• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • Starfield is a classic case of some misleading marketing on purpose, and, well, it just falls into the perpetually doomed category of games/media that will always suffer from extremely high expectations: sci-fi/space/cyberpunk. The imagination wanders especially far with games like these, and there’s little to none us, the consumers, and they, the devs and publishers, can ever do about it.

    That being said, you’re right in not praising the game. It’s a niche fun in my opinion, and only shines if you take it for what it is, but not for what it seemed to have been marketed as.

    TL;DR Stafield is a Bethesda game through and through, but with a coating some Microsoft PG-13 “play it safe” attitude.





  • If you were a faceless algorithm

    There are people behind algorithms. They don’t exist for the sole purpose of gathering the data for the sake of it - the data is later accessed and processed by people.

    I’m giving my address and information to plenty of companies I get services from.

    And how is that different from giving any of information to me? I’m just trying to gather some statistics here, nothing more.

    Those false equivalences are why people don’t take you seriously.

    Is this why Zuckerberg went to trial and the EU is preventing apps and services whose sole purpose is to hoover up some data about you to become available in its domain?


  • If you don’t mind such things one bit, would you mind sharing with all of here all of the following:

    • your physical address (preferably in the format that would let anyone of us send you whatever we desire)
    • your age
    • your full legal name
    • your phone number that you use most often
    • your school
    • your work (its address, your title, company, etc)
    • your income
    • your expenses
    • the stores you go to and what for, also when and how often
    • your hometown
    • your pet names
    • your mother’s maiden name
    • your bank of choice
    • what tech you own in detail
    • your schedule
    • your search history
    • your browser bookmarks

    And many other things, too. Somehow I doubt you’d ever do that, but you’re fine trusting this kind of data to be handed away to many corporations for absolutely no benefit on your end. They’ll just sell it for cash money, only to be bought by con-artsists to try and scam you out of something later.

    I mean being a contempt consumer is one thing, but defending some entities hoarding more data about you than your entire family knows is just delusional. Especially given the fact that you are most likely more careful with your data in other circumstances, like talking to strangers or using the Internet for at least some things, but then you defend careless and irresponsible handling of your data when it comes to what, mobile apps?

    You should really learn more on the topic.


  • Also, Zuck can point to us feddies not wanting to federate with him, and say “see? Interoperability is pointless, even the geeks don’t want it”. Which is oddly accurate…

    I think the easiest counter-argument here is healthy disagreement.

    Being exposed to multiple opinions is undoubtedly important and is far, far better for us all in the long run than only limiting ourselves to only those opinions and views we already share or at least like, but having an option to wall somebody off on an Internet platform has its benefits, too, like not actually wasting your time in endless and fruitless arguments. As great as it would for everyone to be able to have a healthy and productive conversation about the differences in their views, it simply isn’t wise to honestly expect that from everyone.

    Besides, having two opposing ideas communicate on the same platform is not what the fediverse is for - not exclusively for sure. It’s the freedom to self-host and self-regulate places dedicated to specific things to various degrees: lemmy.world, for instance, is wide and large and encompasses many things at once, and has an option to federate and communicate with smaller, more niche communities and vise versa, while letting the users open a single account with either.

    Otherwise it’s just the old Facebook formula of encouraging opposing views to constantly clash for the sake of engagement. That’s just not real, not healthy, and only exists for the purpose of being some sort of KPI in a corporation perpetually hungry for money and influence. So yeah, we don’t want that.


  • I think it’s more of an ego thing. The people with healthy egos probably never end up as execs in companies as big as Reddit, and the people that do are likely driven by something else other than the desire to actually build a platform that respects its users and works well in cooperation with them - “I’m smart, I’m sexy, I know better than these plebs making us money”.


  • I wouldn’t count on big companies ever going that route, to be honest. The decision-making people there will likely never trust Lemmy or similar software enough because it’s not like them - not proprietary, not closed source, so they’ll keep wasting money on making their own shitty websites with their own shitty forums if they ever want to give their communities an official place to hang out.





