Are you saying I was being silly?

You might be onto something

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said “Hey Google’s doing that and they’re super smart, we should do that too.” So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don’t really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don’t worry they’re all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who’s not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they’re concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said “Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they’ll just hit the button and make it go.”

And so now everyone uses Docker and it’s a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it’s all in this weird virtualized box, and the “from scratch” instructions are usually out of date.

The end

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Craig is the real hero of the internet age.

People came to him and offered him tons of money to give them craigslist so they could ruin it. He said, no, what the fuck? Why would I do that? I like it the way it is.

They said, but you can make MONEY.

He said yes but I have already have some money. Why would I want to fuck up something neat that I created? That sounds bad.

But, they said, MONEY.

He repeated himself. It went around several times. Eventually, they went away, angry and confused, still not understanding.

I can’t stop laughing.

No single person suggests making a logo that resembles an anus, but when everyone’s feedback gets incorporated, that’s what often emerges.

• 1990s-2000s: 3D and Glossy - Remember when every logo needed a drop shadow and a glassy shine? Apple’s aqua interface set the standard.
• 2010-2013: Skeuomorphism - Digital designs mimicking physical objects, with stitched leather textures and realistic dials.
• 2013-2018: Flat Design - Reaction to skeuomorphism brought minimal, clean interfaces with bright colors and no shadows.
• 2018-2022: Neomorphism - Soft shadows and semi-flat design creating subtle, “touchable” interfaces.
• 2022-Present: The Butthole Era

Yeah, I didn’t know about the retraction and it looks like Techdirt didn’t either. Oops.

I know it’s only vaguely related, since they’re not US-funded, but at some point I think it would be hilarious (in a particularly poignant way) if the Lemmy developers’ funding got cut off by the process of the explicitly rabid governments they are fans of finally succeeding at destabilizing the friendly Western countries where they live to the point that NLNet wasn’t funded anymore. As I understand it, NLNet is already facing some headwinds because the friendly liberal elements in EU politics are getting replaced by the same kind of “fuck everyone just give money to rich people and also anyone who disagrees with me dies” elements that Russia likes to give money and social-media-shilling campaigns to support.

Surely Russia and China will jump to the front and fund basic infrastructure work for the good of everyone, if that happened. They could count on it happening, instead of having to get jobs.

Surely.

Yeah. The whole experience might fail and would probably turn out to be punishing for her and her family in a variety of ways. I’m just saying how I would hope it to happen. I pictured one of the school administrators on the stand under oath, having to explain themselves to people with more authority than them, and it was too compelling to let go of.

School administrators not caring about the well-being of their students, because they’re just kids and so who gives a shit what happens to them?

Color me shocked. I think the underlying reason is that the kids don’t have the societal standing to fight back. She should move on to suing the school for conspiracy to distribute child pornography, violating their role as mandatory reporters, IDK about the legalisms but she should pick whatever the best option is and try her best to fuck them up. Maybe they’d handle it differently in the future if it involves some consequences for them.

HL2 was the first major game that based its core gameplay to its physics engine, the first to have HDR rendering and the game that Source engine was developed for. Without HL2, a lot of video games in the decade that followed it, would have looked a lot different.

Yeah, maybe so. Source is just Valve’s internal engine, it was continuously developed and used during pretty much all of their FPS-type game development which includes HL2 along with everything else. It was forked from the not-“Source” source tree at the time of release of the original Half-Life and moved forward continuously from there. But yeah HL2 did do a bunch of ground-breaking stuff, I do see your point and I think it belongs on the list.

The article claims that Shenmue was the first to have a “living world” where characters follow their daily routines and so on.

It’s not. Ultima 6 was doing that.

