experbia

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.

bless you Scotty Kilmer, the angry ranting boomer car dad we all need

the thumbnail edits of his videos out there are my favorite thing

as though they knew him from his brief period as a vorlon or whatever.

vorlon

wait a sec…

I’ve always said that Starfleet is, first and foremost, a jobs program.

It gives purpose to people who can’t find their own, in a time where your needs are provided-for by default, and seeking personal fulfillment is the purpose for most people’s lives.

Drones would cut out the human driving a shuttle over to inspect an anomaly or object themselves, robbing them of a sense of accomplishment and achievement. Starfleet is about that stuff, so that’s a no-go unless nobody wants to do it and it needs to be done anyway. We see that a lot, too. They do have probes and sensor stations and stuff, after all, usually in really boring and unfulfilling locations.

They have excessive, ridiculous redundancy. They have people doing jobs the ship computers could (and often, in times of need, DOES) perform very well on its own. There are several recorded instances of entire starships being successfully maintained for extended periods of time by a single individual (who does go insane due to isolation every time, because plot).

Janeway is my favorite captain for sure. The others are all remarkable, because of course they are, but whenever I watch Voyager, I am reminded of how much more I like her over the others.

She had (and used) this great guile to serve her and her crew’s needs. She didn’t readily break her principles, but would intelligently question them when they didn’t appear to align with the greater good or her responsibilities.

She was both flexible and reliable. I feel that some viewers saw that as unpredictability, but I don’t think so. She actively did more to help her crew in every way than any other captain we’ve seen.

Developers were right to be in fear of Baldur’s Gate 3 resetting expectations. This isn’t close to all of the reason for this backlash, but for me it’s a notable part.

Here we all have for contrast suddenly an expansive, complete, player-respecting game that isn’t trying to squeeze money out of you at every turn… it reminds me of old PC games, before the enshittification of the industry began, before the corporate rot set in. When I bought my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, it was complete. It was expansive. It was before micro-transactions were really a thing, so it was a finished product. BG3 makes me think of those games, but with modern technology. My gaze shifts back to the allegedly “modern” games we have now, to Overwatch 2, and it just feels cheap and disgusting. A minimum-viable pile of gameified gambling covered in greasy MBA penny-pincher fingerprints, shrouded by half-truths from marketers trying to puff it up to look like a complete experience. It is still possible to deliver the better experience. It’s clearly just a matter of “want”.

I feel like I’ve just come from a family-owned restaurant on the beach in Cabo and came back home to a McDonald’s in a roadside casino, and I’ve just realized how genuinely shitty it all is.

I think I would actually rather just go outside or start a new hobby than touch “games” like this ever again.

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.

I live in Oregon. These people are a total joke around here. It’s just funny as hell to think that Idaho would want them - their whole counties are net liabilities in the state economy. Yet they stomp around “threatening” to run away from home and go to Idaho like a teenager mad over having to go to summer school. Might want to actually check with Idaho first, idiots.

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.

Just being able to tinker is kind of like my stim.

100% agreed. My main computer is a beast of a Linux system that is in a state of continual improvement. If I’m stressed, I just make little fixes here and there… try new things, create new little tools. It’s extremely relaxing to have something to dump one’s tinker energy into!

I want to take a moment to wish you luck! I’ve always believed anyone can program, even if not everyone can program everything. Modern web development can be very profitable, but very overwhelming. It is a constantly-shifting landscape of new standards and practices and tools. It has rebuffed many people due to this, who often become dejected by its complexity and dynamism.

If this is not you, then that’s excellent! However, if you feel this way, you should know that a different, slower, more stable version of web development still exists, which more closely mirrors conventional software development and even the shell scripting you have experience with: older style monolithic web applications are everywhere, and more continue to appear. Written in PHP, C#, ASP, even Perl (old!), these older web applications tend to have fairly stable ecosystems and documentation. You rarely find the biggest industry names like Microsoft and Apple and Netflix touting its engineers as having expert level knowledge in these languages and ecosystems, because they’re seen as somewhat old-hat, but they have a massive industry presence nonetheless… and fewer and fewer competent programmers exist to maintain and improve these systems.

Facebook is still largely comprised of PHP code, I believe - though they use a different runtime. WordPress is still a staggeringly massive presence on the Internet for anything from business sites to e-commerce shops, and it has a huge (and profitable, if you find a niche!) ecosystem of plug-ins written in PHP and Javascript/CSS/HTML. The new fediverse software (kbin) I am writing this post on is written in PHP! It is still easily possible to make a comfortable living doing nothing but quality PHP, especially if you can find a nice niche. It has a (relatively) undeserved bad reputation amongst modern programmers.

Anyway, thought to mention this. Good luck!

Sure seems that way, doesn’t it?

If the HA HA HA wasn’t burnt into my mind before, it was after this remix https://youtu.be/LDAR002M8i4

Hopefully it haunts your mind as well.

Insurance adjustor? Cybersecurity blue team?

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?

There’s a really good way for the DOD to avoid getting price gouged like this and it’s [ … To view the rest of this comment from your government-associated IP address, please remit payment of $45,000 to help cover the data storage cost of the message … ]

The executives in charge of these organizations would sooner destroy the entire company than be seen willingly acquiescing to their worker’s requests. The C-suite at this large of an entity tend to actively revile the rank and file workers, they truly view them as subhuman beggar urchins, crowding around them to try and peel scraps of money away from them, the “real earners”. Giving workers a “win”, even when it’s the smart business move, would destroy their credibility in their entire social circle and would likely lead to the prompt end of their positions.

This is all just media theatrics to amp up the perceived “economic damages” of a strike that the “country” will “suffer”, because they’re hoping to get the railroad treatment. They’re posing striking workers as some kind of economic terrorists. They probably have a multi-million dollar fruit basket on the way to the white house right now with a saccharine note pleading for a finely polished boot to descend upon their workers’ throats.

I for one dislike your comment because you used non-ASCII characters (emoji) in your reply. I am viewing this conversation chain via mutt on a tty, as is my preference and hobby, and would appreciate if you avoid using characters that cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII. If you’re going to the effort of having a discussion in a public place, you have an obligation to keep those of us on mutt in mind.

Sent via mutt 2.2.10 (gcc Version 2.7.2.3 (linux_3.3.1-1-i386))