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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I recently swapped my Dad’s Windows computer with my old machine, which I installed Linux on ahead of time.

    I told him it was a faster machine - which it was just slightly in the hardware sense, a very minor upgrade. A half-truth to encourage the transition.

    But of course, it’s running Linux, not Windows.

    Next day he phones me up really happy that it’s “so much faster than the old machine!”

    And it really is a lot faster, but it’s not the hardware. It’s just not getting bogged down with all the crap Windows constantly does in the background.

    Either way, mission accomplished.


  • I chose lemm.ee mostly by chance, but I think that it’s worked out okay for me.

    My impression is that it’s a mostly neutral instance which doesn’t really have a strong agenda, and federates with most other instances. This is definitely what I want, because it gives me access to the most content.

    If there are communities or users I find I have issues with, I can block them myself.


  • Every major shift in how media is consumed has always come because of evolutions in the technology used to deliver it - going from just a few broadcast channels, to cable, to “on demand” cable and satellite, and finally to Internet delivery.

    And it’s just really hard to imagine what delivery technology could provide any new capability beyond the always-on, bidirectional, high capacity data stream in your pocket that is the Internet we now have.

    With streaming we’ve already achieved what should in theory be the best way to watch - and with the studios all having their own streaming platform now, there’s not even any middleman to undercut anymore, like there was when the cable companies were cut out by Netflix at the dawn of streaming. This is endgame.

    The only thing left now is enshittification.

    The one thing that could save us from this fate is if new programs and content are produced that are competitive in quality with what the current giants are putting out, giving people other places to go and forcing competition.

    This is what we’ve already seen with indie studios and single developers disrupting the games industry, and perhaps with ever more achievable 3D animation, AI and other accessible production techniques we’ll start seeing this disrupt the film and TV industry too.


  • Just because something always used to be some way doesn’t mean it’s automatically acceptable.

    TV might have been designed for the ad break but what if it wasn’t? You give Star Trek as an example, and here in the UK growing up I watched TNG episodes on BBC2, which is a tax-funded station without adverts. Did the lack of adverts make my childhood TNG experience worse? Personally I’d say it made it better.

    Even in the cable TV age, to have adverts in something you are paying for is still horrible, and to me it’s unacceptable.

    I will do everything in my power to not expose my brain to a barrage of advertising, and that includes not using any service where I have to subject myself to it.



  • I did buy a (secondhand) nvidia card specifically for AI worlkloads because yes, I realised that this is what the AI dev community has settled on, and if I try to avoid nvidia I will be making life very hard for myself.

    But that doesn’t change the fact that it still absolutely sucks that nvidia have this dominance in the space, and that it is largely due to what tooling the community has decided to use, rather than any unique hardware capability which nvidia have.




  • I can see both sides.

    The studio is upset that people are leaving negative reviews for what the studio thinks are minor issues and will be fixed by release.

    But on the other hand, you can’t expect people to review a game on anything other than the state it is now.

    That said, the gamer community is definitely pretty brutal and known to pile on with negative reviews to ‘punish’ the smallest changes they don’t like, and that is especially true for games that get ‘updates’, like live-service games, or in this case, games still in early access. Players hope the bad reviews will make the developers change course, but that’s no good if they go under before they can.

    For Early Access, the type of game they picked (something with levelling and upgrades and ‘game meta’) is especially prone to rough feedback too, when compared to other genres like horror or platformers or sandbox games where people are a lot more forgiving.

    I imagine they needed to do early access to keep the studio going and maybe to generate funds for the next Ori (fingers crossed?) and I hope that doesn’t end up being the choice that ends them.




  • Different experience for me. My mum was a lovely person who never pressured me into anything, and in retrospect I wish she had, just a tiny bit more.

    She asked for example if I wanted to learn an instrument - and I said no, and she respected that and didn’t push. The truth is that I’d have actually loved to, but I was afraid of failing, and scared to start.

    Now in my late thirties I finally bought an electric piano and started learning.

    I don’t blame my mum at all, but I guess my point is that kids will very often say “no” to things, because no is the easy answer. If she’d said instead “try a couple of lessons, and if you don’t enjoy it you can stop” then the outcome would have been quite different.




  • If this comic was about a small business with the owner stood behind the counter like “I don’t care” then I’d totally get your point, but I don’t think that’s what it is.

    This is a comic about a minimum wage slave working at a branch of some faceless retail supergiant, who gets constantly shit on by customers as if they themselves are personally responsible for whatever policymaking at this enormous company has upset the customer, and as if they could change anything about it even if they tried.

    It’s about angry customers putting their vitriolic remarks in completely the wrong place because they just need a human victim and they don’t care who it is. And it’s about learning how to deal with that as an employee so you don’t lose your sanity.


  • I’d argue no, because they are not a resident. They are only a visitor.

    Resident (noun) 1. a person who lives somewhere permanently or on a long-term basis

    Occupant in a housing sense is pretty synonymous with Resident legally, but in a wider sense can also mean “anyone there at the time” - especially in non-housing contexts (e.g. the occupants of a vehicle). So for the sake of eliminating all ambiguity I’d strike out Occupant, and stick with Resident as the most appropriate term.