tiramichu @ tiramichu @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

In literal terms no, but in comparison to games I would expect yes.

Movies usually have more moving parts. You have multiple people involved in production, a schedule, technicians, actors, people who typically want to get paid for their time.

Games don't have quite the same constraints. Many amazing games have been made by single individuals in their spare time over years, while they work regular jobs, because one person can do every aspect with just a a computer and enough time.

One key difference between games and movies is that games can be made on a much smaller budget.

There are plenty of indie studios putting out some absolute masterpieces, and if being able to own my games means ditching the "triple-A" titles then I will.

Yep, and only 2GB RAM.

It only went 'badly' if you believe the users are the people who get to decide.

The reddit redesign wasn't done to meet the needs of the users - it was done to meet the needs of reddit the corporate entity. And from that perspective it went great.

More uniform look, better marketability, better ad integration and monetisation, all those wonderful things.

They knew the 'old guard' would hate it, and they simply didn't care. They'd have killed it altogether but they needed those users to stick around, because it was the old crowd who provided content and free moderation, and all that great stuff.. So they let old.reddit stay, simply to keep people mollified and prevent a riot.

As soon as reddit thinks they don't need those people any longer, it will be gone, just like the APIs.

It was, six years ago. A non-alcoholic sparkling drink with "metallic effect" apparently

One glass. They know their demographic. But then how are you supposed to share it with Miku your waifu?

The quiet but ever-present whisper of "this place is not for you, you are not welcome here"

A lot of that can be helped by design, but a lot is purely cultural, and driven by perceptions of what others think - or what we believe they think. In Japan for example I always saw loads of people eating out alone in restaurants, it's just a normal thing to do. But in the west less so. Like the societal perception of the whole point of eating out is to do it with someone. Not just because you want some restaurant food.

So a lot can be overcome just by learning to not give a fuck.

It does give a peek into how other groups must feel though, like those with physical disabilities, as if the world is hostile by design. Or even worse, just hostile by omission because nobody remembered to think about you. And it doesn't need to be. But it is.

It's a good sermon lol.

On my original point about "stages", the part that really got me thinking was that the person who designed that questionnaire probably didn't even give it a second glance. They just wrote it, and it felt fine, because to them it seemed like a normal way of thinking.

Same to your point about there being few events that aren't targetted at couples and families. When people are in a heteronormtive couple or a family, then they won't even notice how the whole world seems to be set up in a way that is tailored just for them. It's perfect for their needs, so why would they see anything deficient with it?

I remember a form one time that asked me "what stage of life are you in"

Options being like Single, Married, Married with Children, etc

The part that made me blink wasn't so much the options but the use of the word "stage" , as if these things are mandatory steps in life, and by being unmarried I'm somehow still on the starting line.

Incredibly prescriptive of them.

Learning that 'decoy' comes from 'duck cage' is extremely interesting!

You can also use proprietary cameras but put them on a separate network segment or otherwise restrict their access so they can't get out of your local network.

Not ideal to use proprietary cameras at all, but if you are doing then that's the way to do it.

Vista was fine, apart from the performance. I had a fairly beefy machine for the time so I hardly noticed, but on lower spec machines it was an absolute dog.

Kinda felt like an unoptimised prerelease version of Windows 7

The 'old' way of faking someone's voice like you saw in 90s spy movies was to get enough sample data to capture each possible speech sound someone could make, such that those sounds can be combined to form all possible words.

With AI training you only need enough data to know what someone sounds like 'in general' to extrapolate a reasonable model.

One possible source of voice data is spam-calls.

You get a call, say "Hello?" And then someone launches into trying to sell you insurance or some rubbish, you say "Sorry I'm not interested, take me off your list please. Okay, bye" and hang up.

And that is already enough data to replicate your voice.

When scammers make the call using your fake voice, they usually use a crappy quality line, or background noise, or other techniques to cover up any imperfections in the voice replica. And of course they make it really emotional, urgent and high-stakes to override your family member's logical thinking.

Educating your family to be prepared for this stuff is really important.

I feel for you, it's a real situation.

I'm fortunate in that I've managed to build up a bit of "fuck you" money. So-called because if my employer did anything awful I could say "fuck you" and walk away, and know I had I few months of buffer.

It definitely makes me feel more able to stand up for myself and others when I don't fear the consequences of losing my job. I wish everyone could feel that way because it would make society a better place, and UBI would help.

Precisely what they are worried about.

From a capitalist perspective it's ideal if your workers are on the verge of poverty, living paycheck to paycheck. That's exactly where you want them.

People in that situation won't complain. Won't stand up for themselves or their rights. Will take poor treatment and deal with it. Will work in unethical or even illegal ways and keep quiet because they have no choice.

Even better if you can tie people's health insurance to their job, then you've really got them by the balls.

UBI would put an end to all that, so it's no wonder business owners would lobby against it.

For those who don't know, much of the reason WYSIWYG is so fun is because the accepted pronunciation is "whizzy-wig"!

As a term it rarely gets used any longer, because "visual editors" are now the norm, where once they were the rarity.

Before visual editors, you'd have content on a screen like a document which you could only see how it would actually look by physically printing it onto a piece of paper. This is because the printer itself knew about fonts and paper size and all that, and the editor didn't.

Nowadays even with technically non-WYSIWYG editors like markdown text you can still instantly preview the rendered output on screen, so there isn't as much need to call it out as a feature.

The GameCube was a flop mostly because of image and marketing, not because it wasn't technically good.

I have one and I love it, but I only got it long, long after release.

What 12-year-old boy asking for a Christmas present is going to choose the cutesy purple brick that "only has kid games" over a sleek black PS2 that is seen as being adult, with action and fighting games? Not many, and so the GameCube flopped.

I think Nintendo were starting to see at that time that consoles weren't just for boys. They were for girls too, and for the whole family, and the GameCube was a step towards that. But it didn't go far enough. They ended up stopping short and falling smack in the middle where it didn't appeal to the established 'male gamer' demographic, and still didn't grab families either.

Then the Wii came along and went HARD on the family-friendly aspect, and just blasted off the shelves. Nintendo learned a lesson, but the GameCube was the price they had to pay for it.

This is how it always is with tinkerers. We enjoy setting stuff up and tweaking to perfection more than actually 'using' it.

We also spend days writing scripts and programs that will save only hours at best in the span of our entire lifetimes, and feel happy doing it.

And we're also the same people who spend about 20 hours messing around with getting the perfect combination of mods on Skyrim without even 'playing' a single real minute of the game.