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mindbleach

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mindbleach ,

No, fuck that. Be mad at Valve for just assuming Nintendo would flip out, if Valve did literally nothing. Homebrew in general is not what Nintendo’s bastard lawyers get after.

And anyone who’s gonna chime in ‘oh but they gotta’ can save it. They do not. All of this is optional. We choose to do this, and we can just as easily choose something else. Anyone who thinks the status quo demands evil and actively enables that instead of calling for it to change is choosing to be an asshole. That includes performatively rolling your eyes when people point to a problem that keeps happening and say “this fucking sucks.”

mindbleach ,

The higher-ups were skeptical of the concept of computers

It’s arguably dumber than that. The higher-ups treated R&D like any other centrally-planned ordeal, which meant a bunch of incredibly smart people in different countries were at each others’ throats for the privilege of trying to build a thing… rather than just building multiple things and picking the ones that worked.

When it was a 5-ton, room-filling affair - called the Small Electronic Calculating Machine, because all programmers are the exact same kind of dork - building exactly one kinda made sense. When the west had three competing 6502 minicomputers for like a hundred bucks each, it was just tight-fisted control for the sake of political grandstanding. The fuckin’ BBC rolled out a better centralized computing standard.

The root problem is having “a bicycle for the mind” in a country that restricts travel.

mindbleach ,

Honestly, the world lucked out with a minimal Latin alphabet become the standard. English even lost its weird special symbols because all the good printing-press typefaces were made in Germany. It’s only twenty-six discrete characters (admittedly in two cases) and they’re the most common throughout all the European languages that, uh, spread their influence.

Shame you all have to deal with our bullshit spelling.

mindbleach ,

APL was evidently written by an alien.

mindbleach ,

Needing etymology to guess at pronunciation is why it’s bullshit.

People have tried to fix it. Their partial success just created more exceptions.

mindbleach ,

Remember when creationism was the dumbest thing on the internet?

Wasn’t that nice?

mindbleach ,

“Why does this Cow know Slash?”

“… why does this Giraffe know Milk Drink?!”

mindbleach ,

Pheasant evolves into Peacock or Turkey depending on evolution stone.

mindbleach ,

IngloriousBasterds.gif

mindbleach ,

So… AI jackasses bought another dead-skin mask for an obviously doomed gizmo.

mindbleach ,

Dr. Stuart Ashen’s most resilient contribution to internet culture, somehow.

mindbleach ,

Don’t repost Nazi comics.

mindbleach ,

No… it’s still spreading that asshole’s content.

mindbleach ,
  1. More money for us
  2. Fuck you
mindbleach ,

RealMedia once made a program called RealJukebox. It let me rip CDs and play music with minimal nonsense. One day I got online and RealJukebox forcibly converted itself to RealOne, which was useless garbage. No amount of restoring from backups or fighting registry settings would bring back the program I relied on.

This was where I learned to care about software freedom. Or rather, when I first demanded it, but could scarcely express the concept. I knew I was betrayed.

All of this went down on an eMachines 566i2 that shipped with Windows ME. It was my first computer. The prior family computer ran Windows 95, which despite being five years older, was plainly a better experience. So while I was never the guy calling Bill Gates the devil, I was already well aware that Microsoft was a lumbering giant that could easily fumble that big picture.

So it’s kind of bizarre my first Linux experience was through someone selling their SuSE 7 CDs at a boot sale on another continent. We’d moved to Germany (military brat) and I think I was running a Windows XP developer build that one ultranerd friend had burned for me. (I paid this back by making like seven copies of everything I pirated. CD-Rs were so beautifully cheap back then, and my entire hard drive fit on a dozen.) Some guy with a pile of ISA and PCI cards atop plastic milk-crates on a chilly sports field had a folding paper sleeve labeled “Linux,” which I’d vaguely heard of, and I figured yeah sure that’s worth a couple bucks to try. He tried gamely to explain that it wasn’t selling or buying, because it was “free software,” but even looking back now I think he was more confused than I was. Dude still took money for a professionally-made ordeal. I still have the stickers within arm’s reach. I ran that for a few months, I guess? Lots of nights on non-numeric roleplaying over IRC. Went back to some Windows after that, until the next move and my first laptop, a proper IBM T42 running XP.

