ameancow

@ameancow@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  laser light has this way of enhancing interference patterns as it spreads out, this is why it has weird looking patterns when projected in a wide angle.

  This is also probably what the person in this post was seeing and tripping on, staring directly into a laser pointer while high as balls.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Did the society became so stupid that being an idiot influences is now a valid profession?

  Yeah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Citizen fans sigh deeply, rub their foreheads as developer casts doubt on Squadron 42's 2026 release: 'I don't know if we're going to make it'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.

  All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them.

  Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.

  The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.

  Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.

  Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.

  And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.

  And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.

  And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.

  I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.

  (No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK about 15 bean soup.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  What if you have it with a cup of coffee? Does that count towards the bean counter?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Goated⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, I’m sure there’s some folks who are really into that, but I’ll pass.

  I’ll stick to my close-ups of aardvark noses wrapped in lace chokers, tyvm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump's video on the shooting of Kirk appears to be AI⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m reminded of how the high-resolution footage of Space-X’s landing [attempts] from a few years ago stoked massive waves of paranoia and conspiracy across the internet because nobody had ever seen such modern footage of a spacecraft in motion and most people who saw it thought it was fake.

  People really want to feel like they’ve figured something special out, in a world where media and information is constantly changing and advancing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kinesi Protein⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Most motor proteins use brownian motion (the random vibration of particles) to “move” and make other actions, but you rarely see any rendering showing what it looks like in real-time because it’s too fast and wiggly. All of these mechanical “clockwork” animations are super-slowed and clarified for better understanding.

  There are hundreds of variations of this animation out there which are very similar, some made by major science organizations, so while you’re right that it’s not “true to life” it’s the standard, acceptable model, and not entirely a product of a church. Although I’ve seen plenty of creation-science groups use all kinds of biomechanical motor motion to justify creationism, so it’s hardly matters. They will believe what they want and interpret what they want no mater what.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Wouldn’t it be awesome if people cared about research and facts.

  Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television. They have pushed many major media platforms into censorship already, and are just getting started.

  But what if I just pirate and use VPN’s? You tech-savvy kiddos might ask, getting a small thrill from feeling like anti-establishment pirates.

  Well never fear, they have plans for that too! Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have AI scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3139: Chess Variant⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At Dragon Con I saw a huge Robo Rally game being played on the auditorium floor with real little robots. I was disappointed though that the conveyor belts weren’t real.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a federated alternative to Wikipedia?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Wikipedia is not perfect, but it’s one of the best things we have ever had in the world. You should delete this dumb question, then go download it. Get it on a thumb-drive, and lock it in a safe.

  Everyone should. We need to preserve the archives of information. You can hem and haw all you want about people being allowed to edit articles and the constant propaganda wars being waged through the most controversial pages, but it’s STILL the best we have.

  Before this, people could just publish whatever books they wanted and that would become canon history for a thousand years. At LEAST wikipedia is largely self-balancing and so far not in the direct pocket of any one, single entity trying to control knowledge and history. For now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3139: Chess Variant⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you like this idea, try Robo Rally as a fun party board game. Turns are simultaneous, actions happen automatically, boards have actions that are constantly changing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m older also and am enjoying Hollow Knight a lot, it’s hard but I wouldn’t say frustrating, the game lets you say “Hmn this is not working out, I’m coming back here later after I get more skills or abilities” and it’s relatively non-linear for a metroidvania type game.

  Part of why it was very popular is the difficulty straddled a good line between challenging and manageable enough to keep making progress. But every player has different experience levels, distractions or time-limits on how much we can dedicate to gaming so it should be standard to allow players to choose difficulty. However, in a game like Hollow Knight you might be able to adjust the difficulty of boss fights but that’s only part of the challenge, the rest of the challenge in inherent in the game’s layout and mechanics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The vast majority of people who lean right are not individually as hateful as youtube and social media and most of the content algorithmically fed to us would have us believe.

  Do they say horrible things around each other? Yes, they ramp up the rhetoric and make it seem like they’re absolute super-villains at times… but we really miss in all this is how shallow their values are. They are not complicated people. They go with the popular sentiment but are so comfortable living in a state of cognitive disonance that they will work all day with a team of black and hispanic coworkers, get along great, consider them true, best friends… then go home and upvote the most racist shit you’ve ever seen on facebook because it makes them laugh. They simply cannot make comparisons the way the other ~66% of the population does, so they don’t see things like hypocrisy or inconsistency. They don’t see larger pictures. They don’t understand the concept of punching down.

