• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Thank you both (@NinjaFox@lemmy.blahaj.zone, @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org) for taking the time to make this post not just more accessible but somewhat more bit-/link-rot-resilient by duplicating the image’s info as a text comment.

    We don’t talk about it as much as authoritarian censorship, ip & copyright related takedowns, and their ilk, but image macros/memes often have regrettably small lifetimes as publicly accessible data in my experience. It might be for any number of reasons, including:

    • because many of them are created on free generator websites that can’t afford to store every generated image forever,
    • because people often share screenshots of things instead of a link to it,
    • because for-profit social media websites are increasingly requiring account creation to view previously accessible content,

    or (more probably) a combination of all three and more.

    In any case as silly as image memes are, they’re also an important vector for keeping culture and communities alive (at least here on the fediverse). In 5-10 years, this transcription has a much higher chance of still hanging around in some instance’s backups than the image it is transcribing.

    P.S.: sure, knowyourmeme is a thing, but they’re still only 1 website and I’m not sure if there’s not much recent fediverse stuff there yet. The mastodon page last updated in 2017 and conflates the software project with the mastodon.social instance (likely through a poor reading of it’s first source, a The Verge article that’s decent but was written in 2017).

    P.P.S.: ideally, OP (@cantankerous_cashew@lemmy.world) could add this transcription directly to the post’s alt text, but I don’t know if they use a client that makes that easy for them…





  • Metal Gear Rising : Revengeance

    I watched a few playthroughs earlier this year, and was struck by the games’ vibes. Maybe I’ve become jaded, maybe 2013 was just a different time, but the over-the-top-bombastic, gratuitous-yet-totally-sincere meditation on power, violence, and humanity feels incredibly relevant, not to mention a breath of fresh air compared to the games I see coming out today.

    It’s also very similar to the type of video game I’d like to make someday, so it counts as homework as well!

    Not to mention it feels like half of the media/art that I love from the past 10 years has been heavily influenced by this game, so playing it could give me a fuller appreciation for them.



  • Why do we even need a server? Why can’t I pull this directly off the disk drive? That way if the computer is healthy enough, it can run our application at all, we don’t have dependencies that can fail and cause us to fail, and I looked around and there were no SQL database engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, “Richard, why don’t you just write one?” “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” I didn’t do that right away, but later on, it was a funding hiatus. This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all government contracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.”

    Gee, thanks Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton?! Government shutdown leads to actual production of value for everyone instead of just making a better military vessel.





  • We should stop making software for others.

    A prerequisite for reasonable tech use is understanding the amount of energy and materials you need to “burn through” for any given piece of tech to 1) exist and 2) do its useful work. Call me naive, but I really doubt that we’d be accelerating climate change this much if every person contributing to the “X thousand hours of videos uploaded to YouTube each day” was required to write their own video hosting software first. I doubt our social networks would become so captured by propagandists of every user of one had to write their own. (Obviously as an absolute this is a bit too restrictive - it’s more the tone and direction that I’m trying to convey).

    Instead, we should be teaching and helping others reach our knowledge /skill level.

    Maybe the execs would stop pushing shitty UI dark patterns if they had to code the service themselves (and then use it afterwards!).

    Onecan^dream…


  • It just takes a little effort to filter to see and reach the right people’s content. Otherwise, I don’t think completely withdrawing would be very beneficial in my industry and the era I live in.

    I have been thinking about this a lot. Wrestling with how much consumption I can allow myself to sustain, and how much I can allow myself to abstain from.

    As more and more of the world around me is interfaced with through machines and/or the internet, I can’t just “take a break from computers” for a few days to give my brain a break from that environment anymore. From knowledge to culture, so much is being shared and transferred digitally today. I agree with the author that we can’t just ignore what’s going on in the digital spaces that we frequent, but many of these spaces are built to get you to consume. Just as one must go into the hotbox to meet the heaviest weed smokers, one shouldn’t stay in the hotbox taking notes for too long at once because of the dense ambient smoke. Besides, how do you find the stuff worth paying attention to without wading through the slop and bait? The web has become an adversarial ecosystem, so we must adapt our behavior and expectations to continue benefiting from its best while staying as safe as possible from its worst.

    Some are talking about “dark forest”, and while I agree I think a more apt metaphor is that of small rural villages vs urban megalopolises. The internet started out so small that everyone knew where everyone else lived, and everyone depended on everyone else too much to ever think of aggressively exploiting anyone. Nowadays the safe gated communities speak in hushed tones of the less savory neighborhoods where you can lose your wallet in a moment of inattention, while they spend their days in the supermarkets and hyper-malls owned by their landlords.

    The setup for Wall-E might take place decades or centuries from now, but it feels like it’s already happened to the web. And that movie doesn’t even know how the humans manage to rebuild earth and their society, it just implies that they succeed through the ending credits murals.





  • That happened to me at first as well. What made it feasible was to reconsider how I was approaching the fights

    spoiler

    literally: approaching a worm’s tail, while keeping the head as far away from me as possible, let me kill the worm before its cloud and eruption attacks ever reached me! Took about 4-5 rare uranium cannon shells to kill it in around 5 seconds, tops.



  • If I recall the order of events, that was after many months of peddling anti-vax ideas and getting anyone who would listen to him riled up at the prospect of there even being a pandemic. So I don’t think it’s much praise to note he tried, once, ineffectually, to push for people to get vaccinated, especially when he lets those booing him shut him down so easily.

    That clip of him getting booed at the rally in August 2021, to me, especially shows why Trump deserves so much of the criticism. As president of the USA he was probably the individual with the most power and resources at his disposal to keep people from dying, from getting sick, from transmitting the disease. Not only did he actively make things worse for the first entire year of the pandemic being declared in the USA, when he finally does start telling people to get vaccinated it’s once he’s no longer in charge. On top of that, when he does it in the place with the lowest rate of vaccination in the entire country (according to this article published at the time: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-booed-alabama-rally-after-telling-supporters-get-vaccinated-n1277404) he lets himself get booed into a soft, non-committal “I recommend you take it, but still you need to preserve your personal freedoms, also I took it so haha guys if it doesn’t work you’ll be the first to know!”.

    Trump definitely deserves the most blame for repeatedly stoking the fire of an already bad situation. So much so that there are articles that exist titled “a timeline of how Trump failed to respond to the coronavirus” (https://www.vox.com/2020/6/8/21242003/trump-failed-coronavirus-response). Sure, if you want to be a bit pedantic, he’s not responsible for “all of it”. I don’t think anyone here is exactly claiming that either.



  • I haven’t seen inside out 2, but the first one remains one of my favorite Pixar movie ever. I think addiction would make a perfect addition for inside out 3, or whichever number they’ll be on when Riley is old enough for a Pixar movie that talks about addiction to be made about her.