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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • What “entitlement?”

    I don’t expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.

    I’m just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that’s self-evident bullshit.

    If anybody’s acting"entitled" in that scenario, it’s the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.


  • I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.

    I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I’ve turned around, for the past thirty years now, I’ve seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.

    Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.

    When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I’ll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.




  • Or you could just not care so much.

    If you post memes that are likely to offend someone somewhere, then there’s a risk that one of those someones is going to be a mod, and they’re going to delete it. And really, that’s just the way it goes.

    Certainly you might prefer that they have explicit, precise and closely followed rules so you can accurately predict what they’ll do, but there’s really no requirement that they do so - if they want vague rules arbitrarily enforced, that’s their prerogative.

    And really, what are you out if they do delete a post? It’s not like you paid for it or you have some sort of quota you have to meet. You just toss things out into the internet, and some of them float and others sink.




  • The thing you’re apparently calling “traditional” seems natural to me.

    I’ve never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.

    On a touchscreen, it’s simple - it’s my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I’d expect.

    With a mouse, my finger isn’t the important part because it’s not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the “traditional” way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.

    So to me, that’s what’s natural.



  • I find google works fine if I’m just looking for general information on a simple topic, because it will dependably return a link to the wikipedia entry and a few of the most popular sites.

    And I find that it’s pretty much useless for specific information about narrow topics, because it’s still just going to return the same general shit.

    I’m not sure exactly how the change worked, but some time back (it’s been a year or two now, and maybe more - it’s just something that I sort of slowly realized had happened), they shifted to a system that made Google Fu essentially useless.

    It used to be the case that you could define the importance of search terms by the order in which you listed them and make some effectively required by putting quotation marks around them.

    But starting a couple of years back, it’s been generally ignoring search term order and quotation marks, and instead giving priority to specific common (and certainly not coincidentally common marketing) terms.

    To anthropomorphize, it’s as if it’s developed a cripplingly narrow focus. So if, for instance, you’re looking for the title of some specific movie, it doesn’t matter how many other search terms you include or what order you list the terms in - if you include the term “movie,” that’s what it’s going to focus on. So if you’re lucky, you might get the actual movie you’re looking for, but it’s absolutely guaranteed that you’re going to get streaming services and “18 movies with real blood” style clickbait.



  • I love the entire game, but there’s one part that stands out for me, and that I always look forward to - the flight through the asteroid field with Juni when you first arrive in Kyushu. It’s just this beautiful, tranquil interlude in the middle of all the danger and drama.

    To me, the thing with the game is that it’s just quality all the way through - the story, the characters, the mechanics, the graphics, the controls, the gameplay, the combat, everything.

    There are so many places to go and things to see snd so many different ways to approach it. And it’s all balanced so well - there’s a constant calculation of risk vs. reward.

    The only thing I don’t really like about it is that there are so many mooks. It gets tedious when I’m trying to explore or trade and some scrubby ships pick a fight that they’re absolutely guaranteed to lose. There’s no risk and no challenge - all it is is an interruption. But I can put up with it - all the rest of the game makes it worth it.