  As a group, they are our country’s biggest problem, a menage, a scourge upon the Earth who are enabling the worst, most malicious people to engage in plans of oppression we haven’t seen in a century.

  But as individuals, we could reach almost each of them. They’re stupid enough to believe whatever we tell them and we’re afraid of them. The math is broken.

  We have to get more social, we have to get more confrontational, we have to get less isolated.

  I will get some rando lefties screaming at me that they don’t want to “compromise with their oppressors” and that’s fine. Don’t. I’m not making you personally, and if you get that insinuation that I’m telling you personally to do something traumatic, you’re part of the problem. For everyone else, I’ve changed the hearts of people with apparently “set in” bigotry simply by listening and talking to them. It’s not jedi mind magic, it’s just a skill that comes from engaging with people in real life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  While I get the concept, it’s kind of as realistic as Star Trek. We have a long, long way to go before people will voluntarily want to live in a system where your government owns the land, starting with developing a government that can be trusted. I don’t see that happening in the next several thousand years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Should buying and selling homes be completely removed as a private institution then? What about land ownership entirely?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long do we have before PCs get locked bootloaders and corporations ban installation of "non-approved" software? (for context: Google is restricting sideloading worldwide on Android ETA 2027)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of things I hope I’m wrong about, but I have seen over and over as far back as the earliest days on the internet, companies like AOL have given users the illusion of choice, the feeling that they have control over what they’re looking at and “installing” and that effect has been played with back and forth, from apple giving users a lot of control while also outsourcing app development to third parties. But even that space was somewhat gated and those gates got taller and taller as time went, and I think a lot of platforms would be very happy if they had absolute control over the content users have access to, and have tried to exert this control in many ways.

  We wouldn’t have so many legal challenges and issues around monopolization, right to jailbreak, etc. if this wasn’t still a burning problem, so I don’t expect AI is going to be much different, especially since it’s so abstract and “weird” and not even programmed but almost shaped and grown and can still barely interact with computer apps outside of itself.

  I guess time will tell if we get a whole a generation of people locked into corporate matrix worlds where they know the steak isn’t real but love it anyway, or if people find ways to train their anime catgirl companions to download, interact with or even simulate 3rd party apps and custom content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long do we have before PCs get locked bootloaders and corporations ban installation of "non-approved" software? (for context: Google is restricting sideloading worldwide on Android ETA 2027)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not saying it will be good, but it will be pushed as the next big thing and it will work enough to get people who are already locked into their ChatGTP waifu fantasies or using the thing to supplant their missing social lives in some way to jump over to it, bugs and all.

  I think actual AGI is years and years away, but the things the major companies will release in the near future will “simulate” general intelligence in a few clever ways, and as we’ve seen, the public doesn’t have the attention span to care about the nuance, they just want something that makes them feel special.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long do we have before PCs get locked bootloaders and corporations ban installation of "non-approved" software? (for context: Google is restricting sideloading worldwide on Android ETA 2027)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It will happen when the major companies produce some kind of magical formula that literally everyone wants and are willing to sacrifice freedoms just to have it.

  THIS is the reason they are chasing AI so hard and trying to make it to AGI before anyone is ready or prepared. They want everyone to have their magical fairy whispering product placements in their ear and charming them into simulated relationships so that the users abandon all thought of having personal control and freedom to train the things themselves, to install their own upgrades, etc.

  The next major “thing” we all carry is going to be some kind of AI that can see through your view of the environment and can whisper to you privately various simulated thoughts, observations and relevant info about the things around you. As well of course as “Hey look, Kohl’s is having a 35% off sale on jackets, didn’t you need one?”

  This is their dream, this is why they have put so much into the tech. People are going to gobble it up if they can ever get there, and with that goes all semblance of autonomy, freedom or independant thought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You are stardust.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Both perspectives are equally valid. The universe has no right answer. There is no correct way to live, experience or perceive anything.

