desantoos

desantoos, 9 months ago

"Homestuck Made This World" is a critical analysis of the webcomic Homestuck that morphs into a discussion about how the culture of the Internet changed immensely from 2008 to 2015.

"Lavar Burton Reads" is as it says, a podcast about an actor reading science fiction pieces.

desantoos, 10 months ago

I imagine a programmer unaware of anything that's going on writing the code for the latest, greatest /r/place feature, getting so wrapped up on the project that they don't realize it's not April anymore, smiling proudly and announcing loudly when they deliver their pride and joy. Only to see it be transformed into a big penis that shoots out the letters API.

desantoos, 10 months ago

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez is wonderfully read by Joel de la Fuente and it's a really special book.

desantoos, 10 months ago

I was thinking about this a few days ago! The game has maybe a dozen interactable characters, along with some characters that ignore your input and babble on about various nonsense in the voice of Terry Jones. I'm not sure if you'd have to pay Terry Jones's estate to develop that game with his voice. Probably so.

The game's setting is really bizarre, the Titanic in space, which leads to the visuals being gaudy and eerily out of place. The graphic design was really wonderful. It'd be nice to see the game's setting updated to a modern standard. Art deco seems to have fallen out of fashion after Bioshock pumped it up to infinity. I love art deco and would love to see something that embraces it fully like Starship Titanic did.

The puzzles, however, are really terrible. The worst kind of esoteric stuff. But, I think, the point of the game was to talk to the Bellbot and the Doorbot and ask them enough questions to overcome the ultra-esoteric puzzles. I'd love to see such an idea attempted again, perhaps more gracefully. There was a puzzle in Starship Titanic where you had to ask Bellbot to "give me the light" or something like that and if you used any other phrase like "hand me the light" it wouldn't work. ChatGPT definitely could smooth stuff like that over, where it can ascertain the meaning of text to bridge such gaps in speech.

Could Starship Titanic be rebuilt? Probably not since Douglas Adams and Terry Jones are dead and so whatever passion there might be for this oddball game is likely dead. (Though if Douglas Adams were alive he'd be absolutely enthralled to remake this game.) But I do think Starship Titanic is a game that people who want to make the next big thing in video games ought to play to see what people were reaching toward back in the day but failed. Those bots may not feel real, but they do have a lot of personality.

desantoos, 11 months ago

It reminds me of that Onion piece on a Kindle that loudly shouts what book you're reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDBzQkWeQ5g

desantoos, 11 months ago

Kinda sucks that whenever major news outlets cover a social media company, they only interview the people who own the company and nobody else involved. Like here, maybe it would've made sense to interview a mod or someone. The way major news outlets frame it, social media outlets are theme parks and the only people who work to make it function are the owners. Most users see them more as pseduo-government leaders, and when you think about it like that it makes a lot of sense to interview the people on the ground like they do in non-tech related news pieces.

desantoos, 11 months ago

Here is the proposed text: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/21/2023-08239/changes-under-consideration-to-discretionary-institution-practices-petition-word-count-limits-and

The news piece linked is too vague in its explanation on what precisely is in this text that will help patent trolls. I also can't figure out what it is from my skimming. Perhaps someone with a better legal reading can elucidate.

desantoos, 11 months ago

I supported the blackout not just because of the sudden changes to third party API usage (I only use Old Reddit so it does impact me less) but because this was clearly a change that severely negatively impacted the moderators on Reddit. The moderators on Reddit are unpaid and the work they do is mostly deleting spam. It's not fun stuff and we are fortunate to have so many volunteers (even if some abuse whatever little power they have). They were the ones who organized this blackout. Reading some of their complaints, I empathize greatly. So even if the API changes don't get reverted maybe the blackout gave Reddit's corporate heads a moment's pause to actually do something to help the people who do all of the work for them.

So even if things don't get reverted, perhaps there was something positive to this whole event.