  • Looking at the way things have been going for years (decades) now, giving someone a birth would be a huge disservice - they’ll inherit a simultaneously more globalized and divided world, a world with technology that has the potential to trivialize sharing knowledge and experience, which is instead use to drive up engagement for the sake of profits, effectively breeding hate groups and echo chambers, a world with economy consisting of bubbles and not-so-careful manipulations, leaving our offspring in a position few would probably envy. Oh, and there’s rapid climate change that is being ignored and actively accelerated by the people and other entities that are capable of doing anything about it.

    I know more than a few people who have never considered any of the above, and I’m sure many people here know such people as well, so it’s more than safe to say that whatever the humanity is facing in the near future, it’s nothing similar to extinction through lack of birth.

    The future seems really good for certain groups of people, but I doubt my kids could be a part of these groups, or even want to a part of these groups. Not that I would actively indoctrinate them, but I’d imagine that living with me through the years when they’re developing and shaping themselves is going to leave its mark regardless.

    Maybe I’ll regret that decision when it’s already too late, of course, but then again, this is not going to be a world-ending decision by no merit.





  • Hopefully my experience can help some people see the bright side of going off Reddit.

    To me, Reddit has been a great platform in almost every possible way - except meaningful engagement. At some point, I realized that any somewhat big subreddit that I frequented for news and discussions of topic I’m interested in is plagued by dead-end threads: karma farms through reposts, lame jokes and similarly low-effort content that’s breeds equally low-effort comments, and things that don’t provoke any sort of discussion in general.

    Joining the protest made me go to difference places, especially forums big and small, where the only real way to engage with the community was to actually reply to what they said. I quickly realized that Reddit has long turned into another brainless scroller akin to Instagram or Twitter, which all may have their place, but that’s just not what I joined Reddit for back in the day.

    Now that I’ve basically kicked the Reddit habit, I’m finally enjoying the Internet again - it’s not the same as it was in the 00s, and it will never be, but it’s much, much better than going to a single website, owned by a single company, for nearly everything I want to do online.

    Today, I finally have a proper choice for the first time in years. A lot of that choice consists of the fediverse, with different scopes and goals, but some is just basic and mainstream places I’d forgotten because of the convenience that Reddit seemed to bring.

    Today, I’m finally having actual conversations with people in the communities I choose to interact with, rather than just reading through the witty chains of comments.

    I know that Reddit means different things to different people, but to me, it has lost its meaning long ago, and it’s only with the protest that I managed to kick the habit of going there for basically nothing. As surprising as it is, the whole thing lead me to enjoy my online life much more, and actually engage with the topics on the old, deeper level of fun, rather than just being exposed to an absurd amount of things, each pretty shallow and uninspired.


  • This wad made me feel like it was going to be a great Spooktober material, but now that’s so many people played it, commented on it, and loved it, and now John himself is playing it, I really wanna play it myself and join the still fresh talks.

    On Doom, no less, the game that breathed in so much life into the FPS genere and thus modern gaming as a whole, released back in 1993, and yet still active and alive thanks to its community! I love modding!


  • They might be downvoting you because you’re basically declaring the variable twice, with the same name, too. If someone knows better, though, please correct me.

    Either of the following should work just as well:

    var magazineString = 'kBiNmEta';
    magazineString = magazineString.toLowerCase();
    
    
    var magazineString = 'kBiNmEta'.toLowerCase();
    
    

    Another reason some people may be upset is that they see it as downplaying the complexity of the issue, I suppose, but I’m not going to play psychic here or put words into peoples’ mouths. One thing I’ll say for certain is if there’s anything I learned about any sort of work, is that it’s always far more complicated than it sounds/looks like; applies especially well to software.

    But don’t you get discouraged! Learning to code yields great result even if you decide to not pursue the career with it for whatever reason - it’s fun, it’s rewarding, you can easily turn into something useful, you can contribute to open source, etc. There’s always something.