MudMan

Somehow still accurate.

I didn’t say it looks like a flash game, I said it looks like the logo for a flash game portal.

Twitter has an aggressive character limit, a focus on a streaming feed and historically it’s been built on fast, trending content updated in real time via reposts and this sort of atomized discussion using unthreaded quotes.

Tumblr has changed a bunch trying to stay relevant in a MySpacey kinda way, but it’s ultimately more of a blog platform where the main post is expected to be bulkier and more readable while the threaded responses are framed as more of a comments section you don’t even get to see in full by default, so it more or less splits the difference between Twitter and Reddit, or between Masto and here.

“A different CSS” can impact how you interact with things a bunch, along with how you present trends and follows. Which I guess was my original point.

It’s less the design itself and more that it makes the entire proposition seem like a flash game portal circa 2006, so it just screams “stay away” at unsafe volumes. It’s not even a bad drawing, it’s just branding the wrong thing at the wrong time.

It’s all just little text packets, this place included.

But hey, that’s all social media. The slight differences in threading, text limits, media embeds and share mechanics do matter.

I can give that a whirl if it’s not set up like that already, but the monitor is VERY slow on its own. It basically never wakes up in time for the BIOS bootscreen and any signal interruption sends it on a wild goose chase of signal searching around its inputs that can take ten seconds at a time. It’s not a cheap monitor, either, which I assume is part of the problem, as it wants to be super smart about a bunch of things and has to contend with a bunch of options and alternatives that maybe a simpler setup wouldn’t.

Still, worth a shot to try to tune grub and double check if it’s swapping modes unnecessarily between the bios image and the menu. I hadn’t considered it. Like so many Linux features and app there’s a bunch of stuff you can config on it that I keep not looking into because it’s only surfaced in documentation, if that.

EDIT: Tried, didn’t help. The motherboard rebooting gives the monitor just enough time to search its display port input, decide it’s been unplugged and shut down, so by the time another monitor picks up the slack it’s too late and the timeout has expired unless you’re mashing down to stop it. The changes do make the second monitor come up at its native resolution instead of changing modes, but the mistake happens elsewhere.

I could just set a longer timeout, but I’d rather have a faster boot when I’m sticking to the default than wait for the whole mess to sort itself out every time. Been mashing bios entry buttons and bootloader menus since the 90s, what’s a couple decades more.

Still dumb, though.

I don’t know about Gentoo, but as a serial dual booter I know this pain well.

I swear about two thirds of the time going through grub on every boot adds to the process are waiting for my monitor to figure itself out. Half the time it doesn’t get there on time at all.

I imagine being convinced that a loved one is trapped inside ChatGPT the same way I imagine believing they’re trapped on the TV or the telephone. I mean, yeah, ChatGPT can generate text claiming this is the case, but ultimately the whole thing requires a fundamental disconnect with the technology at play.

I’m less concerned with the people who are in that situation and more with the current dynamic where corporate shills are pushing fictions around that idea while media and private opposition is buying into that possibility and accepting the wild narrative being passed by the other side because it’s more effective to oppose the corpse-trapping semi-sentient robot that makes you go mad than it is to educate people about the pretty good chatbot.

The shills aren’t helping, the people who made their entire personality to fearmonger about this online aren’t helping, the press sure as hell isn’t helping. This is mostly noise in the background of a pretty crappy state of the world in general, but it sure is loud.

I’m perpetually mad at having a global conversation about a thing without understanding how it works despite how it works not being a secret or that complicated to conceptualize.

I am now also mad at having a global conversation about a thing without understanding how we work despite how we work not being a secret or that complicated to conceptualize.

I mean, less so, because we’re more complicated and if you want to test things out you need to deal with all the squishy bits and people keep complaining about how you need to follow “ethics” and you can’t keep control groups in cages unless they agree to it and stuff, but… you know, more or less.

I mean, of the fictions you can build around this tech this is one of the least harmful ones, except when it’s GenAI corpos hyping their stuff up unreasonably.

I’ll say that the concern is people not understanding what they’re using, which honestly has been the case since the Internet went mainstream and I just don’t have good solutions for it.

“New” is a bit of a stretch, I already owned all of those on GoG. But hey, if them cherry picking which games they’ll vow to patch themselves helps them get a marketing hit I’m all for it.