Also, being off Reddit for days has been really nice. I feel better, not being there. I might stay longer here.

desantoos, 10 months ago

In short fiction I recommend Sam J Miller's "The Heat Of Us: Notes Toward An Oral History" which is about the Stonewall Riots but adds a fantasy twist. I don't think the twist is necessary, but Miller's description of the events is so lucid and engrossing that it's a substantive tribute.

desantoos, 11 months ago

Likely what is going on at Reddit is that they are losing a lot of cash. To get available money to pay for the services they need to pay, they want to do an IPO and collect public investments. To do that, they need to show how Reddit will eventually be profitable. So they have to find ways to get enough revenue and minimize expenses. One way (among many, including cutting a good amount of staff) is to get people off third-party apps and onto their advertising and tracking-ridden platform. To determine whether this is a good idea, they likely had some accountant or consultant run the numbers to see how many people would leave and how many would switch over to the Reddit-approved phone app.

These are my presumptions on what is going on as it is what a reasonable business would do and it reflects much of what the admins have been saying. If we are saying that Reddit is a business just making reasonable decisions, then the answer to your question is no because they already know that it makes business sense. However, Reddit has a long history of being a rather irrational business. For example, during the 2016 election they kept business as usual despite their staff being threatened and harassed repeatedly by supporters of one of the presidential candidates to the point where the CEO had a meltdown on the site.

Reddit has reversed some policies in the past but for the most part their actions have not been reversed, even ones that are rather unpopular such as the removal of the position of the IAMA subreddit that coordinated celebrity interviews. If we go by their past as an indicator and add into the fact that they must please a new slate of investors in order to stay afloat, they will likely not reverse policy.

desantoos, 11 months ago

I think the worst aspect of Reddit is how depersonalized it feels. In a way, it's a good thing that Reddit is so depersonal as it leads people to frank and open discussion and while some (okay, a lot) of that discussion is toxic, open discussion along with good moderation and a solid upvote-downvote mechanic is the only way for people to really know what is actually going on. However, it's really disappointing that if I join a niche subreddit where there are only a few hundred regular users I'm still just anonymous no matter how much I contribute. Likewise, even after spending years on a subreddit, I don't really know anybody and while that is partially a good thing, it also makes the whole place feel kinda soulless. Reddit Enhancement Suite has a tagging system that helped identify personalities but it's really still not much. I suppose New Reddit has snoo icons now but New Reddit is... well you left Reddit to come here so you know how bad it is.

I think the place for improvement upon Reddit is in reviving the humanity of the old forums from the 2000's. A place where people can still have semi-frictionless conversations with a large number of people all while allowing for smaller spaces where people can feel like they're part of a community and not one human being in a sea of people who all kinda sound the same.

desantoos, 11 months ago

I think it's useful at times to know the populist answer. It's also useful to have comments that are so heavily downvoted contained in a space where one only looks at them if they really want to. In most cases, heavily downvoted comments are either people being highly rude, highly racist/sexist/etc., or, more than the other two, people writing very terse responses that are empty of all meaning. In a traditional forum, these remarks are a major irritation. More moderators are needed just to clean out some of the low-lying remarks.

Once you get past those bits--the responses that are ones most people agree with and the ones that are a total waste of time to read--the rest of the comments can be sorted in any way. Often the best responses are randomly arranged somewhere in the middle as good comments are often ones that are a bit provocative. When a person inputs their original thoughts and doesn't just parrot what they think everyone believes is true (or grunt something unnecessary for anyone else to read), it's often going to be something that doesn't quite fit with everyone else's views. On Reddit you lose those sorts of people who do have something quality to say and can speak their mind but don't want their posts always down near the bottom near the grunting racists.

So I do think there is value to the upvoting system, tremendous value in the downvoting system, but I think we have yet to find an ideal approach beyond that. Whatever actual algorithm is needed to adequately display comments from people even whom they may disagree with while still filtering out the trash is probably highly sophisticated, if it does exist.