d3Xt3r @ d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

Posts

15

Comments

146

Joined

2 yr. ago

Finished Mass Effect 2 and loved it

Did you play it on PC or console? If it's the latter then how were the controls? I'm planning on getting it on console, but I suck at playing FPSes with a controller.

The Reddit-style presentation of topics and ranking comments isn't really conducive to lengthy, quality discussions that persist over a period of time. The Reddit-style works for following current events and posting links to new things etc, but as a result, old topics - topics even a couple of days old - falls off the engagement radar. Once it's gone from the front page, it's gone from people's consciousness. This is bad for a small community with few posts that value quality of discussions over blind sharing of links. For instance, say I create a topic called "share your favorite vegan recipes" - I may get some replies in the first couple of days, but then the topic will fall off the frontpage and completely die. This is further exacerbated by the voting system. On Reddit/Lemmy, topics and comments which have a higher number of votes get more visibility, and this creates two issues - one is it encourages group think and creates an echo chamber, the other is that it drowns out less popular topics or comments. This sort of intentional drowning of posts and comments actually may be a good thing - and even necessary - on high-userbase systems like Reddit, where a single thread could have thousands of comments - but it works against low-traffic communities like Beehaw, where every comment is valuable (unless it's off-topic/spam etc of course).

Whereas in a traditional forum:

• A topic gets bumped to the top when someone posts a comment, which encourages threads to live longer
• There's not as much importance given to the "newness" of a post
• The lack of votes on a topic would give equal importance to all topics
• The lack of votes on comments would encourage people to actually chime in if they agree or disagree with a comment, instead of just blindly voting
• Forums also allow you to show a categorized homepage, where you can have several sub-forums appear on the homepage all at once. This is a better approach than blindly unifying the entire feed in one page, because this allows threads in low-traffic subs to keep their visibility and compete against high-traffic subs. For instance, consider a current news sub which may get a lot of posts ever single day, vs a niche sub such as gardening. With a unified feed, you'd almost never see posts from a gardening sub, unless you went into that sub.

With all the above reasons, forums are therefore more conducive for encouraging discussions, over a place which simply acts like a feed aggregator. Traditional forums are the solution to the doomscrolling issues that plague modern social media. Plus, they offer better moderation tools, with better granular permissions granted to mods, so you could grant various levels of access. Also, you can place several restrictions on users to reduce spam, for instance, you could grant a user rights to post a topic only after they've read all the rules, and maybe participated in a quiz or something. You could grant additional rights to people who've gotten a certain number posts in their bag. You could have a "trusted poster" system where a user could have mod-like abilities. There's so many ways a forum is a lot more flexible than a system like Lemmy.

So overall, I think Beehaw's ethos and vision would align better with a traditional forum, over a feed-aggregator style forum like Lemmy.

Would be cool if Beehaw switched to old school forums, like Invision or phpBB. Invision have now moved to a hosted forum model, so you don't need any technical knowledge to set it up.

humans have been trained to imitate the guttural grunts and shrieks of gray langurs, a type of large monkey that can scare away the smaller kinds that tend to invade city officials’ residences or disrupt state visits.

This weekend, the impersonators will take on a fresh challenge: keeping monkeys, which often evade guards by swinging through tree canopies, from barging into venues for the Group of 20 summit of world leaders, the first to take place in India.

I bet "monkey call impersonator" would look amazing on a CV. Can you imaging applying for a job and going thru an interview though?

Those look yummy! Also, thanks for the reminder, it's spring here, perfect time to grow some chillies I reckon.

Katamari Damacy - The objective is to roll a ball-like thing called a katamari, to roll up objects, and make the katamari bigger and bigger. You can roll up anything from paper clips and snacks in the house, to telephone poles and buildings in the town, to even living creatures such as people and animals. Once the katamari is complete, it will turn into a star that colors the night sky. Sounds weird, but it's super fun, trust me. Plus, it's soundtrack is kickass.

My bad, you're right - Metroid Fusion was indeed on the GBA. I was playing Prince of Persia 1 on the Genesis - there's a ROM hack for it which fixes all the issues with the port and makes it behave pretty much like the OG DOS version, with the added graphics of the Genesis version of course.

