ArghZombies
@ArghZombies@lemmy.world
- Comment on Bluesky is now open for anyone to join | TechCrunch 9 months ago:
Well, that’s the whole point of the whole thing. Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, which will be federated early this year. bsky.social/about/…/11-15-2023-toward-federation
I know everyone likes to shit on all Social Media that isn’t called Mastodon, but that doesn’t mean Mastodon is the only option. I am on both (and Twitter a bit still too) but Bluesky is where I spend most of my time.
- Comment on Bluesky is now open for anyone to join | TechCrunch 9 months ago:
I like it over there. Of all the Twitter alternatives I think it ticks the right boxes.
- Decentralised
- Low barrier to sign up
- Not owned by a crazed billionaire
- No ads
- No popularity algorithm
- Interesting features, like custom feeds and moderation lists
If they can bridge their AT Protocol with ActivityPub then I don’t see why it can’t take off.
- Comment on How Quora Died 9 months ago:
It’s more that it pops up in Image Searches all the time and it’s almost always a useless example of what you’re searching for.
- Comment on How Quora Died 9 months ago:
It’s like the text version of Pinterest.
- Comment on UK government announces Industry Transparency Code on Music Streaming 9 months ago:
Honestly, I’m so jaded with this government that I just assume anything they announce is either just a disraction away from whatever ghastly thing they’re really doing or it’s some culturewar bait to stir up trouble.
- Comment on Meta’s “overpriced” ad-free subscriptions make privacy a “luxury good”: EU suit 11 months ago:
I guess that advertising has been around for 100s of years. For the vast majority of history it’s been something people accept - nobody could avoid posters on the street, adverts in store windows and later it was adverts on the radio, in the cinema, then ads on TV… It’s only incredibly recently that people have had even the possibility of blocking ads, and even then it’s only a small subset of online adverts that can be blocked. Most ads (TV, radio, billboards, print…) are just as unavoidable and unblockqble as before.
Which basically means advertising has been part of people’s lives since the day all of us were born. Mostly folks just accept it, like we accept we have to spent 2 minutes every single morning brushing our teeth even though we wish there was a better way.
It’s just one of those tradeoffs. You can avoid that 2min every day but your life would be massively inconvenienced as a result (people would avoid you and you’d be in pain every day), and you can avoid ads by not using the internet, but life is inconvenienced as a result.
- Comment on Meta’s “overpriced” ad-free subscriptions make privacy a “luxury good”: EU suit 11 months ago:
Facebook are an advertising platform. They only offer a paid tier because they now legally have to. They don’t really want you to take the paid tier, they want you to explicitly opt in to the ad-supported ‘free’ one. - because by specifically agreeing to "I want the free Facebook with ads’ option it means you’re actively choosing to be served ads, which is what all the recent lawsuits have been about - users giving explicit consent to be targeted for advertising.
- Comment on From Outer Wilds to Core Keeper and a new Shantae, here’s everything announced at Indie World - Polygon 11 months ago:
Ah interesting option, thanks! I’ve occasionally watched a few speedruns of it but I didn’t realise there’s whole first time playthroughs.
- Comment on From Outer Wilds to Core Keeper and a new Shantae, here’s everything announced at Indie World - Polygon 11 months ago:
That’s not really a problem with the game, but with your expectations. If I watch the film Alien expecting a comedy but it’s actually a horror I wouldn’t complain the film is overrated and not funny.
- Comment on From Outer Wilds to Core Keeper and a new Shantae, here’s everything announced at Indie World - Polygon 11 months ago:
A shame, but that’s cool. Not every game works for everyone. I can’t stand the Dark Souls games and it seems I’m in a minority on that one.
- Comment on From Outer Wilds to Core Keeper and a new Shantae, here’s everything announced at Indie World - Polygon 11 months ago:
Outer Wilds is so good. A perfect game for Switch. And the DLC included too, which was also superb.
Pity they can’t release a way to erase the game from my memory so I can play it afresh. Half the point of the game (and DLC) is just figuring out what the game is. Because I already know what to do I’d just complete it in about 10 minutes so it’s sadly not worth me picking it up again.
But anyone who hasn’t played it, please give it a go. It’s just wonderful.
- Comment on GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour 11 months ago:
An hour of grinding - that they will also sell you powerups to help you skip that grind.
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
Snowrunner. A great combination of both chilled-out & stressful, driving massive diesel trucks at 5mph through woods and rivers delivering logs or girders.
The fact there’s no big story and almost zero dialog, just assignments and map markers mean it’s a superb ‘podcast’ game - something you can put it on while you listen to some podcasts / audiobooks.
Not that the game is boring or just a distraction. It’s incredibly satisfying finding the best way to navigate through a horrendous woodland or swamp and get all your cargo through safely.
Plus, it has some of the best landscape physics out there. Rushing water really feels accurate. Mud paths get distorted so that it’s harder to get through on your way back than before you churned it all up.
A great game. 100s of hours I’ve sunk into that thing.
- Comment on Braid, Anniversary Edition Release Date Trailer 11 months ago:
Jonathan Blow can fit an awful lot of antivax, conspiracy theories and transphobic ranting into a 15hr commentary.
