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@pulsewidth@lemmy.world
- Comment on This is the smallest print size i've ever seen 1 day ago:
I came looking for the meme pic, stayed for the story.
- Comment on 'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup 1 week ago:
Didn’t confuse them with anyone, they put out a quarterly report as all publicly-traded companies do, and they’re on track to do over $2 billion in profit this year ($17b revenue).
What I didn’t go into depths to describe is that the vast majority of their money goes to big labels and several big artists they have less-favourable (to Spotify) contracts with, because those big labels and artists know they can pressure Spotify to get a bigger slice.
So, they continue to give most artists, especially small/new artists next to nothing, exploiting them.
Nothing I said is innacurate IMO.
- Comment on 'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup 1 week ago:
How about just boycott it because it’s terrible for artists? It pays four tenths of a tenth of a cent per stream ($0.004), while raking in billions of profit each year.
Spotify’s whole business model is exploitation.
Listen to music on whatever service, then if you like the artists music - buy the album, or the track / single. Sure, you may support fewer artists this way, but each artist gets paid literally 2500 times as much (album averages 9.99).
- Comment on Alley cat lunch 1 week ago:
I know and I was waiting for someone to complain, even though it doesn’t affect the accuracy of the comment. You have won this bouquet of Dutch flowers: 💐
- Comment on Alley cat lunch 1 week ago:
Its pickled, not raw. Scandinavians have been pickling fish for a very long time and it’s worked out OK so far.
- Comment on PM breaks silence to back US military strikes on Iran 1 week ago:
The simple and truthful thing to say was that the US had no evidence of nuclear weapons being built and so we are unclear of any justification for this strike - or simply not comment on it if he doesn’t want to anger the US. Australia does not want to be dragged into another war of aggression to help America’s oil&gas and militarily-industrial industries.
But that was apparently too much to hope for.
Albo’s better than any Liberal party leader would be, but we can do much better.
- Comment on Add it to the pile of reasons to hate 'em 1 week ago:
Ahh yes, Wikipedia is wrong, books on aluminium and scientific naming are also wrong, evidence…? trust me bro. Once again you keep the parts from Wikipedia you like, but discard facts counter to your point.
What’s the point in engaging further, we’ve reached peak comedy. 👌
- Comment on Add it to the pile of reasons to hate 'em 2 weeks ago:
Edited my comment for more clarity. But the etymology of the spelling is all in the Wikipedia article if you’d just read that small ‘spelling’ section instead of stopping when you feel you’ve read something that backs your point. It was 100% driven by American marketers, not “Brits changing their minds”.
[…] in 1892, Hall used the Aluminum spelling in his advertising handbill for his new electrolytic method of producing the metal, despite his constant use of the Aluminium spelling in all the patents he filed between 1886 and 1903. It is unknown whether this spelling was introduced by mistake or intentionally, but Hall preferred aluminum since its introduction because it resembled platinum, the name of a prestigious metal.[141] By 1890, both spellings had been common in the United States, the -ium spelling being slightly more common; by 1895, the situation had reversed; by 1900, aluminum had become twice as common as aluminium; in the next decade, the -um spelling dominated American usage. In 1925, the American Chemical Society adopted this spelling.[135]
- Comment on Add it to the pile of reasons to hate 'em 2 weeks ago:
The only reason it’s called ‘Aluminum’ in the US is that name was popularised in the Webster’s dictionary in the US as he took the name that marketers were using at the time (as they thought it sounded fancy like Platinum). Prior to that it was widely called ‘Aluminium’ in the US as well as the rest of the world - as it was the dominant name scientifically, and nobody else used it as it wasn’t widely commercially used.
This is all on Wikipedia, dunno why people feel the need to make up their own stories every single time this comes up, but it does make us laugh.
- Comment on Add it to the pile of reasons to hate 'em 2 weeks ago:
The English ‘stole’ words from the French in the same way half the European world ‘stole’ Roman roads, words, and customs.