In college I was enamored with Ubuntu’s initial promises (and any form of ‘e-mail us to get free discs’) and handed out a bunch of earth-tone paper sleeves for an OS I guess I was dual-booting. I still used XP throughout school, on that laptop and on a tiny little desktop my long-distance boyfriend sent me so we could play City Of Villains together. I’m a little fuzzy now - but I was using Ubuntu for a while after school (and after that boyfriend), until Mark Shuttleworth declared all windows would be left-handed, and I felt that familiar sense of betrayal. I switched to Mint for a while and then decided I cared too much about video games to bother dual-booting all the time.

I was on Windows 7 from about 2010, and exclusively from about 2013, until about the end of 2020. When I built my new machine - the one I’m typing this on - I knew I was going all-in on Mint. It still has problems, believe you me. But they’re all my problems, and potentially fixable. They’re not locked into a decade-old OS that was honestly the pinnacle of Microsoft’s oeuvre. They’re not ever-shifting betrayals of a product where you are not the customer. They’re plain ridiculous technical goofs, plus the occasional conflict between user demand and common sense.

I wholeheartedly recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon to anyone who gives a shit about their computer’s operating system. It is good software. It runs with negligible bullshit on my at-one-point higher-end desktop with a dozen cores, and my thirdhand beater laptop with Windows Vista stickers. I’m still using Foobar from my late Windows days and IrfanView from my early Windows days. It is the least bullshit solution, for someone who is prone to call bullshit on just about anything.

mindbleach ,

Honk.

mindbleach ,

Oh wow, Top Gear was right.

mindbleach ,

That sounded silly until I remembered English has “sawhorse.”

mindbleach ,

Paul versus Baby Driver really illustrates what Nick Frost and Simon Pegg’s chemistry bring to a movie versus what Edgar Wright’s directing brings to a movie.

And even in combination, the trio only nailed it two out of three times. The World’s End is just… okay.

mindbleach ,

These crossovers with Forgotten Weapons are weeeird.

mindbleach ,

That would be ridiculous, and make generated lines even less useful than simple recordings. Presumably they mean new lines cannot be generated, past a certain date. That’d let the studio continue doing the character without needing the actor… in that game, for a while.

mindbleach ,

Why would I want a fictional character to sound like a specific real person?

Or, framing the question differently: what actor plays Dave The Diver onscreen? Because the answer is what this technology will do for audio.

mindbleach ,

Again: why would the NPC saying that need to sound like a specific real person?

mindbleach ,

Again: why would an NPC’s dialog need to sound like any specific real person, doing a voice?

mindbleach ,

That’s what this already does.

We are talking about a completely computer-generated voice. But for some reason we’re only talking about cases where it’s modeled as closely as possible on one specific human being.

mindbleach ,

I’m talking about artists using these tools for how characters sound, the same way they use tools for how characters look and move. The answer to “who plays Mario onscreen?” is “nobody.” The answer to “who voices Mario?” can be the same. It doesn’t mean nobody is responsible for how he sounds, or that someone typed “short plumber red hat” to render him.

mindbleach ,

Playing single-player game alone at home on your own hardware.

Somehow banned from a network.

Okay.

mindbleach ,

It’s mutual. I don’t necessarily extend my expectations of a machine doing what I tell it to, out into geopolitics.

There’s a lot of overlap in useful terminology and philosophy. There’s a bit of overlap in organizational problem-solving (and problem-having). But you can be aggressively capitalist, and still recognize the benefits of stone-soup development. Even in hardware - RISC-V is going to undercut low-end ARM in embedded applications, and hard-drive manufacturers are not exactly Spanish republicans.

mindbleach ,

How the hell did you pick lemmy.ml?

mindbleach ,

And that excuses a total lack of awareness.

mindbleach ,

Case in point. You think quoting an argument and sneering is a counterargument. Obviously, because you don’t know the first thing about labor theory of value.

Someone asked if you think capitalists or engineers did the engineering, and you revealed you don’t understand the question.

mindbleach ,

No dude, you demonstrably said ‘I’m going to repeat your argument so you can think about it.’ Projecting some emotional state onto me is not gonna change how you fucked this up.

This is mockery. I am calling you ignorant.

