Recently watched The Carpenter’s Son. Don’t know why he agreed to that one lol.

I take it you haven’t seen his incredible backup dancer work, then?

Pros:

• I never have to worry that my OS is working for someone else by design.
• Never surprised by ads.
• Never surprised by updates that move/remove something in the UI.
• Never have to be worried about some new feature that windows is forcing everyone to use that accesses all my data and might go rogue and delete it all or upload it somewhere.
• BTRFS feels decades ahead of NTFS
• package manager makes it easy to try new programs
• I can try multiple desktop environments
• I can write scripts to customize my experience

Cons:

• Occasionally there is a program that only officially supports windows and I have to figure out how to get it working in proton or a VM. This happens much less now than 10y ago.
• A game might say it works on Linux, but I hit some issue that my friends on windows aren’t hitting, and have to determine if I’m just unlucky or if it’s something to do with proton/Linux.
• there are still some remaining kinks being ironed out with the x11 to Wayland migration.
• sometimes there’s a bug in a package and I have to downgrade it. But that’s not really even an option in windows.

All in all, there is nothing from windows I would say I “miss”. And it feels refreshing to know I’m out of the line of fire of msft.

Unionize.

In the US, democracy means that “my ignorance is as good as your [low temperature pasteurization]”.

Luckily, this particular case of ignorance will work itself out. I just worry about any innocent children who have to suffer as a result, but it will eventually work itself out…

CoreKeeper is a good one for multiplayer. Like Terraria x Stardew. I self hosted a server that we played for months, including at a LAN party, but I do think they use a nat hole-punch server to ease connectivity. Not sure if it was possible to direct connect via IP. It’s a big world with boss/gear progression and some mining automation.

Nothing has quite scratched the Rimworld itch for me, anything in that realm just makes me wanna play RimWorld more. But technically I have to mention Dwarf Fortress.

If you haven’t played a factory sim, Factorio is a classic. If you don’t want to have to fight buggers, you could try Dyson Sphere Program or Satisfactory instead.

Modulus is a recent factory sim with a unique twist: instead of having a fixed tech tree you work through, you’re given arbitrary 3D block configurations, and you lay down the configuration of buildings to make them. I really like the open-endedness. Some designs nicely complement others, so that the pieces you cut out to make part A can be stuck into the line that makes part B.

Btw, for Stardew, you need to eat foods that give your stamina back. Early on it’s harder to get the foods, but later you grow tons.

Always has been :(

I had put off reading it because I assumed it would be mostly preaching to the choir, but there are some challenging chapters to think about.

Ex. the idea that all the people who believe in aliens, and reject vaccines, and wear tinfoil hats, they’re all doing the first step of science: which is to doubt. The problem is that people are generally untrained on what to do next.

The question is whether this modern era of science is an anomaly, or if there’s something about the scientific method that gives it an advantage. If we fell completely into a dark age, is it inevitable that we find our way back? Or was this time period just a fluke?

It notes that throughout history, the dominant nation has always been the one who wields science most effectively. And the US wouldn’t be the first to fall because it failed to.

I did like the book, it’s not a 10/10, but it’s fun and I like weird fiction. I think both SCP and the Remedy Connected Universe are delightfully mysterious.

I hadn’t watched that short yet, just did. I see what you mean, but it was relatively true to the first chapter of the book. It’s really hard to do this genre justice in video form I think. Partly due to budget, but partly because what you didn’t like about it is a perfect description of the entire SCP universe: a giant, very serious conspiracy theory that fans swear is completely true and “THEY” don’t want you to know about it…while obviously being a absurd work of fiction. It’s like 80s horror, you have to embrace the campiness to enjoy it.

The notion of an anti-meme is interesting to think about too. Not really in a supernatural sense, but in a sociological/anthropological one. Are there things in this world that people have trouble wrapping their head around, things we can’t seem to pin down and understand and assign an easy-to-proliferate name to, but nonetheless hurt us?

