I’m sure it’s just autism, but I start taking machines apart in my head, or go through steps of a project I’m in the middle of. I can walk through step by step of how every part interacts, visualize how it moves and where the wear and contact points are, which tool I need for fastener X, Y and Z… then go farther down, and think about how each part would itself be cast, machined, welded, and packaged for assembly. Somewhere in the rote repetition of it, I’ll pass clean out.
They have tons, all by bots. Like just yesterday there were a ton of new communities, all about some game, the bot posted x vs y and then commented while the game was going (what happened in the game).
You’re talking about physical bins whereas the comment above I beleive meant database bins. There’s a legit item in aisle x bin x while there’s a counterfeit item in aisle y bin y. By binning them together in the database, the pickers aren’t sent to x/x just because it matches the seller. Instead, they’re sent to whichever is closest on their route.
I agree with your points around not preordering, or waiting for reviews etc. However, I disagree with you that refunding after 10 hours isn’t the right thing to do for a few reasons.
First, the size of the game in question. For a short, 10-20 hour story driven game, a refund beyond 2 hours is ridiculous. For a large, open role playing game, where somebody spent 120 AUD expecting to get 50-100+ hours of gameplay, 10 hours is perfectly reasonable if you’re really not enjoying the product. If I can send back a meal at a restaurant that I’ve had (relatively speaking) two bites of, I should be able to refund a game the same way.
Second, again speaking for Australia as a jurisdiction, is the behaviour of brick and mortar stores. I can purchase a physical copy of a game, play it non-stop for two weeks, and get a refund. They have no way to know I finished it three times, but strong consumer protection laws enable me to game the system like this. I agree that it’s the wrong thing to do, but Steam is aware of the fact that the same consumer protection laws apply to them. While they have enough information to stop people from outright gaming the system, Steam needs to balance that against driving people to other storefronts or back to physical retailers.
Finally, your premise that people can’t reserve the right to get a refund just because they don’t like something. I would agree with this, if game demos were still a wide practise. I can’t get a change of mind refund on a shirt I buy in a physical store most of the time, but I can try the shirt on in the store to see how it looks on me. I can get a change of mind refund on most shirts I buy online, because I have no idea how it’s going to look. Yes, you can wait for reviews and watch gameplay, but it’s always different when you actually play the game. At the end of the day, it still comes down to “I thought this game would be X but it’s actually Y”.
A firm, inflexible refund policy in my mind achieves the opposite of what you are looking for. If people can never get a refund because a game simply isn’t what they thought, what barrier is their to a mildly successful company ridiculously overpromising, securing the bag, and disappearing into obscurity? If everyone buys the game on Steam and can’t get their money back, the company has won in the short term. If 50% of preorders get refunded, the company has just lost all of that money.
There’s a lot of ridicule regarding this article but chiming in my opinion. This makes Ubuntu less appealing for me. Granted I would use Mint anyway but, the entire focus of Ubuntu is supposed to be to bring new people in. If I’m helping a friend convert to the OS from Microsoft, I’m not going to want to have to info dump “ok so you will also need x y z and m” for it to properly work. It will be hard enough to have had to explain the install process. This is without mentioning the live aspects of it. I always tell people “try the live version first and if you like it go for it” well if the live process is now a dumbed down minimal… what’s the appeal for new members. I think this is counterproductive to be honest, if I was looking for a skim distro I would just recommend another system, that’s the glory of Ubuntu and why it was recommended for starters, it just “works”
A lawsuit alleges AI image generators violate artists’ rights by ingesting huge troves of digital images and producing derivative works that compete against the originals.
let’s see them argue this for copying and further altering other people’s styles manually.
you know, what we call “art”.
you telling me all those people that thought “oh wow that artist’s method of using long curving lines is awesome, im going to try that too.” are somehow different than the act of visually scraping everything and then telling ai to create X in the styles of Y and Z?
sorry, but no.
if it is someone copying someone’s exact style and the acting as though the artist made it, that’s where it’s crossing a line. personally i think doing a carbon copy of a persons work is grounds for legal complaint.
