Nate Cox @ natecox @programming.dev

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443

Joined

2 yr. ago

I’m fighting the good fight by using Safari to browse and Kagi to search. I have effectively eliminated Google from my life and I could not be happier about it.

Signed, a former Google fan who got tired of being the product for their ever shittier services.

I kinda thought that was the way to go as well, but I need to find one that supports my giant troll hands. The ones I’ve tried in the past were too short I think so my hand ended up just on my desk at a weird angle.

The biggest difference between Nix and Guix is that Guix doesn’t support non-foss software, meaning you can’t use it as a package manager on other operating systems. I originally wanted to use Guix but use a Mac for work, so that became a deal breaker.

Nix is pretty awesome as a package manager, I’ve been happy with it after the truly unnecessary learning curve brutality. I do not imagine I would ever use the full OS though.

Especially since I’m pretty sure printing text message transcriptions doesn’t actually print out a scaled-to-page high definition blue bubble.

I have such mixed feelings about my Ergo, I really want to like it but I feel clumsy on it and it seems like the extra strain on my thumb will take a toll long term with that repetitive stress.

I kinda feel like I just don’t have the heart for ST anymore. Picard was the final nail in the coffin, I am all out of trust for the modern generation of writers.

I’ll just watch TNG through every couple of years and be happy in my bubble.

I think DS9 set a precedent that was bad for the franchise, but I don’t hate it; the show felt like it understood its roots. I took DS9 as a way to explore how federation values addressed a galaxy not quite there yet.

It didn’t diminish the hopeful future by saying that “actually the federation is evil" it just said “listen, we still have work to do”.

Watching Cisco wrestle internally with reconciling who he knew he was supposed to be while the galaxy tested that was at least interesting on an intellectual level.

I think that bit of nuance got lost though, so I do kinda wish it had never happened.

I enjoy the Tarantino films, but I don’t want them anywhere near Star Trek.

I really dislike what’s happening with ST lately; what was in my childhood a hopeful message for how much humanity could achieve when we finally get our shit together, is now just another action movie / drama template. Government bad, corruption everywhere, war for the sake of war, etc.

I’m certain Tarantino would double down on that and I just don’t want it.

I see mention of full gamepad support, which makes me happy. When I can play it from my steam deck without wonky input customization I will finally dive back into the game.

Well, the mobile game industry has very successfully set a precedent that mobile games are cheap, which is basically the problem. It’s hard to break into a market at ten times the cost of existing products… regardless of how reasonable it is.

Though to be honest I’d love to see a future where buying a license to play a game grants that license everywhere. I’ve bought too many games multiple times to play it on different consoles for whatever reason. Maybe that’s part of the complaint here.

Honestly it’s the monetization systems. I’m sure there are some fine mobile games out there, but they are drops in an ocean of low effort microtransaction factories.

The status quo right now seems to be gacha style games, which tend to be a thin veneer of probably anime fan-service girls over a deceptively addictive slot machine. The point isn’t to make a fun game, it’s to get whales addicted to the loot boxes so they pour fortunes into the game a few bucks at a time.

I doubt that most people actually care that a game is played on a phone, they’re just tired of watching the mobile game industry race to the bottom of the integrity barrel; and they’re afraid that the undeniably successful profiteering is going to continue leaking into every other medium.

Paddle or joystick?

Kids are indeed a huge time/emotion/frustration sink that eat much of your life, and yet somehow still totally worth it.

But, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I don’t feel like I need friends. Children are very emotionally rewarding in a certain spectrum, but adult companionship is still a general need.

You don’t even need to quality it. Some people just feel the need to tear down others to make themselves feel good. It’s low self-esteem, misplaced onto whatever happens to be near them.

I think we’re all vulnerable to it, too. Part of being a good neighbor is checking yourself to see if you’re being a dick about your preferences, and just letting people enjoy what they enjoy (unless that thing is harming others; you know, common sense).

Chrono Trigger on the SNES.

I have a black belt in a mixed martial art focused on self defense in the real world, of which one of the primary pillars is “never be on the ground”.

Wrestling is excellent for subduing a single opponent, but is not suited for dealing with multiple attackers. You can be the world’s greatest wrestler and perfectly lock your opponent out, but it doesn’t help you when his buddy comes and kicks you in the back of your head.

We assume that in any self defense encounter you will need to defend yourself against more than one person.

Same, I wanted to like starfield very much but it just felt hollow.

I pay for Kagi because it does not have any form of advertising or “sponsored results”, and it consistently gives me the best results of any other browser I’ve tried.

Apple supporting this would not be hard, as with all the other search engines the search is just a query parameter appended to the url, they could just provide a template string for “unsupported” search engines.

Probably explains why I’m not allowed to just make Kagi my default search engine on iOS and Mac.

The worst part is that this isn’t new behavior. Musk pulled this same shit at the Tesla factories; forbidding safety yellow from being used, having the warning alarms disabled on forklifts because it annoyed him, etc.

I am glad the veil has been lifted for more people though so they can see Musk for who he always has been.