According to Google trends, the people who left are an insignificantly small number, Reddit has still grown in search popularity over the last year. However, if you’ve browsed Reddit since the shutdown, you know that this isn’t the whole story, engagement and quality are both down.
Numbers are all spez cares about, though, and just like with Facebook, listicle sites, and reality tv, eyeballs are all that matters. The content is trash and may even be harmful, but if they can sell eyeballs, that’s all that matters.
I’d rather a smaller community with quality content myself, but unfortunately that’s never going to be lucrative.
Downturns in quality always take a bit of time to have an effect. Sites coast on momentum. Sometimes it takes a user a while before they decide the site just isn’t as interesting as before. Sometimes a user might be optimistic that the quality will return and stick it out. Eventually, those user numbers will see a bigger dip.
Of course, when it comes to corporations and finance, it seems all the power players ever care about are the short term. What gets them into next quarter. Most of them are going to be long gone and working on something else before the real damage kicks in.
So, yeah, you’re right. All spez cares about are the numbers. But unless they can pivot this whole enshittification process, those numbers are likely to look different in a few years. Though that only matters if you actually care about Reddit and not just making as much money as quickly as possible.
It will take a long time for the numbers to reflect reality. Look at Twitter, it’s still chugging along and it’s gotten way shittier than reddit has in the same time frame.
I don’t expect search numbers going down any time soon. I don’t post there as much anymore but I always type “reddit” in search engines whenever I’m looking for answers. Seems like it’s the only way to get search results that aren’t bloated blog posts and articles.
Given that I no longer have an app, my google search for “what’s the best for x? Reddit” has gone up. I’m sure many people are still using Reddit for that vs relying on google for the answers.
In case you’re just adding reddit into the search bar…
If you type it as “Site:Reddit.com Figurines presented in jars” it’ll remove any result that isn’t from reddit. It even works as “site:reddit.com/r/fuckspez” for instance.
Previously Reddit was the be all and end all. Sure there was alternatives for subreddits like car forums or star trek but a generic Reddit alternative no. The goal was then to increase users from something like Facebook, increase the time on the website and maximum revenue. Maybe alternatives were tried and they failed. It was almost impossible to reach that critical mass and the websites died.
This time feels different. The number of users Reddit lost is meaningless. But the number of users the alternative gained is significantly.
If lemmy keeps growing to become an actual competitor to Reddit that changes the game entirely.
The question isn’t how many users did Reddit lose it is did lemmy hit that equilibrium point to keep organic grown. It’s like an exponential. If lemmy wins the way Facebook beat MySpace is not about going from half the users to 100%. It’s about going from <1% to 5% or even from 0.1% to 1% whatever that mass is. Getting from 1 to 100,000 will take longer than 100,000 to 1,000,000,000
Seconded Wikipedia. The amount of knowledge that can be gleaned in mere minutes from Wikipedia is insane. It contains enough information to do most stuff, aside from blatantly illegal things.
WP as it is is of course not useless. But don’t confuse it with a real library. Then, imagine in the apocalyptical worst case, having archived only that summary of humankind’s knowledge. There’s a vast amount of detail that WP is just not the right place for.
Well, sure, of course it leaves a lot of material out. But you’d start with Wikipedia surely, then move onto the source material. If Wikipedia leaves out a lot of material, any one of its sources leaves out a lot more.
email spam and scammers have been using this tactic forever. if a person is stupid enough to click or respond to the message from 'Wels Farpo', they're more apt to go all-in on the scam.
I mean, yeah, obviously the dev would rather people pay the subscription when some of the Ultra features require server work and/or continued costs (translation, OCR, etc.).
Developing Sync is his full time job, which is why it initially shipped without a lifetime tier. People voiced their opinion and the dev listened by adding the lifetime option and the ad free option. If you don’t like the pricing, use a different app. Nobody is forcing you to use Sync. LJ doesn’t owe you the app for free (or any price outside of what he feels is fair).
