rwhitisissle

@rwhitisissle@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, Jesus famously overcharged on delivery and transaction fees when feeding the masses with all that miraculously created bread and fish while also losing 13 billion dollars in the process, somehow, right?

  No, wait, I’m thinking of a different guy…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A supermarket trip may soon look different, thanks to electronic shelf labels⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I love how reality manages to combine the most comically exploitative parts of cyberpunk fiction with literally none of the intense, vibrant, or interesting parts. It’s just a dull, gray, sexless, post-industrial dystopia with ugly cars, chronic obesity, and fentanyl addiction. And now surge pricing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The level of engagement on Reddit these days⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would imagine IP bans would be useful. Although the issue with this is that you run into the problem other websites are having: people who are valid users that are on VPNs get caught in the filter of IP bans because botnets also use the same VPNs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Online Content Is Disappearing⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is true. Right now the OG internet is sort of kept alive by oral history, but we have the technology to save these websites in perpetuity as historical artifacts. That might be a good coding project - a robust archiving system that lets you point a URL at a webpage and scrape everything under its domain and keep a static collection of its contents. The issue, though, is that this doesn’t actually truly “capture” many web pages. A lot of the backend data that might have been served dynamically from a database isn’t retrievable, so the experience of using the page itself is potentially non-archivable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Online Content Is Disappearing⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dead Internet Theory is one of the few “conspiracy” theories I sort of buy, in the sense that it’s probably not descriptive of the nature of the current internet, but rather predictive of what it’s becoming: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Online Content Is Disappearing⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  From a historical or intellectual archaeological perspective, no one in 2000 BC Babylon thought their pottery would be of historical significance, but 4000 years later, it is. These websites, particularly ones independently created and maintained by hobbyists, are snapshots of the ideas of the time and people that created them. These websites may not have been intensely popular, but they were in many ways a foundational part of the inchoate tapestry of the internet that would eventually become the “modern web.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve’s hero shooter Deadlock leaks with screenshots, gameplay details - Polygon⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wikipedia says that Overwatch and Apex Legends are each part of the “Hero Shooter” genre (boy does that sound like an uninteresting genre). I’m guessing there are greater subdivisions of play structure that matches what you’re describing, but it all sounds like an uninteresting blend of character based FPS, like multiplayer Borderlands. I guess that’s where modern gaming is, though, since these really took off after 2016, which is solidly after my “hardcore gaming” days were mostly over.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maven is a yiddish word for understanding, or something similar. There’s a few things that have been named after it, but as it’s in the tech space for this social non-network, it definitely has the potential to be confusing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve’s hero shooter Deadlock leaks with screenshots, gameplay details - Polygon⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Deadlock sounds like the name of a no-budget indie horror game that would release on Steam for a dollar. Not a big budget Apexwatch or Overlegends or…whatever you call this style of game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's discuss: Mass Effect⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fair. I’ll admit that I have a problem with getting overly mad at people for making stupid, accusatory comments that actively misrepresent what I say for their own benefit. I mean, they made a dumb comment and I can, and should, just ignore it. But I also have a difficult time letting things like that go and it’s something I should try to be better about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's discuss: Mass Effect⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m emotionally incapable of accepting that other people dislike things I enjoy and I perceive their criticism of those things as personal attacks. When they tell me that this is a personal problem that I have and that I should learn to accept that people are complicated and that enjoying something someone else does not is perfectly valid and shouldn’t impact my sense of self-worth, I piss and shit myself and tell them that they’re calling my baby ugly. Because that’s how I think of the mindless entertainment I consume: as the closest thing I’ll ever have to children.

  Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's discuss: Mass Effect⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In terms of AAA video games, I can’t help you. I really like Becky Chambers novels, though. Lots of people talking about their feelings in a space opera setting. Big emphasis on character development. These are things I enjoy. The ball numbing action violence of your typical mass-media space opera stuff? Much less so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's discuss: Mass Effect⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If anyone enjoys the game, that’s great. Nothing I say should take away someone else’s fun, but from my perspective, if you let another person’s negative perception of something you enjoy diminish your enjoyment of that thing, the only one who has “yucked your yum” is yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's discuss: Mass Effect⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I consider myself a truly gigantic science fiction fan. I’ve read a ton of science fiction novels, both old and new. I enjoy Star Trek. Love Star Wars. I like a lot of science-fiction themed video games, like Zone of the Enders, the original Bioshock, Borderlands, Prey (both the original and remake), Halo, Metroid, Half-Life, Fallout, etc.

  I utterly loathe Mass Effect. I consider it one of the worst pieces of science-fiction ever created. I consider the overly sleek aesthetic of everything, from the ships, to the weapons, to the armor hideous. I consider the characters underwritten. The political entity that runs the galaxy is an uninteresting and derivative bureaucracy. The conflict between the various member races and their respective histories are far more interesting than the looming conflicts of the giant undead space robots looking to destroy the galaxy. And as a game, the gameplay is repetitive and uninteresting. Many of the enemies eventually just become damage soaks. The weapons and abilities are generally unforgettable. I don’t think I’ve ever had less mentally impactful combat in a game before (as a note, I consider this a general issue with third-person shooters). And the inventory management in the first game was painfully terrible. I remember getting to the end of the game and having to spend an hour to manage my fucking inventory right before the last fight because I literally ran out of space and at a certain point all the crap you’ve collected just becomes worthless and pointless to have.

  I played the first two games. I hated the first one when it came out and still hated it when I revisited it years later. The second I also really disliked because of the bifurcated Paragon and Renegade oppositional morality system that seemed really popular with that era of RPGs. And I didn’t even bother with the third. The games are just dull and frustrating, and I’ve never understood the love people have for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Man Who Killed Google Search⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What about remembering him as “Raghavan, Nimble Pilferer?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cable can't compete with 5G home internet, so it's cheating⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s really more about two massive industries colluding to extract additional income from working Americans. Rental agencies contract with Spectrum, get a cut off the top, and the renters are stuck with a shitty internet service they don’t want. Honestly, renting has never been a great experience for the average American, but it’s been getting worse over time. Rental agencies are starting to cut staff, reduce actual beneficial services offered, force renters into paying for additional junk services they don’t want or need (what the fuck is a $50 a month “beautification fee,” anyway? Nobody ever fucking cleans this place…), and, of course, increase rent every year. And they can do this because…what the fuck else are you going to do? If you’re working class and live in a high cost of living area, you can’t just move, or buy a house. You have to rent. No other options, really. And while you’d think “well, if someone else opens an apartment complex that offers better services, you can just move there.” Sure, and spend 15 grand moving a mile and a half only to have the apartment complex you moved to suffer the same enshittification after 6 months that the first one did.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Disney Unveils the Holotile Floor Inching Us Closer to a Real Life Holodeck⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This thing is so technically complex and has so many moving parts that I can only imagine it breaking literally constantly and costing a fortune to repair whenever it does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies. Almost every “alternative” browser is chromium under the hood. Google’s next big plan is basically constructing a walled garden around the internet (at least the HTTP part) via complex DRM. Eventually, if you want to access an actual web page, it’ll have to be via a Chromium browser. Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don’t fucking render correctly and I’ll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them. That’s only going to get worse with time.