TheBananaKing
@TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
- Comment on It's 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 Celsius), raining moderately hard, the rain is cold, and there's a guy blowing around wet leaves with a leaf blower. What the hell is the obsession with leaf blowers? 5 days ago:
if I ever live somewhere with a garden, I’m ripping out the grass and planting a dandelawn.
- Comment on Netanyahu claims Melbourne synagogue attack linked to Albanese government’s ‘anti-Israel position’ 2 weeks ago:
Dear albo: netanyahu will never give you the reacharound you’ve been hoping for.
- Comment on What was going on in England in the 1970s to give Monty Python so much comedy fodder that is still relevant today? 2 weeks ago:
The 1970s was going on.
- Comment on Serious statement: I don't understand the argument that not voting for Harris was the morally correct thing to do, because of Gaza. Why does anyone believe this? 1 month ago:
Consider how you’d go about exploiting the opposite case.
If people will always vote for the slightly-less-worse candidate, then you only ever have to be slightly-less-worse than the opposition. You can sleaze right up to them and be almost as corrupt and evil as they are, so long as there’s just a little bit of extra sleaze sticking out that you can point to as the worse alternative. And you can farm the shit out of that, because then the other side never has to improve either - it’s an anti-competitive duopoly, where they both agree to only compete over surface details, not their overall horribleness, leaving them free to sleaze right up to the fucking-monster end of the spectrum.
Presumably a percentage of people refused to enable that behaviour, and said that slightly-less-genocide is a bridge too fucking far.
They made it plain from the outset that if the dems wanted to play chicken on this, the dems would lose. That they were not to big to fail, that daddy wouldn’t bail them out this time; put down the bombs or you’re getting kicked out for real.
The morally-correct choice would have been for the dems to stop supporting genocide, especially with so much at stake.
There’s this huge narrative that’s been consistently pushed that the actions of politicians are beyond accountability, sent down from on high like acts of god, and that moral responsibility lies only with the voters; that it’s meaningless even imagine any obligation for the ruling class to try and be good enough to vote for.
You know, the way the fossil fuel lobby found ways to shift the blame onto the consumer instead of themselves. The way the opioid manufacturers did the same. The way the gun manufacturers did the same. The way plastic manufacturers did the same fucking thing as well. We’ll act however we fucking well want to, and if you don’t like it, that’s literally your problem.
Oh no, you can’t hold us accountable now, it’s the worst possible time. It’s too soon to have this conversation, how can you be so insensitive, can’t you see there’s a highschool full of dead kids?
Somewhere, sometime, people have to say enough. And they did.
- Comment on Houses in my area increases 82% in just 4 years 1 month ago:
:laughs in Australian:
- Submitted 1 month ago to [deleted] | 2 comments
- Comment on No-grounds eviction banned in NSW and rent increases capped at once a year 1 month ago:
If rent-increase caps aren’t part of it, it’s all hilariously worthless.
Want your tenant gone, just put the rent up $10,000 a week, then when they can’t pay, you have grounds to evict. Simples.
- Comment on Should I or should I not use/bother with using Linux? (READ THE WHOLE POST) 1 month ago:
Okay:
You don’t have to deal with scripting and command-line stuff, but all the major tinkering under the hood depends on it. The amount of customisation and tinkering is fairly infinite, so past a certain point you just can’t build graphical stuff to cover every single possible choice - and that’s where the gibberish comes in.
Baseline concepts:
‘Operating system’ means different things in different contexts, and this can be confusing.
Context 1: technically correct
Your computer has a big chip that runs programs, and a bunch of hardware that actually-does-stuff: network card, graphics card, disk drive, mouse, keyboard etc. Programs need to talk to the hardware and make it do stuff, or else they don’t actually… do… anything.
There’s two problems with that:
There’s a gazillion kinds of hardware out there, that all has its own language for talking to it, and your program would either only run on one EXACT set of hardware, or it would have to speak all gazillion languages and be too big to fit on your machine.
The second problem is that in order to do more than one thing at a time, you need a bunch of programs all running at once, and they all need to use the hardware, and without something to coordinate the sharing, they’ll all just fight over it and everything falls down in a tangled heap.
A good analogy for this is a restaurant. They aren’t just public kitchens where you can just wander in and start preparing your own meal, taking ingredients/equipment/space however you want, then just carry it to whatever table takes your fancy - and you definitely can’t have all the customers doing it at once. Especially if they don’t know how all the equipment works, where the different ingredients are kept, etc - it would be an absolute disaster, and there would be fights, injuries, fire and food poisoning.
