CoderKat

CoderKat, 11 months ago

I think it's important to not have a single person having to deal with those. But admittedly it's hard to get to that point. I've only significantly done established, commercial software dev, where you can just trust your coworkers. Random people on the internet are harder to trust. Anyone can play nice for a couple of days for a chance to slip in something malicious.

The project is not only rather new (so any contributors are gonna be new), but it's also hosted on an unfamiliar site (which is to say, it's not GitHub), so most people don't have an account with history either.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Myself, I had no problem with picking and instance. But the one I mostly randomly picked had approvals turned on. Once I realized I wasn't gonna get to use my account immediately, I abandoned it.

It's utterly critical that manual approval is not part of the sign up. I tried another site, but many users won't. Nor will they necessarily come back when their account gets approved in a week (that's how long mine took).

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Eh, it's still missing a ton of smaller and even medium sized communities. Pick video games and TV shows for example. A bunch don't have a community or only have a dead one with zero or one posts.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

I didn't wait that long. I immediately tried kbin and it worked. A week later I did see the email though. I actually thought they had rejected me prior to that (I only did a short one line response to the lengthy question that was asked during sign up, as I wasn't sure if it was just to filter out bots or what).

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Oh goodie, I most recently purchased Final Fantasy XVI. What's the granularity of this? Do I just get extra copies of the game (kinda useless, since I bought it digitally) or can I view it as a lifetime subscription to PlayStation games in general (very useful)?

CoderKat, 11 months ago

You often don't get paid or don't get paid nearly enough. Too many people like paycheque to paycheque to be able to do that.

And in extreme cases, you can get sequestered, where you're expected to basically put your life on hold for the duration of the trial, which complete bullshit and feels as if you're being punished.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Same for Valhalla. Which interestingly canonically has a female player character for the vast majority of the game (the "real world"), but a male lead for the shorter Norse mythology parts of the game. There's a lore reason for it. Though the game does let you actually choose whichever gender you want for either part (but it does recommend the canonical choices). The modern day character is also a woman and has been since Origins.

For an older style AC game, AC Syndicate has you play as opposite gender twins in Victorian London. It's one of my favourite AC games. You do have to play as both twins for some length of the game, but a significant amount of the game lets you choose which to play as (and Evie is more fun to play IMO).

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Specifically the first game (unarguably the best one), its prequel, and True Colours. Life Is Strange 2 has two brothers, instead. They're all very, very good games that all have made me cry (some multiple times).

They're also pretty gay if that interests you.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Seconded. And I'd say they're more than pretty decent. They have amazing level design, particularly with respect to interactions with the level. Eg, you jump on a ledge and the ledge might start to break. Think stuff like that, repeated dozens of times in various ways.

Lara is pretty cool. She has that kinda inquisitive yet "I wanna help everyone" power fantasy that I relate to. They did also try to make it like she doesn't want to kill bad guys (which is realistic -- it's weird more video game characters have no qualms with the first time they kill someone), but it is a video game where combat plays a prominent part, so it doesn't really work when Lara is kill people by the dozens.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

For anyone unaware, Control feels like a triple-A SCP game. Which should appeal strongly to anyone who enjoys SCP.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

When you do get around to it, you'll enjoy it! I played it fairly recently. It isn't quite as hard hitting as the first game, but it still made me cry. More of a "prey on insecurities" kinda hard hitting. The power (because they never want to go back to rewind, do they?) is pretty neat. Second best after the original.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Cyberpunk is soooo much fun. I can't wait for the DLC. It got a bad rap when it launched, but at least when I played it (on PC about 6 months after launch), it was really great and didn't experience any major issues.

Though it should be noted for those unaware that it is a very dark and mature game. An NPC is violently raped off camera. That makes the game not for everyone's taste. Personally, I enjoy when games don't feel like they're avoiding subjects like that (which can feel jarring, since it's a real life concern) and it does add an extra level of emotion to the game. Plus of course, getting to have revenge.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

But we (1) already have bars that have this problem far worse and (2) why would we require being completely car free to have such a place? The vast majority of people already don't drink and drive. Why should they all be held back because of small number of assholes?

