jsdz @ jsdz @lemmy.ml

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3

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198

Joined

2 yr. ago

What I want is just something where travel takes enough time and effort that interesting problems can arise during the course of it that aren't just generic random encounters. Something where different parts of space have local character, something like geography rather than a flat isotropic void where distance is meaningless. In each case the technology used for moving about is entirely fictional, so I don't see a reason not to make it interesting. I was just pointing out examples of that being done, not advocating for either of them being the one true way to do it.

Whether it's changed so much that we shouldn't call it capitalism any more is debatable, but it ain't what it used to be.

That will certainly go on my list of books that I should probably get around to reading some day.

New Atlantis does look pretty cool, but I worry that it seems a bit empty. From what info I can find it seems to have maybe half as many named NPCs as the average Skyrim city even if it is three times the size. But maybe there are many more and they just haven't all made it to the wiki yet? I don't know, it's little things that annoy me. Like it's the glorious spacefaring future and every city is still full of fast food franchises selling coffee in what look like exactly the same kind of disposable cups with plastic lids we use today? Maybe that's a failure of imagination too small to complain about in itself, but it seems representative of how everything is when you look closely. Is it meant to be allegorically examining the social problems of our current world rather than presenting future humanity as doing something genuinely new? If so what's it trying to say about that, exactly? Where's the deep lore? Where are the characters you'd actually care about as people rather than video game NPCs that help you advance a quest? I was hoping for Skyrim in space, but to me it looks more like Fallout 4 in space. Never mind the reviewers who compared it to Oblivion and got my hopes up. The only thing it has in common with Oblivion is the Annoying Fan who I must admit is genuinely annoying.

Eh well, it's a Bethesda game. I'll probably give in and play it eventually.

There are all kinds of possibilities, and for one example of a video game system for travelling among the stars that gives you a sense of actually going somewhere without getting too dull I'd point to EVE. You can go anywhere, but there are distant and dangerous places that take actual effort to get to. It lets you get some kind of sense of the distances involved. Having made that comparison it's hard to avoid noticing that the space combat (even against NPCs) and ship outfitting are quite good too compared to how it looks in Starfield. Planetary interaction was pretty tedious when I played it, but EVE is mostly really good at the space stuff.

Another example would be good old Star Control II, another of my favourite space games. Another one that managed to make space feel big. You had to carefully manage fuel and resources, and if you wanted to go all the way across the map you'd have a long and interesting journey during which many things would happen. Combat and navigation were primitive compared to what people expect today, but still it made it feel like you were exploring a vast space, not just a big catalogue of planets.

As for Starfield, I don't know whether it does that or not since I haven't played it yet; I'd sort of like to find out before I spend $ on it.

The moon is boring, so every planet in the universe must be boring. Earth is mostly capitalist right now, so every planet with humans must be one form or another of late capitalist dystopia. A whole galaxy made of inert rocks, fast travel, and people eager to exchange gunfire with you.

I haven't played it yet, but from what I've seen the setting looks even more bleak and depressing than Bethesda Fallout.

When does this moment of bliss happen? I must've missed it. All I noticed when I lost my firefox profile for some reason and had to make a new one was about an hour of fiddling with the settings, installing extensions, and messing with userChrome.css to make it look reasonable.

Don't ever trust a "smart" TV until you've installed Linux on it. All of the ones I've bought so far (the cheapest available at Wal-Mart, usually) are willing to display things without ever having been allowed a network connection. If you manage to buy one that isn't, return it and complain vigorously.

It's not particularly easy to find a trustworthy VPN, but it's not particularly hard to find one you'd trust more than whatever random public wi-fi you've found while on the road. Your stock reminder that we can never trust anyone is not really useful here.

Using a good VPN is one way to sanitize the whole network environment when you have no reason to trust even the router you're connecting to, avoiding quite a few risks besides that of someone passively analyzing your traffic.

So they've decided that this part of the bill will be unenforceable and useless, but they plan to go ahead and pass it anyway. I suppose they'll soon need to do the same for the age verification nonsense as well.

They still want to impose these ill-conceived laws on us so as to appear to have done something, but the people who had somehow been convinced that this would do some good will be disappointed. If they stick with this course, they will soon have managed the impressive political feat of pleasing exactly nobody with the results of this excruciating years-long process of counterproductive legislating.

I haven't pirated any actual software since the 1990s (too cowardly) but my hatred for Denuvo and the like burns with unsurpassed intensity. I will never knowingly buy a game that includes it. "Anti-tampering" indeed. I'm not sure if that shit should be legally allowed at all, but certainly not in ordinary mass-market PC games.

It does require you be online, and it is essentially a "rootkit." Its malware features are more polite and better hidden than some of the worst of what has been tried before, but that just adds to the danger that it might be seen as acceptable by people who don't know any better.

I was mildly annoyed the other day by a conceptually similar warning about some software I was installing from F-droid. The annoying part was that unlike this flathub one it wasn't completely clear how exactly the app was using the dangerous features I was being warned about, but I had done my research and knew I wanted to install it anyway. Took me a moment to remember that for a lot of people it probably helps to be reminded of the risks.

Then I went to install the same thing on someone else's phone with Google Play. No warnings, but I had to scroll quite a long way down past ads for competitors and presumably malware-laden copies with confusingly similar names before finding the app whose name I'd typed in the search field.

Peertube is for people who want to get away from Youtube. Invidious is for people who want a better UI for Youtube.

"W" is a letter often used to represent a "Win" which I assume is what's meant here since that's what AMD have been doing.

It's Mitchell Baker's expression of the naive but still-fashionable idea that the way to deal with the evils of today's dominant centralized social media is to tweak the algorithms and otherwise adjust things so that they do not promote undesirable effects such as all the "culture war" bullshit. It was instantly seized on by people using it to promote culture war bullshit, perhaps in large part because it mentioned Donald Trump. As part of a series of simplistic yet easy-to-misinterpret statements the reaction to which seemingly persuaded Baker to stick with more safely bland and meaningless public statements in more recent times, it is perhaps of some historical interest. But it's unclear why you've dug it up now if not with some ulterior motive in mind.

One of my greatest Internet accomplishments was randomly typing "aaaaarg" into a search engine one day and having that come up. It was pretty good.

This means that all content from communities which are hosted there is hidden. Posts from users of blocked instances are still visible in other places.

Cool! Although it's not quite what I imagined. It's widespread problematic posts and comments from users on instances I'd want to block in other communities I do follow which I was thinking of, and those wouldn't be affected? I have not seen a whole lot of it so far, but I saw enough to think about it a little.

It might be more complicated, as I suppose you'd have to hide all the replies to comments from user-blocked instances as well. Maybe it could be done client-side? Seems like giving users that option would mean less motivation for defederating.

Lemmy could be much improved by letting users block instances.