Actually, The Last Express had already done whatever Shenmue was attempting to do with its “living world” absolutely ten times better. But the same tragic story that led The Last Express to be a commercial flop also means that all the wonderful stuff it did didn’t really make any impact. 😢 TL;DR it was an actual successful implementation of powerful narrative inside of a world that the player could meaningfully impact, in a perfectly meshed and groundbreaking form. But for some reason the studio either refused to or couldn’t do basically any promotion for it, and so after being completed it sold barely any copies and simply fell into the abyss, unknown. It was a masterpiece. Shenmue probably had more lasting impact on gaming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Express

Zero Punctuation as usual gets to the heart of the matter very effectively: https://youtu.be/g4Dw0Z2Dsts

That’s for Shenmue 3. He actually made a separate video reviewing the original, but that one covers more of the history and context. TL;DR It has a devoted cult following of people who basically want a very specific type of gaming experience, but the specific game that was the first to give it to them just objectively is not very good at all as an interactive video game, which is why it has never been all that popular outside that little following. Some people trace to Shenmue the lineage of huge cinematic games that emphasize narrative, which I guess could be valid, but even a super-charitable reading shouldn’t put it anywhere near the coveted number 1 spot.

Oh, you know what happened? I just realized, I hadn’t even read the introductory material and realized it was from a public survey. It’s a “first past the post” problem. Plenty of people had various lists of games they felt passionate about (and you can tell where the boundary is where “I played this game recently and I love it now so it is my favorite” started to distort the placement of some recent games), but anyone who had Shenmue anywhere on their list put it as the number 1 spot. And so, it won by bad voting algorithm. I can almost guarantee that each respondent was only allowed a single choice for most influential game.

I actually think the list, with some exceptions, is remarkably accurate. It definitely isn’t perfect. There are also some big omissions, notably in old PC games that had a big influence or fleshed out new genres that have mutated since then, or gone extinct or something. I think they’re just outside of too many people’s memory at this point.

Off the top of my head:

• Ultima or Dungeon Master
• King’s Quest or Monkey Island
• Civilization
• Battlefield 1942
• Halo or Goldeneye
• Counterstrike
• Warcraft 2
• Zelda 1

21. GRAND THEFT AUTO
22. THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM
23. GRAND THEFT AUTO III

Wow… okay, this is good. It is really rare to see one of these lists that is actually populated with extremely influential games. That’s a good choice of metric, too. Not which ones are “great” but which ones had a lasting impact on the landscape.

15. WORLD OF WARCRAFT
16. PONG

I wonder if it might be good to separate by decades or generations or something. These are both obviously ground-breakingly influential and belong on the list but it seems kind of senseless to try to “compare” them.

9. HALF-LIFE 2

Okay that’s a little weird. We’re getting up into the real high-water heights here and I mean HL2 is good but…

7. KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE 2

Guys? You okay? I haven’t played it but it seems unlikely that it needs to be above WoW and Dark Souls.

6. MINECRAFT
7. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME
8. HALF-LIFE

Okay, here we go. You guys found your stride again. These are legit choices yes.

1. SHENMUE

THE FUCK WHY WHAT

Yeah, the whole aspect of spending AI with all its associated costs to defeat the AI is a whole unpleasant aspect of it, for sure.

But it’s not personal. The entity you are interacting with has explicitly chosen to attack your systems for their own benefit, causing significant damage while disguising its intent and evading the systems which are supposed to protect your stuff from harm.

I’m not saying you need to go throw eggs at the developers’ houses. I’m saying that once an entity is actively harming you, it becomes okay to harm it back to motivate it to stop.

The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts—such as neutral information about biology, physics, or mathematics—to avoid spreading misinformation (whether this approach effectively prevents misinformation, however, remains unproven).

You cowards. Make it all Hitler fan stuff and wild Elon Musk porno slash fiction. Make it a bunch of source code examples with malicious bugs. Make it instructions for how to make nuclear weapons. They want to ignore the blocking directives and lie about their user agent? Dude, fuck ‘em up. Today’s society has made people way too nice.

Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.

I feel like in the current climate, a lot more people need to be adhering to the doctrine of go fuck yourself.

“But we had the ARBITER say you COULD NOT”

“Yeah good luck with that”

“We will SUE you and RUIN you”

“Hey I’m doing a gofundme then good luck with all your stuff, people definitely know about my book now.”

Yeah, that’s why I like it. It is a well-informed list that still communicates good information. Presumably a lot of people who would find themselves watching this video already would know that Celeste is good.

“Papers, Please” got robbed, too.

Yeah, they are both good lists.

Also, Cunningham’s Law. I totally ignored the person who simply asked for the information.