sailsperson
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sailsperson

@sailsperson@kbin.social
sailsperson,
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Starfield is a classic case of some misleading marketing on purpose, and, well, it just falls into the perpetually doomed category of games/media that will always suffer from extremely high expectations: sci-fi/space/cyberpunk. The imagination wanders especially far with games like these, and there's little to none us, the consumers, and they, the devs and publishers, can ever do about it.

That being said, you're right in not praising the game. It's a niche fun in my opinion, and only shines if you take it for what it is, but not for what it seemed to have been marketed as.

TL;DR Stafield is a Bethesda game through and through, but with a coating some Microsoft PG-13 "play it safe" attitude.

sailsperson,
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That's what I was going to suggest as well. Basically, the planets and whatever is on the could benefit from a greater degree of procedural generation, even if as trivial as variable room layouts, but a deeper system (variable objects, contents, colors, designs based on the module manufacturer like with ship habs, etc.) would greatly remedy the repetitiveness, as with the current system, you've basically seen all the POIs or the type once you've seen one of them.

Planet surface is nice, though, because I agree with Bethesda's idea of barren and deserted planets being much more prevalent than those that support any kind of life or even atmosphere. Elevation and scenery changes are also fine by me.

But still, POIs are oddly repetitive, even if somewhat numerous. They definitely should've gone for the more roguelike approach or something and use more proc gen with these.

sailsperson,
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Microsoft will likely do fuck all and have us all rely on third-party solutions.

sailsperson,
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Probably a stretch, but The Binding Of Isaac now has a decent system for this. Sometimes I start a run, get angry, leave the game, and pick it up some time later - sometimes even multiple times per run.

What is one generally common thing a lot of people do or believe that you cannot understand?

I bring this up because it seems to once again be gaining traction in the zeitgeist: I cannot comprehend why UFO hunters put so much time and effort into trying to force governments to "reveal the truth about extraterrestrial contact", but I also cannot fathom how they think aliens even have a chance of successfully contacting...

sailsperson,
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People who dislike these videos and comment on them to say that the perpetrators are morons also contribute to the tractiosn it gains because algorithms love engagement, corporatations love engament, so they'll happily show the videos to more people in the vicious cycle of engagement.

sailsperson,
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Sometimes you also think that you're the one who's got it all figured and can provide something so insightful, so powerful, so eye-opening that you're going to change someone's life, and consequently, the world, for the better - we like to feel special and big, but we're not.

sailsperson,
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If you don't mind such things one bit, would you mind sharing with all of here all of the following:

  • your physical address (preferably in the format that would let anyone of us send you whatever we desire)
  • your age
  • your full legal name
  • your phone number that you use most often
  • your school
  • your work (its address, your title, company, etc)
  • your income
  • your expenses
  • the stores you go to and what for, also when and how often
  • your hometown
  • your pet names
  • your mother's maiden name
  • your bank of choice
  • what tech you own in detail
  • your schedule
  • your search history
  • your browser bookmarks

And many other things, too. Somehow I doubt you'd ever do that, but you're fine trusting this kind of data to be handed away to many corporations for absolutely no benefit on your end. They'll just sell it for cash money, only to be bought by con-artsists to try and scam you out of something later.

I mean being a contempt consumer is one thing, but defending some entities hoarding more data about you than your entire family knows is just delusional. Especially given the fact that you are most likely more careful with your data in other circumstances, like talking to strangers or using the Internet for at least some things, but then you defend careless and irresponsible handling of your data when it comes to what, mobile apps?

You should really learn more on the topic.

sailsperson,
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If you were a faceless algorithm

There are people behind algorithms. They don't exist for the sole purpose of gathering the data for the sake of it - the data is later accessed and processed by people.

I'm giving my address and information to plenty of companies I get services from.

And how is that different from giving any of information to me? I'm just trying to gather some statistics here, nothing more.

Those false equivalences are why people don’t take you seriously.

Is this why Zuckerberg went to trial and the EU is preventing apps and services whose sole purpose is to hoover up some data about you to become available in its domain?

sailsperson,
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Also, Zuck can point to us feddies not wanting to federate with him, and say “see? Interoperability is pointless, even the geeks don’t want it”. Which is oddly accurate…

I think the easiest counter-argument here is healthy disagreement.

Being exposed to multiple opinions is undoubtedly important and is far, far better for us all in the long run than only limiting ourselves to only those opinions and views we already share or at least like, but having an option to wall somebody off on an Internet platform has its benefits, too, like not actually wasting your time in endless and fruitless arguments. As great as it would for everyone to be able to have a healthy and productive conversation about the differences in their views, it simply isn't wise to honestly expect that from everyone.

