ggtdbz
@ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Are some people just unable to become fluent in a foreign language? 3 days ago:
At the risk of coming off as too gatekeep-y, Arabic is structurally so different from English and French (the other two languages I know). It has a reputation for being difficult for a reason.
Despite it being my native language I’ll occasionally still think of an idea phrased primarily in English, and contorting it into Arabic is very clunky (despite Arabic being much more loosey goosey with word order, in general, you can figure out how to tie up an idea as you go - this applies more to MSA, dialects usually sway more towards a small number of forms).
While strictly more rigid, you might be better off at least grasping the basics of MSA first before jumping into a specific dialect. It is antithetical to how I think about languages (go learn the specific prescriptive form of Arabic instead of the most commonly spoken popularly developed one) but it might be easier to learn that way.
(I’m thinking of it like learning piano (or MIDI?) as a baseline for music and more instruments vs learning guitar first and having an understanding of notes and scales that is very closely associated to the relational positioning of these notes on these strings.)
Or maybe it might not be easier that way. I didn’t learn Arabic as an adult with a background in western languages, fuck if I know what the pedagogically optimal way to learn Arabic is. Arabic is hard, dude. Doesn’t help that half of all Arabic media is (I say this as an Arab) embarrassing mindless drivel.
- Comment on you miss all the shots you don't take 4 days ago:
I’m not in academia, but I’ve seen my coworkers’ hard work get crunched into a slop machine by higher ups who think it’s a good cleanup filter.
LLMs are legitimately amazing technology for like six specific use cases but I’m genuinely worried that my own hard work can be defaced that way. Or worse, that someone else in the chain of custody of my work (let’s say, the person advising me who would be reviewing my paper in an academic context) decided to do the same, and suddenly this is attached to my name permanently.
Absurd, terrifying, genuinely upsetting misuse of technology. I’ve been joking about moving to the woods much more frequently every month for the past two years.
- Comment on Why don't Americans use electric kettles? 5 days ago:
It’s not, but you need over twice the current to supply the same power, and since many safety measures and physical constraints limit the current, it effectively means the power limit is more strict.
This is assuming the same cables and breakers etc being used for both voltage ratings. I know there are specific wiring and connection systems for high amperage stuff in 110v places (probably for some 240v places too, but I’m in a place with notoriously bad electrical everything, fuck if I know)
- Comment on Why God Made Me a Veganivore 🥩🔥 Unlike Weaklings Who Settle for Unfrefined Plants 6 days ago:
Too many people here don’t understand that memes and shitposts are not the same thing.
Decent enough shitpost.
- Comment on Thank you, Thor! 1 week ago:
To be fair, I do this at work and while I get funny looks I do get complicated ideas across better when I can provide visual aid.
Frankly I need to improve my MS Paint skills. I need to get my mouse handwriting up to at least 70% of the Khan Academy guy’s level.
- Comment on Do you prefer Performance mode or Quality mode? 1 week ago:
sufficient performance > sufficient beauty > power usage > max beauty > max performance
This is basically alien to me. I think it has to be game specific.
Euro Truck Simulator? Beauty is more important than performance, unless playing it on my handheld, in which case I can knock the FPS limiter down to 40 and crank the settings down
Satisfactory? Performance over everything.
Granted most of the games I play are older (so I don’t need to choose) or CPU-bound simulation games (Raising the graphics doesn’t make it run meaningfully slower if your CPU is the bottleneck).
Although I must also point out that I think the current trend of “fidelity=beauty” is ridiculous. I recently played INFRA, a game built in Source, and while the fidelity was clearly “outdated”, the game looked fantastic.
Plugging my system into a Kill A Watt was enlightening.
Laptop gaming is a harsh but educational mistress re: power consumption (even when it’s plugged in), I’ll tell you that. All the heat you generate is right in front of your face, as is all the airflow (and noise) needed to wick it away.
- Comment on Why is Lemmy attempting to radicalise people to enforce class wars? 1 week ago:
Is the resident Lemmy population becoming too easy to troll?
Hello lemmings are you all left wing because you are CIA and racist?
12 upvotes 912 downvotes 1,210 comments 14 reports
- Comment on Nightmare fuel 2 weeks ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratothoa_oestroides
Geographically given where I am, it’s probably this one
- Comment on Nightmare fuel 2 weeks ago:
Seems like a similar species is common where I am.
- Comment on Why American Films Are Objectively The Best, post # 1/17 2 weeks ago:
In no particular order, here are some games I’ve enjoyed most in the past decade or so (and found most interesting to shill to my friends):
- The Roottrees are Dead (online sleuthing game, with a cool but slightly campy story, wears its Obra Dinn influence on its sleeve a bit too obviously for some people)
- Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (Cities Skylines for people who understand economics are more than just dollar signs and tweets, it’s more like Factorio than SimCity)
- Hacknet (Learn basic command line stuff in a game about hacking)
- Duskers (atmospherically amazing game about controlling distant drones in hostile environments. Genuinely chilling)
- Chants of Senaar (language deciphering game)
- Outer Wilds (le le le dae hidden gem for a reason)
- Dyson Sphere Project (more Factorio)
- Satisfactory (you guessed it, more Factorio, but very different environment than most of these games)
- Factorio
- Shapez (minimalistic Factorio, with a less minimalistic sequel)
- Nomifactory (Minecraft modpack that was formerly known as Omnifactory. It’s more Factorio.)
