dustyData
@dustyData@lemmy.world
- Comment on Does anyone use a phone without a protective case? 9 hours ago:
Yeah, like, there’s even a little leaflet that is the first thing you see when you open the box that just says “Don’t remove the screen protector. If it gets damaged, don’t replace it yourself, send it in for a free replacement.” Or some wording of that kind.
- Comment on Does anyone use a phone without a protective case? 13 hours ago:
The flip and the fold come with a screen protector from the factory. It’s integral to the phone as the screen is flexible and soft, without it the screen would get opaque and dull. People forget that the point of cases and screen protectors is to be like rubber tires. They’re there to take weather (not damage) instead of the phone, and to be easily replaced on the regular. Samsung offers a replacement service for the flip that changes protectors regularly with the phone protection program.
- Comment on Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog 1 day ago:
The kobo colour goes for less than $160 regularly. It is water proof, has front ligths, usb-c, and it can display color. I’m considering it for an upgrade from my, bought used 8 years ago, kindle. With Kobo, and ereaders track record in general, it will probably last twice that and still work. I consider that extremely cheap, specially in a market that usually expects people to dump a thousand dollars every two or three years for a phone. E readers have some of the best cost to utility ratios of electronics.
- Comment on I've started playing The Witcher. No, not the good one. 2 days ago:
That’s because the first one was going to be a Baldur’s gate game. But it got canceled because interplay was on the brink of bankruptcy. So CDPR repurposed all the work done thus far, including most of the script, with a new license they had just bought.
Funnily enough, the mild success of the writing convinced CDPR to port the game to consoles and that also almost bankrupted them.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
4.26 million copies sold, 17 best game awards and critical acclaim as the fourth best game for the 3DS disagree. The game also predates Breath of the wild by four years. I don’t know anyone else who compares the two directly. The LoZ games had always, until the Switch, been defined as existing in two distinct lines, the handheld games and the console games. I was thinking more of games like Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater, Ocarina of Time, Splinter Cell or Resident Evil Revelations who were more direct ports. And that’s even with a caveat, as RER was released for 3DS first then ported to consoles.
The 3DS has more that 1800 games, and most of them are exclusives.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
There’s a massive catalog of 3ds exclusives and those drove the market, not the adaptations or ports. The latter were the minority and not even the most popular titles.
- Comment on glupi jebeni bot 4 days ago:
Hey man, listen. Call centers suck. I worked at a call center, and it really really sucked. I’d be the first to empathize with workers locked up in call centers.
But this wasn’t even about a call center. It was a support experience survey for going to a physical store that offers support as one of the many things they sell and offer there. The place is not owned by the telecom company, they aren’t their employees.
The problem, again, is that the people designing, sending, collecting and overreacting to the support survey probably weren’t ever anywhere close to a remotely similar place. Which just shows how utterly useless and pointless the whole exercise is and how it is actually counterproductive to be honest on these corpo surveys.
- Comment on glupi jebeni bot 5 days ago:
9 out of 10 is not poorly. And that is exactly the core of the comment. They saw a 9 and acted as if I was beaten with a bat and verbally abused by this poor lady. This perception is their problem, they are completely out of touch with reality.
- Comment on glupi jebeni bot 5 days ago:
Then they should ask that. The question was redacted as a blanket statement for the entire support experience, which was really good overall. Everything else I rated a 10, including the quality of the attention received. We don’t need to make this excuses for bad management practices.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2 is now in preproduction, CD Projekt says 5 days ago:
Bethesda’s games are also celebrated as all time greats.
Games are good, eventually, in spite of the mismanagement, not because of it. At one point they will run out of magic, just like Bethesda did. For magic is just a ton of good writing and developers putting up with crunch.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2 is now in preproduction, CD Projekt says 5 days ago:
Yes, you did. The last step of the cycle is that everyone forgets that this already happened before. The witcher, then the witcher 2, then witcher 3, then cyberpunk. Each was such a mess at launch that the press at the time thought the games would flop. Each time devs, not suits, pulled the games out of PR hell after the fact.
People forget that the console port of the first witcher game nearly bankrupted them.
- Comment on glupi jebeni bot 5 days ago:
I once got a call from a telecom marketing department because I rated a customer service agent with a 9 out of 10. When I told them it was not for anything the agent did, just that the store the support was in was extremely difficult to find, the caller got a bit aggressive. Like they expected me to shit talk this poor lady who had been so nice to me, just hard to find, and it was all corpo’s fault. The store wasn’t properly branded and signaled. She couldn’t take any comment that was negative on the company, just on the employee. So I told her how ridiculously stupid that system was. That I wanted to change my score to a perfect ten, comment, the best employee this company has, even better than the CEO. The caller got obviously upset. Told her to write down that if they ever call me again I will immediately cancel my contract. She went with, is there anything else I could help you with? Which is call center code for “I want to hang up”.
