jjjalljs
@jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
- Comment on Jack Dorsey's New Company Falling Apart as It Forces Employees to Use AI 1 week ago:
“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”
Yep.
Management is often out of touch and full of shit
- Comment on The American Dream is turning into. the American Nightmare real quick 1 week ago:
It’s always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.
Even the idealized stuff of “buy a house on one income” was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, “and then the white people burned down our house” were all realities.
This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.
- Comment on Meta could make social media posting immortal — and we should all cancel our Facebook accounts right now 2 weeks ago:
It’s really hard to get people to suffer mild inconvenience when they don’t emotionally connect with the benefits.
Most of facebook’s evils are remote and impersonal. Seeing your cousin’s baby photos is real and at hand.
- Comment on How Walmart And Pepsico Rigged Prices And Supercharged Food Inflation 2 weeks ago:
Break them up.
Jail the leaders and seize their wealth.
The shareholders get nothing. I probably own shares via Vanguard-type generic investing but I don’t care.
- Comment on What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love 2 weeks ago:
I’m just going to move on
That’s my point. They’re doing a self-sabotage. Some of them will then complain that they’re not getting good matches and messages, but a big factor is they’re not giving potential good matches anything to work with.
- Comment on What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love 2 weeks ago:
So many people see the prompt “what I’m looking for” and write “my keys”.
A. That’s not a terribly funny joke. It’s fine, but not great.
B. It’s not original.
C. You are wasting valuable space. Now the other person has a little less information to make a good opening message. Do you really want that many people messaging you about your keys? Really? Why are you setting yourself up for unhappy outcomes?
Most people don’t think very hard about this, and hope it’ll just work out.
- Comment on What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love 2 weeks ago:
One problem is users are selfish idiots. They won’t go somewhere that doesn’t already have a lot of users. They don’t care that going there now moves it closer to having a lot of users, so in a few months it’ll be good and vibrant. Most people can’t even think an hour ahead.
Another problem is that there are many scammers and bad actors. You need to deal with them, and convince your real users that the scammers are dealt with.
Lastly, in this capitalist hellscape everything is expensive. How are you going to run a big service that’s got low latency and high quality?
- Comment on What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, it can be hard, but many things worth doing are hard. If you start with the bare minimum, the other person’s first impression of you is that you half-assed it. Would you be extra interested in someone who’s too half assed to even read your profile?
Put in the hard work. If you don’t have the energy, don’t use the apps. Half-assing it is just going to make you unhappy.
- Comment on What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love 2 weeks ago:
Except when actually trying to make a match, it’s more advantageous to literally swipe right on everyone to maximize matches and then unmatch if you match with someone you aren’t interested in.
This isn’t true if their system punishes people for swiping “yes” on everyone. While I can’t be certain that’s the case, it seems very plausible it is. Swipe yes on everyone, your profile is down ranked, you don’t get as many good matches.
Additionally, tinder and hinge only allow you a limited number of yes swipes per day. If you blow them on the first ten profiles, you’re going to have worse results than if you spend a little longer looking at profiles.
Furthermore, on hinge, you can send a message with your like. Your chances of having a conversation and date go way down without a good message.
- Comment on What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love 2 weeks ago:
Thinking about my friend group, about half the people met their long term partners on dating apps. The other half is a mix of work and large social groups (eg: people who all go to certain kinds of music festivals)
I guess it varies by age and region.
pewresearch.org/…/key-takeaways-on-americans-view…
While meeting partners through personal networks is still the most common kind of introduction, about one-in-ten partnered adults (12%) say they met their partner online. About a third (32%) of adults who are married, living with a partner or are in a committed relationship say friends and family helped them find their match. Smaller shares say they met through work (18%), through school (17%), online (12%), at a bar or restaurant (8%), at a place of worship (5%) or somewhere else (8%).
Some other sources I’m seeing say it’s as high as 60% of couples met online.
- Comment on What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love 2 weeks ago:
I think dating apps are mostly used for hookups
This isn’t especially true. Maybe Feeld and Tinder are less “serious”, but the idea of dating apps is mainstream enough that you find all sorts of people and goals.
The capitalism and for-profit nature does make them all kind of suck, though
- Comment on What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love 2 weeks ago:
The top of the funnel I could see an argument for not putting a lot of thought in. You’re just trying to get a pool of potential matches. (The apps are cruel for making you pay for this and not just giving you the list up front)
But once you do have a match, you have to put in some effort to stand out. A lot of people get a match and all they write is “hey”, and then they go right into the trash. Why would I engage with someone who just wrote “hey” when I could instead talk to someone who read my profile and said something personalized?
Also swiping yes on everyone might do strange things to their recommendation algorithm. Unfortunately that’s a black box, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that puts you in some sort of chum bucket shadow ban situation.
And also, yeah, making you pay for basic filters is a trashy design. Match group should be broken up.
- Comment on What dating apps are really optimizing. Hint: it isn’t love 2 weeks ago:
Most of the apps are trashy and don’t optimize for good matches.
At the same time, many users half-ass using them, or deploy a variety of self-sabotage. (No, it’s not that you’re not tall or hot or whatever. It’s more likely your impersonal message didn’t warrant a response)
These two facts together mean a lot of people have truly bad outcomes.
- Comment on From Microsoft to Microslop to Linux: "Why I Made the Switch" 2 weeks ago:
Cool. Been on Pop!_os for a year or so. Not memorable issues. Plays games fine.
Microsoft should be broken up. Even if they walk back some of their AI slop, they’re too big. They don’t fail like they should for releasing a bad product.