You do realize he can charge absolutely any price he wants for a product he created right? He doesn’t have to even offer an ad-supported version, but he’s decided to give the user the choice. If someone wants to use his app for free, they can. And if they don’t agree with his model, they can just not use the app. It’s really not a predatory practice.
So you’re ok with artificial paywalls? Are you the type to prefer to pay a monthly sub to get your heated seats that were already preinstalled in the car but can’t use it fully based on a deceptive design ?
You have ads on Lemmy though. Which is free and open source software whos developers disagree with the idea of an ad driven internet. Paying for it to remove the ads isn’t any better though as you are rewarding this kind of behavior.
No, putting ads in software to the point that it is annoying enough to pay someone to make them go away. Selling software without this strategy is respectable.
Basically said what I would have. The app takes work. Work deserves reward. Donations usually aren’t proper reward for work put in. I value the work the dev put in.
What does lifetime even mean? What if this developer decided next year that this isn’t working out and needs to get a real job and anyone that paid 100+ dollars only got 1 year as the lifetime “of the app”
Well to be fair, he’s been building and updating the app for 10 years now and just porting it over to Lemmy recently if you want to look at it that way. It’s not an entirely new app out of the blue.
As someone who bought lifetime ultra on sync for reddit the day he announced the shut down it’s a price worth paying. Used the app for almost 10 years and only paid 5 bucks. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen going forward so I gave what I could in return for that service.
People deserve to be paid for their labor. This is Lemmy; that’s the default position given our history. There are plenty of free as in beer and speech apps out there if someone doesn’t or can’t pay the price. But software development is hard work, especially if it isn’t a hobby. And a lot of Lemmy apps are hobbyists. That’s the communtiy phase we are in right now. And we are a smaller community, which means fewer paying customers, which means a higher overall cost. LJ can’t throw out an app for $5 and expect a hundred thousand to convert into paying customers off the backs of over a million downloads.
I’ll never understand this criticism of Sync. I hate subscriptions as much as most people, but with software it sort of makes sense because the work never ends. It isn’t like buying a bookcase or any other static item. And Sync, in this case, isn’t like what companies such as LG are doing where they are intoducing forced subscriptions into static firmware to extract maximum wealth from customers.
We know it took about 360 hours. That’s a shit load of work and it will be a daily job maintaining it. Besides that lifetime price is entirely optional
The guy who is making Connect did its initial release in 4 or 5 days, I remember I tried it, he was updating multiple times a day in the beginning, impressive
My understanding is that it is a complete game with no microtransactions to shove along with it. After that I believe it is because it is really really good and not a common genre to get the spot light. Mainly the first part.
I think its based on timing with the state of the game industry being fascinated with various versions of P2W and how to squeeze more out of gamers through monetization of both ‘nice to have’ and ‘need to have.’ Larian and BG3 are a breath of fresh air when all the others are prioritizing greed over quality.
If we could just overcome our addictions and vote with our wallet, EA, Blizzard, Activision, M$, etc. would eventually learn, but we can’t, and this is the true sad part of the story.
It’s just a really good game. It’s complete, unlike the majority of things being released these days. The lack of monetization is really nice, but ultimately the fact that it’s basically an automatic dungeon master for 5e with compatibility for up to four cooperative players makes it the easiest entry point into Dungeons and Dragons in general. You can enjoy it by yourself solo and have a wild campaign that’s totally different than the group campaign you play with your friends.
I’ve always hesitated stepping into the dungeon master role because I’ve always wanted to help tell a story, but this negates the need for me to lead anything and I can bring friends with little to no experience and we have a blast. I can focus on helping people with the mechanics rather than having to focus on running the campaign.
Do you think the game has appeal for people who aren’t into DnD? I keep wanting to try it but every time someone calls it “DnD The Game” I get a bit turned off again. Might just be because I’ve had awful experiences in RL with DnD though.
Yeah, it holds overall mass appeal. It’s a good roleplaying game that happens to be in an established universe with known mechanics. If you play by yourself you have more than an entire party’s worth of companions to learn the stories of, and you don’t have to worry about playing with degenerates or weirdos. Unless you consider the NPC a degen or weirdo, but thems the brakes.