Non-fiction:

• The Demon-Haunted World
• The Fourth Turning is Here

Fiction:

• There is No Antimemetics Division

The Trump administration is, at best, a denial of service attack on every facet of the US. The amount of time and effort spent putting his name on there, and then slowly determining that it’s not allowed to be there, and now removing it could likely have fed hundreds of people for months. He’s doing the same thing all over the place, trying to put his name on airports, money, statues, etc. Death by 1000 cuts. And this is probably the least bad thing this administration is doing to the US.

Don’t worry, trump controls the fed now. He’ll make sure the dollar becomes worthless, and everyone will be billionaires!

A Low Budget Alan Wake would have been better than one that doesn’t sell

I don’t follow. As a fan, I get to play the game either way. Why would a lower budget version that more people buy be “better” for me? It might be better for the companies involved, it might even make future installments easier to sell to investors which means I get more games. But at the end of the day, as a player I end up with a worse AW2. Why would I want that?

I do wonder how the crowdfunding route would have gone for them. I don’t know that they could have raised the full $50M though. The original had a cult following, and Control did really well, but it would be very risky. If they failed to hit their goal in a crowdfunding round, then they could be guaranteed going forward that no one, not even Epic would have seen it as worth funding. It would have been forever dead.

Yes, it’s an unfortunate reality that EGS was the only option. But still, my hope is that someone can crunch the stats and prove to future publishers that the revenue delta can be attributed to EGS exclusivity.

Everything is like that. You buy a CD, DVD, record album, painting, concert ticket, movie ticket, whatever it is, you don’t own the artwork, the creator retains the rights to the artwork, you just own a limited license to view it. You can’t go put on your own concert or show using that license without consulting the owner. You can’t create derivative works without consulting the owner. You can’t make copies without consulting the owner.

It’s not just video games, that’s just how copyright works.

Edit: did you know that a tattoo artist retains the rights to the artwork on your body? If you’re an actor with a tattoo, anyone who hires you needs to either get permission from the artist to show the tattoos in their work, or cover your tattoos.

Curious what went wrong with your Reolink run. That’s what I’ve got. Doesn’t require an app or account, and works with home assistant.

It’s not a matter of privacy vs UX. I actually think Plex has ruined their UX. But if you have friends and family, some are tech-illiterate, some have their own media servers, and you all want to share with each other quickly and easily, Plex is the only viable option. Same if it’s just you, but you travel a lot, and want to watch something from your home server without lugging around a device that has access to your VPN and a screen/hdmi-out.

Jellyfin is really only viable if it’s just you on your own network.

To add on to the top post: with Plex you only need 1 account and can exchange access to multiple servers. I can browse all the media my account has access to with ease.

Jellyfin needs an account per server. If the client multiplexed between them seamlessly, that would probably be fine enough. But it would be nice if they supported some method of federation.

And Jellyfin has a list of CVEs that they haven’t addressed in years, which makes not want to make it visible outside my network.

I want to ditch Plex, but this is the primary sticking point for me. No criticism to the Jellyfin devs btw, they’re doing the lord’s work, I have nothing but respect for them.

Another minor one is that the Plex app works with a controller on my bazzite HTPC, but the Jellyfin one was hit or miss. I could get it to work once, and then the next day the controller would do nothing and the UI would be acting weird. I will go back and try it periodically to see if it’s ready, but last time I checked it wasn’t.

/lemmy

You’re saying “we have to draw the line”. If I’m understanding the discussion at hand, I’m saying: we don’t. But I’d like to clarify what line it is you think we need to draw.

I think this is an interesting discussion to have, but if it’s not enjoyable to you, we can end it here. Cheers.

Edit: reading back again, I think you’re saying we need to draw the line and only use stochastic solutions for problems that necessitate them. That’s fair, ex. it’s inefficient, and error prone to invoke an AI to sort a list.

But rarely do humans have unsorted, well tabulated lists that they need sorted. Most people’s goals are stochastic. They have photos that need organized by location, event, content, etc. They have hundreds of emails from customers all asking the same trivial questions in different ways. They are going to meet a friend at the store across town and need to give an ETA.

Goals are only well defined if you only operate inside the well-defined space of formal languages. But the formal languages don’t exist for their own sake, at the end of the day, we built computers to solve amorphous, difficult to describe, human problems, and the messiness of software engineering has always reflected that.