You have to laugh … I remember Glastonbury, up to my knees in mud - it’s all part of the fun. Having said that, it’s unlikely turn into a survival situation in a field in Somerset, so not really that comparable …
Still, the seamlessness should be there, I don’t care how they mask it, but it should be there somewhat, again, this is 2023. It doesn’t even do simple fade to blacks, but full blown loading screens everywhere.
Also, travelling with the ship mechanic is incredibly, frustratingly cumbersome. For example, let’s say you wanted to jump to Sol for the first time, in Starfield, you’d do:
Select and mark your destination through map screen.
Somehow exit the map screen (either mash B or hold B and tap B again to exit the menu, cumbersome)
Highlight your weapons with the D-Pad and mash down button.
Highlight GRAV and mash the up button.
Enjoy game stripping controls away from you.
Go back into map screen to mark surface spot you want to go to.
Hold X.
Voilà, you’re there, insantly.
Why have an entire space mechanic, if you’re just gonna make it frustrating to interact with? Game is okay with teleporting you around at times, but not others as well. It literally disrespects your time, but not in a good way. Speaking of a game that disrespects your time well, it’s Elite, which the flow of events would be:
Open Galaxy Map with Y+Left D-Pad and select a destination.
Exit with tapping B, once.
Align your ship with the destination and throttle up.
Tap Y to initiate jump.
Enjoy being able to look around or (albeit barely) interact with your screens.
Open System Map with Y+Right D-Pad and select your destination.
Align the ship with destination.
Open Navigation Panel via X+Left D-Pad, select your target and enable Supercruise Assist.
Enjoy ship taking you there, feel free to interact with panels, photo mode, chat, etc.
Sure, it’s a lot more complicated as it is a sim, but see that you don’t really do redundant actions and you’re in control most of the time. Also, no loading screens as the jumping effect will mask the system change, and the “dropping from Supercruise” screen will mask the second loading screen. Funnily enough, you’ll wait more but feel like it took less.
I don’t want Starfield to be be Elite or Star Citizen, but it doesn’t even have the rudimentary systems in place. For example, I thought you were able to fly anywhere with your ship in the atmosphere and outside it. Just not seamlessly transition between those. That’d be “possible” to have as the game already does this technically. It just isn’t there for whatever reason.
Also this basically breaks exploration as the wast majority of travelling you’ll do is via the menus and loading screens due to the exact same issues. I remind you this game was marketed as an exploration game with 1000 and whatnot.
This is also the case for game play as well. There are just way too many loading screens. Especially weird when they already have airlocks which would mask vast majority of those perfectly.
Very, Very Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole | The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that::The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that.
Yeah it’s too much skewed by recent viewing. Even if you’re subscribed to X amount of channels about topic Y but you just watched one video on topic Z, then say goodbye to Y, you only like Z now.
I think this is mostly a US thing. Why use yearly salary? You’re not paid once a year, are you? Most likely once a month. Referencing monthly salary makes much more sense....
It’s not just a US thing. I’ve never actually thought of this until this post, but I’d think it’s because taxes are done annually.
Your employer says they’ll give you X amount a year, but you receive X-Y into your account. It’s easier to talk about X, then to worry about how Y fluctuates.
It also makes it feel as if you’re making more money. Raises for a year sounds better than when you divide by 12 and get the monthly.
I used to think in terms of hourly salaries until I got older and got big money jobs that are in yearly salaries.
I think it comes down to the fundamental difference of salaried jobs vs hourly jobs. Hourly depends on when you’re scheduled, how long. It’s typically flexible schedules, typically student jobs or generally non-career jobs. So comparing compensation with the hourly rate makes sense. The tax rate varies, the pay varies, everything sort of varies. The only reliable metric there is your actual instant compensation.
When it comes to salaried jobs, it’s usually a flat pay. Sometimes I’ll do some overtime, sometimes I do less to compensate for the overtime. The actual hourly rate becomes less relevant, because the hourly rate varies a bit as a result. But also it’s no longer a calculation of “I got X hours this week, I can pay for Y expense when I get my paycheck”. I get paid the same every time, and I care more about whether I’ll overdraft than really how much money I earn per hour. It stops being a useful metric to me. What’s $2/h do for me? Can I afford a new TV with that? Then there’s bonuses typically given as one time payments, lots of one time big expenses on the house. Maybe it cost me 2 months worth of salary and I’ll pay it over 6 to make it work, but I can look back at the expenses in the year and have a good picture of my expenses overall.