So instead there’s an agreed-upon system with rules, and people that do the cooking for you. You make a reservation or queue at the desk, you are told which table you can have, you go sit there and a waiter brings you a menu. You pick the food - and depending on the place, maybe ask for customisation - then wait and they bring it out to you, then you sit there, eat it, then leave.
That system-with-rules is the operating system, or more specifically the operating system kernel. Any time a program wants to do more than think to itself, it has to asks the OS to do it, and bring it the results.
In this analogy, fundamentally different operating systems (windows / linux / OSX / android / etc) would be like different kinds of (5-star / sushi-train / pizza place / burger joint / etc) that have different rules and expectations and social-scripts to interact with them. A program written for one OS would have no idea how to ask a different OS for what it wanted, and wouldn’t be able to run there.
Context 2: what people usually mean
It’s all well and good to have a machine that can run programs and do things, but the human sitting in front of it needs to be able to interact with the thing, so you can poke buttons and move files around and move windows and stuff.
And so there needs to be a crapton of programs all working with each other on the thing to provide all this functionality, and the whole user experience - preferably with a consistent design language and general expectation of how everything should work: you need a desktop environment.
In restaruant terms, this would be the specific brand/franchise/corporate-culture that runs the place. Yes, the general idea is that it’s a burger joint, but specifically it’s a mcdonalds, or a wendy’s, or whatever that homophobic chickenburger place is called - it’s got the decor, it’s got the layout, it’s got the specific combo meals, etc etc, the same uniforms, the same staff policy, etc.
Now here’s the thing:
Let’s say there’s only one sushi franchise in the world. That’s like Windows - there’s updates new versions and some slight variations (server versions aside), but you walk into one, you’ve walked into them all. There’s one Windows kernel, and one windows desktop environment that goes with it.
And say there’s only one pizza-place franchise in the world, and they all look the same, have the same menu. That’s like OSX: there’s one kernel, and similarly one OSX desktop enviroment to go with it. A mac is a mac, and it does mac things.
But linux… linux is different. With Linux, it’s there’s 900 different burger-joint franchises in the world, and literally anyone can go start a new one if they want to put the time into designing one from the ground up. The paradigm is the same - order at the counter at the back, menus on the wall overhead, grab bench seating wherever or get it to go - but every place can design the look and feel, the menu, the deals, the other amenities, the staffing structure, etc.
And the different franchises - that’s what distros are.
It’s the set of programs all working together that create a whole working enviroment, but everything uses the standard kernel to actually get stuff done. If your program can run in one linux distro, then it should be able to run in a different one, because your program uses the same standard set of requests in order to do things.
The windows and the menus and the desktop apps and the way the interface behaves and how you configure everything can be different, but the core functionality that the software uses, is the same.
Now, for the most part, Windows is like NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE, all the fiddly internal bits are carefully hidden away and made deliberately opaque. You don’t need to know, we don’t want to tell you, we’ll let you change the wallpaper, but for everything else, we decide how it’s wired up. If you want it to do things slightly differently to suit your own workflow, tough.
Macs are kind of the same deal: for the most part it’s no-touchee, you’ll break stuff. Just push the very shiny buttons and be happy that everything Just Works ™.
But Linux… doesn’t seal anything in plastic. All the gubbins are not only there on display, they’re mostly all human-readable and human-tinkerable with. Instead of mysterious monolithic chunks of software communicating with each other via hidden channels, with configuration in databases you don’t get to see… it’s mostly scripts you can read and tinker with, and plain-text config files you can edit, all writing useful details in highly-visible log files that you can read through when things don’t do what they’re supposed to.
Now with a lot of distros, you absolutely can just push buttons and treat the thing like a Windows box, and never have to tinker with the fiddly bits. You’ve got a browser, you’ve got apps, you’ve got games, it just does the thing. But if you want to start getting technical, you absolutely can - unlike windows or mac.
But this very ability to configure and tinker and patch bits on - and the fact that most distros don’t have a gigantic microsoft-sized coordinated team all following one shared vision, but are wired together like a kind of junkyard frankenstein from thousands of separate teams as a labour of love - means that occasionally you will need to get technical to deal with small annoyances or use-cases they didn’t think of.
