Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG shares their thoughts on preservation in the face of payment processor crackdowns⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Here in Europe, GOG support pretty much all the local payment systems (they’ll make available as selection the ones for your country on checkout) most of which are pretty straightforward to use nowadays an even come integrated with the banking phone apps.

  Personally I switched from Paypal to one of those on my GOG purchases due to the whole censorship debacle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aged like milk⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Live by the sword …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Time to bash Americans again⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, in my experience it’s the immigrants themselves doing it and never the locals.

  Further, even in a poorer European country like Portugal I’ve never heard say, Germans or French calling themselves “expats” even though those are much more wealthy nations - it’s pretty much only Brits and Americans living there who speak of themselves as “expats”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Foolproof advice⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The stinkier the cheese, the more the fascination!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Foolproof advice⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  … not forgetting to add a term of endearement, such as “sweetie”, “honey” or “babe”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Time to bash Americans again⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience people will use “immigrant” to talk about were they’re from by referring their nationality (i.e. “I’m a Portuguese immigrant”) or explicitly adding a “from” and then using the country name (i.e. “I’m an immigrant from Portugal”).

  If talking about where they’re an immigrant in, they will explicitly use “in” (i.e. “I’m an immigrant in The Netherlands”).

  Even though “emmigrant” is about where you were born and aren’t living in anymore and “immigrant” is about were you went to, in my experience emmigrant is only ever used when physically in one’s country of original and talking about living elsewhere (i.e. when in Portugal I would say “I’m an emigrant” whilst when in The Netherlands I would say “I’m an immigrant”).

  It’s funny since as I’m writting this I remembered that when I first left my country of birth to go live abroad it actually took me a while to figure out the proper usage of the whole immigrant/emmigrant thing.

  As I said, I was an immigrant in The Netherlands and worked often with other immigrants from all over there (mainly because until I learned Dutch I could only work in English-speaking environments and in my area - software engineering - those attracted immigrants), and most people would use “immigrant” when talking about were they came from (i.e. “I’m a French immigrant”) and I only ever heard expat used instead of immigrant by people from Anglo-Saxon nations, overwhelmingly Brits and Americans.

  That said, “expat” was used as a single word combining both “immigrant” and “emigrant” - in other words, unlike with the immigrant/emmigrant pair, the single word expat is valid both when one is physically on one’s country of origin and when one is physically in one’s host country: when I lived in Britain I did hear Britons saying that they were “expats” and meaning it as “living elsewhere than Britain”.

  And yeah, 2nd generation don’t call themselves expats, but they also don’t call themselves immigrants. It’s only people from outside talking in general about people who are the direct descendants of immigrants in a country who will use “2nd generation immigrants” for the groups as a whole. Calling somebody who is a national of that country and has immigrant parents “an immigrant” in that country is only ever used as an insult by Far-Right extremists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Time to bash Americans again⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  From my own experience as an immigrant in The Netherlands, “expat” is generally used by Americans and Brits and nobody else. I mean, I’ve seen on or two Ozzies using it but it’s way rarer with them and I’ve never seen, for example, other Europeans immigrants there refereing to themselves as “expats”.

  I think “expat” is more a thing of people who thing they come from a “great country”, as if somehow it’s a priviledge for the other country to have them there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Time to bash Americans again⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  From my observation when living in The Netherlands as an immigrant (from Portugal) sometimes working in companies with lots of foreigners, most of us said of ourselves as being “immigrants”, except Americans and Brits who often said they were “expats”.

  Curiously, generally the other people from different nations, including the Dutch, would use immigrant rather than expat when refering to the status of the self-proclaimed “expats” in that country - “expat” was very much their label for themselves.

  The Americans and Brits were there in average for just a long as the rest.

  I don’t think it’s really length of stay, at least not directly, I think it’s about the immigrant believing or not that their country of origin is a “greater country” than the country they’re living in. You can see this for example in places like Spain where British retirees have retired to and live the rest of their lives in their own Little Britain communities calling themselves “expats”.

  This also matched to how some of the British immigrants most pissed of about their homeland (for example, a gay guy who had to move to The Netherlands to marry his partner, as back then that was not allowed in Britain) made a point of using “immigrant” for themselves instead of “expat”.

  It’s about national delusions of grandeur, IMHO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There are two ways to deal with one’s position in the Social Ladder: one can either concentrate one’s efforts in climbing up or one can concentrate one’s efforts into keeping the ones below down.

  IMHO, the US used to have mainly the former, but not anymore, whilst the UK (at least by the time I got there, in the 00s) has mostly the latter (and judging by this traditional idea that “people should know their place”, it has been so for a long time).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I keenly remember this Polish immigrant in Britain interviewed on TV who was in favor of Brexit very overtly so than no more people came.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  More broadly, it’s all Tribalism.

  You’ll see it at many levels, not only towards the “outsiders” in nation terms (and examples are not only the anti-immigrant discourse but also in the discourse mainly blaming a country’s problems on some “foreign power” or other, in both cases as insiders didn’t have vastly more power than such outsiders) but also at various other tribal levels (race, political party, region, city and even town in so-called “small town” environments).

