Carighan

Carighan , 10 months ago

No

Carighan , 10 months ago

Department for Levelling Up

Strong Ready Player One-vibes! 😄

Carighan , 10 months ago

Just remember how plasticky and stiff the characters in Dragon Age Inquisition looked because of the mandate to use the Frostbite 3 engine for ~everything, no matter how unsuited it was to a high fantasy world.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Yeah but I think they did it back in 2013. No clue whether the contract is still valid or it’s all old capture.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Yeah in theory this sounds awesome. But given the shoddy state of the multiplayer alpha, I wonder how/when this will release.

Still, if they actually bring this out in a year or so, I would definitely check it out (given 1-2 years for bugfixes, learning from CP2077).

Carighan , 10 months ago

“Opiods are fun. God forbid you enjoy some drugs line [sic] OxyContin 🙄”

It’s not really nice to call an addiction “fun”. Especially if you were to ask an addict about that.

Carighan , 10 months ago

No, whales subsidize the cost of a yacht for the CEO. The games could be paid just from the money you pay for them, if the companies weren’t continuously being siphoned off the top by C-suites and shareholders.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Yeah that’s a bit confusing, too. And sure, Endwalker brought a Healer and Shadowbringers brought a Tank, but they both also brought DPS, and now it’s a DPS only expansion making queues worse again. They need to do 1-2 expansions of only adding a tank and a healer.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Eh, doesn’t those depend on how often I get sick? That’s the idea, no? A doctor signs me off being unable to work?

Carighan , 10 months ago

Yeah but honestly, it’s only the very worst cable that the Apple one truly looks good in comparison to. For the other ones, it’s better, yeah. Sure. 5-10 bucks better. Not 110+ better.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Sure, but they’ll be even easier, so we’ll be hitting Yoshi levels by the next game. 😑

Carighan , 10 months ago

I’ll be honest, since Opencritic came about I’ve only very rarely been to Metacritic. The site is just rubbish by comparison.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Not really. They have to deal with French all the time, they’d know to avoid them. 😜

Carighan , 10 months ago

How come you know this?

We’ve seen pushes for hydrogen, hard ones. And yet ultimately they had to concede that the inherent downsides of hydrogen make them only useful in a select few situations, compared to BEVs that are far better fits especially in the small/commute personal car market where their already short charging duration is irrelevant due to the briefness of the trip.

Not everyone is a professional truck or long distance bus driver where hydrogen can play to its strengths. Even with busses, my city has fully electrified busses with gasoline ones only being used as a backup now. The way they do it is by having a slightly larger spare fleet than normal, so busses can charge while others are running, and then swapping them as a bus nears the end of its lap where everyone has to exit anyways. Intra-city busses benefit massively from regenerative braking, after all.

I mean, do humor me, because I thought hydrogen was a fantastic idea, until I actually read up on it and it turns out it’s not actually a very good tech, as cool scifi as it sounds at first.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Toyota has already come out and say that a fuel cell car costs the same as an ICE car to build, at least in theory. But it has very small resource requirements, so it seems self-evident that it is the case.

Isn’t one of the big downsides of hydrogen fuel cells the required platinum, even after the improvement of not bonding them to carbon?

You don’t have to make a compromise. If there’s a way to power a car just like a conventional gasoline car, while also being a zero emissions electric car, then there’s no reason to oppose the idea.

Hydrogen is not a zero-emissions thing, and I hope that you didn’t pick that up from “sources”, because you speak about others going by social media information while - apparently - believing that hydrogen is a zero-emissions system. (neither is BEV, at least not in a well-to-wheel-comparative scenario, mind you)

Most engineers in the car industry actually believe the hydrogen car is the future. And they still do. What you’re hearing on social media is just a lot of marketing BS coming from BEV companies. Most of these accounts are Tesla drivers or investors. None of them are being honest.

What about all the other car companies then, that should have a vested interesent in marketing-wise opposing Tesla, yet even after initial pushes to hydrogen, Toyota and Honda quickly swapped to a near-100% BEV fleet? Wouldn’t your logic dictate that if hydrogen was a valid alternative as-is, then companies would lean hard on that as their USP compared to Tesla? Especialy in North America where Tesla is so dominant, but which is also just about the only place where hydrogen vehicles have any existence and hence usable network at all?

Last stats I’ve seen still had hydrogen at 50%-100% more pollution than gasoline cards while also costing ~2x as much per kilometer for the owner. Of course, in theory all hydrogen can be produced from solar/wind/etc, but:

• The losses during production and shipping are so big that the amount of energy is absurd.
• The extra storage and shipping problems are entirely unsolved at the scale personal vehicles would require. Nevermind the further reduction in final efficiency they incur.
• Right now >90% of hydrogen is produced from methane, as electrolysis is just not a valid source. Without serious technological advancements, switching to hydrogen would actually make things worse.
• Speaking of making things worse: We worry about batteries in crashes and fires. We mind the pollution from their materials in such cases. Both issues are, at present, worse for hydrogen.

