On the weekend, I was having lunch with a family member, and they were talking about how they were so sick of all the apps that everyone wanted them to install. Apps for going to the museum, apps for paying for car packing, apps for ordering at a restaurant etc.

I pointed out to them that although they are complaining, they are still using and installing the apps; and I asked why they were doing that. Its easier to do it than not, they say.

Meanwhile, I myself don’t use a smartphone at all. Zero apps. And so although it is mildly annoying to keep see “just use the app”, and “scan this QR code”, I still manage to simply not do those things.

My suggestion to people who don’t like installing apps for random crap is this: don’t. Just don’t do it. And if that means you have to walk 10 more steps, or say a couple of extra sentences to a human; then accept that cost. Accept that experience in a world that is not controlled by the auxiliary brain you keep in your pocket.

So is the plan is to use a heat-pump to cool the computers while getting some waste-product as hot as possible, and then eject the waste product? Or perhaps rather than ejecting it, the heat could be put into a large surface-area heat-sink thing to just radiate the energy black-body-style…

I think ideas like this are fair and reasonable if we have to have a data centre in space (for example, if we wanted people to live indefinitely on a space-colony or something like that). But its pretty clear that no plan will ever be anywhere near as good as what we can do on the planet’s surface.

Building and operating these things on the Earth’s surface is already expensive and resource intensive. And doing it in space is going to be a lot worse.

You pirate because GOG made a fuck-up in its marketing comms?

I’m very much anti-car. I don’t own a car. My apartment doesn’t have a car park (at my request before it was built). … But I think you’re really over-egging the utility of horses. I don’t think they are anywhere near as viable in dense urban environments. I’d say a bicycle is far more realistic alternative to a car (I say that from experience). Perhaps an electric bike depending on your needs.

Keeping a horse takes a huge amount of space and resources. Perhaps you can do that if you live in a rural area and own a bit of farmland; but otherwise, I don’t think its is affordable or practical to own horse.

I’ve talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don’t care, because it hasn’t blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.

But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it’s very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as “it hasn’t been active for very long. Lets wait and see.”

I just think that’s interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don’t totally match my internet social circles.

I figure I’d post a follow up after having the game for a couple of weeks:

I still stand by all the criticisms I made. (Poor early-game experience; lots of UI oddities and annoyances; weaker world-building and thematic buildup compared to DD1.)

However, I will say that the strategy and tactics side of the game do improve after unlocking a bunch of stuff. When first playing the game, there often weren’t any good responses to many challenges - so it was basically down to luck. But after unlocking stuff the balance is a lot better. I reckon the game would have a better early experience is more items were unlocked from the start. Unlocking stuff does give a nice sense of progress - but the player needs to have meaningful viable options to actually play.

So anyway, I do think the core gameplay is pretty good, and has quite a bit of variety in viable tactical styles - once you have the stuff unlocked to actually make it work! I think its kind of a shame that the game wasn’t polished a bit more before launching. Fixing the UI issues wouldn’t be a huge amount of work. And some early-game tweaks could improve that first-time experience quite a bit. … The thematic stuff might be unfixable though, because the nature of how the zones work. (Having randomised zones with bosses and such means that it can’t really give a sense that you’re gradually going deeper into the darkness).

Well, if they are the same game then it would be reasonable to expect that this “new expansion for Diablo 2” actually works with Diablo 2. But it doesn’t. It only works with “Diablo 2: Resurrected”, which is sold separately. People who own Diablo 2 cannot play this new expansion pack without buying another game.

That ladybird gender thing is such a load of crap. I find it hard to even believe that people are genuinely passionate about it. Every time ladybird is mentioned, someone brings up the ‘extreme views’ based on this. But it is the biggest load of nothing you are ever likely to see.

For anyone who doesn’t know, here’s what happened:

• The build documentation for this unreleased pre-beta software used the pronoun ‘he’.
• Someone suggested that they change it to be more inclusive.
• The author didn’t think it was important enough to change, so left it.
• More requests and pressure came to change the pronoun.
• The pronoun was then changed, and the author apologised.

To me, that’s a minor error of judgement, with no lasting harm caused to anyone at all. But yet somehow this is constantly used as a reason to avoid ladybird.

How can I take this seriously? Is this some kind of organised anti-competition propaganda campaign? We’re talking about a free and open source project of a highly technical nature, and somehow people are upset that the word ‘he’ existed temporarily in a work-in-progress document with a target audience of essentially zero people. The people making this project are not political leaders or public figures with media training. They are focused on the technical side of things. Yeah, the pronoun was a mistake, but it pretty much the smallest mistake you could possibly make in this context. It not like they are donating to right-wing orgs, or publicly denouncing anyone, or promoting hate. I see far worse than what they did on a daily basis from all sorts of people - including right here in lemmy. And in terms of ladybird, I have not heard of any kind of misstep ever since this instant - which was a very long time ago now. It is honestly bizarre that people have clung onto this incident. I’m honestly not sure I believe that the backlash is entirely organic. It’s just too disproportionate.