Besides, having two opposing ideas communicate on the same platform is not what the fediverse is for - not exclusively for sure. It's the freedom to self-host and self-regulate places dedicated to specific things to various degrees: lemmy.world, for instance, is wide and large and encompasses many things at once, and has an option to federate and communicate with smaller, more niche communities and vise versa, while letting the users open a single account with either.

Otherwise it's just the old Facebook formula of encouraging opposing views to constantly clash for the sake of engagement. That's just not real, not healthy, and only exists for the purpose of being some sort of KPI in a corporation perpetually hungry for money and influence. So yeah, we don't want that.

sailsperson,
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I wouldn't count on big companies ever going that route, to be honest. The decision-making people there will likely never trust Lemmy or similar software enough because it's not like them - not proprietary, not closed source, so they'll keep wasting money on making their own shitty websites with their own shitty forums if they ever want to give their communities an official place to hang out.

sailsperson,
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I think it's more of an ego thing. The people with healthy egos probably never end up as execs in companies as big as Reddit, and the people that do are likely driven by something else other than the desire to actually build a platform that respects its users and works well in cooperation with them - "I'm smart, I'm sexy, I know better than these plebs making us money".

sailsperson,
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Next we need politicians and policy makers putting their fists to work instead of sending others, preferably in taxable ways, too.

One could dream.

sailsperson,
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YMusic is great Android app, too. It's mostly intended for being able to properly use your phone when you want to focus on the audio, i.e. you can freely disable the screen, browse other apps, set timers, tweak the built-in equalizer, that kinda stuff, but it is perfectly functional and complete video player for YouTube as well.

And it doesn't roll YouTube ads.

sailsperson,
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Because the decisions like that made by the people who don't know shit about these things or don't care to know shit - most likely, it's also cheaper for them to run this kind of office anyway.

sailsperson,
sailsperson avatar

Here's my config (no hardware):

  • OS: Arch
  • Kernel: linux-zen
  • Window Manager: i3-gaps
  • Compositor: picom

I've been running this for several years now across multiple PCs, all with different hardware, including Nvidia and AMD for graphics, and Intel and AMD for CPU - and it's been working really well for me right up until recently.

After this paragraph, I will talk about the issues I've exeprienced as a gamer using my particular config. Please note that it's just a couple of minor issues, and the rest of the experience has been more than wonderful, convenient, functional, and beloved, and I do recommed Arch as a gaming setup as someone who's been running it to play games for several years in a row.

The most recent Steam Next Fest (June 2023) has revealed several demos that behaved like they launched, i.e. Steam changed my status to "in-game", changed the Start button in library, updated the playtime properly, etc., yet the game did not, in fact launch at all. I managed to play the affected demos when I switched to the KDE Plasma desktop environment on the same PC... and back on the same config after that as well.

I would consider that a one-time error that was gone by, essentially, reloading the X server, but there's been another consistent issue that I have only managed to observe in this i3+picom config. Ever since Steam's most recent UI beta, the floating elements, such as the buttons that let you install the game's demo, wishlist it, or navigate the store by the tags applied to the same game, all of which appear when you're hovering your mouse pointer over the game's thumbnail in Steam, are basically ignored; when clicking any of them, the click registers on the element that is supposed to be underneath the element you're actually trying to click: for example, if you're hovering your mouse pointer over a game and want to click the green wide "Install Demo" button, which is floating over another game's thumbnail, you'll click that thumbnail instead and open its Steam page. This particular issue persists between full PC reboots, X server restarts, i3/picom restarts, etc., and never occured in XFCE or KDE Plasma.

As I haven't been using any of the store features in Steam prior to the June's Steam Next Fest, I failed to notice any of the above, but now, I can't deny that it's been annoying. I really like my current configuration for everything I'm doing at my PCs: it's great for my work, it's even great for my gaming, it's great for my leasure, and I don't want to ditch it, because I have already tried many other tiling window managers, and i3-gaps is the one that stuck with me the most.

Now, I know there's sway, which is supposed to be a drop-in alternative, i.e. I can use my i3 config with it no problem, but sway uses the Wayland compositor, so I can't run it as easily: I'll have to set up the SDDM display manager instead of the dead-simple lightdm in order to keep the convenient multi-user setup I have, and probably sacrifice some of the performance my GTX 1080 has been giving with the proprietary drivers (I know, disgusting, but it has worked the best for my hardware as compared to the nouveau, unfortunately). I guess it's just time for me to tinker again.

sailsperson,
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As far as I know, it's not entirely about some purism ideal they have in mind - the difference between the two nvidia camps on Linux is the functionality you gain with both drivers, and the proprietary driver is simply more restrictive, so, yeah, I agree that they have a point.

This is the reason I know very well that my next GPU is going to be an AMD one (given that their hardware has proper open source source by that time, that is). I bought by GPU back in 2017 or 2018, I think, a couple of years before using Linux and even considering it - had I known that today's me was going to run LInux, I would've gone for an AMD GPU right away.