- Comment on Battling Anti-Israel Hate with AI Bots - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology 1 year ago:
The last election was in 2006. 17 years ago. The median age of people there is only 20. Most of those people didn’t vote for anyone, let alone Hamas. And even those that did vote, Hamas got less than 50% of the vote.
Also, nice use of ableist slurs there. Is that really appropriate?
- Comment on YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers 1 year ago:
But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.
Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.
It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.
Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
- Comment on Meta faces permanent ban on targeted ads across Europe 1 year ago:
But people advertise with Google precisely because they know the ads will be targeted at relevent people. If Google just sell loads of ad slots that just show to random users then that’s just a waste of money. If I’m selling motorbike helmets I don’t want to waste my money having Google show those ads to 60 year old men who only travel by bus or golfers or people who use wheelchairs.
Google won’t just sell loads of ads here, they’ll totally change their business model to something closer to the targetting approach.
- Comment on Cities Skylines 2 - Review Thread - (76/100 OpenCritic) 1 year ago:
I thought PS5 / XBOX versions were delayed to 2024, no?
- Comment on today I was reminded how bad YouTube ads are 1 year ago:
Thanks, but I can’t install into a Roku, which is the main TV I’d be using.
- Comment on today I was reminded how bad YouTube ads are 1 year ago:
Weirdly, and annoyingly, I get this same thing when watching YouTube on my TV. Via Roku stick, Chromecast or anything. However watching the same thing on a laptop or my phone even without any adblock and the video will play far better. Maybe 1 ad at the halfway point and nothing else.
I don’t know why the TV version of YouTube is such an arse for ads. They’re not even in clean places - I get an ad mid-sentence.
Honestly, for a 20 minute video I’d be perfectly ok with a 30 second ad or so. It helps the creators and isn’t that much of a pain for me. But getting adverts every 2 minutes, even if they’re skippable is just a horrific experience.
- Comment on FTX thief cashes out millions during Bankman-Fried trial 1 year ago:
Love the nominative determinism at play here for Mr Bankman-Fried.
- Comment on Is It Still Worth Going to the Movies? 1 year ago:
Cool, thanks for the valuable insights.
- Comment on Is It Still Worth Going to the Movies? 1 year ago:
You can’t replicate the cinema experience at home, regardless of how big your TV is or how impressive your audio setup is.
Watching some epic sci-fi on the big screen, or communally experiencing some creepy horror movie, or a whole crowd of 100s laughing along together at a ludicrous comedy is something I don’t want to give up.
Sure, a lot of films are fine to watch at home but with a decent audience the cinema experience can’t be beaten.
- Comment on X drops headlines from articles, as new report details its bleeding ad revenue 1 year ago:
Sadly these still a lot of folks on there that haven’t moved elsewhere. If you curate your follower lists and don’t venture into the replies of big/ trending accounts then it’s still manageable. Mostly I just use to to read people I follow rather than post anything new myself these days.
Also, I’ve feeds of decent journalists that I’ve built up over many years that don’t post elsewhere. There’s still that immediacy that you just don’t get elsewhere.
- Comment on X drops headlines from articles, as new report details its bleeding ad revenue 1 year ago:
For people still using Twitter, if you view it in a browser like Brave it will hide all the ads for you. Even better, you can save the webpage view as a Web App in your phone and access it that way and you barely even notice it’s the web version you’re using and not the app. I’ve not seen an ad on Twitter in months since doing that.
- Comment on Apple will no longer fix the $17,000 gold Apple Watch 1 year ago:
Very little of the price is the gold.
An actual gold watch (excluding the bracelet) weighs about 20g.
At about £50 a gram that’s £1000.
And I doubt the amount of gold in the case of the Apple watch is anywhere near the same amount as in a traditional gold watch case.
- Comment on X Social Media is suing X, a social media company 1 year ago:
I like the fact that the article had to refer to the non-Musk site as XSM instead of its full name of ‘X Social Media’ because it would just make the article too confusing to use the proper name.
That perfectly illustrates the point.
- Comment on The EU says X is the worst platform for disinformation | Just as it removes a way to report election misinformation 1 year ago:
People say that picking a server for Mastodon isn’t that important, but really I think it is. Because just a with Lemmy where you can view your Communities, Local and All it’s the same on Mastodon - your server is the Local feed made up of all the people on that server. So you can just read the whole feed of everyone that way, and is it’s a server based around a topic you like then it’s a great place. But if you pick a server based around Crypto or Dance or Sport then you’re going to have a dull time.
Yes you can find individual people, but it’s a lot more fiddly to find people that aren’t on your server. You kind of have to know who and where they are already.
That’s why the fediverse works better for Lemmy than Mastodon IMO - because it’s about whole topics than people.
- Comment on Lego axes plan to make bricks from recycled bottles 1 year ago:
Seems like even if it’s no less carbon intensive to produce them this be way it’d still be ‘greener’ just by virtue of the fact they’re reusing plastic bottles and stopping them just being dumped in landfill.
- Comment on Fully Charged in Just 6 Minutes – Groundbreaking Technique Could Revolutionize EV Charging 1 year ago:
This assumes everyone can have a charger at home. A large portion of people can’t. Apartments, associated spaces, on-road parking… a lot of people need public chargers.