- Curse of the Golden Idol (finally a good retro adventure mystery thing)
- Return of the Obra Dinn (immaculate game.)
- CHR$143 (Zachlike-ish)
- Kerbal Space Program (my next obsession)
- INFRA (one of my favorite games of all time, I’ve written about this extensively, a sort of urbex walking simulator with incredible atmosphere, deep deep lore, amazing world building, and light puzzles, that goes on for about 40 more hours than you expect it to)
- Hexcells Trilogy (puzzles)
- Hexologic (similar puzzles)
- Baba Is You (puzzles that make you think you’re an idiot)
- NaissancE (I don’t know how to describe this, I think it’s free)
- Manifold Garden (you dreamed about this game when you were 8 years old, decades before it existed)
- The Big Con (be gay do crime 90s)
- Death Stranding (this game is so boring, I played it for 200 hours and got every achievement, I love it, it sucks)
- The Forgotten City (this started its life as a Skyrim mod and still has that baggage)
- Mostly Intense Monster Defense (PvZ homage)
- The Witcher (1) (CRPG with a cool world. Needs a few mods to cut down on tedium. Pretty different from its sequels but it has a special place in my heart)
- Binary Domain (absolute schlock, but from a previous era of gaming. Not necessarily a good game, but cool to see from a historical perspective.)
- Cultist Simulator (needs an eternity of patience but I promise there is something in there)
- SLUDGE LIFE (SLUDGE LIFE)
- What Remains of Edith Finch (I fucking love walking simulators with good writing and cool art)
- Promesa (obscure walking simulator, it’s barely a game, I love it)
- CUCCCHI (check above description, same guy. Artistic showcase of a painter called Enzo Cuccchi. I’m not a modern art guy, but seeing these works contorted into worlds to walk through… a unique and interesting experience. Soundtrack is someone’s once-lost old experimental tracks and it absolutely slaps)
- Please Touch the Artwork 1 and 2 (one of them is free, funded by the Belgian public art fund. Weird and cool)
- Betrayal at Club Low (part of a series of games by Cosmo D, this one is different from the previous few. The first, Off Peak, is free, but it’s also the least polished. Astonishingly excellent music, there’s some cool lore in this series. The art style is a bit out there but this guy’s stuff is gold)
- Engare and Tandis (mathematical patterns puzzlers, I promise they’re so cool)
- What the Golf? (An actually good mobile game. I mostly played it with a controller on my TV lol)
- Cities Skylines (my beloved)
- Comment on Why American Films Are Objectively The Best, post # 1/17 2 weeks ago:
And then they give a passionate interview about how the original Jeg Spiser Pis short film from 1993 informed their entire creative journey, before immediately going on to direct Mario Movie Minecraft 3 starring Dwayne the Rock Johnson as Sheep and Tilda Swinton as Cat Bowser 64 ft. Ariana Grande burger
- Comment on Why American Films Are Objectively The Best, post # 1/17 2 weeks ago:
I have watched a fair few nigh incoherent French movies with a plot that is simultaneously either the most complex or most banal story ever written (that doesn’t get resolved at the end). You could find me at the one specialty cinema in Beirut every other weekend before it completely collapsed financially in 2020 back when our economy did the funni
I get that a lot of this is turning people off but this is shockingly accurate of a lot of mid arthouse stuff. It’s like trash TV but for movie tryhards. I love it. For the French ones, I almost feel like the experience is worsened by my grasp of the language.
Since then I’ve all but stopped watching movies and even series and have moved to games full time. There’s so much more genuinely fun weird interesting shit.
- Comment on Nightmare fuel 2 weeks ago:
Horrifying. Thanks for the link, although to be honest I probably could have googled “fish tongue parasite isopod” at some point in the past decade+.
Interesting that the Wikipedia page has photos that wouldn’t have rang the bell for me, the one I remember was exactly like the one in the post.
- Comment on Nightmare fuel 2 weeks ago:
A foundational memory for me was a fish dissection in middle school in which we respectfully sliced the innards of one of these bad boys only to find this exact parasite inside. All the other groups just had a fish to dissect, but we also took a supercurricular lab detour to dissect that other thing too, as my classmates from other groups gathered around with real curiosity.
Frankly haven’t thought much of it in years. Would be cool to know what this is actually called.
- Comment on You can do it. It's an easy one 2 weeks ago:
j 8 sss LED 3
Tap for spoiler
Π ≈ 3 ≈ e as we all know
- Comment on Have you noticed 3 weeks ago:
I know Lemmy is mostly populated by computer touchers (I’m one of them) but Pep Guardiola is probably one of the most recognizable human beings on planet earth
- Comment on we are not the same 4 weeks ago:
Hm. Interesting how negatively coded this scene is when I hear people talk about their own “that one dream public bathroom”.