Even skipping the Nvidia driver debates, the AMD hardware has been a much more consistent and pleasant experience for me on Linux overall across several AMD-based laptops that I have installed Linux on. While I did manage to get things going on my desktop that has an Nvidia GPU, it definitely caused me more headache than I expected.

sailsperson,
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Chuck hasn't been the same since that whole phone batter chicanery...

sailsperson,
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Looking at the way things have been going for years (decades) now, giving someone a birth would be a huge disservice - they'll inherit a simultaneously more globalized and divided world, a world with technology that has the potential to trivialize sharing knowledge and experience, which is instead use to drive up engagement for the sake of profits, effectively breeding hate groups and echo chambers, a world with economy consisting of bubbles and not-so-careful manipulations, leaving our offspring in a position few would probably envy. Oh, and there's rapid climate change that is being ignored and actively accelerated by the people and other entities that are capable of doing anything about it.

I know more than a few people who have never considered any of the above, and I'm sure many people here know such people as well, so it's more than safe to say that whatever the humanity is facing in the near future, it's nothing similar to extinction through lack of birth.

The future seems really good for certain groups of people, but I doubt my kids could be a part of these groups, or even want to a part of these groups. Not that I would actively indoctrinate them, but I'd imagine that living with me through the years when they're developing and shaping themselves is going to leave its mark regardless.

Maybe I'll regret that decision when it's already too late, of course, but then again, this is not going to be a world-ending decision by no merit.

YSK: If you reply to a comment, you should probably give it a vote

Why YSK? Comments you reply positively to, should definitely get your upvote. Comments you disagree with should be at your discretion. Trolls deserve downvotes (seriously, they live for those). Disagreeing with someone in the midst of a good discussion doesn't necessarily warrant one, and might deserve an upvote. Even if you...

sailsperson,
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Me neither. Following the logic of the name, boosting should help the post rise up. Following the same logic, upvotes and downvotes don't influence the position of the comments and posts. Yet, the reputation of a given user seems to be affected by the amount of boosts and downvotes, but not the amount of upvotes.

Maybe that's still WIP, though, I never bothered to look it up.

sailsperson,
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Sie sind eigentlich etwa näher als die Angelsachsen und ihre Sprache unterscheidet sich tatsächlich.

Oder?..

sailsperson,
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Because people like to act shallow and just put other people into grouos they hate regardless of actually knowing anyone form that group?

Gee, that's always works well for everyone.

sailsperson,
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It's not some exclusively Reddit behaviour - it's just that much common, unfortunately.

sailsperson,
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Hopefully my experience can help some people see the bright side of going off Reddit.

To me, Reddit has been a great platform in almost every possible way - except meaningful engagement. At some point, I realized that any somewhat big subreddit that I frequented for news and discussions of topic I'm interested in is plagued by dead-end threads: karma farms through reposts, lame jokes and similarly low-effort content that's breeds equally low-effort comments, and things that don't provoke any sort of discussion in general.

Joining the protest made me go to difference places, especially forums big and small, where the only real way to engage with the community was to actually reply to what they said. I quickly realized that Reddit has long turned into another brainless scroller akin to Instagram or Twitter, which all may have their place, but that's just not what I joined Reddit for back in the day.

Now that I've basically kicked the Reddit habit, I'm finally enjoying the Internet again - it's not the same as it was in the 00s, and it will never be, but it's much, much better than going to a single website, owned by a single company, for nearly everything I want to do online.

Today, I finally have a proper choice for the first time in years. A lot of that choice consists of the fediverse, with different scopes and goals, but some is just basic and mainstream places I'd forgotten because of the convenience that Reddit seemed to bring.

Today, I'm finally having actual conversations with people in the communities I choose to interact with, rather than just reading through the witty chains of comments.

I know that Reddit means different things to different people, but to me, it has lost its meaning long ago, and it's only with the protest that I managed to kick the habit of going there for basically nothing. As surprising as it is, the whole thing lead me to enjoy my online life much more, and actually engage with the topics on the old, deeper level of fun, rather than just being exposed to an absurd amount of things, each pretty shallow and uninspired.

sailsperson,
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De-juro, US already uses metric - there's samples and document and stuff like that, just like in other countries. This makes it even more peculiar, because it's just the people that aren't willing to drop some old system that they brought from the colonial British Empire with them back in the day; you'd think it only makes sense, with all the freedom and independence tendencies, but somehow the archaic measuring system from the monarch is still vigorously beloved and defended by millions... even though they've declared independence from the monarch a couple of centuries ago.

We live in a weird world.

sailsperson,
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I've always made up for the lack of prompts with other people's art, primarily images of any kind. I often see some sci-fi picture, think it's neat, and write a short story involving the scene at some point.

Simon Stalenhåg is a great starter.

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