lvxferre

@lvxferre@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Play as a virus inside Winnie the Pooh in Winnie's Hole - demo out now⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I played through the demo. It’s fun; you need to strategise a bit and think about the synergy of the power-ups you get, otherwise you will get yourself killed. (That sloth was specially hard.)

  It reminds me a bit The Binding of Isaac, both in the overall “mood” and randomness of the power-ups you have to choose from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Aah, cut off the crap Clegg.

  Under the current IP and copyright laws across the world, your argument has as much merit as “let robbers steal; asking others permission before snatching their stuff would ‘kill’ the black market”.

  And, if the idiotic laws are to be revoked, they should be revoked for everyone. This would allow you to train your bloody models on those artists - but it would also allow everyone to grab things from your “industry” and you should not be able to do anything against them.

  Pick a choice. One of those two. Enough of this bloody Bob Dylan defence* - either everyone is a thief, or everyone is a king; your industry is not such special snowflake, and you are not a higher caste above the rest of us dammit.

  * Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s hope you’re right, and Matrix improves by a lot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes but soon it’ll be better than Discord. Sadly not because Matrix would’ve improved, but because Discord went downhill really hard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Discord is entering its second decade as a company and is seeking to go public.

  I’m going to laugh my arse off at the muppets who migrated from Reddit to Discord, yet another centralised platform enshittifying itself.

  Told ya. I told you all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Minecraft will finally let you craft saddles instead of hunting for them⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They should’ve made them craftable since the beginning. But hey, it isn’t like Minecraft follows any sort of design or logic, more like the developers say “ooohhh shiny” and add new features on a whim.

  And this is likely associated with the happy Ghast mob. I’m not directly opposed to the idea of a flying mob that lets you stand on, to build stuff, but… come on, stop wrecking the theme of older mobs dammit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hideo Kojima proposes a game where the protagonist forgets abilities if players take too long a break⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Skill loss itself is fine, the problem is to make it based on RL time. It’s a game, not a job; you shouldn’t need to clock in/out regularly to enjoy it. (Tamagochi had the same issue. Except it was character loss.)

  I didn’t play Escape from Tarkov but two good examples come to my mind:

  • RimWorld - colonists have ~10 trainable skills. They lose skills over time, faster at higher levels. This encourages specialisation, so when shit hits the fan the game cripples you even harder. (Fuck you, Randy.)
  • Nethack - your character gradually forgets spells over time; to avoid it you need to either re-read consumable spellbooks, or use the spell often (thus using precious mana). It’s all about resource management, hoard spells and you’ll get yourself killed in no time, but if you prioritise useful spells you have a better chance of survival.

  In both cases the player is always losing something, even with correct gameplay. But neither demands you to treat it as a job.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hideo Kojima proposes a game where the protagonist forgets abilities if players take too long a break⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fucking dumb idea. It isn’t like the player themself won’t forget this stuff already.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A shame the project was discontinued, the visuals were fucking cool. (Yup, it was a real distro.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Myself mentioned a bit below that the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run. But I still think that some distros should be recommended - otherwise the newbie simply says “Hannah Montana Linux, Justin Bieber Linux, Ubuntu Satanic Edition… bleeergh I can’t choose, I give up”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Speaking on that: a lot of people act as if promoting Linux means simply “to get others to install it”. And they ignore that the newbie will need help the first days, weeks, even months. Then the newbie gets burned out and switches back to Windows.

  That probably explains why some people manage to retain even tech illiterate people using Linux, while others struggle to convince even tech literate ones to switch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My point is that the site should be recommending a few newbie distros, instead of telling the newbie to search it. for them.to look it up. Specially because the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful. out", instead of telling them to search it.

  That said I agree Mint would be a good choice. Not sure on Xfce; I’d probably recommend Cinnamon instead, as it looks a bit more modern (even if myself would rather use MATE or Xfce than Cinnamon).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Download a new OS // Download the operating system you want to install. Search for Linux distributions for beginners to get some suggestions.

  I feel like it’s better to actually list/suggest a few beginner distros than to tell people to look it up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit will work with “various third-party services” to verify a user's humanity, after an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  🤣

  …although frankly I still get some Schadenfreude from seeing Reddit wreck itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paradox Interactive announce Europa Universalis V⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  [Replying to myself to avoid editing the above]

  Just for curiosity I went to Reddit, to check r/eu5. Guess what! It’s now controlled by the powertripping circlejerk that controls other Paradox subreddits. “Yay”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit will work with “various third-party services” to verify a user's humanity, after an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Clean TP is useful. Used TP has negative value, it’s the sort of nasty trash that you see with disgust, and that you can’t wait to get rid of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit will work with “various third-party services” to verify a user's humanity, after an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. It isn’t like Reddit is known for efficiently tackling the problems that appear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit will work with “various third-party services” to verify a user's humanity, after an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
  1. Whatever pigboy says is worth as much as used toilet paper.
  2. This will be likely ineffective against bots but screw legit users major ways.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paradox Interactive announce Europa Universalis V⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It was time. I’m not playing it (screw Paradox) but this was that one series I followed closely. Or like my nephew called it, “boring map game uncle plays”.