What you gotta keep in mind is that this game is effectively “D&D as intended”, not “D&D as played by people who only care about number crunching” or “D&D, but really just 5 friends memeing while one dude kills literally everything no questions asked” or whatever else may have happened in groups you played with.
This is a deeply strategic roleplaying game with some difficult conversations and impressively hard combat. The game doesn’t put up invisible walls and say “if you tried that you’d die, so instead you can’t”, it lets you try and fail. Or if by some miracle you win and get some items way above your current power level, you can use them immediately unlike other RPGs that say “you have to be lvl 5 to hold this sword”. You wanna jump off a cliff? Game says “Okay… you died. Wanna reload?”
D&D 5e rules are there, but they’re operating sort of like the laws of physics. The heart of this game is its phenomenal writing and the sheer openness of the world it sets up for you to explore. You could argue this game is a full-blown immersive sim just because of how it sort of hands you a pile of problems and you build tools and skills along the way to overcome them.
See I’ve been seeing this take in the headlines, but this doesn’t seem like enough to me. Folks have been sick of microtransaction-heavy games in the same way for at least 2 years now, and most studios (outside of the ones you listed) have been releasing games that are light on microtransactions. The System Shock Remake is a good comparison point - it was a modern release in a traditionally niche PC genre, it reviewed very well, and to my knowledge it has no DLC. I guess it didn’t release on console yet, so maybe that’s a key difference?
To be fair, System Shock remake is of incredibly niche interest. (I speak from personal experience being someone who was waiting a long time for it, heh.)
The style of this game hems closer to Dragon Age or Mass Effect in presentation, and those are much more popular game series, by far. So naturally it appeals to fans of those series, of which there are quite large fanbases.
I think that’s what I’m gathering - it’s that the increased production value has signaled to the mainstream gamer audience that “this is a Mass Effect”, and that is a powerful marketing message. The last game of that type was…Dragon Age Inquisition? So yeah, people have been starving for another one of these.
Well damn, I think we solved it. Larian basically reverse-engineered Bioware’s origin story, and this release is them fully stepping into old Bioware’s shoes.
Aside from it just being a very good game (a new game in the all-time top 10 over at Metacritic is going to be news regardless), if you’re hanging out in gaming enthusiast discussion a lot, there are a few other things going on that explain why it’s generating so much buzz.
It came out at a lull in the release calendar. August isn’t typically a hot month for gaming unless you’re an NFL fan. It also ended up being a de facto console exclusive, so once the game started blowing up, the usual console war chatter spun up with it.
The other dimension–and one that surprised me–is it fed the “developers vs. gamers” spat to the point where it’s been making headlines again. As you’ve said, one price for admission games have been coming out more, but I think there are some sour grapes around over Larian’s successful graduation from AA by way of passion projects. I invite these developers to join in celebrating this release, as the success of games like these are bound to get more of the kind of game they’d rather work on greenlit.
The difference is that System Shock Remake is as the name implies: a remake, of a very old game no less. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a full on modern AAA game, with all the bells and whistles. It doesn’t need to hide behind nostalgia, it can stand head to head with all the other big games out there. And it comes as the successor to the Divinity games which themselves already were massively popular.
Demon Souls might be better comparison here, started out as a rather niche PS3 title, build a fan base over the years, had numerous sequels and follow ups that all matched or exceed the quality, and Elden Ring is a gigantic hit now.
I guess doing quality games for a decade or more just accumulates a lot of fans and positive word of mouth, so much that even people that aren’t hardcore into the genre get sucked in.
There’s also the reaction from other developers claiming that the game “sets an unrealistic standard for what to expect out of a game” despite it being exactly what people want from a triple A studio. Just a complete, well made, functional game with no microtransactions
People who are strongly against nuclear power are ignorant of the actual safety statistics and are harming our ability to sustainably transition off fossil fuels and into renewables.
