pixelscript @ pixelscript @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

I would never complain about it being served to me at a social gathering. But given the choice of most other canonical topping options, I would never order it myself.

At the time the first games were out, PMD felt like they were the only games in the Pokemon franchise that actually tried to build a world out of the lore that Game Freak made for its own monsters. Read the Pokedex entries in any of the first three generations. They're fantastic, but they don't seem to tie into the actual games themselves. A lot of them are strangely disconnected flavor text that hint at mannerisms, abilities, or feats that simply do not translate to what the mons are like in gameplay. The fine lads at Chunsoft were apparently the only ones who bothered to read that flavor text and think, "Hey, we can make something great with this." And holy shit did they ever. Several times.

TreeSize has saved me a lot of bytes over the years. Performant and visually slick. I would prefer a FOSS utility, though. Apparently, reading other comments here, there isn't an actively maintained one that isn't garbage. Oh well.

Procmon has gotten me out of a couple binds. Task Manager can only do so much for you. I've always been dubious of people who deify Task Manager as some ultimate authority of the OS that kicks ass and takes no prisoners, as I've run into several problems it couldn't solve for me. Procmon feels like the real version of that mythic Task Manager. The main thing it can do which Task Manager (to my knowledge) cannot do that I've needed several times is detect which running processes have a lock on a given file, so I can kill them.

KeePassXC is KeePass2, but not sinfully ugly. It's FOSS and equally functional as the program it aims to supplant, but it's also multiplatform (so I can use it on Linux without Mono!) and it looks like it actually has a design philosophy developed by someone who knows a thing or two about UX design. Also, it lets you auto bulk download favicons for all of your key entries. With KeePass2 I had to do that manually one by one. I was happy to do it then thinking the program was worth it, but now that I know there's a better way I feel like an idiot for putting up with it for as long as I did.

Also, just a short rant: I am so glad Windows finally has a native OpenSSH implementation that ships with the OS. Because that means good fucking riddance to PuTTY and WinSPC. I appreciate them having been there to be our secure and stable options for SSH and FTP/SFTP clients on Windows over the years. But now that I can finally do those things in the terminal with standard cross-platform tools, I no longer have to use their ugly, clumsy GUIs, their stupid .ppk key format, or WinSCP's cryptic command line args ever again, and I couldn't be happier.

I fail to see the distinction between "making a logical decision without all the facts" and "make guesses based on how [you've been programmed]". Literally what is the difference?

I'll concede that human intelligence is several orders more powerful, can act upon a wider space of stimuli, and can do it at a fraction of the energy efficiency. That definitely sets it apart. But I disagree that it's the only "true" form of intelligence.

Intelligence is the ability to accumulate new information (i.e. memorize patterns) and apply that information to respond to novel situations. That's exactly what AI does. It is intelligence. Underwhelming intelligence, but nonetheless intelligence. The method of implementation, the input/output space, and the matter of degree are irrelevant.

Creators of Lemmy, owners of this instance, and creators of the Jerboa app are all the same people. As I understand it, Jerboa won't be getting an update until they're happy with the stability of the update to Lemmy itself. Lemmy is getting all the focus first. Also, no sense in pushing a client update for a server update that itself is not finished.

Getting really annoyed at that error toast in Jerboa, though, not gonna lie. And not being able to post on mobile. At least I can still read posts and comments, though. Hopefully the patch will release soon.

Your posts take me back to 2007 where I was doing the same thing on the Nintendo Wii's Weather Channel.

The Wii hit different.

Your response confuses me.

I agree with everything you said. But I'm not sure which part of what you said is supposed to be a "counterpoint" to what I said...

Meanwhile, over at the grand exchange (Amazon), someone is offering, "gold armor trimming, 10k"

To me, using default face emoji gives off the same kind of vibe as still having the setting that adds "Sent from my iPhone" to the footers of your emails enabled. Or driving around a car you've purchased with the car dealership branding badges and license plate covers on it. Or using a laptop with all the factory stickers still on it. It signals a kind of "this is fine" lack of care or concern by allowing your own expression to be polluted by pre-canned expressions from a corporation.

Here you have a short list of milquetoast, approved-by-committee standard-issue emotion pictographs. Only the most broadly applicable ones. Perfectly weaponizeable for some airplane food communication by some brand on Twitter or Facebook. And people look at these and go, "Look! That one's sad! I'm sad! These emojis really 'get' me! I'm gonna use them!"

They're expressive, but only in the ways the platform is permitting you to be expressive. A valid counter argument would be, "Some is better than none". But I can't shake feeling like I'm being railroaded into communicating my feelings by approximating them into a small handful of simplified, standardized emotions. And I don't understand how others are satisfied with that.

Emojis only render a specific way on a specific platform, too. So if you're using an emoji that feels like it fits your current emotion because it has a very specific, nuanced look to it, but you're on a platform that doesn't render them the same for every user, you'll unwittingly send a completely different signal than you were intending, as your emoji will become mangled into some slightly different emotion depending on who receives it. The only two ways out of this are either staying inside a platform's walled garden so you only use their standard issue emojis, or you just relegate your communication to being described solely by the broad, vague notions that the emojis represent. Both options are restrictive in ways I dislike.