I am trying to highlight how you joined an explicitly leftist server, whilst remaining aggressively unaware of… genuinely the first things people learn about leftism. So when you try smugly posturing your way out of a pointed question, you’re just revealing you know less than nothing.

To be utterly frank I just lack respect for people who think of themselves as any flavour of anarchist while still dreaming of a system as thoroughly rigid as the artificially created Internet.

Anarchists being naked hippies, of course, not organized laborers. The internet was mostly designed and operated by academics. It runs on half a century of “does this sound right?” collaborative standards. Whatever browser you’re reading this in has its origins in anti-monopolist diehards building better software out of spite.

None of which is even addressing the initial failure. Capital didn’t design your computer. Intel’s founders definitely did, but only because they were workers dissatisfied under Fairchild, who were in turn workers dissatisfied under Shockley. The early history of silicon valley is halfway to semiconductor co-ops.

At no point did shareholders build hardware.

mindbleach ,

On the contrary, I’d expect individual NPCs to be refined first. Like if the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 was mostly improvising. Or if you had a halfway genuine friendship with your buddy Superfly.

mindbleach ,

Or lean into that passive-aggressive vibe the actress took. She got assigned to some half-naked cat who stumbled into town smelling like an execution, five minutes after he killed a creature of legend. There’s a bit of Commander Kiff in that “I am sworn to carry your burdens.”

On the other hand - I don’t do tagalongs. I sat her ass in Breezehome as it got larger, fancier, and piled high with obscenely rare weaponry. It was kinda sad every time she stands up like we’re gonna go somewhere. Lydia, honey - this is your house. I use the chests, the bookshelves, and the gratuitous enchanting table that might actually be a mod. Go hook up with Farkas in one sense or other. I should come in and find you drunk on mead, out in some dungeon, or improvising whatever a sock on the doorknob is for a culture that has neither.

mindbleach ,

AKA “we get it, Quake 3 engine, you use real fonts.”

mindbleach ,

I’m gonna guess the defensive downvotes are about insecurities. I wasn’t putting you down.

The duality of man.

mindbleach ,

Blaming criticism on personal issues is blatantly putting people down. It’s the fallacy of projection.

I love how people on the internet love to inject their own meaning into words.

I don’t think you know what the word irony means.

mindbleach ,

S1 TNG is infamously jank.

mindbleach ,

That’s a funny way to spell SG-1.

mindbleach ,

Every community without sufficient moderation becomes /r/Funny with different CSS.

mindbleach ,

4 AM is definitely one or the other.

mindbleach ,

4D chess isn’t real. Sometimes, rich and powerful people do dumb things. Sometimes they’re not very smart and have a visible personality disorder. Searching for an underlying clever motive is an exercise in your intelligence - not theirs.

mindbleach ,

“So” is the mistake. He’s not breaking it on purpose. He’s just a fucking idiot. He is exactly as smug and incompetent as he appears.

mindbleach ,

… and what it is, is completely different from secretly pursuing a complex goal that only looks like an idiot immune to good ideas.

mindbleach ,

In light of recent accusations: an idiot off his tits on meth, and immune to good ideas.

mindbleach ,

Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.

That’s why it’s spreading. So long as a fraction of people get sucked in - your non-participation does not matter.

Those victims “voted with their wallets” and their vote counts for ten times more than yours. This is why outright vitriolic boycotts barely made a dent. This is why it can creep into existing games, including ones you already bought. They’ve got your money. They want more.

This business model amounts to a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching a real-world price tag to anything inside that make-believe. Convincing you that you need some random imaginary geegaw is half these people’s job.

No kidding nobody should throw money at that.

But I don’t know why anyone defends its continued existence.

mindbleach ,

And that fixes the rest of the industry somehow.

mindbleach ,

Copyright should be irrelevant immediately, for most of that.

Someone modifying software you sold them is not a pirate. Licenses mean nothing.

Someone sharing a game you stopped selling is a pirate, but if you don’t want money, who cares?

Someone sharing clips of old sports games is not competing with your live broadcast business.

Intellectual property laws don’t need to be brief, to be sane. Most things that rights-cartels freak out over are downright stupid. We can give them what they need without tolerating their every paranoid want. These laws only exist to benefit us.

Simplicity is useful here. I’m willing to spot people a nice round number for ample opportunity to sell their thing. Especially if it means the date on the cover is a guarantee.

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