- Comment on SteamOS massively beats Windows on the Legion Go S 5 days ago:
No, you see. Corporations have no rights. People have rights. Corporations can have legal protections, but not rights.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2 is now in preproduction, CD Projekt says 5 days ago:
And so the endless cycle of the borderline CD projekt games continues. Everything is hyped beyond realistic expectations a decade before launch, the masses whipped in anticipation. The game developers are kneecapped by suits making technical changes and demands they don’t understand. The game is launched after sorely felt apologies for delays, as a messy distasteful buggy disaster. Then the devs get to finish the game during thn next five unars after sorely felt apologies for the buggy mess at launch. 5 more years later the game is hailed as a creative masterpiece, despite being held by bubblegum and paperclips under the hood and still being a subpar experience. Then CDPR announces a new game, and the cycle repeats.
We didn’t learn anything from “Bethesda’s magic”. What a mismanaged company.
- Comment on Into the meat grinder! 5 days ago:
To be accurate, they will all make it through.
- Comment on Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails 1 week ago:
Tl;Dr: skip the apps unless they’re part of a bigger in-person course. Prefer reputable sources like pimsleur and mango languages. If you have no rush, get graded readers and watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, etc.
Ok, so here are my two cents on learning languages and the whole category of learning apps. They are all flawed on some major way or another. But mostly it is about pacing learning progress.
Teaching absolute beginners is easy. They know nothing, thus anything you show them will be progress. The actual difficulty when learning a language is finding appropriate material for your level of understanding, such that you understand most of it, but still find new things to learn. This is known as comprehensible input. The difficulty of most apps is that they are not capable of detecting then adapting study content accordingly to the student’s progress. So they typically go way too slow, or sometimes too fast. Leaving the student frustrated and halting learning.
Jumping with some nonzero knowledge into any app is also torture. It’s known as the valley of despair. The beginner content is too boring and dull, now that you know a bit, but the intermediate level is way too much of a gap for you yet.
My advice is to skip language learning apps. The “motivation via gamification hypothesis” is flawed and lacks nuance and understanding of behavioral science. People don’t stop studying out of a lack of tokens, gems, streaks or achievement badges. It’s because the content itself is uninteresting and bores them. Sure, the celebration and streaks work at first, but they usually lose effect by something known as reinforcement depreciation. The same stimulus shown too much or too frequently stops being gratifying. The biggest reward for learning a language is actually using it.
A method that is known to work is to find graded readers. Watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, social media, in the target language (avoid the language learning influencers) listen to native influencers speaking about topics you care about. Books work, in-person courses work, learning apps are good to start you up form absolute zero. But most learning happens on what you do in your everyday life. Using the language is the most effective way of becoming good at the language. Everything else is just excuses for using it.
- Comment on Is a DRM-Free Ebook always better than a physical book? 1 week ago:
Formatting error? Ereaders have shown footnotes in floating tooltips for a very long while. I recently read annotated Frankenstein and I read all the footnotes along with the main text with no issue.
- Comment on Is a DRM-Free Ebook always better than a physical book? 1 week ago:
E-ink readers are superior to both paper and LED tablets.
- Comment on Where does technology come from in Star Wars? 1 week ago:
Anacrhonistic?
They have instantaneous duplex comms, over millions of light year distances, without line of sight! That’s FTL communications.
It is modeled after the style of early radio comms for the cinematic drama, but technologically speaking they would be so far advanced from us that it might as well be magic.
- Comment on The chocolate cake featured in the 1996 film *Matilda* is the canonical chocolate cake for all 90's kids. 1 week ago:
Pop out cakes. They were already going out of fashion in the XIXth century when it became even more misogynist with its association with showgirls and strippers. I think the 50s was the last time it was actually done unironically.
- Comment on The Copilot Delusion 1 week ago:
Until it gives you a list of books and two thirds don’t exist and the rest aren’t even in the library.
- Comment on The Copilot Delusion 1 week ago:
Good writers use em-dashes with care and intent. They’re a tool like everything else, and they abound in literature. That said, LLMs do tend to use it every time and everywhere.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 1 week ago:
I’m the last person to ever ask for perfection. The problem is that educators are being told that video is so great. Then their schedules are crammed full by administration with hundreds of hours of video to show the kids. Leaving them with no time for reading, discussion, or project work. Time that is already taken by tests. So in the end, good educators who are probably way better than some of the awful standardized slop shown to children, have to waste hours showing mandated videos. Bad educators sit on their hands knowing they don’t have to become better because the video is babysitting the kids. This dulls the kids to learning and sends them into a false impression that learning is 100% passive. Sorry, but this way of using video is a net negative to education.