I distinctively remember mine having knee-high cloudy water, but it was very dark. My innate “understanding” in the dream is that the water is some kind of natural feature, not sewage. I don’t remember the sinks, tissues, cleanliness or of the bowls, or anything, just the incredibly weird layout and flooding, and the weird lack of privacy due to the doors and walls of the stalls being higher to accommodate the water.
US style stalls where you can conveniently park your XXXL truck under the divider aren’t a thing here.
- Comment on Mindfulness 5 weeks ago:
Driving leisurely through a nice lush valley? God what a marvel of engineering this crumbling manual 1994 Kia shitbox is. Driving is so calming. Radio off, windows down, I want to hear the birds and the terrible engine. I don’t even care that second gear doesn’t bite anymore. This is nice.
Driving in start stop traffic? God I hate how we’ve defaced our planet, our home, just to enrich these blood sucking oil companies. The Ottomans and the French built railroads and streetcars here during our servitude. And what did we do with that silver lining? Tore it all out to sell more cars and petrol. For shame. All of these people’s lives are measurably worse from wasting their lives on the road.
Driving at a normal speed in a normal area with people driving around me at normal speed, pedestrians, street lights, traffic cops, nobody is crashing, I’m not crashing, I’m barely even thinking about doing it? bro what tHE FUCK WHAT
- Comment on I am bereaved 1 month ago:
Here’s another one, professionally voice acted for maximum effect.
- Comment on Anon isn't fooled by planes 1 month ago:
- Comment on LOVE THEM 1 month ago:
Extremely underrated game, even after it received popular sequels. I’m shocked nobody talks about the original Witcher game. I played it way after it was released in around 2017 and found it refreshing, like a slightly more modern classic RPG with actual classic game design, plus a few quirks (combat stances and so on).
The enhanced edition looks perfectly fine. I think I’ve hit the stage in my life where I care more about graphics looking cohesive and how the art style serves the game’s vibe than I care about garish post-processing and needlessly complex models and textures.
TW1, visually, has a sort of dreamy fantastical blandness with bursts of really cool visual interest. Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that serve the concept of a video game well?
- Comment on What's the worst spelling you've seen? 1 month ago:
I’m now thinking of that classic post from the old site that shows someone’s painstakingly cursive-written note of the entire text of a bluescreen (the old bluescreen with a lot of characters on screen) for tech support.
And thinking of a slightly more tech inclined grandma who doesn’t quite get all of it having a problem with a torrent and just reading the infohash/magnet link to the ISP’s support call center.
- Comment on Fucking google did it again, they "fixed" something that never broken. This time they make thumbnails way too big even with 70% zoom 1 month ago:
Posy is my spirit animal.
This happened to me too and the Ublock filter fixed it. I dread to think of the day YouTube is made to be completely unfixable.
- Comment on How I view others in social media 1 month ago:
Punchline Situation is Diabolical
@SomeDude 8 hours ago
2.8M Views
- Comment on Nintendo Updates Its User Agreement To Crack Down On Emulation 1 month ago:
Been thinking of getting a used Switch Mini exclusively to solder in a chip and use it as a nice emulation handheld. As long as it doesn’t rat itself out over Bluetooth or something to its older brother gathering dust behind the tv (which has never been touched by the light of piracy), I should still be good I guess.
It’s unfortunate, but what I’m actually worried about is that world where different devices will report on each other.
- Comment on Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts 2 months ago:
I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.
The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.
Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.
I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.
- Comment on Stumbled upon this art (?) in Korea 2 months ago:
Huh. The image was very weird to me, but I’ve played some version of this as a kid. Team one makes this structure against a wall, team two send people to jump and crawl forward, the goal being to break the “bridge”. I can’t even remember what we fucking called this game, this was in Lebanon in the late aughts/early tens.
There’s something about how most teenage boys are wired that made it feel exceptionally badass when your team was on the bottom and you didn’t crumple when it was the turn of one of the large gentlemen on the other team to jump.
- Comment on Relatable 2 months ago:
It’s called talent, learn it.
- Comment on I know you all have big plans for this man 2 months ago:
I don’t know if I’d say Daggerfall to Morrowind was a step backwards. In terms of years they’re not all that far apart. But in terms of capturing the philosophy of their respective eras? I’d call them two different types of maximalism, before things coalesced into the distilled Skyrim experience.
Both of those games were before my time, but the impression I get with Daggerfall is that this was right when PCs started getting enough memory to go crazy and build giant procedurally generated worlds. Morrowind is like that with maximizing graphics and sounds, it’s in that first generation of games that aged differently to everything that came before. As dated as Morrowind looks, it still looks really high effort and (dare I say it) artfully designed. It’s much more of a game, while DF feels to me like a game program. Am I making any sense?
- Comment on Necromancer skill 2 months ago:
They said they thought it was great. Surely it can only be one of these two?
