Mikina
@Mikina@programming.dev
- Comment on Anti-masturbation DLC 1 week ago:
To be honest I never really looked into Budhism, but my only experience with the practice is from the amazing Mind Illuminated book, which I think is loosely based on their practice as far as meditation goes, while providing a reasonable context and arguments about why it works. Learning to consciously control your subconsius feels kind of reasonable, and I highly recommend the book to anyone interrested in that.
- Comment on Anti-masturbation DLC 1 week ago:
Tbh I’ve never really looked into or talked with almost anyone who’s into oculltism. I do know a few friends who are heavily into the unformalized new-age stuff, and they are definitely not ok to the point it controls their life, but I realize that it’s a spectrum (and I don’t mean it as “it’s autism” way, but that the way people approach even to the new-age stuff can be a spectrum of reasonable-dangeeous). I’m mostly sad because you can’t really talk to people like that, and share cool lore on a topic most people consider downright crazy, because there isn’t any or they haven’t done any research. Even astrology has some cool lore and manuscripts, but they usually don’t care.
I just think it’s cool, and reading about the practices of different cults and orders is extremely interresting.
I’d vager a guess that “chaos magick” has a similar problem to LaVeye’s Satanism, where you get a lot of edgy people researching the bare minimum, if even that, and just being edgy. Not that it wasn’t edgy, it’s one of the few movements that was downright off-puting for me due to how extremely selfish and arogant it is (IIRC it’s basically “I m a massive dick and walk over anyone”), but people who don’t even know what they are subscribing to are worse.
I never got that feeling from chaos magick, it felt just like you said - extremely rational, and was actually the first movement that made sense, as in “I can imagine this actually working”, with the argument “rituals work by nudging your subconsciousness to the direction you need”.
That’s basically the same as Budhissm does, just by hacks and symbols instead of just sheer practice and will. And we kind of have a proof that budhism works. Image
And even for someone who doesn’t really believe in magic, this makes sense and I can imagine it actually working.
Plus, doing rituals is fun, and a little faith gives a pretty fun amount of LARPing into your life, as long as you don’t let it control you and are reasonable about it.
- Comment on Anti-masturbation DLC 1 week ago:
That’s actually exactly how the 70s “chaos magick” occultism works. If you get past the cringy name, it was one of the more interesting occultistm movements which actually kind of make sense even to me, as someone who’s not really into esoterism (or rather - I like researching it, but would feel dumb practicing since I’m skeptical)
Their core idea is that all of the other occultist movements and orders are basically all the same - through belief, rituals and symbols you affect your subconscious to manifest change, and it doesn’t matter what “flavor” / dogma / lore you choose to believe in. What matters is that you really truly belive.
So, a wiccan making circles in a forest while invoicing spirits or someone making a pizza pentagram while invoking Garfield is the same,as long as he believes into it.
The only thing that matters is that it works for you, and to find what does and what doesn’t they work with “paradigm shifts”, where you decide that " I"m going to try wicca for a year", and then you delve deep into that practice, trying to trully accept it and go all in, noting your experience and results, to see if it works for you.
After a year, you review your results, and move on to other practice, I.e “I’ll be a christian for a year”, and you really get into it, going to churches, practicing all the daily prayers and rituals, and the like.
It’s my favorite occultism movement, because it’s o me of the few where I can imagine that it actually makes sense and could work for making your life better, if you have grounded expectations of course.
- Comment on Guild Wars Reforged Announcement Trailer 2 weeks ago:
That sounds kinda cool tbh. I’m mostly intrigued about the class system, although I’ve bever really looked into it.
It sounds just like Fellowship, though, and I’m loving that game.
- Comment on Guild Wars Reforged Announcement Trailer 2 weeks ago:
If I’m getting back to a game with gear treadmill, I can just clean uo my inventory and start the next exoansion with a clean slate.
I have around 70% of the world cleared, several characters leveled to max, but I got through kike half of HoT and a bit of Path of Fire. I opened my full inventory that had a lot of random crafting stuff, consumables a a gew gear sets and I had no idea what’s anything for, or what am I even supposed to do next. Did a few quests then gave up in trying to sort it out, since it was just too overwhelming.