Sadly the Miyoo is a bit underspecced for the N64 and Gen 6 consoles, so the PS1 is the highest it can emulate. For newer consoles, you'd be looking at something like the Retroid Pocket 3+ or the upcoming Anbernic RG405V, but of course, they're bigger and more expensive. The main reason I prefer the Miyoo is because of how lightweight it is, which allows me to game for hours if I felt like it, and it's size makes it easy to carry around too. But I guess it won't be long before we get to see a future Miyoo, or an alternative in the same form-factor, having the specs to emulate m Gen 6 consoles.

I did the TV -> projector swap last year, got myself a 4K projector that sits above my bed and projects a massive 100" image on the wall opposite my bed, and it's awesome. I've got my PS5 and Switch hooked to it, and I'm currently living the dream of being able to game and watch movies on a giant screen, all from the comfort of my bed. Some games really shine on such a screen and you see them in a new light, like TotK, Horizon series, Spiderman etc and it's 100% worth the switch, IMO.

Now I also have a regular monitor - a nice low latency QHD 16:10 monitor with HDR, hooked up to my PC, which also uses a 6600 XT btw. Main reason I use this setup is for productivity, running some PC games that don't have console equivalents, plus the colors look much nicer compared to my projector. Maybe if I bought a laser projector and had one of those special ALR screens I could get nicer colors, but all that is way beyond my budget. Although these days I'm not on my desktop as much as I used to be (I also have a Ryzen 6000 series laptop that I game on btw), I still like my desktop because of the flexibility and upgradability. I also explored the option of switching to a cloud-first setup and ditching my rig, back when I wanted to upgrade my PC and we had all those supply chain issues during Covid, but in the end, cloud gaming didn't really work out for me. In fact after exploring all the cloud options, I've been kind of put off by cloud computing in general - at least, the public clouds being offered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft - they're just in it to squeeze you dry, and take control away from you, and I don't like that one bit. If I were to lean towards cloud anything, it be rolling my own, maybe using something like a Linode VM with a GPU, but the pricing doesn't justify it if you're looking any anything beyond casual usage. And that's one of the things I like about PC, I could have it running 24x7 if I wanted to and not worry about getting a $200 bill at the end of the month, like I got with Azure, because scummy Microsoft didn't explain anywhere that you'd be paying for bastion even if the VM was fully powered off...

Anyways, back to the topic of CPUs, I don't really think we're at the cusp of any re-imagining, what we've been seeing is just gradual and natural improvements, maybe the PC taking inspiration from the mobile world. I haven't seen anything revolutionary yet, it's all been evolutionary. At the most, I think we'd see more ARM-like models, like the integrated RAM you mentioned, more SoC/integrated solutions, maybe AI/ML cores bring the new thing to look for an a CPU, maybe ARM itself making more inroads towards the desktop and laptop space, since Apple have shown that you can use ARM for mainstream computing.

On the revolutionary side, the things I've been reading about are stuff like quantum CPUs or DNA computers, but these are still very expiremental, with very niche use-cases. In the future I imagine we might have something like a hybrid semi-organic computer, with a literal brain that forms organic neural networks and evolves as per requirements, I think that would be truly revolutionary, but we're not there yet, not even at the cusp of it. Everything else that I've seen from the likes of Intel and AMD, have just been evolutionary.

My favorite part of that site was discovering this site: https://simone.computer/#/webdesktops

I already knew about Windows 93 and 96, but didn't know there were so many of them out there!

For those wondering what this is about:

Kavita is a fast, feature rich, cross platform reading server. Built with a focus for manga and the goal of being a full solution for all your reading needs. Setup your own server and share your reading collection with your friends and family.

Also, apparently you can also set up Tachiyomi to use Kavita as a source, or to track your progress.

To be fair, on modern systems it does open quickly in spite of it's size (probably because most of the shared libraries for UWP apps are already loaded in memory). And at the moment, the new Notepad doesn't offer any additional features which are common in heavy duty editors, so the "bloat" is mostly from an engineering standpoint. Well, I guess with the recent unwanted addition of Bing search, we're now starting to see signs of actual user-facing bloat.

Notepad++ is nice, but a bit bloated IMO. I'm personally a big fan of Notepad2 and Notepad3 - they're just standalone portable EXEs which don't need to be installed. On most of my installs, I replace the OG notepad with this, so when I type "notepad" from the run dialog, it launches Notepad2.