  The human tendency from Tribalism will turn even otherwise “good people” (but not very competent when it comes to introspection or having a strong keen sense of what is Just) into mindless “us vs them” drones who are easy to manipulate into blaming outsiders for the outcomes of the actions of insiders.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyone wants a turn⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Free Wheely!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Private water company increases CEO pay by nearly 100%. This is how Steve Reeds, UK water minister, reacts⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Steal the cake from the public.

  Slice it up and sell the slices to the fatcats at discounted prices.

  Throw a few crumbs towards members of the public and claim that “now everybody can own it”.

  It’s been the neoliberal strategy for privatizing public assets since the very start.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Well that didn't work out as planned⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Interestingly as an European I didn’t even thought about school buses when I read the shitpost and instead a regular public transport bus was what popped into my mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Well that didn't work out as planned⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Public Transportation is no joke!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NANDalf!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a NAND gate (back is flat like the AND, front has the little ball on the output to indicate it’s negated). The back of the OR/NOR is curvy.

  AND is “Only both shall pass” hence NAND is “No more than one one shall pass” (which are the other logical options).

  As other pointed out what you’re describing is the negation of a XOR (which is “no more and no less than one shall pass”), i.e. NXOR.

  OR would be “One or both shall pass” hence NOR would be “None shall pass”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So Long to Tech's Dream Job: It’s the shut up and grind era, tech workers said, as Apple, Google, Meta and other giants age into large bureaucracies.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even the “facilities” they offered before were meant for achieving one objective whilst claiming to have a different purpose, like Google’s “relax areas” which the techies never had time to use and whose purpose was actually to attract candidates by projecting the idea that Google was a relaxed work environment (rather than the neverending death march of it has been for more than a decade) or their free shuttles to work so that people actually worked during their commute without that being counted as work time which were sold as being to help Google employees with their commute.

  I was in Tech back in the 90s bubble and already back then things like the Aeron chairs, office get togethers and pizza parties were just hypocrite ploys to get people to work long hours for free and to make their office the center of their social life so that they would be less likely to move jobs.

  Companies expecting you to put in 50, 60, 80+ hours a week, don’t actually care about you or your well being and all their non-monetary “benefits” should be examined with a skeptical eye and the assumption that they’ll gain from it in some way until proven otherwise: it’s not always selfish and sometimes one’s direct manager genuinelly wants people on the team to feel good: a good way to spot it is how reacted if you say “not interested, I’ll just take that as time off instead” - if they’re ok with it, then it’s genuine good will, if they try and pressure you or refuse the time off part the whole thing was meant to serve objectives other than what’s good for team members - but anything coming down from HR or upper management is going to be some kind of ploy to directly or indirectly benefit the company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyone else from Europe feels the same while browsing the "All" feed?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not even “news” - a lot of that shit is just Clown-President does yet another thing that a Clown would do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t control your peons, you mainly define zones were certain things should happen and the peons go and do it.

  Zones can be for very low level explicit things (such as “cut all trees in this area” or “mine these iron nodes”) or broader activities (for example defining an area for cultivation of a specific plant, were the peons will automatically seed and sow, and you don’t even have to assigned specific peons to it).

  There are a few single-action commands (say, toggle this machine ON/OFF) but again they’re not peon-specific (you just signal that the machine needs to be toggled ON or OFF and somebody will get around to do it),

  You can force a specific peon to do a specific action just once, but it’s seldom used or useful.

  You do normally control your peons directly for warfare, though.

  In practice, you vaguely control who does which kind of things and with which priority via a control board where you define priorities per type of activity and per-peon, so basically a high-level management tool.

  My impression is that there is a little bit of micromanagement but very little.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s basically a survival management game where the skills of the peons you control are random and the terrain and broader world are procedurally generated.

  Whilst the graphics are simple, the actual gameplay is solid and interesting with enough depth to keep you interested for many hours, The randomly generated per-game terrain and peons means that even though one can get bored after playing for tens of hours (maybe a bit over 100h), after a couple of months playing something else Rimworld is interesting again because whilst the game mechanics don’t change between games (hence to a point you do “crack the game”), the game space is different for every game hence the situation your colony finds itself in is different too,

  If you like that survival and/or management games it’s well worth it if you can get it for 20 bucks or so.

  As for the DLCs, I don’t think they actually add enough to be worth it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even without modding I have in the last couple of years found myself mainly in a cycle of playing the same emergent gameplay (were the game-space and/or game characters are random) games, one game at a time until I get bored then the next and the next until eventually I’m not bored of the earlier played games anymore and start it again.

  These are mostly Indie titles like Factorio, Rimworld and even The Lone Dark in free mode.

  The curated experience - which is what most of the AAA stuff is - just doesn’t have this infinite replayability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  True, such a low number of production units design would really only make sense if you could find an off the shelf solution to drive multiple displays.