[edit] Let me just follow this by saying that I do think there are other good reasons to be upset with this same ladybird dev. I just don’t think the ‘he’ in the docs thing is anything at all.

I find that there’s an almost constant stream of updates, most of which I don’t care about. So I tend do the security updates once every few days, and do all the other updates (mostly for flatpak stuff) once every few months - unless there is a particular update that I actually want.

I shut my computer down whenever I intend to stop using it for more than a couple of hours. So that means every night, and some other times as well. Starting the computer doesn’t take very long. So I don’t feel like it is a hassle or trouble. Being completely shut down saves a bit of power; and there are other minor benefits.

One benefit is that it prevents accidentally waking the computer in the middle of the night, filling the room with light and noise while I fumble in a tired state trying to shut it down. (Not saying that happens often, but it has happened - and it is not nice.)

Even better, aspire to not use a car. Commute via bike or public transport.

Everyone has better things to do then sit in traffic, and its always tempting to blame someone else - eg. some old guy that you wish would have gone shopping at a different time. But if you are on the road in your car then you are traffic. You’re holding people up. You’re delaying people. And as the previous person said, you have no more right to use public roads than anyone else. So rather than wishing and hoping that other people will do something different, take initiative to do something different yourself.

You’re a liar. No one is that influenced.

There are a lot of people in the world. Some feel passionately enough about certain topics to write long lemmy posts. And it doesn’t stop there. Some people actually physically do stuff in the real world too! So if you think typing a few paragraphs of text is too much effort for any real person, then I suggest you try to broaden your social circle.

Yeah. The idea that tracking should require explicit consent sounds pretty good at first, but we now the result is that users are constantly nagged and harassed and annoyed until they finally “consent” - at which point everything becomes silky smooth.

So yeah, I agree that this kind of thing should be simply banned, to remove any inconvenience or confusion from the whole thing.

It’s not really an authoritarian impulse. It’s about collectively pushing back against a power imbalance. Supermarkets and large companies have a lot more money and resources than most individual people, and so they are able to leverage that power to make individuals do things that benefit the company but harm society. Laws and regulations are official organised ways of the general public collectively pushing against unwanted behaviour from powerful entities, such as supermarkets.

If it was illegal, there would not be a higher price vs a lower price at any particular store; there would only be the one price. And obviously all prices change over time for all sorts of reasons. So it doesn’t really make sense to say “everyone pays the higher price”. Higher than what?

Maybe it’s a bit unfair to say ‘part of the problem’. But yeah, it isn’t really helping.

Yeah, Australia has that law. However, in recently years it has started to erode a little.

Cashless one-tap card payments have become very popular, because they were fast and no cost. Pretty convenient… except that more recently there are now transaction fees associated with them, and the fees vary from place to place. … So when it comes time to pay, often the price is a couple of percent higher than quoted. It isn’t much, but it is does make it harder to know what you’re actually going to pay. And it also feels like a bait-and-switch, since it built popularity by being free and now starts to increase nickle-and-dime people.

Anyway, that’s all minor small-fry stuff compared to the tax-excluding price bullshit in the USA.

Products already aim to have attention-grabbing / attractive packaging. So I don’t think that is going to get any worse if general advertising is banned.

I’ve also been saying for years that unsolicited advertising is wasteful and harmful and unnecessary - and should be banned. (Well, it’s ‘necessary’ from an individual point of view, because you need it to be viable vs other products. But that would not be the case if it was banned. The massive work and resources spend on advertising are only necessary because of advertising. Killing it would free up those resources for something actually productive.)

There are obviously a lot of tricky issues and edge cases that would need to be ironed out for an advertising ban; but that doesn’t make it impossible. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be an improvement, and it’s not hard to imagine some basic guidelines that would work reasonably well. … That said, it’s complete fantasy that this would happen, because there is too much money tied up in it. The only realistic way forward would be a very slow gradual increase in weak rules about what kinds of advertising can be used.

Yeah. I also use Bottles for GOG / itch games that don’t have a native linux version. And I’m pretty happy with how it works. Things install smoothly and easily, and it has a very nice menu for the games I’ve installed. Here’s what it looks like:

However, there have been some hiccups along the way that might have caused less patient people to give up. In particular, it took me awhile to work out that although I could tell bottle to launch a windows .exe from anywhere on my computer, it would only actually work properly if I first move the exe into the virtual drive - which deep inside a confusing directory structure. (The “troubleshooting” menu option goes directly into talking about this issue; but even finding that menu option isn’t totally straight forward, especially if you’re just launching the exe from a file browser or something.)

Anyway, the upshot is that I like bottles; because it is easy to use but also very transparent about how it works and what it is doing, which I like. But I wouldn’t say it’s the best option for everyone.

You may not like a feature, which is fine, but a lot of people do.

Sure. I agree with that. But I think you’re seeing this in reverse of the point I was trying to make. My point is that you might think this feature is mission critical, but a lot of people do not. The purpose of my previous post was to imply that you are over-emphasising its importance.