I’ll probably give it a try again, love thw game.
- Comment on Guild Wars Reforged Announcement Trailer 2 weeks ago:
I’ve hear good things about GW1, but never got to play it.
GW2 is my top favorite MMO, although I haven’t really played much recently, because due to the lack of gear treadmill it’s soo confusing to pick it up again when you stopped playing for a few expansions.
Will probably give GWR a try.
- Comment on Finally a month that's relevant to me 3 weeks ago:
You’re right, I used a wrong word there. It wasn’t science, more like public perception maybe? I’d consider lack of research as a part of science, though.
I’m not sure what better word would fit there instead. I wouldn’t say it’s the fault of marketing, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt that they thought it’s actually healthier to use this kind of filter.
The comparison that sparks to my mind are vapes. There’s AFAIK lack of research that can tell us anything about long term issues, but a lot of people consider it as healthier. But in this case, common sense is also not correct - because it kind of makes sense that it probably isn’t, and it’s just marketing.
But in the case of an asbestos filter, I can see why people (and common sense at the time) would asume that it helps.
So, I guess common sense is the word that I should’ve used, because that’s what was wrong at the time.
- Comment on Finally a month that's relevant to me 3 weeks ago:
While I get where are you comming from, and I’m also not fan of smoking, isn’t asbestos extremely worse?
I remember my friend had a roof over his summer house that was using asbestos, and it was extreme problem. Like, you can’t even take it down without investing heavily into protection, or hiring a company that specializes in it’s diasposal, because it’s just that much toxic to handle.
- Comment on Finally a month that's relevant to me 3 weeks ago:
My favorite asbestos trivia, which I learned only recently, is that at the start of public realozing that smoking causes cancer, one company came up with the solution of “cigaretes with asbestos filters”.
It’s kind of morbidly funny reminder how catastrophically wrong can current science be.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 4 weeks ago:
They already have a really cool solution for that, which they talked about in their GDC talk.. I don’t think there’s any need to slap a glorified chatbot into this, it already seems to work well and have just the right amount of human input to be reliable, while also leaving the “testcase replay gruntwork” to a script instead of a human.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 4 weeks ago:
Square Enix actually has a pretty sick automated QA already. There’s a cool talk about how they did that for FFVII remake in GDC vault, and I highly recommend watching it, if you’re at all interested in QA.
It has nothing to do with AI, it’s just plain old automation, but they solve most of the issues you get with making automated tests in non-discrete 3D playspace and they do that in a pretty solid way. It’s definitely something I’d love to have implemented in the games I’m working on, as someone who worked in QA and now works in development. Being able to have mostly reliable way how to smoke-test levels for basic gameplay without having to torture QA to run the test-case again is good, and allows QA to focus on something else - but the tools also need oversight, so it’s not really a job lost. In summary - I think the talk is cool tech and worth the watch.
However, I don’t think AI will help in this regard, and something as unreliable and random as AI models are not a good fit for this job. You want to have deterministic testcases that you can quanitfy, and if something doesn’t match have an actual human to look at why. AI also probably won’t be able to find clever corner-cases and bugs that need human ingenuity.
Fuck AI, I kind of hope this is just a marketing talk and they are actually just improving the (deterministic) tools they already have, and they are calling it an “AI” to satisfy investors/management without actually slapping a glorified chat-bot into the tech for no reason.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 4 weeks ago:
Large companies probably do that anyway.
Take Blizzard for example. They just released a new patch, where class campaign quests for 8/12 classes do not work. Sure, it’s a remixed version of older expansion, and with all the phasing stuff I can kind of imagine some of the phasing issues being caused by, I don’t know, the player having a weird combination of completed stuff that’s hard to properly catch in testing, since there’s quite a lot of variables.
But the fact that one of the class quests requires crafted items to be completed, while crafting isn’t available by design in the Remix, there’s just no excuse. They either just don’t give a fuck about an issue that’s literally a progression blocker with 100% repro rate, or no one ever tested it even once.
