In accord with the other person who replied to you, I enjoyed learning about the design process for packaging of the Xbox accessible controller. Had to find an archive link for it, but here: Link.

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

I’ve read the book and I found it okay, but I read it not long after Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, which I think tried to explain many of the same things that Technofeudalism does, but I feel Zuboff’s take feels more fitting (though the two models aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive)

Once upon a time, a thing happened. And then there was a facsimile of narrative conflict, but everything worked out in the end, because that’s how all the short stories by LLMs seem to work.

A couple of times, Steam Achievements have been a deciding factor in me not pirating a game. I know it’s dumb but ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I don’t think I’d be running Linux as my only daily driver if not for this. I was slightly dreading switching because I feared spending hours trying to fix broken games, but it’s been astonishingly straightforward (which facilitated me learning to live in Linux in a way I hadn’t been able to when was dual booting with Windows)

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

I just started playing Terra Nil today, on your recommendation; I had a craving for a crafting type game, and remembered I had saved this comment two weeks ago. I’m really enjoying it, so thank you — I wouldn’t have known of it if not for you.

When one of my friends started playing Dark Souls, one of the first areas he went to was somewhere that was extremely difficult at his level and skill (he went to the catacombs straight after firelink). He found it exceptionally difficult in a not-fun way, but he continued pushing forward, because he had heard about how gruelling and difficult Dark Souls was.

He told me about this when I was first playing the game, as a way of explaining how the game isn’t necessarily difficult in the way people make it out to be. He needlessly struggled because he was inadvertently listening more to how people talk about the game than what the game was actually communicating to him, via it’s in-game mechanics: namely the skeletons weren’t reviving because the game is unfair and mean, but because there are some mages reviving them; said mages are often difficult to reach, but ranged weapons exist; divine weapons make the skeletons stay dead and can be obtained by explaining other parts of the game; clubs are better against skeletons than swords.

The thing that he, and later I, loved about the souls games is how the challenge works. I like how they foster an environmental awareness in me, both for lore purposes, and figuring out if there are any sneaky mages hidden around. I like being very autistic and getting attached to certain weapons, leading to some enemies being much more difficult than if I were more flexible (and occasionally, I like changing my play-style when the game’s systems are screaming at me “WHAT YOU’RE DOING ISN’T WORKING. TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT — LITERALLY ANYTHING DIFFERENT, YOU HAVE SO MANY WEAPONS”)

I saw some previous news coverage of the Devs saying they’d rather players pirate it than have it spoiled for them, and I went in blind and bought it full price. I don’t generally play this kind of game but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

When I was at university, the student union had a small fund for creative projects that weren’t related to your degree. Many of the people who applied for cameras also included Adobe licenses on their funding application, because many of them were new to film or photography so they defaulted to what is “industry standard”, because that’s what the majority of online tutorials are available for.

That reminds me of a fairly recent article about research around visualisation systems to aid with interpretable or explainable AI systems (XAI). The idea was that if we can make AI systems that explain their reasonings, then they can be a useful tool, especially in the hands of domain experts.

Turns out that actually, the fancy visualisations that made it easier to understand how the model had come to a conclusion actually made subject matter experts less accurate in catching errors. This surprised researchers and when they later tried to make sense of it, they realised that they had inadvertently dialled up people’s likelihood to trust the model because it looked legit.

One of my favourite aphorisms is “all models are wrong, some are useful.” Seems that the tricky part is figuring out how wrong and how useful.

I wonder whether it doesn’t have any inherent meaning. I mean, we all get the sense that it’s an insult.

I say this because one of my favourite insult formats is "you [multisyllabic adjective] [random noun]. Stuff like “You incorrigible spade” or “You abominable turnip”. They’re next to meaningless, but my intention is clear

“The fact that Kratos isn’t the same person he was in the old series is basically the entire point.”

I always feel a little bit sorry for rage bigots like this, because of how dull their world and experiences must be. Like if he felt that the new Kratos felt narratively unsatisfying, or that his journey felt unsatisfying, that’d at least be an opinion with the potential to be interesting. But nah, it’s just “things are different”, with embedded implication that different = bad.

I hope your visit to the Dr goes okay, OP!

Though I wonder if even besides adding an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) (writing acronym out for anyone else who would’ve had to Google it), this might be a useful exercise recovering from outages in general. This is coming from someone who hasn’t actually done any self hosting of my own, but you saying you’re still finding down services reminds me of when I learned the benefit of testing system backups as part of making them.

I was lucky in that I didn’t have any data loss, but restoring from my backup took a lot more manual work than I’d anticipated, and it came at an awkward time. Since then, my restoring from backup process is way more streamlined.

Will still occasionally throw “I’m sorry, I can’t”s but you just gotta remind it to follow the prompt and stay in character

This sounds like a kink scene with bad consent

Though to be fair, even this might be progress, of a sort; years ago, I had a girlfriend who had a bunch of apple products, partly because she worked in sound design. At the time, I had never used Linux and I found using her Mac distinctly unfamiliar. When I eventually tried Linux, some years later, I remember a few instances of going “oh, it’s like on a Mac”.

Those similarities made the whole thing feel a tad less intimidating and probably contributed to (or at least accelerated) me becoming the tech nerd I am today.