Sure, maybe in 40-100 years, people might scoff at the idea that hydrogen was ever not a valid way of powering a personal vehicle. But at our present technology, all it has going for it is that it sounds quite cool. Hydrogen powered!! 🤘

Carighan , 10 months ago

Okay, but why should I believe you? When any source other than you disagrees?

And kind you, like I said, maybe in a few decades hydrogen will be a cool tech. But even ignoring the inherent downsides like greenhouse gas, losses during conversion, issues with storage and handling, we are probably decades away from a usable solution for production, too.

At present, a hydrogen vehicle comes out slightly to moderately worse than a petrol car for the environment while also costing the user significantly more. Can that change? Sure! Will it? Dunno, do you? Mind you, meanwhile BEVs provide a solution that is mildly cheaper to run and moderately to significantly better for the environment. We have a solution, we should use it. If in 40 years or whatever things look different, well, then that will be the case.

Carighan , 10 months ago

All of those techs either had no superior alternatives in their primary use (that is, being green) already, or in the cases where they did, they weren’t intended to be used, just to be researched.

That is, hydrogen is worse at what it wants to do than existing tech. Maybe it can surpass it in the future, but that means it clearly belongs into labs and only labs.

Why do you even believe the story that hydrogen vehicles are worse than petrol cars?

Because… it’s not a story? 🤷

FCEVs are happening now. People should not fall for the marketing BS that its still far off in the future.

Yeah, and they’re not as green or as cheap as BEVs. That’s kinda the point, the they’re excluding some very special applications like busses and some trucks a strictly inferior solution to a solved problem. That is not to say that BEVs are the end-all-be-all, quite probably they’re not. But it doesn’t seem like hydrogen can outdo them, at least at out present technological level.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Expand dynamic color usage! Make the wallpaper use the system colors, too? 🤣 More generic and whiter icons for Google applications! Bigger buttons, until a 10" tablet feels like a 4" phone!

Oh and we need under screen everything. Fingerprint reader, camera, a whole under screen screen!

Carighan , 10 months ago

Oh my! I just finished the reboot, and it was fantastic. Time for more System Shock (again) in my life! 😍

Carighan , 10 months ago

Ouff, that’s a tough one.

But I think Persona 5 wins this one, owing to:

• Rivers in the Desert
• Life will Change
• Phantom, it’s menu background music
• The spin-off Strikers has the absolutely brain-infecting Love te Wonderland

However, I’ve recently finished Cassette Beasts, and it’s a really really strong contender. Imagine creating an OST piece as amazing as Same Old Story, then going back and adding lyrics for it for when you are fused. And then there’s the even more phenomenal Shot in the Dark (only linking the lyrics version here).

Carighan , 10 months ago

And shit like this exactly is why religion needs to be kept out of school. If someone is curious, they can learn about it on their own, it’s a decision best made once more mentally developed, anyways. Don’t indoctrinate children with your bullshit, especially if the teachers are clearly not able to keep their own shit out of it.

Her attorney said Monique is just a “normal Bible-believing Christian.”

That’s an admission of guilt, not a legal defense! O.o

Carighan , 10 months ago

My Fairphone 4 I generally charge every second night.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Yes, all your mallards should be thoroughly vetted.

Carighan , 10 months ago

The top 10 instances account for 74% of MAU.

Yes, because even with federation it is inherently advantageous for a user of a social platform to be among the largest pool of people they can identify, to make random stumbling into discussions and groups as likely as possible.

It’s a weird thing where we want the federation to provide a network of smallest scale platforms, yet we do this for social media, where the experience is naturally best when it starts with a single giant platform you filter down not an ocean of individual bits you have to glue together.

Carighan , 10 months ago

When there is a big issue hitting the fediverse (like an bunch of script kiddies attacking servers and pushing CSAM), are we going to just wait for the admins to clock out of the regular-jobs-that-pay-the-bills and then take a look at it?

Why not? It’s a hobby project.

I thought we didn’t want big companies to control the fediverse? But if we want people to main-job it, then naturally you’re turning it into a business, and sooner or later the larger it gets, the largest will be, well, a big company. Naturally. A Lemmy-company, basically. Lemmy.world Ltd.

Do we want big business to run the place, or not? In the latter case, it cannot be a viable full time job, or it will naturally turn into the former if successful.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Your posts here are also the very first time I ever heard of “communick”, so take from that what you want.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Well, ultimately mastodon/lemmy are hobbyist projects. They would naturally count as “provided as is, with no guarantees”.

I have two friends that can use some spare space on my NAS. If I ever randomly pull the plug on that, they got pretty little to complain about tbh, short of me not giving any prior notice which would be nice since they personally know me. Since mastodon/lemmy providers don’t even have that, I also wouldn’t fault them for not giving such notice.