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 2 months ago:
Obviously ideas of fun vary; people are allowed to enjoy things I don’t like :)
Also I’m not rampantly disagreeing with you here, just picking at the edges for discussion because it still doesn’t sit quite right in my head.
It’s just… sometimes I feel like the implementation of complexity in these things is just kind of lazy, comparable to adding difficulty by making enemy bullet-sponges. It’s certainly more work to defeat them, but is that work rewarding?
Consider the annoyance that triggered this whole post.
In grim dawn, mid way through elite. I had some gloves with fairly miserable specs for my level, but they were providing most of my vitality res. Can I change them out?
Well there’s some with better overall specs but no vitality but they do have a lot of fire res, so I could swap those in, then the ring I was getting lots of fire res from could go, and there’s one with some vitality but unfortunately no poison, so let’s see, I do have a helmet that …
spongebob_three_hours_later.jpg
… but now my vitality is three points too low to equip the pants, oh fuck off. How is this fun?
Finding a reasonable solution doesn’t make you feel clever, and making an awkward compromise doesn’t feel like a justifiable sacrifice, it feels like you finally got too exhausted to search through more combinations and gave up. You can’t really look forward to getting better gear to fill a gap, because you’re going to have to go round and round in circles again trying to build a whole new set around the deficiencies that come with it.
It’s like debating against a Gish Gallop - taxing to keep up with but without any real sense of achievement.
And honestly it doesn’t feel like that’s really intended to be the real gameplay. If the genre is really a build-planning-combinatorics game with a bit of monster-bashing on the side, where’s the quality-of-life UX to go with it? Where’s management tools to bring the actual problem-domain to the fore? Where’s the sort-rank-and-filter, where’s the multi-axis comparisons? Where’s the saved equipment sets? Why is the whole game environment and all the interface based around the monster-bashing, if that’s just the testing phase? And if navigating hostile UX is part of the the challenge, then again I say that challenge is bad game design.
And all the layered mechanics across the genre feel like that: bolted on and just kind of half-assed, keeping the problem-domain too hard to work on because of externalities rather than the innate qualities of the problem itself. I know, let’s make the fonts really squirly and flickery so you can only peer at the stats for five minutes before you get a headache, that’ll give people a challenging time constraint to work with.
Did you ever play mass-effect: Andromeda, with the shitty sudoku minigame bolted on to the area unlocks? You know how that just… didn’t make the game fun?
That.
Also it seems to me that if the prep-work was really the majority drawcard, we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for. Build your character, let it bot through the map (or just do an action montage), then come back with a bunch of loot and XP to play with before sending it out again.
I think an ideal game would hit all three kinds of satisfaction: tactics/graaagh, exploration/harvesting and mastery/optimisation. And ideally, each of those three targets would be free of external complications and left to focus on their own innate challenge and rewards.
I know that’s easy to say and hard to do… I’m just surprised that we haven’t got signficantly better at it in the last couple of decades.
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 2 months ago:
I’ve played the crap out of both; they’re really good.
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 2 months ago:
And that’s entirely valid; like I say, stardew gameplay is immensely satisfying in and of itself.
I just feel like all these other mechanisms in arpgs are thrown on top to try and disguise the nature of the thing, and it’s that disparity that leaves people jaded.
Stardew doesn’t have an endless progression of increasingly fell and eldritch vegetables that need you to constantly grind for upgrades just to tend to them. You water things in one click all the way through, and that feels good; you don’t need to chase a sawtooth pseudo-progression in order to be satisfied.
Stardew doesn’t make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character, or drown you in overly complex interactions so you can’t usefully plan in your head; there’s complexity there, but of the kind that opens up more options.
It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.
Why is that?
Why does gory-stardew need all those external obfuscations, when the normal kind doesn’t?
How could you make a gory-stardew that’s comfortable in its own skin?
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 2 months ago:
I have absolutely no wish to dumb them down.
As I said, if you just took away all those mechanics, you’d be left with a boring empty game.
What I said was that it would be nice if you could make the combat feel more like hunting than gathering, so you wouldn’t have to make up for it with a:) number-go-up and b:) np-hard - then you could then go for much more enriching forms of complexity.
For instance, making mobs fight a lot more tactically as their level increases instead of just stacking on the HP and damage - and instead of your perks just driving stat inflation, they unlocked new tactical options on your part, giving you a series of new stops to pull out as the battles got more fraught.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I someone came into my home and started making derogatory racist remarks about me, I’d say that response would be entirely appropriate.