  You don’t owe the universe anything, it doesn’t owe you anything. It may very well be inherently unknowable at some levels. Live your life the best you can, everything you experience, from joy to despair, pleasure and pain, it’s all just experience and it’s all you’re here to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨bet you can think of more⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s all good advice except the part about getting yourself shot and having crack sprinkled on your corpse.

  Boo them from a good safe distance when you have people with you. Don’t confront cops.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who is the enemy?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Conservatives hate pedophiles

  I wish this was really a blanket rule.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LPT: Go get a shot, now.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yah while I’m aware of the situation and what’s been said, what has been said wasn’t exactly from a highly reputable source, it wasn’t even from the DHHS, it was someone who “talked to” RFK, and somehow every news outlet picked it up.

  That all said, it could indeed happen, the administration is unhinged and a spike in covid deaths would be great for their plan of manufactured chaos, but they also have a much longer track-record of leaking crazy implications in order to fuck with the valuation of stocks.

  They may also be planning to do the Chairman Trump thing again and leverage their threats for a 10% cut of Moderna and Pfizer’s profits.

  All in all, it’s way too unverified and unpredictable to know for sure what’s going to happen, however this infographic/poster thing is really terrible. It’s framed like an announcement, posted in first-person, and has no links or sources. It’s so terrible I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone in the administration made it and leaked it also.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution: 🖕⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  edit: really guys, you can roleplay as colony organisms and refrigerators and small planets and whatever else all you want, at least try to sound like you’re having fun doing it. Have some self awareness and make your alternative identity a source of joy for yourself and others and you will get a lot more acceptance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution: 🖕⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay go play your games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution: 🖕⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My so-called government just canceled nearly every space probe and scientific endeavor planned for the next decade, de-orbited two climate monitoring satellites for no reason other than performative politics, put a stop to windmill energy farms, effectively pardoned one of the worst sex traffickers in the world to avoid being found complicit, and the supreme court is deciding on how legal it is to arrest someone for not being white.

  I’mma say naw dog. The only way I could possibly condone uplifting any non-human creatures at this point is if they’re designed to surpass us in every way and utterly overpower our species almost immediately so that we don’t make it out into the stars.

  I say this as someone who grew up watching Star Trek and reading Sagan. The stars are not for us. We are the same horrible primates who smashed each others heads in with rocks for a million years before we discovered agriculture and money. Same creature, more excused to smash heads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are the grievances with the "male loneliness epidemic"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, that’s a dumb fucking reply. I am saying that people were not happier under dictators, that’s not exactly gymnastics. Meanwhile, there are countries here and now on earth that have higher happiness levels who are more focused on community and culture and have social safety nets to back it up. That’s my point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution: 🖕⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  lol I know enough that i stopped doing commissions for furries over a decade ago because there were so many who took it too far and then got way too serious like this ^

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution: 🖕⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are furries, and there are furries who take things too far.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are the grievances with the "male loneliness epidemic"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  communist regimes

  Already lost me there.

  There hasn’t been a real “communist regime” there have just been a lot of dictators and despots using the label, and if you know history you should know this, otherwise it’s weird that you think the only alternative to life-destroying capitalism run amuck is straight up cartoonish, hollywood-invented, jump-suits and tank-parades-communism.

  However I have traveled the actual REAL world and there are many, many countries where people do not prioritize throwing money at corporations and care about their communities and each other and they are much, much happier with less distractions, less luxuries, fewer stressors and more social engagement, and in many of those places they also have free healthcare and public transportation. You know, socialist policies that help people not have to struggle so hard to survive every day so they can spend time with their friends and family.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are the grievances with the "male loneliness epidemic"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The only thing essentialist about us (and the only other explanations are essentialist) is that we’re highly social creatures, the point that we literally die without social contact like a goddamn lovebird or guinea pig.

  The only thing that’s gotten in the way of our social life of the past is the rampant increase in “luxuries” such as single-family homes, personal cars, computers that keep us inside, and the vast array of conveniences that let us survive with clicks and phone calls with strangers.

  At its heart, it’s not complex. We buy things that are sold to us to give us the illusion of comfort, but comfort is not good for us, having community is what’s good for us and makes happier and have more balanced perspectives, and we’re suffering massively and experiencing national divisions because we don’t have a sense of community broadly.