I'd rather see impaired driving harshly punished and watched for. Every single person who drives impaired once should go to jail and never, ever drive again. And crack down on it hard. It's a far better use of police time than ticketing people going 10 over. Maybe even make bars have a security guard whose sole job is to prevent impaired driving.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Dealer? What's a dealer? Is that something I'm too Canadian to understand?

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Scammers have long since used bots already for text based scams (though dumb ones). Phone calls are a lot harder, though. And there's also "pig butchering" scams, which are the long cons. Most commonly those are fake relationships. I suspect those long cons would have a hard time convincing someone for months, as human scammers manage to do.

I suspect that scammers will have a harder time utilizing AI, though. For one thing, scammers are often not that technologically advanced. They can put together some basic scripts, but utilizing AI is difficult. They could use established AI, but it'd almost surely be against their ToS, so the AI will likely try to filter scam attempts out.

That said, it might be just a matter of time. Today, developing your own AI has a barrier to entry, but in the future, it is likely to get a lot easier. And with enough advancements, we could see AI being so good that fooling someone for months may be possible. Especially once AI gets good at generating video (long con scams usually do have scammers video chat their victims).

And honestly, most scams have a hundred red flags anyway. As long as the AI doesn't outright say something like "as a large language model...", you could probably convince a non zero number of victims (and maybe even if the AI fucks up like that -- I mean, somehow people get convinced the IRS takes app store gift cards, so clearly you don't have to be that convincing).

CoderKat, 11 months ago

I've also mentioned this in numerous threads, but downvotes also are extremely useful against bigotry. When bigoted comments can't or won't be removed (or removed quickly enough), downvotes are reassuring. It sucks to see bigoted comments being expressed and the only thing that can make it better is seeing that the comments are not accepted.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Of course, that's understandable. But there's too many people here that are interested in the reddit drama such that it ends up taking over many subs, drowning out other content.

It's like how r/worldnews was created, because despite r/news being general, there was so many Americans that US news dominated the sub. We need to do the same with reddit drama IMO.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

One thing I'll say is that both kbin and Lemmy need improvements in order to recommend smaller instances. The UX around being the first in the server to subscribe to a sub is really, really bad. Seriously, try it if you haven't yet. Magazine search won't find the sub. It won't show up on the front page. If you try and visit the sub, you'll get a 404 and no way to subscribe. You have to know specifically how to search for the sub in order to get the option to subscribe, and even then you won't see any existing content in it.

The problem is less impactful in larger instances because there's a better chance that you're not the first or that the sub was basically "seeded" for major instances. It's a terrible divide in UX.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Here's a bit of an unusual answer. The TV show Corner Gas is a Canadian comedy set in small town Saskatchewan. I grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan, so loved the show (it's also objectively very funny). It's a show I watched a lot as a kid, probably more times than anything. And that was all before the ages of being able to skip intros, so the iconic theme song (which references a very popular joke about Saskatchewan) was heard a lot.

Mostly I think I'm just nostalgic about it. I really hated growing up in a rural area and the show was literally the only one I had at the time that felt local (Sask isn't exactly a well known place).

CoderKat, 11 months ago

I am no longer a Russian military coup specialist and am now a...huh, someone do something interesting so I can become an expert in it.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

Why even sell a physical box if it has absolutely no benefit over a digital download? I wonder if it's at all driven by desire to trick people who want a physical disk copy (ie, a copy that can be resold or traded)?

Given that people generally expect physical copies to have a disk (at least for console games), it feels like false advertising.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

I mean, Skyrim is still entirely playable without mods, as shown by the fact that it was still a massive success on consoles and on release (when mods didn't exist yet).

Mods just make it strictly better. I love that the game can feel fresh because of the addition of new mods. And how I can increase the depth of the game with stuff like more enemies, more spells, and more equipment. Skyrim had good variety in the base game, but mods just made it unbeatable. And similarly, graphic mods can make this 12 year old game feel like a new release.

CoderKat, 11 months ago

I had a multireddit that I used when I was in "that kinda mood". I'd only see porn stuff when I explicitly wanted to and not the rest of the time. Some equivalent of multireddits would be great here. They were also useful for just having moods. I had one for serious news article oriented subs and another for picture only subs for when I just wanted to look at pleasing (not porn) things.