They were colonised by the Normans you silly codswallop. The British retain French words because they were forced on them by the aristocracy a thousand years ago.
- Comment on Try it today! 2 weeks ago:
“I bet you could hold so many apples in these, step-gammy”
- Comment on 10 years later, no one has replicated Rocket League's mojo 2 weeks ago:
Yeah i’ll remember the good times fondly for sure. In its peak it was a great time and I don’t regret the time spent one bit.
The puck added a fun dimension, being able to fairly effortlessly run it up walls or onto the roof (compared to the ball), and the wonderful semi-glitchy physics of pinch hits on the flat surface of a puck. Nothing like pinch-hitting it against another player’s vehicle and watching the puck rocket unstoppably across into the goal. “Calculated”.
- Comment on 10 years later, no one has replicated Rocket League's mojo 2 weeks ago:
“NICE SHOT!”
“NICE SHOT!”
“GREAT PASS!”In their defense I don’t think they could have come up with any standard chat lines that wouldn’t be used sarcastically by toxic players.
If I was a dev if you spammed the lines 3 times in a row I’d change the third one to something to diffuse the hate, from a random selection of lines that are hard to take sarcastically. "I love you! ", “Wooo!”, etc
- Comment on 10 years later, no one has replicated Rocket League's mojo 2 weeks ago:
Yeah agreed. Best time to get into most competition games is when they’re in their ‘growing playerbase’ phase with lots of new players, still room for casual players. Then they slowly get pushed out.
There’s room for modes that encourage casual fun though to keep that part of the playerbase active, which is what made Psyonix’s decisions so frustrating.
- Comment on 10 years later, no one has replicated Rocket League's mojo 2 weeks ago:
TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.
Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?
This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.
At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??
Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
- Comment on Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community 2 weeks ago:
The Internet Archive. No need to reinvent the wheel. Have a discussion with them - set up a new project. Boom - everyone’s mods hosted in perpetuity by a free digital library.
- Comment on Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community 2 weeks ago:
Since mods are almost exclusively unable to be copyrighted nowadays, there is a very good chance the Internet Archive would be more than happy to host the mod data - as they have with many community projects.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Its just as risky for a non-American buying from a US company. And despite what others have said, customs can be a point of interception. But it’s not customs you need to worry about, they hand-off to the spy agencies to do their thing when they get a valid order to do so. Example program:
arstechnica.com/…/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factor…
Like others have said though, your threat model is what’s important. And if you are a person of interest to security agencies eg a whistleblower or journalist then you’d be wise to have someone you know make the purchase instead of you.
I’d be more concerned about Chinese products in general, as they have been caught again and again with pre-embedded untargeted malware. Meaning, everyone who ordered that model got a helping of malware, not just those under active surveillance by three letter agencies.
A few examples in this blog entry: georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/…/flawed-by-d…
- Comment on Do you care about up/down votes? 3 weeks ago:
I’m onto you’re plan
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 4 weeks ago:
Fair enough. I don’t see Mormons or Jehovah’s as ‘not Christians’ though, nor do they as they believe in Christ as the son of their God - which is really all it takes to be a Christian fundamentally. However I do agree that the practices of the Mormon and JW church are very manipulative and controlling to their followers in the way cults often are, and overall a negative impact to the lives of most of their followers (except those at the top).
When people brand certain Christians as not Christian because they don’t follow Christs teachings the way they believe they should be followed or by some other personal metric then it quickly becomes a ‘No True Scotsman’ situation.
- Comment on What's going on with Borderlands 2? Steam is giving it for free, but the game has 23% positive recent reviews. 4 weeks ago:
Would it shock you to know that ALL of these are in the Steam terms of service also?
