mindbleach @ mindbleach @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

New hit: Love Letter to a Dungeon Master.

IIRC he was serving a king and an archbishop, and the king felt so bad that he strongarmed the archbishop into declaring it was not suicide - a mortal sin.

Which had to be fucking hilarious from across the room. Two distraught men in fancy clothes and silly hats, crowded into a kitchen, arguing nonsense about an extremely dead guy. The one in the crown insists: maybe he fell on it. He was cleaning it, and it went off.

DirectX was always about displacing consoles. Alex St. John was talking about it in 1994.

The task is mostly complete. Software has won. The surprise is that Microsoft really hasn't. They assumed they'd dominate whatever computer-ified market emerged... and that assumption is getting shakier every year. Windows suuucks. Linux is already a better way to run most programs and games. Even x86 is not a sure bet, and whatever ARM does to unseat it, that'll transfer smoothly to RISC-V.

Everything old is new again. "The best Macintosh is an Amiga." The best WinTel box might be your phone.

"This is just a quick message to anyone out there who might be thinking of one day become an adult. I would personally advise against it."

Extra fun on a laptop.

Listen honey, you're going in a bag for three hours, immediately fucking now. You can either turn off nicely or get smothered by the power button.

what’s an Xbox even for anymore?

PC-ifying the console market, same as always. A task it has almost completed.

Sony exiting the console market would be failure. They've been using the PS1 playbook five times in a row - seven or eight if you count handhelds - and it's worked, at most, thrice. Sony's ideal market has games developed for a specific platform, and occasionally ported outside it, so each vibrant fiefdom has its own identity and culture. That made them a mountain of cash on PS1 and PS2 and then nearly killed the PS3.

Developers' ideal market is making the game once and selling it to all customers. Platforms are an obstacle. Sony's ideal was fucked as soon as RenderWare looked the same on any console or PC. Microsoft got the message and made the 360 a generic compiler target. Sony almost shipped the PS3 without a real GPU. It took them years to stop fucking around and offer libraries to make their tiny special supercomputer act like any other computer - and that got them better ports, and made them more money.

What followed was two and a half generations of lockstep releases for near-identical AMD laptops. You can buy the blue one or the green one. Yet I don't think Sony really internalized what's happened until the Helldivers situation. They suddenly demanded every PC player get in their console ecosystem, because they recognized how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them.

Microsoft exiting the console market would be... what they've been planning for a decade, probably. Somewhere after the Xbox One, I mused that they could upset the console race by not releasing an Xbox Two, and just treat the upcoming PS5 as a slightly broken PC. They seem to be getting around to it. Albeit with a side of releasing a Steam Deck competitor, because they love showing up late to a trend.

Damn, if only there was something you could do, like nothing.

Not to be confused with the Venetian defense, where you drop a mortar on the knight's head.

Windows XP's Fisher-Price interface beats the hell out of unreadable flat garbage.

You should be able to find the buttons you need. Giving them text, iconography, and color is good, actually. It's downright necessary. Most of your vision is peripheral vision, but when you look right at something, you wanna know what the fuck it is.

The only stage of this worth slandering is the Microsoft Bob / edutainment CD-ROM / Flash-only website trend, where the interface is like a photograph of a cluttered desk, and you have to guess that clicking the telephone opens your contacts. And that's mostly a problem of poor contrast and no labels.

Your UI should not be a puzzle game. That includes knowing which things are links, buttons, or menus, before you interact with them - and noticing they're available in the first place.

Li​ke brea​king red​dit's as​inine Scu​nthorpe filt​ers wi​th ze​ro-wi​dth sp​aces. The​re's o​ne i​n e​ach w​ord o​f t​his para​graph.

We're right back to /!/\GR4 C1@Ll5 spam.

Meanwhile: having safety to bypass means you're on someone else's system, and fuck that. You're either being put through the wringer in lieu of a human interaction (or a goddamn FAQ) or else you're being spied on while telling a server-side video card about your worrisome rash.

Frankly I'm surprised any model's output looks so much like a 2007 Photoshop Phriday post.

Who's got that Danger Five GIF?

'You want competing software stores, yet you run a software store. Curious.'

Swing and a miss.

Fantastic, congratulations! A genuine victory for software freedom.

Now let's ban Fortnite's entire business model, because fuck that Skinner-box scam.

Evaporative cooling is a bitch. You have some community about the problems with X, and there's a range of opinions about how bad X is. Anyone mildly affected won't post much or stick around. People with intense opinions exaggerate. Whether it's for comedy or rhetoric, 'X will be the death of us all!' chases out even more mild users. Now you have a vicious circle of X haters.

If that's popular enough to form a meaningful audience, you see careers made, serving that conclusion. Shockingly few of them are grifters. They just posted something honestly critical that the haters really enjoyed, and the likeminded engagement made the author's brain do the happy chemicals, so now they're the weekly go-to for obsessively complaining about the evils of X. Still naming any actual problems with X, on par with their original independent criticism... but in the new fire-breathing style that makes even half-true non-issues sound like the worst event in recorded history.

The same can happen for positive attitudes, but the result is less circlejerk, and more... cult. Like that DRSyourGME instance. Or Qanon. When sensible people start toward the exits, that doesn't mean the party's over.

Rule: No comparing artificial intelligence/machine learning to simple text prediction algorithms.

That's an overstep. "Spicy autocorrect" is not a joke exclusive to trolls. LLMs genuinely are simpler than they have any right to be, and it's ridiculous they work anywhere near this well.

Then again, rigidly defining bad behavior is a poor move anyway, when you're trying to say "don't be a tedious asshole." Tedious assholes will gladly slip around whatever specific problems you name, and bait other people into unwitting violations. The general version of this is enforced civility, i.e. "Rule 1: Be nice! >:(", and that becomes a duck-blind for infuriating liars. Sometimes "fuck off" is a perfectly reasonable response.

Just write "don't be a tedious asshole." Hash out what that means amongst the mod team. Do not be afraid to give people a week-long time-out for things you did not pre-emptively wag a finger about. If they mewl 'but it didn't say!,' tell them, it doesn't have to. I think everyone is happier when they can trust moderators to make a judgement call on who's being a dick. And so long as the stakes are temporary, don't be afraid to get it wrong sometimes.

It screamed out all the angy.

There's no sponsor in that video.

... oh god, Youtube's fucking up the video itself to fuck with adblockers.

And they sound like death.