politicians argue “no one will want to be a cop if we hold them accountable for their actions.”
That sounds a lot like when they insist that nobody will ever innovate if they ever have to pay taxes when they get rich off their product.
Oh yeah agreed. Their role in the rat race makes up a significant part of their personal identity. That’s part of the design, to keep you focused on your consumption instead of your life.
I guess I should have referred to the noise as attention-grabbing things instead of serious things, lol.
Did anybody else here make the grave mistake of doing this in Oblivion, the game notorious for enemy auto-leveling?
I went off doing random shit the moment that Captain Picard let me out of that sewer, and by the time I showed up to be the Hero of Kvatch I was this crazy invisible assassin of doom, and probably at the top of the thieves guild or the dark brotherhood or both.
So then if memory serves, the town is under attack from monsters and is on fire. The game drops me into a small walled-in arena and instead of whatever lv 1 imps and cockroaches are normally there, I’m holding my bow and arrow and looking up the fiery eyes of half a dozen 12-foot-tall giga-chad linebacker demons from hell. Oh and look they are already sprinting in my direc-- DEAD!
I probably took some creative liberties there but you get the idea.
I think I had to lower the difficulty slider to get through that room. Then I put it back to normal assuming the worst was over, only to have the game put me through a CORRIDOR of hyper-strong enemies next! So twice I had to lower the difficulty.
On one hand, this happened because my character was a min-maxed glass cannon, and a stereotypical one at that (stealth archer, how original! /s). But that same character had no problem with the entire game before or after that town because the whole point of the game is to have the freedom to approach encounters as you wish.
So in many ways that situation was less about auto-leveling, and more about the meme-worthy situations where a boss late in the game requires completely new mechanics the player has never seen. Or even better, it was the anti-forced-stealth-mission!
I wonder, is hatred of advertising a common thing for folks with ADHD? They take away something you are giving your attention to because it interests you, and shove some other crap in your face just to serve their own interests.
I remember being enraged at the scheduled commercial breaks in the '80s and '90s. The only benefit they had was that I always knew which segment of the show I was in and therefore roughly what time it was.
But now? It is so much damn worse and the normies just seem more OK with it than ever. I just remind myself they are living in a society that conditions them to accept it and gives them a thousand more serious things to worry about.
Edit: some words not have right letters
Watching TV of any kind at other people’s homes, and especially my parents’ place, can feel like some real black mirror shit.
The importance of open & interchangeable hardware and software goes way beyond the upgrades you may or may not make, or even saving money & reducing e-waste.
You get better products that way. Having complete control over your system benefits you even if you never exercise that control. It is literally a constraint on enshittification.
I open nano more often than any other editor, and by a lot. I spend more TIME in vscode and maybe Kate, but lately I’ve been tweaking setups on a couple of machines.
sudo nano /that/cfg/file/u/thinking/.about
It sounds like they’ve gotten fat, rich, and complacent. Just like some societies I know!
Well hey, at least our rights-obliterating global surveillance apparatus is already named like the bad guys in a stupid action movie!
People are saying the facility is by the river. You know the one.
I’ve been a fan of the easy to install all-in-one Linux experience of modern distros, being an old guy with a family and a keen awareness of how much I need to maintain some of the non-computer hobbies in my life. Mint has been my jam for a long time.
But just recently I had reason to try out regular old Debian with KDE Plasma, and I think I have found my happy place. I just moved around my hard drives and set up my handful of self-hosted things on this fresh system. It’s so nice to occasionally use as a desktop while it is also a rock solid server.
Gross.
I continue to have my own little cognitive dissonance about the Fediverse:
The world needs more FOSS and information needs to flow in a decentralized, democratic kind of way.
Howeverrrrr… Lemmy is awesome for we few that it clicks with. For the good of the users and especially the volunteer admins who run our instances, I am glad Lemmy is not the big glowing target that reddit is.
Maybe we just hang out and keep the lights on no matter whether it’s for occasional lost Linux users or for when mainstream folks decide to ditch oligarch-tech en masse.
The funny thing is that the biggest practical benefit to most Linux users is not the access to do these things.
It is the secondary effects of not needing to restrict access in order to preserve lock-in and enshittification. It makes the whole user experience better because it is only doing wider you’ve asked it to do. For example, I apply updates more quickly on Linux than I ever did on Windows, even though my Linux DEs are way less pushy about it, because the process is an absolute breeze!
Look at each OS option like you were a product development team, and think “who are my stakeholders?”
The commercial products have long lists of what’s driving the product features and anti-features. Linux has the developers who want the code to be helpful and stay free, and the users who want it to do what it says on the tin, with the option to audit or modify the system’s code. But of course it’s still run by humans, so big personalities and bad actors and whatnot do affect things.
I’m another data point where displays work under Linux better than Windows, making this particular example amusingly wrong.
This is a Dell precision laptop with a dual usb-c connected docking station. Intel cpu plus a discrete nvidia gpu.
Using Cinnamon in X11 on Linux Mint or LMDE, works great.
Using KDE Plasma in Wayland on Debian? Works great!
Using Windows 10? Bzzzt.
I think I’ve had Linux DEs occasionally forget my monitor order & rotation just like Windows would, but out of the box Windows wouldn’t even use all my monitors.
I leave ls alone and instead do
alias l='ls -latrF'
I do sometimes just want to use the plain version, especially if I’m in a small terminal window for some reason. But I think my brain likes scanning 1D lists more than 2D grids, no matter whether I’m in a terminal or using a graphical file manager.
Cool story, goog.
I’m just going to keep waiting for a linux/foss phone so that its features and capabilities are actually predictable year to year.
But maybe I’m just too picky about what features and capabilities I want. I admit I’ve gotten used to some pretty outlandish stuff like… lemme check my notes here… “the device does the things I tell it to do.” Real galaxy-brain shit!
Holy crap, I think you’ve cracked it.
LLM AI is the trillion collar costing, terawatt consuming rubber ducky for the new millennium!
I can only hope that THIS time, with the sheer amount of information available, that future historians will convince society that it’s better to run society based on evidence and progress and humanity.
We have the old boys club running our companies, grifting and building a giant economic bubble to make a quick buck they have no use for, and casually destroying some of the most valuable brands out there.
They are running many of our governments too, and that’s not working great.
I liked it back in the day, but I don’t mess with that stuff no more. That’s how you get another GlaDOS.
I feel like the third panel really captures the essence “I am angry about everything and you’ve shown me something I don’t like, which I guess can exist as long as it hides in the shadows away from my righteous gaze, therefore you are SHOVING it down my THROAT and I am morally justified in attacking those people until they go away”