In the end, taxes are yearly income, and a year is a decent period for spiky expenses to wash out. I earn X a year, I get taxed Y on it, my expenses were Z, and I have W savings that went into retirement. I don’t really have a use for looking at my expenses weekly/bi-weekly/monthly.
Yearly salaries are assumed in local currency (so USD in the US, CAD in Canada), and the gross amount. Because my friend in Ontario might make the same salary as I do in Québec, but we’re taxed differently, but we can still compare absolute compensation. Same in the US, it varies by state. You may have more or less deducted for various things, maybe you owe back taxes, maybe you owe child support, maybe you have a more expensive insurance plan, maybe you’re throwing more in your retirement plan. But total gross yearly compensation is the same, and includes pretty much everything: tax returns, tax dues, bonuses.
Another example: I’m throwing a lot of money on my retirement account. In Canada, this is non taxable income. But taxes are taken out of your paycheck. So everything I put in an RRSP turns into an implied tax return which is once a year. I get less net income during the month, but higher net income with the tax return. The only accurate numbers are the overall net and gross yearly income.
+1 for the FOSS philosophy and why that’s important when it comes to privacy (ie closed source crypto implementation back doors etc) + full system control, lack of spyware etc. KVM for the VM demo - keep it Linux, right? Introduce the concept of how almost everything in Linux is a file and can be read from / written to. This is important when understanding pipes. Show pipelines - logical && ie cat x | grep y | grep z. Logical || ie grep -E ‘x|y|z’ Useful commands like top and ps. Explain selinux and why it’s a good idea.
It’s original definition doesn’t include liberals. I consider myself relatively left. I’ve had people ridicule some of my viewpoints for being too liberal (I guess too center for them). Those people were tankies, but they weren’t tankies because they’re more left than me. It’s because they consider themselves to be very left leaning while still praising authoritative regimes and being apologists for them. That’s the tank part. They’re alright with military dictatorships of the past and even consider them to have been successful. They also rarely are able to admit the flaws of those regimes (including the genocides), and even if they do, there’s a “reason” for it (X might have been bad and did this, but at the same time, it also did Y which was somewhat good)
I’m in my 30s so I should be used to this by now, but this shit is getting so stressful guys. I have no savings, my checking account is drained every month with rent, and if there’s ever a serious emergency I have no safety net, I’m legitimately fucked. I’m one unplanned expense away from absolute ruin. Those in the same...
Assuming you’re in the US, check out the USPS for jobs. They are understaffed and so long as you can jump through the hoops, they’ll hire you. I applied there back in 2013 and when I went in for an “interview” it was more of a walkthrough of if you complete x, y, and z by the deadline you’re hired. It pays well and you can get a ton of hours for overtime pay. I can’t talk to the job conditions, since I ended up going with a different job at the time.
I have a Jellyfin server, NextCloud instance, etc that I share with friends and family. Currently, I serve them over the open-internet using Cloudflare tunnels. Obviously this has some security implications that I don’t love. Also recently one of my domains got flagged as malicious by google and now Chrome browsers won’t go...
They added so much bloat to Plex that I constantly got asked where is X and do I need to pay for Y? When they started mixing online content with local libraries in all apps things got annoying because my older family members could not differentiate between them. Since there’s no server setting for this but only app settings I had to disable them for every device they use. Rinse and repeat every few months when they added another shitty service nobody asked for.
This and that I couldn’t access my library without internet connection were the things that drove me to Jellyfin.
All those folks in the 50+ age group that grew up with "Russia is enemy #1" are probably cycling through waves of intense work and prolonged orgasm.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of the first things considered in strategizing any armed conflict is whether they want Russia and China to know that we have X or are capable of Y. Russia has shown their hand. If they could do more, they would have by now.
It has also taught NATO that Russia is still in the barbaric tactics mindset. Hospitals, schools, churches, shipping centers - they're all valid targets. If Russia wants a position, they'll level the entire town. That certainly changes the plans, of anyone thought they would abode by the Geneva Conventions.