  Things mentioned:

  • New and larger map: pathfinding will be a mess.
  • Longer time scale: flashy but surprisingly irrelevant in the big picture. Okay, if still ending in 1821 then it’s +25% gameplay time, but people typically drop their games before the end anyway. I also hope they dropped that “start in any date” feature, it was a nice idea but in practice it was awful, non-canonical starting dates were not managed so they ended a mess.
  • Population based system: Imperator like, perhaps? I actually like the idea.
  • Thousand of historical events: see… the problem with those is that they always assume some country will pop up, as if countries were “fated” to exist. When they don’t, it’s always replacement goldfish country (e.g. Castile vs. Spain). They tend to react poorly to the main historical force in the game, the player.
  • Detailed production and trade: okay, this sounds cool.
  • Design a nation [SIC - country] to suit your situation: EU3 sliders comeback?
  • Deep military and diplomatic systems: should I expect the associated bugs? Such as your vassals not being able to declare on each other, but their colonies do, even if they’re all from the same overlord?

  Things I wish I saw mentioned:

  • complete fort revamp, without introducing path-dependent outcomes. For example in EU4 if you an army reached a fortified province A from province B, it could only go back through B, so you had to memorise it. And this interacted really poor with the fact that armies can be merged and split, the outcome was always a mess. Plus naval transport.
  • I hope they address that fucking mess where tags represented ambiguously states and stateless societies at the same time, native people could be “abstracted” as a province attribute or a tag,
  • An actually interesting colonisation system, that is neither “click on province, send colonist, ???, profit” nor “it’s the same you do in Eurasia, just blob over nearby small tags”. (Relevant to note how natives-as-tags fucked up colonisation - because the old colonisation system assumed huge tagless areas.)
  • getting rid of magical boundaries. In EU4 they were everywhere, e.g. you’d had to cheese the game to change your capital from Anatolia to Persia because they were across the magic “Europe vs. Asia” border, but you could change it from Anatolia to Ireland just fine. Or colonial regions goddammit how I hated those, always assuming colonial governments should control areas that loosely correspond with XXI century governments. (Although I always had fun breaking this system. For more merchants and aesthetic borders.)
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google shares slump as Apple exec calls AI the new search⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What about old style search that does not suck? And by “not sucking” I mean:

  • It doesn’t show you results missing a search term.
  • It has simple and functional Boolean logic.
  • It doesn’t assume = bullshit what you meant.
  • It doesn’t try to answer questions by itself.
  • It is either language-agnostic or respects the language options of your browser.
  • It doesn’t show you “AI snippets” or whatever.
  • It doesn’t take your location into account, unless you explicitly say so.

  You don’t need AI for that dammit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Fight for the Soul of Video Games⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Regarding sexism and the games industry, I’d like to mention the Petrie multiplier: “if the percentage of men and women in the room who make questionable remarks to the other sex is equal, then the average number of sexist remarks experienced by members of one party scales by the square of the proportion of the offending party to the other”. This means that, the less women you have making games, the harder it is for women there.

  (This can and should be generalised towards non-binary and trans people, too. It gets even worse for them, through the same mechanic.)

  One wonders: Is it video games or the Internet itself that needs to be fixed?

  Neither - it’s society itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yokai farming sim Tales of Seikyu gets an early access release date, may or may not let you date a handsome otter man⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So instead of potatoes, pineapples etc., you’re farming yōkai?

  …this looks cool. I’ll give it a check once it releases.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not opposed to A"I"; far from that, I actually use text generators a fair bit, sometimes image gens. It’s simply a technology and I use it as such. And I still bloody hate how corporations handle it:

  • Always two weights, two measures. If you violate their IP, you’re a filthy criminal; if they violate yours, you’re overreacting and a luddite and harming progress. I want to see copyright gone, but if it is not, then apply it consistently to all sides. (By the way, fuck “Open"A"I” and their Bob Dylan defence.)
  • Always nagging you to use it. If you’re nagging me to use something, it’s because it’s in yours best interests that I use it, not mine. No means “no” dammit.
  • Always implicitly lying about its abilities. No, I’m not going to ask it anything where a bullshit answer might ruin my day, stop misleading me to do so.
  • Always downplaying issues. Yeah, nah, I’m not blind to the environmental concerns around training those huge models. Or that corporations - that don’t understand what “consent” means - basically DDoS sites to train their models.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Research Announcements Shifting to Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, it is a waste of effort. But as my grandma used to say, “a lazy person works twice” - those people can’t be arsed to learn how to use platforms more resistant to this sort of enshittification, so they keep migrating.

  Even then, it’s still better that they’re doing this silly dance and migrating again than sticking to that Xithole.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Research Announcements Shifting to Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bluesky might be far from ideal, but I’m still glad to see researchers aren’t playing along Musk and his dog’s bullshit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paradox Interactive's return-to-office policy may be driving employees away from the studio⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cool. Get dunked, Paradox.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Welcome to real life: advertisement is seen as filth. People might tolerate it in exchange for something else, but being “targetted” doesn’t make them less filthy; on the contrary, once you get how it’s being targetted at the expense of your privacy, comparing it with dog shit becomes unfair - because dog shit is less worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hexbear started in Reddit, as r/chapotraphouse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WhatsApp defends 'optional' AI tool that cannot be turned off⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Personal information fuels much of AI innovation so people need to trust that organisations are using their information responsibly,” it said.

  *sigh* Please make me forget that “trusting” is just an euphemism for “gullible”.

  Anyway. It’ll get worse over time; for now they claim that your messages aren’t being fed into Meta AI, but that’s bound to change later on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Perfect analogy. I still used /vg/ and very rarely /a/, but nowhere as much as I did before. Methheads moved in, I moved out, and now the house burned.