- Comment on I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. 2 months ago:
I dunno if it even needs to be difficult; even a bit tactical would change the nature of the thing. As it is the mobs in these things tend to be mindless converging waves; what if they set up set pieces, ran for help, dived for cover, used supporting fire etc etc?
Also perhaps overambitious, but what if the difference between low and high level enemies wasn’t their HP or damage, but how tricky and organised they were? What if leveling up didn’t make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?
- Submitted 2 months ago to games@lemmy.world | 54 comments
- Comment on Would you consider making a sandwich to be "cooking?" 2 months ago:
Entirely context dependent.
Who’s cooking tonight? Me, and if it’s sandwiches, salad, etc - still counts.
No cooking in the room. Combining sliced bread with sliced cheese out of the bag - doesn’t count.
- Comment on Is this a triangle? 3 months ago:
Two things I need to ask:
- What inspired this question, exactly, and
- Can I have some, please?
- Comment on Is this a triangle? 3 months ago:
Congratulations you just invented magenta
- Comment on How is it possible for the IT experts to recover data that was erased from a hard drive when the storage of said hard drive appears empty? 3 months ago:
If you actually fill the drive with zeroes, the chances of anyone getting anything back are somewhere between fuck and all.
Old MFM drives (tech likely as old as your parents) had a theoretical exploit for recovering erased data.
With modern tech, that loophole was firmly closed; even state-level actors would be shit outta luck.
- Comment on How is it possible for the IT experts to recover data that was erased from a hard drive when the storage of said hard drive appears empty? 3 months ago:
A file comes in two parts: the actual blocks of data that hold the file itself, and a directory entry with the name of the file, and the location of the first block.
When you delete a file, it only scrubs out the directory entry, and re-lists the data blocks as available for use.
- Submitted 3 months ago to [deleted] | 34 comments
- Comment on Why 🤷♂️ do users 👨💻 dislike 👎 the use ✅ of emojis 😀 on Lemmy 🐭? 3 months ago:
Because this isn’t a Spot The Dog book, and we don’t need little picture of all the nouns.
On their own they’re ambiguous and vague; with the matching word they’re completely redundant.
What good does it do to say “I had pizza [little picture of pizza] for lunch”?
I’ll use the occasional :) or such as befits the tone, but pointless hieroglyphics are pointless and annoying.
- Comment on How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way? 3 months ago:
As for helping - I think that once they get far enough down the path, there’s probably not much you can do for them. But compassion is always a good thing no matter who you spend it on.
As is sparing a thought for the poorly-socialised, and for the lack of opportunities people have to just hang out in any kind of casual social setting, if you’re not already part of a friend group.
Someone works a shit job in a dingy office with three people they hate and no general public flowing through, they’re exhausted at the end of the day and even if they had a place to go they just want to go home. Weekends are for laundry and chores and recovering from the week - and besides, what are they going to do, head to some bar and spend all their money drinking alone, just getting aloner?
Most of the opportunities out there rely on having either a pre-existing set of people to hang out with, or enough acquired charisma that they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
- Comment on How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way? 3 months ago:
Nah, I’m just old - and I was the weird homeschooled kid; there but for sheer blind undeserved luck go I.
- Comment on How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way? 3 months ago:
When you hollow out the middle class (in the US sense of the term), people go looking for a narrative to explain it, to give them a reason they don’t get (or can’t give their children) the lifestyle they were promised in the media.
One narrative that fits is corporate greed, late-stage capitalism, enshittification and staggering corruption.
Another narrative, however, is all this rampant social change going on, people changing the demographics, changing the rules, changing definitions, changing the comfortable rules of thumb they were used to - and now everything’s shit, the two must be connected, we need to slam the brakes and catch our breath, perhaps even go backwards, and maybe conditions will follow suit. Even if they don’t, change is a loss of control, and that’s scary. We need to pull our heads in, hunker down and take back what’s rightfully ours from those we’ve been forced to share it with.
Once people start looking through that lens, everything starts self-selecting to fit - and they start thinking yeah, maybe those guys had a point.
Yes, there’s horrible shitty filter bubbles on social media and 4chan and everything else, but this stuff doesn’t take root without the underlying socioeconomic issues driving it.
