I chose lemm.ee mostly by chance, but I think that it’s worked out okay for me.
My impression is that it’s a mostly neutral instance which doesn’t really have a strong agenda, and federates with most other instances. This is definitely what I want, because it gives me access to the most content.
If there are communities or users I find I have issues with, I can block them myself.
Every major shift in how media is consumed has always come because of evolutions in the technology used to deliver it - going from just a few broadcast channels, to cable, to “on demand” cable and satellite, and finally to Internet delivery.
And it’s just really hard to imagine what delivery technology could provide any new capability beyond the always-on, bidirectional, high capacity data stream in your pocket that is the Internet we now have.
With streaming we’ve already achieved what should in theory be the best way to watch - and with the studios all having their own streaming platform now, there’s not even any middleman to undercut anymore, like there was when the cable companies were cut out by Netflix at the dawn of streaming. This is endgame.
The only thing left now is enshittification.
The one thing that could save us from this fate is if new programs and content are produced that are competitive in quality with what the current giants are putting out, giving people other places to go and forcing competition.
This is what we’ve already seen with indie studios and single developers disrupting the games industry, and perhaps with ever more achievable 3D animation, AI and other accessible production techniques we’ll start seeing this disrupt the film and TV industry too.
Just because something always used to be some way doesn’t mean it’s automatically acceptable.
TV might have been designed for the ad break but what if it wasn’t? You give Star Trek as an example, and here in the UK growing up I watched TNG episodes on BBC2, which is a tax-funded station without adverts. Did the lack of adverts make my childhood TNG experience worse? Personally I’d say it made it better.
Even in the cable TV age, to have adverts in something you are paying for is still horrible, and to me it’s unacceptable.
I will do everything in my power to not expose my brain to a barrage of advertising, and that includes not using any service where I have to subject myself to it.
The idea there should be some definitive, canonical domain for the Fediverse is somewhat at odds with the core tenents of the Fediverse itself - decentralisation, and no single point of ownership or control. And on that basis, we absolutely should not care about a particular domain, or assign any level of ‘specialness’ to it.
I understand your worry - that some ‘bad actor’ could buy the domain and do something anti-Fediverse with it and mislead the public, but my response would be to simply not worry. The strength of the Fediverse is that we are diverse and unbothered by whatever nonsense some centralised platform is trying to pull. We don’t have a profit motive. We don’t care.
People who want to find the real Fediverse will absolutely still find us, all on their own, regardless of who owns some random domain :)
If you are in a healthy relationship, you can do this voluntarily and for free using functionality built into the OS or third party apps, without paying your network operator $10/mo
Didn’t ingest any, but it’s still there somehow
Those few days between jobs are moments of pure joy.
You’re finished with all the bullshit of the previous job, and are blissfully unaware of whatever fresh bullshit is waiting for you at the new one.
There plenty of other things to consider too, though, especially for laptops.
WiFi chipset, trackpad hardware, webcam, all can lead to a sad time with the wrong manufacturers and driver support
Sus timing, though it’s certainly just branding.
The whole “My-” prefix for “My Documents” and “My Computer” and all that is something that was around since the 90s, and really served to emphasise the “Personal” in “Personal Computer” at a time when PCs were coming into the home for the first time.
Nowadays that branding is really unnecessary and feels pretty antiquated too, especially in an era where most stuff for most people is online, and the emphasis is more on connected seamless stuff rather than a cute little folder to put your things in.
Exactly according to plan.
When someone buys a used physical game, publishers don’t get any of that money, and the publishers want that money.
Digital-only is how they get it.
The article basically answers its own questions in the conclusion that we’ve pretty much reached the ‘final form’ for consoles - Just like with phones.
In the early 2000’s phones were all manner of wild designs with weird shapes and crazy functionality, but now we’ve settled on the ubiquitous black rectangle of the smartphone. So too now has the console settled on this, a single screen with buttons on the sides.
We saw the lead-up to this long ago with Nintendo’s own evolving line of handhelds, and Sony’s PSP and Vita, and now we’ve seen it on the PC side too with the Steam Deck.
Even Sony are trying to move into making their main console a handheld - the only reason Nintendo were able to get there first is they were willing to do their classic move, and go with a low-power device without much grunt, and rely on the fun-factor of the games to make it good.