The better option is to recognize that just like everything in education, you need diversity and play to each strategy’s strengths according to the group being taught. Video is good to show things that cannot be demonstrated in class or to showcase highly specialized topics. But it has to be mixed with other strategies to be truly effective. What you must not do is pretend that video is always the better option for everything. Because that is absolutely not true. Specially since OP’s assumptions are wrong.
watch the most engaging individuals instead of the average ones
This has no impact on education. If the teacher present in the class is average, a better instructor on the video has a marginal effect, if any at all.
presenting the content in a way designed by entire teams of top teachers
This has not happened and it’s mostly unnecessary. Specially as the mythical “team of top teachers” has never existed, it is not a thing that exists anywhere. Education all over the world is usually designed by committee, with all the associated flaws and setbacks.
falling back on the average ones only for the interactive parts of education
The worst person for the most important part of the process doesn’t sound good to me.
We have the science, we know that in order to have a positive effect videos must be short, display things that cannot be ordinarily experience in everyday life, and present concrete single topic lectures that can feed interaction and discussion, or provide guidance to project work and problem solving. They are a tool that makes good educators better, but for average educators who don’t know how to take advantage of it, it won’t have much impact.
- Comment on Why does Spotify sometimes play few ads but other times barely any? 1 week ago:
It doesn’t have to be that sophisticated. Random ad frequency is good enough to push people to buy and it is very effective.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 1 week ago:
The only point I will disagree on it’s about video. Today’s teaching actually over relies on video media precisely under the hypothesis you suggested. Unfortunately modern science knows that showing and telling is the lowest and most primitive form of learning. Effective learning happens when the student starts using the knowledge in interaction with others. For example practicing using said knowledge to solve problems and later teaching others about the topic. The old medical adage has been proven to be true: show, do, teach. Video is less effective at knowledge transfer than reading and for the worse, reading proficiency is at an all time low. Precisely because of pedagogic inertia in adapting evidence based strategies and depending on tradition based strategies.
- Comment on We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. 1 week ago:
It is, infrared radiators weight a shit ton and are inefficient, big and unwieldy. Still the only viable option for cooling in space. AI would take an hugemongous square footage of it just so the GPUs won’t melt.
- Comment on VS Code: Open Source AI Editor 2 weeks ago:
It’s an extension so it can be deactivated. That’s good. But it is a lot of effort and time invested on a feature no one requested, to shoehorn people into workflows that have been proven to be unproductive and introduce another telemetry spying vector. While several performance issues and years old bugs remain ignored. So of course people hate it.
- Comment on Simple NAS hardware for home use? 2 weeks ago:
People are using NAS for things they aren’t meant to do. They are a storage service and aren’t supposed to be anything else. In a typical data center model, NAS servers are intermediate storage. Meant for fast data transfers, massive storage capabilities and redundant disk fault tolerance. We are talking hundreds of hard drives and hundred gigabit connection speeds inside the data center. This is expensive to run, so they are also very energy efficient, meant to keep the least amount of required disks spinning at any given moment.
They are not for video rendering, data wrangling, calculations or hosting dozens of docker containers. That’s what servers are for.
Servers have the processing power and host the actual services. They then request data from a NAS as needed. For example, a web service with tons of images and video will only have the site logic and UI images on the server itself. The content, video and images, will be on the NAS. The server will have a temporary cache where it will copy the most frequently accessed content and new content on demand. Any format conversion, video encoding, etc. Will be done by the server, not the NAS.
Now, on self-hosting of course, anything goes and they are just computers at the end of the day. But if a machine was purpose made for being a NAS server, it won’t have the most powerful processor, and that’s by design. They will have, however, an insane amount of sata, PCI-e channels and drive bays. And a ton of sophisticated hardware for data redundancy, hotswap capacity and high speed networks that is less frequent in servers.
- Comment on I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store? 2 weeks ago:
Lol, no one is listing steam features. Epic is perfectly capable of being pieces of shit and a garbage company without needing comparison.
EGS is today as old as steam was in 2010. Yet it is still behind 2010 steam’s features. All that on top of all the unethical and shady stuff they have done and the many different ways they make gaming worse for everyone.
- Comment on Over a hundred thousand Dune Awakening players got swallowed by the sandworm | Massively Overpowered 2 weeks ago:
It doesn’t show up on Wikipedia. But the board games by dire wolf also have videogame versions.