  If these displays are not supposed to be animated and they’re reasonably low resolution (say, 800x600 20bit RGB or less), they could be connected via SPI and pretty much every microcontroller out there has multiple SPI ports, so even a cheap SBC would work for that). However I expect that getting XWindows or Wayland in Linux to work with such displays would be a PITA.

  I’ve only ever got software running under Linux to control a tiny 2-tone display via I2C - on an Orange Pi SBC - and it’s totally its own thing which happens to be running under Linux sending low-level commands via the I2C dev and not at all integrated with X-Windows or Wayland. This would also work fine if the comms was via SPI (in fact the code barelly changes since I’m using a library that does most of the low-level work for me).

  To just display a static image or a sequence of static images loaded from storage in a bunch of screens low-resolution enough to support SPI (so 800x600 or less) I expect something like that would be fine.

  The more I think about it, there more I expect this thing could run on a single $50 SBC as long as the connector exposes at least an SPI device and 8 independent I/O lines (given how SPI works, shared SPI bus is fine with one separate Chip Select line for each screen as long as the SPI device under Linux can run on a mode that lets your code control the CS line itself, and the other 4 I/O lines are for touch detection) assuming touch position is irrelevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Human replaceable printed paper labels, manual stick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What I describe goes well beyond things with screens.

  For example computer mice have a microcontroller inside (and unless it serves a mechanical function, not much more than that) and cars have several, only one of which actual handles a proper screen (it’s actually a microprocessor rather than a mere microcontroller).

  The simplest microcontrollers have nowhere near enough memory to handle any half-way decent display (some nothing at all, some can just about handle a two-tone 320x200 display over I2C or SPI, some can handle 640x480 16-bit RGB but without animations as they don’t have enough memory to actual have a buffer for image composition) and yet they keep getting sold in massive numbers.

  Pretty much all digital electronics out there no matter how invisible to users has been replaced by embedded microcontrollers or, in a some use cases, single function controllers (which are basically microcontroller programs converted into integrated circuits).

  Embedded computing was a massive revolution in digital electronics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The difference in what can be done and the amount of work that needs to go into it between discrete digital electronics and just having a microcontroller there is HUGE.

  Also with microcontrollers and microprocessors most of the work moves from Electronics Engineering and circuit-design space to Software Engineering and software development, and the latter experts are easier to find plus the development cycle is way more friendly when it’s just code which you can change and upload at will rather than physical circuits.

  Even more entertaining, microcontrollers are so stupidly cheap (the most basic ones cost a few cents) that throwing in a microcontroller is almost always significantly cheaper than doing the control stuff with discrete electronics.

  I actually got an EE degree back when we embedded circuits were just starting to be used so I didn’t really get taught how to use them, then went for a career in software instead of electronics and came back to digital electronics years later and it’s like night and day between the discrete digital electronics age and the everything is a computing device era.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it just me who feels that having one processing unit per display is a waste?

  I mean, I get it why they did it (it’s way easier to just have one SBC per-display, both on the hardware and the software sides), but if designing such a system I would still try to come up with a single board solution if only because waste gets on my nerves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Also applies perfectly if he’s a Working Class person and the viewer is Middle Class.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In the GDP calculations, the Official Inflation will “deflate” the GDP number calculated in today’s money (the Nominal GDP) to produce the Official GDP number (the Real GDP), so if the Official Inflation is lower than reality, the difference in inflation pretty much “leaks” into a higher GDP number than it should be, or in other words, officially it looks like GDP growth.

  You might have noticed just how much politicians celebrate that they’ve “made the Economy grow”.

  Massaging the Inflation is an easy way to create GDP “Growth” in the official figures and is far more indirect and obscure than massaging the GDP figures themselves so less likely for those doing it to be caught and even if they do only a handful of people actually understand the true significance of what has been done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s more that Official Inflation is a lie and has been a lie for decades, and always in the direction of understating realiy.

  Hence why two money values at different point in time which according to the Official Inflation are equivalent (i.e. one when inflation adjusted using the Official Inflation over the years in between results on the other) have very different purchasing power, the longer the time distance between them the worst.

  It actually makes total sense for politicians to do whatever it takes for Inflation to be understated:

  • Directly because too much Inflation is seen as a bad thing, so if the official number is lower, it looks better.
  • Indirectly because Official Inflation affects the Official GDP - GDP calculation first yields a number in today’s money (the Nominal GDP) which then gets “deflated” by Official Inflation (so, the higher the inflation the smaller it gets) 1to produce the Official GDP (i.e. the Real GDP), so if from year to the next the Official Inflation understates reality the difference ends up making the GDP look bigger which appears as GDP “Growth”, something that in the Neoliberal era politicials harp about like crazy.

  We are being lied to and have been lied to for a long time about the Economic “success” in our Western countries, which is part of the reason why most people keep feeling poorer all the while politicians keep telling us GDP is growing (the other reason being the increase in Inequality).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  At least in the US and UK (and I suspect most of the West), the official inflation has been understating the reality for years (just look at the massive difference between what a salary in the 60s could pay for and the very same inflation-adjusted salary today buys) so the real picture is probably significantly worse.