• 10 Posts
  • 63 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • 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.




  • 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



  • 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.


  • I played Nethack. I was overwhelmed by my anxiety and depression. I realised I was not good at video games. So I quit playing Nethack and swore to get good at video games before returning. Been, what, at least 15 years? I’ve gotten better I guess. Should I return? Soon, maybe.

    (Seriously, though, roguelikes are still a genre I struggle with, so I do need practice!)


  • 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 completed TMNT as a kid… on Commodore 64. That version is admittedly a little bit easier than the NES version (some mechanics were missing, and an entire level is gone, as I recall). Still, I have no idea why people complain about the second level (river), it’s actually pretty fun. Compared to what’s to come later in the game.

    To me, the definitive “hard” game is Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on GameCube. Dark Souls just makes me say “eeeeeehhhh this is probably doable, I’ll play this after I’m done with MP2E.”

    (When I first played MP2E, I only got through the second to last boss. Then my MadCatz memory card died. Played through the game again, with the fury of million suns. 99% complete. Because I missed one optional scan. …One of these days I replay this bastard.)




  • 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.


  • /mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

    /media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

    And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.


  • Yeah, the biggest tragedy of technobros pushing generative AI everywhere is that as a result of that, everyone just had to adopt the stance that you can’t trust a damn thing these days.

    At least previously, this kind of disruption led to nuance. Photo manipulation has been around pretty much since the dawn of photography, so now we as a society have developed nuanced view of it over the past couple of centuries. Now, photographs used as evidence in criminal cases have different standards than photographs used in advertising - former has strict standards because it’s a serious inquiry requiring hard evidence, the latter has lax standards because the viewers understand that the photos offer an “enhanced” truth. But generative AI? It just got dropped on our lap all of sudden. We as a society can’t deal with it yet. We’re not ready.

    Sorry I just had coffee


  • I’ll get YouTube premium once they fix their damn TV app.

    • If I resume playing a video from history, it often plays the ads, then re-plays them shortly after. (You know, at the point when it hit me with a fucking 55 second ad and I backed out and said fuck no, are you shitting me. Double points if the ad it tries to play again is also ridiculously long. I just keep refreshing it until it gives me 5 seconds to skip. I’m not much of a gambler, but this much I can gamble.)

    Admittedly, this bug is not applicable to Premium. Being ad-skippy and all. But it’s indicative of the overall quality of the app. For example:

    • When long-holding a video in all circumstances, I it should give me a full menu. Like, with the “go to the channel” option? …doesn’t give that to me in Subscriptions view. This might come as a surprise to YouTube, but I don’t always like watching Whatever The Algorithm Feeds Me. I might, you know, choose to watch the 10 episodes I missed. To do that, I need to actually like to go to the channel in question.
    • …Or any of the channels I like or are particularly interested at the moment. There’s no way to pin this shit either.
    • Speaking of which, the fucking way to browse my subscriptions is fucking atrocious holy shit. It’s useless. This is Google. They don’t do user experience research. They half-ass everything.
    • On my smart TV, sometimes the buttons just fuck up. Sometimes I can’t control this shit. Because my TV operating system was designed by particularly deranged people, they thought “closing” or “restarting” any given app was space technology that no average consumer can understand, so they reduced that to bare minimums: the only way to restart the app is to pull the plug. This is just fucking demeaning.

    A collaboration between Google and Samsung, people! Two giant corps serving millions of users! And they expect us to pay monthly fee for this holy shit

    …sorry for the rant.