• 6 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2020

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  • So I did read the article, and… I’m not understanding a word you are saying. The families are suing a video game company for a gun in their video game. Also the article is not at all making the emphasis that you are making between marketing a specific game and video games writ large (the article kind of speaks to both of those at the same time and isn’t making any such distinction), so I don’t know what you are talking about. As far as the article is concerned this has everything to do with the fact that the gun was in a video game, and even Activisions statement in response was to defend themselves from the idea that their video game is a thing that pushing people to violence. So even Activision understands the lawsuit as tying their video game to violence.

    I’m not saying I agree with the logic of the suit, but I literally have no idea what you think in the article separates out video games from the particular model of gun because that is just not a thing the article does at all.




  • My Puxl was from eBay.

    To be honest, I don’t know much about how credit cards can be associated with phone hardware. I would think it could conceivably be tied to phone #s. In my case the phone is unlocked and it’s not an esim, which I understand we will all be moving too soon.

    I wonder if it might have something to do with Google Pay or Apple Pay that ties hardware information to payments? And as for Esim, it might make it so that you can’t distinguish phones based on their physical sim card so it perhaps introduces a possibility of reliance on hardware.

    But this is all speculation on my part. I just don’t know and I haven’t made whatever precautions would be needed.




  • Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

    However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.


  • I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

    Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.






  • abbenm@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you use Discord or Matrix?
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    3 months ago

    Are you sure that you actually know how to browse the rooms? I just opened my app, and I see, just for some examples, Linux gaming, vegan, and pine 64 all having activity within the past hour or so.

    I mean it’s no discord by any stretch, But you’re actually straight up saying that even the most active ones are 100% dead, there’s something going on with how you’re browsing and looking at the rooms.

    I feel like one of the biggest communication problems with stuff relating to open protocols or fediverse stuff, is that no one knows the lay of the land, there’s no broadly held consensus of whether things are active or not, what the culture is like, and you end up with people making confident matter of fact statements that are just transparently not true based on cursory examination.

    When Mastodon was new, reporters would just make matter of fact claims that one of its downfalls was that instances couldn’t connect with each other, even though that was called federating and just one of the most basic built-in features. Not that I’m the biggest fan of Blue Sky, but now that people are talking about blue sky, I’ve seen people just matter of factly claim that Blue Sky was 90% furry porn and rage bait. A totally outrageous claim, not even remotely aligned with my experience, but, just because there’s no settled consensus about what’s going on, there’s not really any disincentive for someone just coming in and randomly saying that.


  • Exactly. For any proposed change, it’s going to run up against what I like to call Status Quo Extremism, which is a mindset that suggests that “But that would be different from the status quo” counts as a defeater argument against proposed changes.

    The combination of incentives would, as you note, need to be driven by niche interests rather than attempting to reproduce the incentives of the top 0.01% of YouTube creators.


  • It is but there’s just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet

    I don’t think anyone is proposing an overnight switch. You’ve got to take the long view. That said, I do think when it comes to federated activity pub style projects, Mastodon has gotten off the ground, Lemmy has exploded, pixel-fed seems to be doing pretty good, but the video stuff appears to be a tougher nut to crack.



  • Because it’s pointless.

    This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it’s tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

    Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS’s do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

    You have:

    • experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don’t align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
    • user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
    • study/teaching in academic context
    • niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

    If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it’s the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). “Because it’s pointless” makes me feel like I’m witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

    It doesn’t mean there’s no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there’s so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.