As for incels - I don’t think people realise just how much social privilege is involved in having a peer group during childhood and adolescence to develop the give and take of social skills necessary for actually courting a partner. Consider the weird kids, the fat kids, the (disproportionally) poor kids, the ones with a fucked up home life, who didn’t get to form stable relationships, who didn’t get the practice at human-wrangling, who maybe ended up in a socially-isolating job, who had no ‘third place’ to hang out with people, to socialise and to meet people they might be interested in.
And once people start out without social skills, it can be really hard to pick them up; the embarrassment and exclusion that can follow small fuckups get exponentially worse as time goes on. And you don’t have to be painfully awkward, you just have to… not have game. Just enough to kick you to the bottom of the rankings, so failure (or the likelihood thereof) stacks up and becomes progressively discouraging, so you don’t try and don’t get practice.
And then it’s the same situation: the world doesn’t work for them the way they were told it would; they do all the things that they’ve heard were supposed to work (but without any of the nuance needed to do it successfully), and it just doesn’t.
For some of them, they feel like they’re getting singled out to get ripped off, or that the whole damn system is rigged; it’s a big club and they aren’t in it, as it were. So they look for a narrative, they look for someone to blame, they look for the bad guy, they look for a coherent explanation of why they’re the victim here. And of course that spirals out of control and ends up in a very bad place.
- Comment on How come it seems for the past decades the Catholic Church has been plagued with sex crimes especially among young boys? How long has this been going on? Or did I just miss something up. 3 months ago:
The issue is the coverups and deliberate efforts of the organisation to protect the people doing it and keep them in business.
5% of the general populace with the tendency isn’t nearly the same kind of problem as 5% of a group that has extended access to children, the power to blackmail both the victims and the parents, and the knowledge that they’ll get safely moved on to pastures greener if their stomping ground starts getting risky.
Weird guy on the corner is a risk.
Person you’re forced to spend entire days with unsupervised, and who claims the ability to have your entire family tortured forever if there’s any trouble, and has an entire global organisation watching his back, rather a lot more of one.
- Comment on How come it seems for the past decades the Catholic Church has been plagued with sex crimes especially among young boys? How long has this been going on? Or did I just miss something up. 3 months ago:
Give people power, and they will seek transgression as proof of that power. What’s the point of being supreme earthly authority over people if you have to just sit there and follow the rules? Rules are for little people, are you calling me a little person? Watch me prove my status by committing abominations and not getting punished!
This is especially the case when you load up the stakes with anxieties and resentments and jockeying for power with others and cognitive dissonance and all that jazz. Now they don’t just want to prove their made-man status, they need to. And that’s not even including malignant narcissism in the mix.
And the thing is, there’s a whole category of people who are legitimately impressed by this, who see rule-following as a hallmark of losers, and rule-flouting as a hallmark of winners.
See also; trump voters, cart narcs, anti-maskers, karens etc etc.
The priesthood is an absolute magnet for these kinds of people - and also a magnet for people struggling with shame, hoping to overcome it by being all holy-like, for instance, existing pedophiles.
And on top of that, corrupt power structures like this very often have a culture of mutually-assured destruction: people end up required to do something horribly incriminating themselves so they can’t blow the whistle on others - and once they start down that road, the justifications start piling up. See also David Cameron and the pig, and police in general.
Layer on a teaching that the reputation of the organisation must be protected even at the cost of people’s own children, and yeah, perfect storm.
No way in hell has this only been happening for the last few decades; it’s only in that timeframe that the church’s power has diminished enough for word to get out.
- Comment on if you ever had to start consuming low fat dairy and cheese due to high cholesterol, did your ldl cholesterol levels decrease? 4 months ago:
My cholesterol ratio was becoming of-concern a couple of years back.
I replaced most of the animal fat in my diet with olive oil and the like, and a year later all my levels were acbsolutely fine.
- Comment on if you ever had to start consuming low fat dairy and cheese due to high cholesterol, did your ldl cholesterol levels decrease? 4 months ago:
Low-fat cheese is horrible, tbh. It’s like eating slices of vinyl eraser, and does not spark cheese-joy. Cardio-risk-wise it’s like getting healthy by smoking half-length cigarettes: everybody loses.
There’s no good alternatives that fill every niche, but humnmus is a damn good start. It’s got (good) fat and protein and it’s salty and umami, and feels like you’ve actually eaten something.
- Submitted 4 months ago to [deleted] | 8 comments