As someone who worked in QA and gamedev, I can’t imagine how could something as obvious as this ever get approved for release. That’s something you catch immediately. Hell, you don’t even have to play through it to realize that this might be a problem.
- Comment on How long? 3 months ago:
Tbh I have no idea, I just like the evolution stone analogy :D
- Comment on How long? 3 months ago:
That’s my favorite thing about axolotls.
They do live in water, but if you neglect them enough (or feed them special [hormone] evolution stones), they will say “fuck this”, grow legs, evolve into slamanders and leave.
- Comment on ultra high iq 4 months ago:
Thank you, that makes perfect sense. It’s easy to fall from the outside into the trap of judging it by the “smarter than you club” label, and forgetting that probably isn’t the point for most members, and the club part is the important one.
- Comment on ultra high iq 4 months ago:
I don’t get why something like Mesa even exists. Like, what even is the moment where pulling out your Mensa card is a good idea?
Assuming you are inteligent, you should know that flashing a card from a gatekept “clever people” club will probably not impress many people, just like you should recognize that the test you did doesn’t mean shit and IQ is not a good way how to measure people.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 6 months ago:
Shadowrun kind of does the same. It’s not really super-advanced, since it’s cyberpunk, but it’s cyberpunk with magic. And it’s my favorite setting, it’s such a cool idea.
- Comment on The way they buried the Unsubscribe text color into the background 6 months ago:
Isn’t this actually illeagal in the EU?
- Comment on CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google 9 months ago:
but if they do it’s a scandal waiting to happen
That was my line of thought. If you pay for failed captchas, there are a few websites using it that’d deserve a bot failing them constantly.
- Comment on CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google 9 months ago:
Do you pay for successful verification only, or even for failed ones?
- Comment on Gen Z reveals the surprising reasons they are career catfishing—ghosting a new boss after endless interview rounds: Nearly a quarter say it was a dare 10 months ago:
That sound like a fun idea.
Is it illegal to use a fake name for such interviews, or rather - can it get you prosecuted, i.e if the company would get really salty and sued you for their incurred manpower? As long as you don’t submit any fake legal documents, just sending a fake CV with fake name and creds, maybe going to an interview or two, only to bail out before providing anything legally binding, is it a persecutable crime?
- Comment on Telegram Hands U.S. Authorities Data on Thousands of Users [404 Media] 10 months ago:
I’m a fan of self-hosted Matrix server. You can get a dozen of bridges for those stubborn people that refuse to leave messenger/whatsapp/telegram (at a loss of encryption, and they still get your convos, but at least you don’t have their spyware on your mobile and you can have everything in one app), while also being decentralized.
Self-hosting a server is actually really, really easy. It took me like half an hour, because there is an amazing Matrix Ansible Deploy script, that has a pretty easy to follow documentation, and is also one of those super-rare projects that just works. Even if I forgot to update my server for several months, I could literally “just update”, and the script is clever enough to figure out what changed, tell me what I need to update in the config files (which are still only like four rows of stuff I needed to setup), and it is a really smooth experience.
- Comment on Michigan to clear 400+ acres of state forest for solar farm to meet "clean energy" goals 11 months ago:
I’d love to see the math behing how much power cpuld be generated from the 400 acres of wood, and how long will it take for the solars to break even.
Also, how much co2 is saved by the solars in comparison to what the trees would generate.
- Comment on Anon hates smartphones 11 months ago:
From my experience, all the linux for mobile distros I’ve tried on my Pinephone were a really bad experience, with a lot of issues. But the option is there, and while it wasnt reliable enough to use as a daily phone, I still carry it in the bag with a dock and Kali, which sometimes can get useful during pentesting.
- Comment on CIA Is Openly Recruiting Informants on Social Media 11 months ago:
If I ever wanted to fight against my local regime, it would definitely not be through US and CIA, lol.