Imagine if next cycle Nintendo came out with a dual screen beast, a-la the DS. These days, more and more games on consoles are cross-platform and work on all systems, with few exclusives. That doesn’t work so well if your system has super unique hardware and deviates too far from the single black rectangle. They’d be shooting themselves in the foot.
I think if Nintendo do something truly off-the-wall again, it will only be because there has been some new tech shift in the market and Nintendo jump in to get first mover advantage. Like a new type of VR that works super seamlessly, or something none of us have though of yet.
But for now here we are. The ubiquitous black rectangle has arrived.
It’s quite easy to understand, even though it’s bullshit.
When the sales department has a good month and makes loads of sales, the business too has a good month. The activity of those individuals directly correlates to revenue on a month by month basis, so management are naturally going to be incentivised to give the sales team perks and bonuses as motivation.
In a given month the IT/dev department doesn’t “generate” any money at all, they only cost. We know they generate value in other ways of course, because the product the sales team sell is surely built and operated by the dev team, but because the relationship is indirect management don’t care to reward you.
Reward sales with nice perks -> Revenue goes up
Reward devs with nice perks -> Revenue doesn’t change
So of course management doesn’t see the benefit in giving more money to tech, because it doesn’t seem like you get anything back.
Of course, the reality is that investment in tech will make the product and the business better and more profitable, but it takes months or years to see the impact of changes, and management has a short attention span.
I wish the best for you, and hope you find yourself a better boss soon.
Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.
A person who thinks developers are all useless, and has total contempt for any skills that aren’t “business” stuff.
A person who thinks tech is easy and you can “just” do this and “just” do that and everything will be done, always telling you “this is so easy I could do it myself” while any contribution they make only makes things worse, and if there’s any kind of hold-up it’s because you’re either “lazy” or “incompetent”
No thanks.
Adding on to this comment, it is very often not possible to change your auth method.
If you use email to register, you can almost always change to a different email (same method) but you can’t change between methods, like from Google auth to Apple auth, or even to a different google auth.
You’d need to create a new account, and therefore lose all the data on your old account.
Always choosing email gives you the most control and most privacy, I’d strongly recommend it.
I was almost convinced they were keeping this broken on purpose, it’s been broken so long. Like, years long.
It was broken so long I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if news surfaced that Discord was taking back-handers from Microsoft under the table to keep it broken. With steam working so well on Linux now, broken discord streaming without actual working audio share was one of the last things that posed a hurdle for gamers ditching Windows.
(In the meantime, thank you Vesktop for your service <3)
As someone who loves mods, I’m totally I’m agreement.
Mods vary greatly, from ones that add tiny quality of life improvements, such as a ‘sort’ button on your inventory, right through to huge visual overhauls and new characters and mechanics changes.
Personally I like to always play games in a fairly vanilla way first with QOL changes only, and then when I’ve played it through once, the mods can keep things interesting.
That’s why mods are great, because they give you, the user, the choice.
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Using established characters in your own works has long been accepted in Japan, especially for smaller doujin works, and that’s awesome. But the analogy between that and modding just isn’t the same.
If we apply the ‘modding’ analogy to manga, that would basically be taking someone else’s published work, applying white-out on half the frames, drawing in partial new contents of your own, and then republishing it. That would be incredibly disrespectful of the author to use not only their character, but their exact art in such a way. Very different from creating a whole new derivative work.
I’m personally very in-favour of modding, but I can understand why the Japanese in particular, when seen through that lens, do not like it.
VSCode is by far and away the best thing Microsoft has ever done. (I’m sure therefore they will ruin it eventually, but that’s a separate issue)
Its good for two main reasons IMO:
It is plugin-based
It is (therefore) language-agnostic
Plugins mean the DE starts as a very lightweight thing that is basically nothing more than a text editor. You can then add as much or as little as you want to get the level of features you are comfortable with but without being too bloated.
And then, because it’s all plugins, you can work with any language and still stay within the same editor. Divine.
I personally love how lightweight it is compared to a full IDE because I don’t like it when IDEs hide the magic behind UI. Press the button and it compiles huh? But how? What’s going on there? What toolchain and commands are being executed?
I much prefer a good MAKEFILE where you know what your entry points are and what is going on, because it makes everything so much more portable and also improves your own knowledge and understanding.