Isn’t there Thorium reactors or something that should be some of the safest. And the waste can’t be turned to nuclear weapons. So it probably won’t be used :(
If you take all operational nuclear reactors safety records into account from all countries in the world, including all meltdowns and near meltdown disasters, it’s still by far safer and has resulted in less deaths and long term illness than any fossil fuel, on every single metric.
True that newer style reactors are far safer, but that’s the point. If we had started to transition in the 70’s into nuclear power, we would have made a massive dent in climate change and set the stage to transition into full clean renewable energy sources and along the way improved regulations and engineering standards for existing nuclear plants.
Yes, BUT the risk isn’t distributed like the rest. One Reactor could displace tens of millions of people, disrupt infrastructure, and cause devastating impact to the US economy. That’s a lot of risk based on it’s proximity. If they could build them in the middle of nowhere out west that could all be mitigated.
I feel this would have been spot on, in the nineties.
Right now the problems plaguing nuclear are economic. There is no guarantee you can build and exploit a plant and get to break even before either it becomes irrelevant, or you fall victim to regulatory jostling.
Nuclear was a missed opportunity, but the window is closing fast and it will probably remain a missed opportunity forever.
Nuclear power plants generate waste very slowly—slowly enough that we won’t be using fission any more by the time it becomes a serious problem. Fusion ignition was achieved recently, so it’s only a matter of time.
However, nuclear power plants are also extremely expensive to build, which seriously limits their practical usefulness.
The Jetbrains suite of IDE’s. Particularly Jetbrains Rider. The platform ~~they are all ~~ many of them are built on is open source though, and you can get free licenses for all of their products if you are using them to develop open source software!
Yeah. My work machine is Windows and I haven’t even installed vs. Rider is just superior for the vast majority of .net work.
Msft needs to realize that they no longer own the best ide for their stack and do something to improve the .net vs code experience. That recent c# plugin needs a lot more power.
are there any good open source alternatives for VSCode for people that don’t want to learn emacs/vim? I’ve been looking for a good code editor to replace it but I haven’t been impressed elsewhere
VSCode is open (MIT) but it is packaged by MS to include some tracking/telemetry and they are distributed under a non-free license.
You can use VSCodium for a telemetry free and MIT licensed binary or you are free to build the source where the default config is no telemetry and MIT license.
There is always Eclipse IDE. It’s not as polished as Jetbrain’s apps for sure but it’s still very capable. It’s published under the Eclipse Public License. I think the language server code that’s used in VSCode is from Eclipse, it can be used for developing many languages and there are lots of plugins and other add-ons to enhance the experience.
That’s a bit of a silly statement. Once you’ve installed a few extensions for your language (a language server and linting at minimum), it is effectively an IDE with a reasonably powerful debugger included. Just because it’s modular and not “batteries included” doesn’t make it incomparable.
Sure. But I didn’t say it was either. I only pointed out that it’s silly to say “there’s no comparison”, when most functionality is easily achievable on both. And depending on language, it’s not even difficult.
Edit: In fairness, I did say “it’s effectively an IDE”, but I stand by the point that after a few extensions - what is the difference? If I can debug, refactor, and and get complete intellisense (including finding declarations etc), I’m doing more or less everything I would in a dedicated IDE.
Edit 2: I feel I’ve gone to far the other way. I have used am am aware of some of the capabilities that a fill fledged IDE has over something like VSCode. Especially for languages like those of the C-family. But I do take issue with implying they’re not comparable. For many usecases and languages, they’re totally comparable.
I guess it depends on your goals. I install Intellij, or WebStorm, or PyCharm, or RubyMine, and I get a working environment right out of the box. I don’t have to figure out what functionality is missing, then go search for the most maintained and up to date plugin, hoping that it has all the features I need. It just works. I use VS Code a lot, every day, but it’s sorely lacking, even with all of the plugins it has, in basic stuff like refactoring an entire codebase, or just regular old code cleanup. I’ll give a few examples, they might have equivalents in the vs code ecosystem, but I have not been able to find them.
