So, I live in Europe right now. And if there's one thing Italians are great at, it's opening authentic pizza places all over Europe. So I'm not in Italy, but I'm close enough that I get this REALLY good, authentic Italian pizza. It's, like, perfectly thin crust, wonderful cheese... It's heavenly.
But whenever I visit my family back in Canada, I crave this very old-style pizza that I can only find in my hometown anymore. I'm talking super-thick and fluffy crust my dad would eat with a dab of butter, homemade tomato sauce, thin, salty pepperoni slices the size of saucers, long strips of green bell pepper, and a mountain of greasy cheese that gives the pizza a semi-oblong shape.
And what can I say... I love them both equally. Pizza is love.
There's a lot of similarity in tone between crypto and AI. Both are talking about their sphere like it will revolutionize absolutely everything and anything, and both are scrambling to find the most obscure use case they can claim as their own.
The biggest difference is that AI has concrete, real-world applications, but I suspect its use, ultimately, will be less universal and transformative as the hype is making it out to be.
Of course they are. Netflix's password-sharing crackdown was a success and raised their subscriber numbers. They've proven that people will by and large put up with it despite the backlash.
Cat's out of the bag. Expect all other platforms to follow suit.
I personally make sure I stay in a good neighborhood and check Wikivoyage for details like transportation and safety, but that's pretty much it. If I land in a good neighborhood (not touristy, lots of amenities and restaurants around, easy connection on foot or by public transport to the major areas), then I'm pretty much golden.
It's a bit counter-intuitive, but I think not enough research is much better than too much. Any tourist information will draw you to overpriced and/or overhyped places. The desire, say, to "eat the best X" or "visit the most famous Y" is making your travels crappier.
Instead, I recommend cultivating normalcy. Visit your neighborhood by foot, and take chances on unknown places. You can check Google Maps to get the sense of a place, but if the reviews are good and they're mostly local reviewers, and the place is crowded, you're in good hands. Check out what other people are eating and order that. (Just point if needed.)
My partner and I have what we call our "grounding ritual." We set out by foot in our neighborhood and spot what we'll need: a convenience store for late-night snack runs, a supermarket or fresh market for food, etc. We check out public transportation options nearby. Then we find a nice, no-frills local restaurant and have a meal there. If the place is good, we make a point of returning there over the next few days. Doesn't matter if we're there for a weekend.
We just returned from a few days in Warsaw, a city I had never been before. Besides the Old Town, none of the places we visited were stuff I had read about online. We just let our feet, eyes, and noses lead us to interesting places.
I watched it last month and it's telling that I can't quite remember what it was about. They're trying to save Rocket for a big part of it, and there's a lot of flashbacks to how Rocket came to be. But then that gets resolved and it becomes about... the High Evolutionary, who wants... something? He wants Rocket because he's smart, and he's gonna go do... something? And Adam Warlock is there, except he's a joke character?
I enjoyed it overall, but I have a much clearer recall of the overall dramatic arc of the Christmas Special.
I've dabbled in crypto and I use Revolut extensively when traveling. When I saw Revolut was starting to push crypto, I got really nervous about their legitimacy as a financial institution.
I used to love Sync, but hear me out: Infinity is FOSS and it currently is much nicer and easier to use.
I'm grateful to the creator of Sync for bringing over the app to the Fediverse, and I'll never begrudge anyone for sticking with it or even paying an outrageous price to not have to see ads even though Lemmy has none to begin with. All I'm saying is, you just switched from Reddit to Lemmy, now's the perfect time to try something new.
The more I use Lemmy apps (favorite is Infinity), the more I realize what an awful experience the official Reddit app is. It's so sluggish in a subtle way, it makes me tired to scroll. Plus, there's tons of clutter, nothing is where it should be (e.g. r/all is at the very bottom of the left slider menu), and the app behaves in weird little ways (e.g. if you unmute a video, all your videos are now unmuted even if they're autoplaying in the feed).
Biggest offender is the ads. All over the feed and comments, created on purpose to blend in so you don't immediately realize you're being advertised to. But other than that, the official Reddit app is enshittification by a thousand little shitty design decisions.
I was on Slashdot circa 1998 and people back then kept saying mainstream adoption was right around the corner. Meanwhile, 25 years later, the core barriers to entry have yet to be addressed. But Linux is gonna hit the mainstream any day now!
I think the reason for that disconnect is that what a typical Linux user wants is very different from the mainstream desktop user. Linux users want flexibility and freedom, and they don't mind getting their hands dirty and doing a little research to get there. They're also patient with setbacks because they believe in FOSS and their privacy.
Now, the Steam Deck's success, I think, happens in spite of Linux. It's a closed environnement with a very specific target hardware, so none of the usual problems with a desktop distro are gonna show up. And I'm not even sure that many Deck users realize they're running games on Linux, to be honest. The Steam wrapper is really its own thing.
I do wish Linux would make serious headway in the desktop space... It's just frustrating to see that, 25 years on, the main strategy remains crossing fingers and whispering "any day now."
Definitely interested, if you don't mind providing an update! I'm especially interested to hear how it plays on the gamepad. If it's not great I might just wait for a time when I can play on PC, but I'd love to jump on it on Deck if it turns out to be a fairly good experience!
I do think there's an issue of political correctness at play. Top Gun had evil Ruskies, but somehow Maverick just can't name its bad guys for fear of offending someone somewhere. Part of it is greater awareness of other people in the world, part is global markets, but there's also the general sense that depicting a nation as a bad guy is gonna create an uproar no matter who is used.
Then there's the fact that a lot of people latch on to bad guys these days. Whether it's the Joker in The Dark Knight or in the eponymous Joker, social media freaks out at bad characters that can be interpreted as role models. Heck, Thanos was a genocidal maniac yet r/thanosdidnothingwrong was a thing.
So, I live in Europe right now. And if there's one thing Italians are great at, it's opening authentic pizza places all over Europe. So I'm not in Italy, but I'm close enough that I get this REALLY good, authentic Italian pizza. It's, like, perfectly thin crust, wonderful cheese... It's heavenly.
But whenever I visit my family back in Canada, I crave this very old-style pizza that I can only find in my hometown anymore. I'm talking super-thick and fluffy crust my dad would eat with a dab of butter, homemade tomato sauce, thin, salty pepperoni slices the size of saucers, long strips of green bell pepper, and a mountain of greasy cheese that gives the pizza a semi-oblong shape.
And what can I say... I love them both equally. Pizza is love.