lvxferre
@lvxferre@mander.xyz
The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
- Comment on In a world first, Brazilians will soon be able to sell their digital data 1 day ago:
As I mentioned in beehaw, I’m completely opposed to that; privacy should be seen as an inalienable right, not a commodity.
But hey, the current gov is an alliance between neolibs and centrists, so… if they can put a price tag on your dignity, they will.
- Comment on The Gmail app will now create AI summaries whether you want them or not 2 days ago:
Then it’s either unavailable for people using it in Portuguese, or I disabled it too and I don’t remember.
- Comment on The Gmail app will now create AI summaries whether you want them or not 2 days ago:
If the customer doesn’t want the feature:
[user]“I don’t want it.”[corporate]“Trust Us, We know what you want better than you do. You want it.”[user]“Stop it. I don’t want it. Consent you wanker, do you understand it?”[corporate]"Since you aren’t using the feature, We assume you’re an ignorant unaware of it, so let Use smear it a bit more on your face until you swallow it. "[user]“Sod off. And stop putting this bloody shit on my face.”[corporate]“We understand that simple concepts like obedience might be a bit too complex for something like you, but We are fairly tolerant and helpful, so We shall remind you of the feature again. And again. And again.”
If the customer does want the feature:
[user]“Okay, I want it. This is cool.”[user, later]“What happened with the feature? It was amazing, why did they kill it?”[corporate, lying]“We’ve replaced it with something better, bigger, flashier. Trust us. It’s better.”[user]“It’s completely different. Now it sucks.”
Then proceed as in the first part.
Seriously, the way GAFAM handles AI is just like the first part for plenty people. And it’ll be like the second part, once their marketing teams find another trend to chase. Fuck this shit. I’m glad my email my email is not from Google, but if Yahoo pulls off the same shite I don’t care if my address is 25yo, I’m migrating.
- Comment on Two of the World’s Worst Termites Hooked Up in Florida—and Now We’re Screwed 4 days ago:
If the hybrid population is fertile, it has at least as much survival fitness as the “best” of the parents. But probably more because it can couple advantageous traits from both for that environment.
- Comment on Play as a virus inside Winnie the Pooh in Winnie's Hole - demo out now 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week ago:
Let’s hope you’re right, and Matrix improves by a lot.
- Comment on Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created 1 week 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 1 week 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 3 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 3 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 3 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 3 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:
- Whatever pigboy says is worth as much as used toilet paper.
- 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 Your majesty 4 weeks ago:
A kingdom always seeking expansion. Stop expanding into my stale bread dammit!