- Comment on 10+ year manager named Joe was apparently fired for bringing cookies to be thrown away before their sell by date to a food pantry in my town 3 weeks ago:
So far as I know it’s available in a bunch of regions: www.toogoodtogo.com/en-us
- Comment on 58 UK public libraries have parenting books with advice to encourage children to detransition 3 weeks ago:
On the one hand, you don’t really want to give people the power to decide what books are available. Assholes would use that to remove queer books, for example.
On the other hand, that power is already implicitly in place. There’s finite space in a library, so they must choose a subset of all possible books. I’d want to know how the existing processes work before suggesting changes.
- Comment on Geoguessr, but actually fun 3 weeks ago:
Interesting. The inability to pan and walk around makes it very different. I liked “walking” around in geoguesser until I found a landmark or something, but I never played competitively or obsessively.
- Comment on 10+ year manager named Joe was apparently fired for bringing cookies to be thrown away before their sell by date to a food pantry in my town 3 weeks ago:
I worked in a grocery store that had a little pizza making section. End of the day they’d throw out a lot of pizza. Management absolutely did not want employees to grab some at the end of the day.
Well, I was friends with the guy who worked there so he’d “throw it out” into my possession. I had a lot of free pizza back then.
Nowadays there’s an app “too good to go” where you can get cheap food at the end of the day from places. Not as good as free, but like four slices of pizza for $5 isn’t bad.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Bg1 and 2, Dragon age, and mass effect famously had save imports, so “the only way” doesn’t check out.
The dark souls games are so far removed in time that the previous game is legend, so that’s an option.
For the tv show they also could have, as I said, just set it somewhere and somewhen else. They can have rumors about what’s happening in Vegas, but it’s 20 years ago and you’re in Chicago, so who knows what’s true.
So, yeah, they could’ve done something else and still made a TV show.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
What made new Vegas interesting was that it’s not just another kitschy wasteland romp. It’s post-post-apocalypse, and it asks who rebuilds after.
My limited understanding is the TV show nuked the NCR so they could do more wasteland theme park, and not continue that train of thought. But also didn’t just set it somewhere else.
But admittedly I haven’t actually watched it.
But also, again, trying to make a TV show intersect with a video game with multiple endings is a foolish idea. You won’t make everyone happy, and it’s an entirely avoidable problem. They could’ve just set the show in a different part of the world that hasn’t had a game.
- Comment on The developers of PEAK, explaining how they decided on pricing for their game. 3 weeks ago:
I found a pizza place near me that still has like 2010 prices. It’s like a large pie with 5 toppings for $20. Most places are more like $30 now, here (NYC)
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I kind of refuse to watch Fallout. Partly because I read they fucked up the NCR. But also Amazon sucks , and Bethesda is kind of creatively bankrupt.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Spoiler for Shadowheart’s story
spoiler
Viconia is a recruitable party member in bg1 and 2. You can even make her not evil at the end. I was bummed that they decided that she just stays evil.
And for the main plot in act 3, with a certain bhaalspawn.
spoiler
You can also redeem sarevok, but they just decided that he’s evil.
Annoying, but I get why they didn’t do like a save import from an ancient game.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Related, if they ever make another game in the franchise this show will probably be canon, so it’s not entirely ignorable.
Technically I don’t have to watch it. I don’t have to play any more games in the franchise either. But if I do want to play more games in the franchise, I’ll probably have to deal with the show.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Can we just not do this?
One, not every thing needs to be a whole franchise universe.
Two, the game had a lot of decisions players could make. Collapsing that into a single canon is going to be unsatisfying. It was annoying enough that bg3 made some big decisions about choices from bg2.
Related, if they ever make another game in the franchise this show will probably be canon, so it’s not entirely ignorable.
Three, it’s not even that interesting a setting. It’s pretty Standard Fantasy.
- Comment on Meta progression in roguelites was fun for a while, but it's starting to feel unrewarding 4 weeks ago:
Yeah I don’t really like the model where it starts basic and hard, and each failure makes it a little easier.
Feels like it would be more interesting if you started with high stats, and each successful run you had to remove or lower something. Sure, you won with 200 health but can you win with 100? Hades kind of had this alongside the upgrades as you go.
I didn’t like dead cells or rogue legacy that much because it felt like I would’ve won if I had grinded more, and that’s not what I want.
I feel like games are usually a mix of execution challenges and numbers challenges. In a pure action game or other games without progression (eg: chess) you win or lose from your decisions and input. But in numbers games, you win or lose based on the stats. There’s really no way cloud from the start of the original ff7 can defeat disc 3 bosses. The numbers just aren’t there.
Some rogue-lites feel like they’re trying to be execution games but have a less clear numbers check on top. Doesn’t always work for me.
I do really like the traditional rogue like Crawl: Stone Soup, though. No meta game aside from the occasional player ghost.
- Comment on Borderlands 4 for Nintendo Switch 2 likely axed, as Take-Two says it’s ‘paused’ development | VGC 4 weeks ago:
Is it like the other ones where it takes several hours until you start finding interesting guns and get cool powers?
- Comment on You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift 4 weeks ago:
I don’t understand how my coworkers are using windows. Like, they routinely have issues where it randomly reboots or gets sluggish. And it’s just flat out unfit for software development, unless you’re targeting windows specific stuff. They can’t even run our code locally.
Maybe some of the problems are janky security stuff to try to lock it down
- Comment on Games you really want to play, but can't or won't? 4 weeks ago:
I’ve heard this but I haven’t taken the time to find a rom and emulator and get it working (on Linux)
- Comment on Games you really want to play, but can't or won't? 4 weeks ago:
I was going to say diablo4 as well. Diablo1 and 2 were some of my favorite games in my youth, but I just don’t want to give blizzard any more money. Path of exile 1 and 2 are good for the same itch.
Also any console exclusives. Bloodborne? Would love to play. Not buying a console. New Zelda and Mario? Same.