Also, Expedition 33 launched in there, along with the newer Tomb Raider games. Am I a bit mad that they didn’t go for it at launch and made me get it on Steam instead? I am. Still glad there’s a DRM-free option, though.

I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.

After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?

The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.

Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.

I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?

I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?

Mind you, I said that of smartwatches for a while until I got one and realized that… well, yeah, being able to see your notifications without taking your phone out of your pocket is worth it on a thing you already wear anyway.

But that’s still… you know, an understandable use case that is already well covered and rings don’t do.

I may not be the right person for this, considering the entire “let us monetize your yuppie paranoia about being healthy and hot” nonsense has always missed me entirely. I remember in the early days of fitness bands I made a joke about them in front of a hip, techie audience and I immediately realized that hip, techie audiences don’t think tracking their steps and heart rate 24/7 and shipping the data out to Google is a extremely dumb thing to do that only exposes their sexual insecurity.

Turns out that’s a me opinion.

You could certainly build a ring that unfolds or at least isn’t a full circle around your finger if you weren’t obsessed with encroaching intoj an existing jewelry format for marketing reasons.

Of course that would imply that there’s a need of some kind to have a headless computer around your finger, which… there isn’t?

With the exception of NVidia, all GPU vendors build their drivers on Mesa, so they are more homogeneous than Windows.

This sentence is written in some form of alien language that looks like human writing but clearly isn’t.

Alternately, it may or may not be a particularly playful segment of Alice in Wonderland.

Yeeeeah, I think we’re good here.

But you’re not describing a loot box. That’s not how loot boxes work.

I mean, for one thing, 1 in 4 doesn’t mean you should get a payout in the fourth try. You could buy a hundred things with a 1 in 4 chances and never win. Random means random.

But precisely for that reason loot boxes sometimes implement “mercy rules” that increase the odds on repeated tries to prevent people being frustrated because squishy human brains are bad at understanding probability intuitively.

But the way look boxes work is by having a loot table, which associates a list of possible outcomes to a weight and runs a random check against that table each time. It’s how it worked on pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and it’s how it works in monetized loot boxes today. Different implementations can have different odds, each game can offer different box types with different probabilities, but if we’re talking about loot boxes we’re talking about that.

I don’t know what game you were playing. I suppose a loot table with 75% of nothing and 25% of a single hardcoded item is still a valid loot table, but it’s overly simplistic and now how it’d typically be implemented. If you’re playing some game that gives you an on-screen representation of a paid item under those rules and you can show that they are misrepresenting the odds you can and should go flag them in front of whatever body regulates advertising in your country, as well as to whatever platform is offering the game. It’s very likely that it’d be breaking multiple regulations entirely unrelated to gambling, both public and private. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (mobile games in particular are full of really gross design people aren’t following up on enough), but that isn’t a typical implementation and not the base complaint people have.

And again, can’t stress this enough, it’s probably already illegal regardless of whether loot boxes run on gambling rules or not.

Sure, but this isn’t a digital version of a casino game. It’s a digital version of a blind box. And there is no rule to say that trading cards or collectible card games need to have equal possibilities of yielding a specific card. That is very much the opposite of how that works. Physical blind box offerings absolutely use different probabilities and different content rarities.

So yeah, if you make up the categorizations, the rules and the mechanics we can be talking about whatever you want, but in the real world that’s not even close to how this works in either physical or digital form, which I guess explains the confusion.

For the record, multiple games offer a readout of the possibilities of getting a particular type of thing. I, you may be surprised to know, haven’t checked the probabilities being accurate in all of them, but I’m gonna need some specific proof of someone fudging them, because that’s a problem of false advertising at that point, forget gambling rules that don’t even apply.

Also, 1% is a HUGE drop rate for rare items in loot boxes, both physical and digital. 1% is, as it turns out, 1 in 100. Lots of games, collectibles and other types of blind boxes feature way more than 100 tries at opening a loot box, even for fully unmonetized ones. If anything there’s a bit of a cognitive bias there, where people are very bad at instinctively understanding how percentages work, which makes disclosing loot box percentages a bit of a challenge.

Look, I’m not sure what games you play or your understanding of how any of this works but, respectfully, you’re misunderstanding it pretty deeply.