🤷

Does it matter? Not really, IMO. Social media as a whole is a scourge, and plenty of the bigger sites with corporations behind them are run at a negative, so there seems to be no good financial solution in sight so far. If you could just collect a few donations or run some ads, you bet the corporations would long have done that and be far in the black. But they’re not, so that hints at an inherent issue of usercount vs perceived per-user-value that makes users unwilling to spend on the service they’re using.

Carighan , 10 months ago

I mean Reddit Gold was a cool idea back in its heyday.

But yeah, funding it via donations comes with some implications in regards to cutting non-donation costs.

Say you have a single donation tier, on patreon or so. If push comes to shove and you get too few donations, the following would be perfectly understandable things to happen:

• To cut costs, non-donating users are rate-limited for their interactions.
• To cut staff cost, defederation is vigorously employed to both cut external content to review and also marginally cut server cost from the actual federation updates.
• To further cut staff cost, non-donating users will automatically be temp-banned if reported with no prior investigation, and placed in a low-priority review queue.

These all sound grotesque, but also understandable if you think about it, in particular the last one as personell cost is always really significant. Yeah you could argue “might as well go paid-only”, sure. But to a point free users are okay, they just have to accept that in any “maybe” situation, they’ll always lose out due to costing too much vs paying too little (nothing that is). “You get what you pay for” would be a way of putting it.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Though I was technically naive about how the fediverse could work, I was generally curious … but when I found out it’s distributed data synchronisation it was one of those moments in tech when you realise something isn’t that fancy and is done essentially the way most people would do it if they had to design it.

Well… KISS is a good concept for a reason. There’s on paper no reason - at least before running into actual issues - to find something fancier than just replicating updates across known other network members.

Carighan , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Geezus. I’m old enough to remember how the Internet was before the Internet. Sorry. 😅

You however completely missed the point. Social media in its nature benefits from centralized approaches. As a use case. Independent of who operates it. Users have it easier the more central it is. It doesn’t need to be walled. Of course not. But it should be centralized.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Like I said above, specifically for the “I want to socialize” use case of social media sites, there’s no upside to federation. It makes discovery harder, and a giant portion of what made Reddit so amazing was the random stumbling into things.

And yes, sure, federated systems can be made to more closely emulate such a centralized approach, but that’s why I said it that way: A centralized pool of social media content (for a given social media platform) is beneficial to the user, they can randomly stumble into topics and groups, and filter things down to what they desire.

In an ideal federated system, that is in turn exactly how the content would look for the user: They’d not even realize the content isn’t all on whatever instance they’re on, it’s fully transparent. Because that’s easier for the user. No matter how low the barrier to finding federated content is, there’s still no upside for the user having to take that step and go hunt for federated concept. From the perspective of the user, that is.

It’s not a big issue of course, but it does mean that by default, more users flock to where there are already more users.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Meanwhile, Mobvoi still hasn’t supplies Wear OS 3 to the TicWatch 3. Last time I ever but something by that POS company. Kept lying and saying its coming.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Still better hab Ryanair!

Carighan , 10 months ago

Say what you want about Alphabet, but this is all pretty cool stuff. I particular the custom shortcut blocks for routines!

Carighan , 10 months ago

Who do you kill by selling infinite quilts? The quilt industry?

Carighan , 10 months ago

I crouch on sand, I’d assume. Next to me a woman pulls a purple sword out of her own chest, tells me to get going then disappears. On my other side a sniper with bandaged eyes talks about a piece of her soul before shooting someone.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Exactly. It’s still invite only, so blue-sky really feels like a bit of a nonstarter.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Similar for me, there’s just absolutely no comparison to Google so far. DDG is the closest but the results are still a fair bit worse and importantly, I’ll always have to swap to Google for maps anyways as Apple Maps is just an insult to users.

Carighan , 10 months ago

But doesn’t that naturally just recreate an even more personalised and hence affirming echo chamber the like of the algorithms on Google or Bing or so usually do?

Granted, plenty Spam sites to exclude, but is it easy to keep it to just those?

Carighan , 10 months ago

Yeah but game production isn’t about the consumers. It’s a business.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Get D4 (Dungeons 4) instead! It’s coming out soon!

Carighan , 10 months ago

I mean sure it can be solved easy enough: centralize it, and work with the authorities for reportable cases. Fork over the data. Exactly all the stuff most people in the fediverse wouldn’t want, but there are serious upsides to having a central authority for such stuff.

More specifically, anything that requires legal intervention or arbitration might be better off being centralized. This is exactly why crypto isn’t really a valid model for money, our everyday usable of money needs a moderation and arbitration authority that is backed by actual legal enforcement. And dating apps need a way for people to report creepys and stalkers and in extreme cases, have the data be handed over to the police easily.