Inspect Code
In JB products I can choose Code > Inspect Code, from the menu bar, and have it show everything wrong with the project, including code that is never hit, code that is duplicated, Control Flow issues, Data Flow issues, typos, probable bugs, Security issues (including in your dependencies), migration aids, the list goes on and on and on. And it doesn’t just do it for one language in your repo, it does it for every file type. So you don’t have to install a plugin that finds security issues in your poms, and then one that finds them in package.json, and then another for your gemfile, etc.
A conventional search process does not take into account the syntax and semantics of the source code. Even if you use regular expressions, IntelliJ IDEA still treats your code as a regular text. The structural search and replace (SSR) actions let you search for a particular code pattern or grammatical construct in your code considering your code structure.
IntelliJ IDEA finds and replaces fragments of source code, based on the search templates that you create and conditions you apply.
It’s that’s fine that you’ve got some examples of features that are more powerful in JB products. It would be a great shame if such a heavy and reasonably expensive program didn’t.
But I’m not arguing that VS Code is better or worse. I’m arguing that it is comparable (on the sense that it is worth of comparison). Which it is.
I agree that JB’s search is fantastic. Unmatched perhaps. All of that indexing it does when you open a project really pays off.
But you can get a lot of JB’s functionality in VS Code. You can get a very good code inspection in several languages, Python being the premier example. You can also get excellent docker integration, excellent linting, a reasonable search and replace across all files, and a top notch debugging experience for some languages (Python being the premier example again).
Sure JB products do some of that stuff better (at the cost of being heavier programs with significant start up time).
I use both. I like both. I believe VS Code is very formidable and could be the sole editor a developer uses flr many types of projects (Web Development, Python projects, many Go projects too all come to mind).
The underlying intelliJ platform is, not the entire IDE. I did edit the post though, as I realized not all of them are built on that platform.
If you are working on open source, you can still grab free licenses. You just have to renew them each year (completely free, just requires proof of FOSS contribution)
DataGrip is the one JetBrains IDE I can’t work without and continue to pay for. I’d love to find a pure OSS alternative, but there’s nothing else like it.
Oh yeah, I wandered in. I was with a group of people that didn’t really know each other. We were supposed to see a niche movie at the movie theater. It was a one time showing special event. It was a group of people that my wife met online that is into this franchise. Anyway, the company that made the movie forgot to send the movie to the movie theater. Or rather, they sent it to the wrong movie theater. They were going to show the movie the next day instead, and gave us all refunds and free movie vouchers. But the group was already all there, so we decided to walk to a local coffee shop nearby. It wasn’t a coffee shop. It was a casino. Casinos are not legal where I live. We walked in, awkwardly looked around and walked out and went to Starbucks.
Unrelated, but their toilet was on the patio outside. Very weird experience all around.
Oh theres a bunch of those around here. Its not really a casino per say, but they have a ton of state sanctioned lottery games that look like video slot machines.
Have lots of those in Oregon. They are required to sell some food so they aren’t just straight up gaming establishments, but is a semi government-sanctioned way to bend gambling laws. “Lotto Delis” they’re sometimes called.
I feel like using this for the sake of posting pictures to Lemmy would just clog up Pixelfed instances with things not even meant for them. Pixelfed is a community, not really an "image host", even though it technically has that capacity,.
Upvoted for the Fediverse and FOSS features, but if you’re looking for a simple FOSS image hosting service devoid of any social features then also look up for any Lutim instance
Some working instance (there are less and less for service being free and focussed on hosting images makes it a cost hard to sustain for any volunteer individual or association)
I highly recommend users setup their subscriptions, and set their default feed to subscription and new. This will get them engaging with conversations. Use the All feed to find new stuff to subscribe to. This is a fun experience.
It is a better way to sort during normal hours, but unfortunately I work a weird shift (4a-12:30p EDT) and the “new” page doesn’t seem to change much during my normal breaks and lunch times and activity doesn’t really seem to pick up until around 6:00 p.m. local time, which isn’t far off from when I need to be in bed. We need to get some Australians on this platform.
