to change some new settings, you should probably make a backup in case you have to roll back... How did you know there was a new version out? How do you know if there's some critical bug or security flaw you need to fix? You have to subscribe to the community, essentially.

Maybe you subscribe to a lot of busy photo communities and then one day lemmy is down for you. Weird... the box won't turn on. Oh, the disk is at 100%. Shit, did you not have a monitor that checks disk usage and emails you when it's getting full? Oops...

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