The only really sus one to me is the forced arbitration clause, and Steam also had that til they were pressured to remove it by multiple legal cases, including a class action brought to them by Steam user just last September. It is only sus because it’s outdated - companies are generally removing them now rather than adding them. legal.io/…/Valve-Removes-Mandatory-Arbitration-fr…
RE: remaining top 5 bullet points, 3 of the remaining 4 bullet points are uncontroversial bullet points about anticheat. The fourth is banning modding, which is also just a heavy handed anticheat attempt, and not uncommon for online games to add to their ToS to allow banning at their discretion. Either way its clumsy at the least as some mods can be harmless eg HUD mods for colourblind people and deserves some negativity - but not to this level, given everything else is just so boilerplate.
Collected data types: these are all for if you buy stuff with a credit card / paypal / etc off 2k/parent company Take 2. Remember, they sell games with in-game purchases. They also have an app which has location permissions option which is what the precise location is about.
So yes - again, as OP said, this is nothing controversial if you have paid attention to ToS meaning and content over the past 20 years.
Aside from the forced arbitration crap - which Steam, Microsoft, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, Google, AT&T - and hundreds of other major companies all snuck into their ToS over the years, and many have now been legally pressured to remove by consumer rights group. That is stupid because it shows their legal team is behind the times, companies are mostly removing their forced arbitration clauses nowadays because it has been the cause of many lost class actions.
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 4 weeks ago:
I can completely believe you - but this man is a certified psychologist and has lectured and even written psychology textbooks, right? When I watched a few videos in the past (circa 2017) to find out who this guy the alt right was falling in love with was, I took away from it that broadly he was a grifter selling himself & books, but as for his discussions on psychology I’m a layman so couldn’t digest some of it. He sure does seem to think the world starts and ends with Carl Jung though, almost every problem had a solution that came back to a Jungian archetype.
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 4 weeks ago:
He literally wanted to open a church and deliver servons every Sunday. He is not an atheist, he is just a charlatan.
Highly recommend anyone interested in him read this article / open letter written by an (ex) close friend and colleague, back in 2018.
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 4 weeks ago:
He is 100% a Christian - a rather devout and conservative one at that, he just doesn’t like to admit it in public as he doesn’t like to agree to any premise on anything he believes in, or really any statement he’s made - as he’d then have trouble linguistically dancing around it when it was no longer convenient for whatever argument he was in.
If you’ve not read this open letter / article written by a colleague and (ex) close friend of Jordan’s way back in 2018 I highly recommend it to everyone researching him. Though it is long it gives a lot of insight into who he is behind closed doors, and his aspirations.
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 4 weeks ago:
Succinctly put. In retrospect his behavior is classical grifting, but because he’s so well educated in psychology and has spent decades lecturing students he’s well armed to win over the 16-30yo disenfranchised/semi-intellectual male audience without them realizing.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Ehh. The default setting of life is to be ignorant - not politically engaged. So when someone does something like this meme they generally just go back to (now willful) ignorance.
Essentially they’re Cypher from the Matrix, but instead of having their memories wiped with machine technology they use Ambien and Champagne.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Most school curriculums nowadays have critical thinking interwoven as important parts of the STEM classes, in both primary and high school. Its not exclusive to college graduates, however if you do a philosophy course then you will have learned the highest level of it - and I’m sure many school systems around the world have varying degrees of quality of education.
But agreed it is absolutely something that people are not born with and must (and should) be taught.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Sorry but that is wrong. You are using the textbook definition of confirmation bias.
Critical thinking “is the process of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to make sound conclusions or informed choices. It involves recognizing underlying assumptions, providing justifications for ideas and actions, evaluating these justifications through comparisons with varying perspectives, and assessing their rationality and potential consequences.”
- Comment on 8BitDo no longer shipping to US from China due to Trump tariffs 2 months ago:
Am I wrong or do the 8BitDo controllers almost all have inbuilt batteries of unusual capacities? They could just build them to use standard AAA or AA rechargeables, but instead they do proprietary batteries which 8BitDo happily sell replacements for - sure seems like a path to more e-waste.