- Comment on What video game company/developer/publisher loves shitting on it's fans? 11 months ago:
Thanks for this, it actually made me realize that there is another MMO I spent more of my childhood with - Stat Wars Galaxies, and more importantly, that I can still play it on private servers. Which also extends to WoW, playing on a private server might acually be a good compromise, when I get the urge again.
But so far, I’m falling for FFXIV. Hopefully Square Enix isn’t as bad as Blizz. I remember hearing some NFT writings on the wall, but so far it doesn’t sound too bad.
- Comment on What video game company/developer/publisher loves shitting on it's fans? 11 months ago:
I just got through whole of ARR and started HW, so I should be past that point. Haven’t really noticed it too much, but the difference in pacing is kind of apparent in the hindsight. The story is interesting enough and the game never ceases to amaze me with variety of side activities or QoL things that I don’t mind a slower pace and am greatful for the game as is. Especially comparing it to WoW, its such a breath of fresh air. So far it feels like the game SWTOR wished to be, and it’s great.
I also think that they heavily cut through the amount of slog required for ARR, judging by the list of removed mandatory MSQ quests on wiki.
- Comment on European Federation of Journalists to stop posting content on X 11 months ago:
I don’t think so. If people leave and the only reputation you’d hear about the platform is that it’s full of shit like that, you won’t have any reason to start an account in the first place, since there’s no “normal” content with which they’d first hook you in, before they can slowly start changing your views.
If the serious content remains, you’ll get people signing up for that content, only to be slowly manipulated into whatever The Algorithm feels will drive the engagement (which is probably fascism). If there’s nothing in the first place, you don’t have that hook.
Let it die.
- Comment on What video game company/developer/publisher loves shitting on it's fans? 11 months ago:
I started FFXIV trial few weeks ago, and so far I was having a blast. The major issue is that I probably won’t manage to convince my friends and partner to also switch, since they are invested in WoW and are having fun. But the plan is to find a nice FC and get some regular events in, and we’ll see how it goes.
On the other hand, I tried that with GW2 a few years ago, had a blast, found someone random to play with, but eventually I just forgot about the game… Which is something that never happens with WoW 😠
- Comment on What video game company/developer/publisher loves shitting on it's fans? 11 months ago:
Blizzard. I’ve been recently thinking about how much of a “comfort food” the game is for me, and how no other game could ever get me the same feeling as returing back to a game I’ve spent literally months player over the last 15 years. It’s my escapism, where I don’t have to stress about anything and know so much about the game, that I don’t have to learn anything new or unknown, which makes it even more comfortable. It’s also a game where I have a lot of friends, and since they are in the similar boat, we usually just meet up for an expansion - but investing our whole group into another game usually just fails.
The problem is, that Blizzard knows this and has started to exploit it. Milking players of as much money as they can, while abandoning their “Players First” motto and absolutely shitting over the playerbase by gutting most of the development teams that had some passion left, hiring management who didn’t care about the game in the slightest and only was there to increase revenue and reduce costs as much as possible.
It’s more and more apparent, the game is in the worst and buggiest state as far as I remember, lot of content was cut, there’s literally no customer support - people can be stuck for weeks with their character somewhere, while only response they get is an AI generated “FUCK YOU”, and their only hope being that their post will blow up on reddit and someone will actually look at their case.
The new book about Blizzard is so depressing read, and makes me extremely angry. Fuck all those people who ruined the company, even though one of the founding owners was extremely against it and fought for years to keep at least some semblance of original vision. And he lost.
I hate that I always return to the game when I’m down and just need a serious dose of escapism from real life, that only this game can provide. I’m slowly trying to invest myself into other MMOs, and get rid of this toxic, gaslighting ex WoW has been for me. But what I hate the most is how obvious their change of priorities is in their recent games.
I wish nothing but the worst for people who ruined Blizzard. We could’ve had second Larian, if it was Morhaime instead of Kodick and his greed who won.
Thankfully, we have FFXIV and Path of Exile, that still respect players, and Blizz games can go fuck themselves. I hope I’ll manage to finally transition from WoW for good this time.