They actually didn't update it at all. The Notepad app that ships with Windows 11 (and recent Win10 builds) is actually a completely rewritten, bloated, UWP (aka "Modern") app. The old Notepad is now an "optional feature" that needs to be manually installed.

Interesting. My interaction with them wasn't really helpful. Not for this issue, but I raised an issue that the macro function doesn't allow you to replay certain buttons (like '+'), which limits it's usefulness. I reached out to them and they said they'll pass the info back to the team and never heard from them again. I bought this controller specifically for the macro feature (and specifically for being able to replay '+'), and without that functionality, the controller is completely useless for me. I already own a Switch Pro controller and I prefer it's ergonomics/shape much more over the 8bitdo.

Quantum of Slowness. Coming soon, to laboratory near you.

If people really felt strongly about this, we would've seen it being done already. Perhaps the state of Lemmy right now is "good enough" so folks don't care too strongly about a lack of a minor feature, or maybe they find it easier to just migrate to something like Kbin instead and still be federated to Lemmy. Or maybe they prefer to just write a simple patch, which can be maintained and distributed separately, instead of forking the entire code. Afterall, it's easy enough to make a fork, but a PITA to maintain one. Much more easier to just make a separate patch set or standalone utilities or something.

Also, frontend features, like the infinite scrolling one which was quoted, are basically non-issues, considering so many good alternative frontends exist, such as Photon, Alexandrite, mlymm, slemmy, etc. There's no rule you have to use the default frontend. In fact many Lemmy instances have decided to host these frontends on their own servers, and if they wanted to, they could easily switch to it and make it the default landing page.

That's a nice thought, but personally, I'm not a big fan of creating unnecessary waste - even if it's recyclable. After all, it takes a lot of water to recycle paper/cardboard, and for such a small piece of cardboard, it's more than likely that it'll just end up in the landfill instead of even being recycled.

Personally, I think just wishing or greeting someone can achieve the same thing and still make a big difference. When I moved here, people used to wish me "good morning" if I crossed paths with them during a morning jog, and that was such a huge mood booster for me (back where I lived previously, people would just ignore or even completely avoid you if they saw you across the street). I also make it a point to greet and thank my bus driver every time I catch the bus, which can be a very thankless job, and I'd like to believe it helps.

Maybe if you want to do something more visual/physical, you could perhaps give them a high-five or a hug? Like hold up a sign saying "FREE HUGS".... although I'm not sure if there would be many takers in this post-covid world. If you want to so something more impactful, I'd recommend checking out some of Improv Everywhere's videos. Maybe even get in touch with them, to see if there are any agents where you live, and then you guys could organize something big.

Unlike the rest of the answers here, I've been mostly retro gaming this week. Got my new Miyoo Mini Plus handheld emulator and it's been awesome, playing mostly SNES, GBA, Sega Genesis and PS1 games.

Games that I'm playing right now:

• Mega Man 7 (SNES)
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (GBA)
• The Lord of The Rings: Two Towers (GBA)
• Metroid Fusion (GBA)
• Prince of Persia 1 (Genesis Romhack)
• Crash Bandicoot 1 (PS1)

The awesome thing about the handheld I'm using is that it supports instant saving and game switching, so if I'm getting bored I just press one button and switch to a different game, and jump into exactly where I left off. Or just press the power button and it'll instantly suspend, and pressing it back is again an instant resume. Other modern handhelds are more involved or not pocketable, so this has been perfect for me (especially considering the low weight of the thing). I think I've gamed the most this week compared to any other weeks this year, because of how convenient it is to game on the Miyoo.

Unfortunately. The i7-6700 is like 8 years old now, and yeah not really that great for anything but basic tasks or playing old school games. Even if you get a modern GPU, you'll be held back by the CPU. And in case you decide to upgrade to Windows 11/12 in the future (say once Microsoft ends support for Win10), you will need to upgrade your CPU and therefore everything else. Might as well do the upgrade now and switch to AMD for both CPU/GPU as it'll work out cheaper, and AMD is a better option for gaming anyway.

Just wanted to say thanks for the transparency, and thanks to the mod team for making Beehaw such a great community!