The lore is that the saarlac actually keeps you alive while digesting you. ~~Like, it puts roots in that act as life support so it has a constant source of protein or whatever. ~~ eh, that last but might not be accurate but there is some kind of enzyme in their stomach that keeps you alive? Whatever.
That makes as much sense as The Matrix using people for energy. You can’t feed people to keep them alive and get more energy out than just digesting (or in the Matrix burning) that food for energy.
Maybe you get “digested” in the sense that you get incorporated into the sarlacc’s body, like it’s using you in a parasitic sense. It makes you one of its internal organs, and it keeps you alive as it slowly uses you up over the course of a thousand years (assuming we take that phrase literally). I think acting as a gall bladder for an underground sand monster sounds like a fate worse than death.
Isn’t that basically the mechanism of how early complex cells formed millions of years ago.
First it was just basic cells … they fed off one another and at one point … one cell became incorporated into the other and essentially evolved into an organ of the cell … like mitochondria inside the cell, isn’t it basically thought that it was one it’s own organism at one point and just evolved into an organ inside other cells.
Same with the human body. I think the estimate is that we are only about 50% of our own generated cells and the rest is just other beneficial cooperative bacteria our body has evolved to take advantage of.
So the Sarlac taking you in is just incorporating you into it’s body for some function and keeping you alive to fulfill that role … you just happen to be conscious of it and unable to escape the entire time over a thousand years.
I could be wrong, but I think the original idea for the matrix was that they were using human brains for processing power and not energy. But someone in the movie making process decided people wouldn’t understand that and instead went with the battery analogy.
Morpheus is the only one we ever hear the battery analogy from anyway. He might well be wrong about that interpretation, and the brain processors are what’s really going on.
My headcanon is that he tried the more technical and correct explanation, but most people he told it to started to go a bit glassy-eyed during that part, so he simplified his pitch.
The humans blocked out the sun, and probably dashed all other power sources available to the Machines. What you have left are self-replicating humans. Makes sense to keep them alive and farm them just enough to tide you over before their next breeding cycle
Well they scorched the sky which created lots of wind and lightning storms. Maybe they harnessed those sources, or this being the future, used the scant antimatter generated from each strike?
The real reason is the machines are using all the human brains to fake generative AI responses to keep share prices going up in line with their original programming.
The batteries things was also Morpheus’s explanation, and not necessarily a definitive fact of the fictive universe. Morpheus could have been talking out of his ass, or deliberately over-simplifying for the benefit of Neo, who he knew was kind of a dumbass.
Sarlac that lost the ability to grow ‘roots’ and instead worked out venom and energy storage (fat and muscle) would outcompete and supplant the sarlacs still producing energetically-expensive, overly-complicated stasis bellies.
What happens if they momentarily fail to keep their meals alive, do they starve or become poisoned by the rotting meat? Do they have issues keeping a varied diet alive? How do they maintain a net positive energy balance after producing all that is required to keep organisms alive? Why not stun them and stash them, like wasps and spiders? Why not fatten up like -gestures broadly at all life-. Fat requires very little maintenance.
Could one, in theory, rescue one’s friends were they trapped in a sarlac?
Sounds like an organism that would quickly be out of business were there any competition at all.
edit: How do they handle the waste produced by the meals-in-stasis?
As long as we’re coming up with overly convoluted reasons that a minor plot device from a fantasy space opera makes sense in a rigorous scientific way, why not assume that they were genetically engineered specifically as a torturous punishment for the Hutt syndicate? Bioengineering is apparently canon, so there’s in-universe justification.
Wouldn’t Jabba being ‘stupid as fuck’ and making erroneous claims about nature be the less convoluted answer here? Bioengineering, canon or not, sounds like the more complicated explanation.
This is what I hate about Star Wars lore. Same with the parsecs gaffe (I think it’s even pointed out in the screenplay that Han is transparently bullshitting them).
Both of these make sense, but no. They had to make super convoluted explanations in secondary sources and everyone treats that as gospel for some reason.
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