Daily reminder that we all see this pop up on our feed too and you’re going to have a higher quantity of people from other federated instances commenting by virtue of their being more of them active. No one is getting pings telling them it’s time to go to X thread and post Y take, that’s just a main character mindset people get into when they want to think they’re the underdog and the ‘other side’ isn’t playing fair.
Advertising and marketing is about creating a story. Coke will spend a billion on the story that a coke add in your feed, and one during the game, will get you to buy a coke at the gas station on your road trip or something.
Social media, and the internet in general, also provided better targeting and reports than ever before. They get tons of advertising money because they can make a report that the ad was seen X times and clicked Y times, that makes their advertisers happy.
There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better....
They’ll certainly try, though it’ll be quite a bit trickier due to LLMs providing direct answers, not just a list of sites. You can’t really sneak a product in there when it doesn’t actually fit the question. I think the bigger problem is just the lack of good information out there. Finding trustworthy reviews these days is getting really hard, most of the time all you have is the product description and some Amazon reviews, which even when done well, fail at providing how product X compares to product Y. No matter how smart the AI will be, that always leaves a ton of room for error and misinformation.
Hard to tell how things will end up. For the time being, LLMs are pretty much completely useless for product search, ChatGPT just doesn’t know enough and BingChat will just summarize the first three SEO-filled Bing search results. The deep knowledge LLMs have on Wikipedia-like topics is missing when it comes to products and services, and they can’t really do calculations either, so price information is almost always wrong. This will need some specific optimization.
What do you do to stop thinking at night and just fall asleep?
You’ll be back… (i.imgur.com)
Why you should check out "Life" by Keith Richards
So you may have a preconception of what this book is going to be like (as I did), but when I read it I was blown away by how wrong I was....
Buyer Receives Fake Core i9-13900K With i7-13700K Guts From Amazon (www.tomshardware.com)
Another Starfield Post (lemmy.ml)
I Think Ubuntu 23.10 is Making a Mistake… (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
Visual artists fight back against AI companies for repurposing their work (www.nbcnews.com)
A lawsuit alleges AI image generators violate artists’ rights by ingesting huge troves of digital images and producing derivative works that compete against the originals.
Burning Man festival-goers trapped in desert as rain turns site to mud (www.theguardian.com)
You have to laugh … I remember Glastonbury, up to my knees in mud - it’s all part of the fun. Having said that, it’s unlikely turn into a survival situation in a field in Somerset, so not really that comparable …
Starfield: The Digital Foundry Tech Review (www.youtube.com)
Very, Very Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole | The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that (www.theatlantic.com)
Very, Very Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole | The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that::The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that.
What's with telling YEARLY salaries?
I think this is mostly a US thing. Why use yearly salary? You’re not paid once a year, are you? Most likely once a month. Referencing monthly salary makes much more sense....
Ideas for programming rizz? (i.imgur.com)
Topics for a Linux intro course
Hello fellow Linux Lemmings!...
Ukraine designates PepsiCo, Mars as 'international war sponsors' (kyivindependent.com)
Ukraine's National Corruption Prevention Agency added major food corporations PepsiCo and Mars to the "international sponsors of war" list on Sept. 1.
How do you deal with being broke?
I’m in my 30s so I should be used to this by now, but this shit is getting so stressful guys. I have no savings, my checking account is drained every month with rent, and if there’s ever a serious emergency I have no safety net, I’m legitimately fucked. I’m one unplanned expense away from absolute ruin. Those in the same...
deleted_by_author
How to share services with non-techincal friends and family
I have a Jellyfin server, NextCloud instance, etc that I share with friends and family. Currently, I serve them over the open-internet using Cloudflare tunnels. Obviously this has some security implications that I don’t love. Also recently one of my domains got flagged as malicious by google and now Chrome browsers won’t go...
Ukraine tells critics of slow counteroffensive to 'shut up' (www.reuters.com)
Nebraska governor signs order narrowly defining sex as that assigned at birth (apnews.com)
Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen on Wednesday signed an executive order strictly defining a person’s sex....
When if at all will the social media business model collapse?
As far as I understand how things like facebook or reddit work they:...
AI crap - Why ML will make the world worse, not better (drewdevault.com)
There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better....