experbia

Take me to the Internet.

I’ve been working through my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 - it’s fairly enjoyable, I’m glad I ignored it outright until well after big patches rolled out. There’s something very satisfying about blowing up enemies through a camera.

I’ve also picked up Dwarf Fortress (Steam) for the first time. It has a lot of depth but has been fun to learn and try and figure out. I just flooded a section of my fortress by digging into an underground river.

My chill-out puzzle game has been Can of Wormholes and it’s pretty fun! It’s weird for sure… but definitely fun.

I’m glad to hear Wargroove 2 is worth it! I really enjoyed the first and I was worried when I heard about a sequel.

Nope 😂 though, despite their decision obviously having nothing to do with me, I did find it to be somewhat flattering and a bit reassuring that the fine Valve engineers seemed to make similar decisions to me.

I use Arch for all my computers, including my “critical” systems. I only do full upgrades when I know I have the time to troubleshoot something broken, but rarely need to do so.

More than this, I actually use Arch as the OS for thousands of computers for my work that end up in customer hands, who expect stability. I’m not sure at what point it stops being Arch, though - I pin the package repositories to internal mirrors with fixed package distributions from specific dates to control the software that goes to them, so it’s not really rolling release anymore I guess - I control the releases and when updates go out.

Arch is what you make of it. My Arch project desktop pc is constantly shifting and breaking and needing attention as I continually improve it and play with things. My Arch laptop that runs my life and work and is the most important computer I own is a paragon of stability and perfect functioning.

this is a wake-up call to this industry and any other industry enjoying a glut of “free” (as in beer) proprietary tools owned entirely by private (or worse: public!) organizations.

this will always be the result. every single time. if you think you and your industry are immune to getting bait & switched, you are very wrong.

chaining your livelihood to a for-profit organization is begging to eventually be extorted in this manner. greed is inevitable.

And it would never have gotten completely out of control, if people didn’t use ad-block.

“I wouldn’t get so carried away beating you if you didn’t make me so much angrier by trying to run when I smack you.”

We should never have tried to fund the web with ads in the first place.

I agree. But here we are. And until it’s illegal to do so (and, honestly, afterwards too), when a website I’m viewing politely asks me to download toxic ad content filled with psychological manipulation and malware, my computer will politely whisper “no.” I might revisit this policy in the future if the entire advertising industry takes a huge step back to tone down their abusive shit, but in the meanwhile, I have no problem blocking malignant content from my presence. No means no.

A business plan that requires psychological abuse and exploitation of your customers is not an ethical, sustainable, or valid plan and the people who push it are not worthy of my consideration.

Like, what is wrong with reading something? Is it really that hard?

Half of US adults cannot read a book written at an 8th grade level.
Video is easier and faster for most people, as much as I dislike it. It’s a way for a clueless board of MBAs to circumvent the “literacy” problem of more widespread adoption of their service. Lowest-common-denominator corner-shaving ruins everything, as usual.

Firstly, they’re classifying the term “grooming” as hate speech. That’s not factual.

I couldn’t agree more, I’m glad you said this. See, I personally think all conservatives (presumably such as yourself, but if you’re not, you’re obviously close enough) are pedophilic sexual predators by nature, which is why they so readily jump to the false conclusion that everyone wants to fuck kids all the time. Normally I wouldn’t say this because when I’ve said so in the past, conservatives have been real mad about it and viewed it as hateful to be associated with something so repulsive merely by way of having a certain political identity, but it’s nice to be in a safe space you’ve created that allows for me to share this decidedly non-hateful speech targeted at conservatives (and you!) that expresses my complete and utter contempt for you and your gross, clearly unsafe way with children. I mean, you willingly force them into churches (a.k.a ‘rape factories’) all the time. Tells you all you need to know about any conservative. You’re obviously complicit.

do I have a case against either my institution, the professor who threw it out or OpenAI?

This all seems like such recent technology, I can not imagine this question being very answerable except via the long way: a courtroom. I suspect it would take someone trying in order to set precedent.

I’ve made a point to learn and understand commonly “mocked” languages. The reasons they’re ridiculed for are often very tightly related to the reasons why they’re powerful in unique ways.

It’s hard to defend some parts of PHP, but it doesn’t deserve the hatred it gets. Its standard library is a self-contradictory mess, yes. But it’s backwards-compatible with previous language versions to a fairly remarkable degree. This backwards-compatability might seem strange now, but not that long ago, this guarantee meant it could evolve very rapidly as a language and ecosystem without risking losing users to a continual barrage of updates necessary to keep atop of, lest your application fail. I think this is the reason it overtook PERL as the first major “server-side” dynamic website language of choice.

It has that goofy dollar sign variable syntax, yes. I personally think a special syntax for variable access vs function calls is one of the reasons coding beginners found it slightly easier to use - you didn’t need to keep so much track of name collisions and stuff. $thing is always a piece of data, a noun. thing is always a keyword or function, a verb. You can thing($thing), it’s OK, they’re different. You’re verbing a noun.

It could grow fast and be picked up quick, so it’s no wonder to me it persists, ever-improving, in the midst of all these extremely popular, extremely modern languages in use today. Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, Slack, Etsy, indeed even kbin, the piece of Fediverse software I’m writing this on now.

Weird, users can’t access the site, so ad revenue goes down?? Nobody can blame Elon, that’s literally impossible to predict. Maybe if he bans users from tweeting more than once a day it will get better?

This is great. This is how it always should have been.

Organization of any kind needs a Twitter page or subreddit? No, they need their own official, self-controlled Mastodon instance anyone can see and listen to and interact with, even without accounts on that specific instance. They need their own kbin or Lemmy instance to make and administer their community on and have control over, everyone can still participate even without signing up for accounts on that specific instance.