Piers @ Piers @beehaw.org

Posts

0

Comments

215

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yeah no problem. It gets confusing because Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon and the other big one I currently forget the name of are all their own set of software that people use to make their own instances with that can all talk to each other across the different instances and platforms but also, many of the big instances use the name of the software they use as part of their own name. ie mastodon.cloud (which is how you are presumably accessing this conversation) is a Mastodon instance (or whatever term is used for the Mastodon equivalent of a lemmy instance) but it is not Mastodon itself, just one example of Mastodon in action. Similarly in Lemmy-land you have major instances called beehaw.org (a Lemmy instance that my account is on and through which I am interacting with this post), lemmy.ml (which is the instance this post is actually on and is the oldest Lemmy instance run by the people who started the FOSS Lemmy project) and lemmy.world (the biggest Lemmy instance.) All three of those instances are run by entirely different people for different purposes and they all intercommunicate (to some degree, I think maybe beehaw.org currently is defederated from lemmy.world due to the challenges of moderating users from a large open instance in line with beehaw's goals), they are all Lemmy instances but none of them are actually the Lemmy FOSS itself. However, people often think that either lemmy.ml or lemmy.world is exactly synonymous with Lemmy or that beehaw.org is a seperate thing.

Really imo all the Fediverse stuff should have set a standard that would require consistent clear naming across all instances (IE, perhaps they could all be required to have an actual name independent of the name of the underlying technology and then also include what they actually are, ie beehaw-lemmy.org, beehaw-mastodon.org etc) but we're well past that point now I think.

There's something wrong with people who are so out of their depth like that who don't just find and hire someone more competent to do this stuff for them. Either just a complete lack of awareness that they are floundering or some weird stubbornness that it's only worth succeeding if they are personally holding the tiller.

I think part of the issue was that there needed to be a well promoted off-site hub for discussion and coordination established before action was taken.

I dunno. I think if the response has been a bit enough threat to their long-term goals they could have easily just walked back a bit by changing the pricing for API access and extending a grace period to developers already using the API.

You actually posted to a Lemmy instance from your Mastodon one fwiw.

Sort of reminds me of Diep.io in some way I can't quite put my finger on. Not sure that's actually very useful feedback though.

That can be overcome by handling save and exit and continuing from those saves differently to normal saves (is have normal saves be possible whilst continuing to play and be loadable as many times as you wish until it is overwritten, but have "save and exit" create a seperate save file that is deleted after successfully loaded.) One type of save allows you to undo in game events, the other only allows you to end your session an resume it at another time.

Does mean more work to do to make it work properly though.

Iirc they are working to integrate it into the Steam client on desktop wherever possible (and to try to allow for cloud syncing the game state between devices.) Not sure how it's been going but iirc it was never going to be made available until after the UI update (which came out quite recently.)

The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there's an unfun thing to do that wasn't the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn't have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.

Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.

So... Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.

It just is more useful to have it than not (especially as it can be easily adjusted or even entirely disabled for those who don't wish to use it. Iirc you have to intentionally set it up during initial setup of the device.) It's a shame not to see it widely adopted.

We'll to be clear, on handheld PC's I'm talking about having them on opposite sides rather than at a right angle to each other. But I can definitely see the advantage to the right angle orientation. Personall I prefer to have them in line, yesterday for example I had my phone plugged in to power, with audio out connected via cable and wanted to be able to watch video in landscape orientation. With top and bottom connections it all paid smoothly in a line, had they been at a right-angle then one of them would have had to go straight up into the air out of the middle of the device.

I suspect that right angle is better for flexibility in how to connect a single cable at a time but in line is better for connecting multiple cables at once (really side-by-side is best for multiple at a time but you lose nearly all the flexibility for single cable connection.)

Yeah, while I understand that there was a loss of customisation and that naturally the existing username tended towards people who likes the older style, I personally absolutely hated it to the point that I just couldn't get into Reddit at all until the update. It also doesn't really seem odd to me for a website to update it's UI once in a while (tbh, I'd be turned off by one that doesn't. Even the best UI today is still relatively speaking from the bronze age of UX design. If the best we have today is the best we can do I'll be sorely disappointed.)

But like... Why not have those 2000 employees generate some actual reasonable value if you're paying them anyway. Reddit externally seems like a business with 200 poorly organised employees. How were they squandering that manpower so spectacularly? Were they doing it on purpose somehow? Like a military unit firing endless rounds at nothing at the end of the year to make sure they don't get their allocation cut for next year?

I agree. If we're going to lose the headphone port in favour of connecting to a universal connection (either directly or via an adaptor) then it's time we have two of them. As for positioning I gather that there are lots of handheld PC's with the one on top and one on bottom configuration and that it's generally accepted to be the best way (and my on top 3.5mm and on bottom USB-c seems to work pretty well) so I think you're right but it would be nice to see manufacturers try out a few different configurations to see in practise what people prefer.

I'm trying to pick ones with meaningfully different aims so that I can try to keep some sort of separation in my head. Otherwise I'd quickly lose track of what conversation having where, with whom and why.

This is the appropriate time and place to discuss the codebase and project management approach of the Lemmy FOSS project. If you don't like hearing people you disagree with talk about those things, you should be going to do something else rather than rudely trying to make them shut up. Even from the perspective that you just want to challenge this user about the appropriateness of how they are expressing their opinions and frustrations, you are going too far and behaving inappropriately yourself with all the personal attacks. Just leave it alone and if they are saying things that you feel need to be addressed just report and move on.

If it helps clarify things for you, the person you are arguing with doesn't understand what you are trying to say with regards to how autism informs your interactions with others online and is arguing against a point you aren't trying to make. They are however entirely too dug into arguing against that point to easily and effectively get them to understand what you are actually saying and respond to that without the baggage of already deciding that they entirely disagree with you to the point they think they are entitled to be rude to you because you don't agree with them.

The conversation you are in in this thread is more difficult than it ought to be and while some element of that may be due to your autism, there's also a lot of failures from the other side of it making the conversation harder than it should be. At this point you are not being treated kindly and respectfully by the other person (because they are frustrated and handling it poorly.) Better to just disengage with them and shrug it off as a misunderstanding and bad behaviour not of your making as best as you are able to do so.

There were a couple of phones HTC made (both under their name and rebadged as early Google Pixel phones) that could detect squeezing the phone as a programmable button press. It seems like it'd be clunky and triggering at the wrong time or not triggering reliably when you needed it but it was just really well implemented so it worked perfectly. Slightly increasing how tightly you're holding the phone is such a tiny thing to do so getting a full extra programmable button out of it was actually really useful for making your day to day phone usage slightly smoother and more efficient.

I'm guessing it just didn't get enough use because people aren't likely to try it intuitively.

I too came to tell this lady to get a Zenphone when they upgrade. Really underrated handsets imo.

The 3D TVs could do two different full screen pictures at the same time for this sort of usage.