That isn't to say that I hate emojis, or that I don't think they can be used creatively. Ironically, in my opinion, the best uses of emoji are for when you're using one to communicate any emotion other than the one it was intended for. Exhibit A: how 💀 has almost entirely supplanted 😂 in some circles. Usages like that are communicating more than the sums of their parts in only ways that emoji can achieve, and I find that fascinating. It almost feels like a form of social "recapturing", taking them away from their usual stiff, corporate vibe and making them something transformative.

It only lasts for a time, though. As the mass market clues in on it and starts to cater to it, the novelty disappears. There was a time when 🍑 and 🍆 were clever innuendo. Nowadays there's no joke there. That's just what they mean now. The only ones who think themselves clever or fashionable by using them in that way are doing so in shitty Facebook memes.

The problems I have with emojis mostly only affects the face ones, specifically. The way the human mind is a hyper optimized facial recognition machine amplifies the platform exclusivity problem. Like, you can never have just a smiling emoji. You have to use this platform's smiling emoji, the way they drew it, expressing all the little microdetails they decided to put onto it. And given how complex emotions can be in particular, the inflexibility of a standard set of face emoji to express yourself with feels significantly more restrictive than, say, not being able to find an emoji for some random object.

Just my two cents, though. At the end of the day, if you send a message to someone, they receive it, and they understand exactly what it is you've sent, that's successful communication. Send those emojis with pride if you believe they enrich what you have to express in ways words can't. As long as you're being understood by someone, never let anyone, especially not me, tell you how you should and shouldn't be able to express yourself.

This failure of the word "open" to mean one clear and specific thing just feels like an echo of the failure of "free" to mean one clear and specific thing.

Someone came up with the term "free" in the context of software, and a bunch of people asked, "Ah, so that means I don't have to pay for it?" And half the room went, "Yep, of course!" and the other half of the room went, "Ehrm, not exactly..." And from that point on, we've had to amend the word "free" with awkward qualifiers like "as in freedom, not as in beer", or attempt to introduce a clarifying companion term like "libre" to try and capture one of the competing meanings.

I'm sure the "open" in "open source" is doomed to the same fate. "Source available" is to "open source" what "libre" is to "free". An awkward clarifying companion term that only dorks like us bother to distinguish.

I'm glad the first comment I saw here was thinking the exact thing I was.

If I could get some sort of filter for Lemmy that blocked all news headlines that contained question marks, I'd be a happier fella.

Bonus points if it could also filter any headline that contains the following words/phrases: "slams", "blasts", "may", "might", "could", "possibly", "probably", "should", "must", "need to", "[profession] says".

zippocat

"Uncanny fakes are worse than reality" is a hot take now?

Does it actually, though?

I'm not trying to insinuate that it doesn't. I'm just jaded at how many mutually exclusive Markdown-adjacent standards there are out there, and how many implementations there are which claim to adhere to one of the major standards but in actuality either don't fully support it, extend it with their own nonstandard bullshit, or both.

Pretty sure this is asking about entertainment literature like novels. I have no real opinion, as I very rarely read those.

Now, technical books like school textbooks and reference texts, physical. Absolutely no contest. I loathe clunkily scrolling around on two separate axes to negotiate pages where the content is nonlinear, broken up by interspersed photos, figures, and tables.

I don't, tbh.

Not out of any principle. I'm not, like, eager to be rid of past friends or anything. But if they slip away, well, it just be like that.

I'm more than content to Ship of Theseus my way through life's transient relationships. You keep some longer than others. New people take the place of long missing ones. That's just the cycle. It's fine. Just hang on to the ones you can, and that's enough. You can't keep them all around forever.

I'm always receptive to meeting old faces. But I'm not discoverable on any public socials, and I don't live where most of my old friends were. (And neither do they, for the most part.) So opportunities for it are extremely rare.

Mario Wonder is a fantastic game, but it has absolutely no business being on this list.

I had a period where I didn't really understand the GPL or what it was trying to do. All I knew is that it was ""viral"" (whatever the hell that meant!) and that, supposedly, trying to use it would forever bind you and your creation to who knows what unforeseen legal horrors. I mean, look how long it is! It's frightening! I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it at first.

Then I got a clue and actually read it. It's quite straightforward. For almost all serves and purposes it's basically just MIT plus copyleft. All the legal density is just an effort to squash every conceivable loophole to the copyleft directive. I'm no longer afraid of it, I think it's pretty cool.

The thing I want to know now is why so many projects think their shit don't stink and that they need to pollute the FOSS ecosystem with their own stupid permissive license that is functionally identical to the MIT license.

I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.

Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?

In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.

Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think--to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I'd assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I'd also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.

Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I'm less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they'd react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.

It's not usually where the big bucks are, but there is a nonzero amount of money in bad code.